Listen for God’s word to you from 1 Corinthians 5…
It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate: A man is sleeping with his father’s wife. 2 And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have gone into mourning and have put out of your fellowship the man who has been doing this? 3 For my part, even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit. As one who is present with you in this way, I have already passed judgment in the name of our Lord Jesus on the one who has been doing this. 4 So when you are assembled and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, 5 hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh,[a][b] so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.
6 Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? 7 Get rid of the old yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. 8 Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
9 I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— 10 not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. 11 But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister[c] but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people.
12 What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? 13 God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked person from among you.”[d]
“Houston, we have a problem” is a popular but erroneous quotation from the radio communications between the Apollo 13 astronaut Jack Swigert and the NASA Mission Control Center during the Apollo 13 spaceflight in 1970, as the astronauts communicated their discovery of the explosion that crippled their spacecraft. The words actually spoken, initially by Jack Swigert, were “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here”.
I hear Paul saying something similar in 1 Corinthians 5. “Corinth, we have a problem.” But what was that problem precisely?
The Problem
Paul defines the problem as one of sexual immorality. πορνεία is the word in Greek. From it we get our English word: pornography. A “pornos” was a prostitute. So, literally, the word πορνεία means prostitution.
But Paul applies the term to a different form of sexual immorality. It is one that he says even pagans do not tolerate. A man in the Corinthian congregation had his father’s wife. Paul does not tell us whether the father was still living or if the man’s father and stepmother were divorced. He also fails to mention whether the man and his stepmother are simply living together or are married.
In any case, the situation was prohibited by Leviticus 18:8, “Do not have sexual relations with your father’s wife; that would dishonor your father.” It was also prohibited under Roman law.
The Attitude
It seems that Paul was troubled by the Corinthian church’s attitude to the problem as much or even more than he was troubled by the immorality itself.
Michael Green gives us some helpful context…
Corinth was the Vanity Fair of the ancient world. Aphrodite was worshiped there as Porne (prostitute), her temple on the Acrocorinth was given over to debauchery, and the very name of Corinth was used to denote fornicating (“Corinthianizing”). The city was sex mad.
How did the church react? In two ways. One lot said, “All things are lawful for me” (1 Cor. 6:12). They were permissive Christians who were indistinguishable in their sexual mores from the pagans round about them. The other lot was so revolted by all this sexual license that they became ascetic, wanted to contract out of the whole thing, and said, “It is well for a man not to touch a woman” (1 Cor. 7:1). Needless to say, this provided a very tricky pastoral problem. How was Paul to handle two such diverse attitudes?[1]
Chapters 5 through 7 of 1 Corinthians shows us how Paul dealt with these pastoral challenges.
Passing Judgment
If nothing else, Paul was quite clear about his response to this case of incest in the Church at Corinth. He says he has already passed judgment in the name of our Lord Jesus.
I know this raises a question for some of us. Isn’t Jesus the one who has told us not to judge others?
Yes, that is true. But like many teachings in the Bible, we tend to take this one out of context. Here is the context from Matthew 7. Jesus says…
“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2 For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
3 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4 How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
When we read this teaching in context, we see that Jesus is telling us to be careful. If we are going to help others spiritually, we must first pay attention to our own lives. We must first deal with our own sin, then we can help others to deal with theirs.
Furthermore, Jesus tells us precisely how to help others deal with their sin, later, in Matthew 18:15-17. Jesus says…
If your brother or sister[b] sins,[c] go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. 16 But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’[d] 17 If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.
I remember my first real encounter with this teaching happened right after I graduated from seminary. I was working as a youth ministry intern in a large church near Charlotte, North Carolina. If there is one thing essential to youth ministry, that is food. Thus, the kitchen was a part of the church I used frequently. The challenge was that there was a church volunteer in charge of the kitchen who was very particular about how the kitchen was to be operated and kept clean. I found myself complaining to a fellow staff member one day about the kitchen lady. And he said to me: “Matthew 18.”
I responded, “What’s that?”
And he said, “Matthew 18. Read it and follow it.”
I did go and read Matthew 18 and I immediately realized that what my colleague was saying was that if I had a problem, I needed to deal with the kitchen lady directly and not come complaining to my fellow staff member about her. So, that’s what I did.
I’ll tell you one thing. That church’s commitment to follow Jesus’ relational instructions in Matthew 18 certainly cut down on church gossip.
Handing Over to Satan
“But,” you may well ask, “what does Paul mean when he talks about handing the man guilty of incest over to Satan?” How does that fit in with the kind of church discipline Jesus talks about?
That’s a good question. Let’s look more closely at what Paul says…
Paul writes, “Hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.”
I think Paul is saying essentially the same thing that Jesus is saying in Matthew 18. Jesus says that if your brother or sister in Christ sins against you, then you should first confront that brother or sister directly about their sin. If they don’t listen to you, then you should take another brother or sister along with you to talk to the offender. In my experience, most problems in the church can be solved at this level.
I remember when I was working on an evangelistic campaign in Southern California. I had recruited a team of volunteers from a variety of churches to lead the effort. One of those gentlemen, I ended up having a really hard time getting along with. The chairman of our committee showed great wisdom when he realized the problem. He sat me down with the gentleman I was having a problem with, and we talked it through until it was resolved.
“But,” you may ask, “what do you do when that does not solve the problem?”
Jesus tells us what to do. He says that we should bring the problem before the whole church. In our particular form of church government, you might bring an issue to our church council.
Jesus says that if the offender does not listen to the church, then they should be treated as a pagan or a tax collector. In other words, if they refuse to repent of their sin, then they should be removed from the membership of the church.
But also, we need to remember how Jesus treated pagans and tax collectors. He loved them. He spent time with them. In short, he tried to love them into the kingdom. And we should do the same with anyone outside of the church.
Paul is saying the same thing. This man who has committed incest and who refuses to repent should be put out of the church. That’s what Paul means by handing him over to Satan. Satan’s province, so to speak, is outside of the church. But the whole purpose of this act of church discipline is remedial, corrective, healing in nature. The whole goal is that the man’s flesh should be destroyed, and his spirit saved.
We must remember what Paul means by flesh. He is not talking about the man’s body being destroyed, but rather his sinful nature.
Paul’s recommendation of excommunication may sound harsh to us. But at least in this case, it worked. It appears, according to 2 Corinthians 2:5-11, that the man who committed incest repented of his sin and was restored to the church.
Craig Blomberg notes that “Many will continue to view the whole notion of church discipline, and certainly excommunication, as repulsive and unloving.”
But I believe that if we follow Jesus’ instructions in an attitude of love it will be for the benefit of the church as a whole as well as for the benefit of individuals in the church.
As William Barclay says, “To shut our eyes to offences is not always a kind thing to do; it may be damaging. A poison must be eliminated before it spreads; a weed must be plucked out before it pollutes the whole ground. Here we have a whole principle of discipline. Discipline should never be exercised for the satisfaction of the person who exercises it, but always for the mending of the person who has sinned and for the sake of the Church.”
Removing the Leaven
Paul goes on to use a very evocative image. He says, “Get rid of the old yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.”
Paul is using the picture from the celebration of Passover. When God delivered his people from slavery in Egypt, it was sudden. They did not have time to put leaven in their bread and let it rise. So, from that time on, they always ate unleavened bread at the time of the Passover celebration. In fact, the Jewish people go through an elaborate ritual to this day in which they remove yeast from their homes before the Passover festival. For this reason, yeast became a symbol of sin.
If we would more regularly examine ourselves for the presence of sin in our lives and seek to remove it, then church discipline would be much less necessary. What malice or wickedness is there in us today that we might remove and replace with sincerity and truth?
Paul reminds us, that Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed for us. Every time we celebrate Holy Communion, it is a reminder of Christ’s sacrifice for our sin, and it is an opportunity for self-examination and the removal of “leaven” in our lives. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11:28, “Everyone ought to examine themselves before they eat of the bread and drink from the cup.”
To Associate or not to Associate
Finally, Paul corrects a misapprehension the Corinthians had based upon something he had said previously. Apparently, Paul had written to the Corinthians previously urging them “not to associate with sexually immoral people”. Now Paul clarifies that by this statement he does not mean for the Corinthians not to associate with sinful people outside of the church. They would have to leave the world altogether in order to accomplish that feat. Rather, Paul urges the Corinthian Christians not to “associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people.”
Now, it is obvious that none of us are perfect. We are all sinners. If we were allowed as Christians only to eat with perfect people, or to share Holy Communion with perfect people, then we would never eat at all, and never enjoy Holy Communion at all.
The key question here is one that I raised earlier in this message: what is our attitude toward sin? Do we regard our sin and that of others as though it does not matter? Or is our attitude one of sorrow for sin and a desire for self-improvement so that we might please our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?
The bottom line is this: the heart of the problem in the Church of Corinth, the Church today, and in the lives of individual Christians is the problem of the heart. And Jesus is the best heart surgeon around. Or to use another metaphor, he is the best heart cleaner. If we invite Jesus to come in and clean the home of our hearts, that will solve any potential problems in our spiritual life. If Jesus is living in us, then we will be immediately and continually sensitive to anything in our lives that makes him uncomfortable. Furthermore, we will not be able to rest content until that thing in our lives which makes Jesus’ uncomfortable is removed.
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