Listen for God’s word to you from 1 Corinthians 6:1-11…
If any of you has a dispute with another, do you dare to take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the Lord’s people? 2 Or do you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? 3 Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life! 4 Therefore, if you have disputes about such matters, do you ask for a ruling from those whose way of life is scorned in the church? 5 I say this to shame you. Is it possible that there is nobody among you wise enough to judge a dispute between believers? 6 But instead, one brother takes another to court—and this in front of unbelievers!
7 The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?8 Instead, you yourselves cheat and do wrong, and you do this to your brothers and sisters. 9 Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men[a] 10 nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
This section of Paul’s letter is filled with one question after another. And with each question, Paul is inviting the Christians at Corinth to remember something vitally important. I spy at least five things to remember in these verses…
First, Paul calls on the Corinthian Christians to remember to stop flaunting their failures. Paul’s first question is: “If any of you has a dispute with another, do you dare to take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the Lord’s people?”
Basically, Paul is saying, “Don’t flaunt your failures. Don’t air your dirty laundry in public.”
My first ministry experiences came while I was still in high school. I taught a Sunday school class of thirty fifth graders. One of the first things I learned about teaching children was to praise in public and discipline in private. Learning to implement this principal stood me in good stead when I became a parent many years later.
In this we see a connection back to chapter five. Paul’s main concern in this chapter, as it was in the last, is the witness that the Church at Corinth is putting forward to the wider world. In the last chapter, Paul was concerned about the negative witness of one of the Corinthian Christians who was in an incestuous relationship with his stepmother, something that would have been frowned upon in Roman as much as in Jewish law. In this chapter, Paul is concerned that the Corinthian tendency to litigiousness will present a bad witness to the watching world. In both cases, Paul is concerned that the Gospel of Jesus Christ should be commended to all by the lifestyle of the Corinthian Christians.
This leads me to ask: If we were brought into court on the charge of being Christians, would there be enough evidence to convict us? Do our lives speak for or against the power of the Gospel to change a person’s life for the better?
The second thing Paul urges us to remember is our eternal destiny in verses 2 through 4.
What Paul says here is in line with Jesus’ own teaching in Matthew 19:27-28… “Truly, I say to you, in the new world, when the Son of man shall sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.”
Paul argues from the greater to the lesser. He reminds the Corinthians that they will assist Jesus in exercising judgment on the last day, not only over human beings, but over angels as well. Therefore, it stands to reason that the Corinthian Christians should be able to judge earthly disputes.
Thirdly, Paul reminds the Corinthian Christians of their amazing resources.
David Prior explains what Paul believed about the resources available in each local expression of the body of Christ…
Paul believed that in every church resided everything needed to express the love of Christ. He has reminded them that, as a church, they ‘were enriched in him with all speech and all knowledge’. Christ lives in his church and Christ is the very wisdom of God, whom God has made the source of our life. If such wisdom, resident in the church at Corinth, could not be mobilized to sort out a few personal squabbles, then the Christians certainly needed to go back to the drawing-board.
Whenever personal relationships become strained within the body of Christ, it is important to identify and use specially-gifted members of the congregation to bring the wisdom of God into the situation. Few things impair the witness of a church more than broken relationships. There will always be disagreements amongst Christians, but the disciplined approach of Jesus to such matters needs more uninhibited obedience. The best catalysts for healing fractured relationships are usually those with listening hearts and the patience to hear both sides out to the end. To such a one ‘is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom’.
Fourthly, Paul reminds the Corinthian Christians of their higher calling.
The world teaches us to “get what is coming to us” and “to insist on our rights”. Paul and Jesus commend a higher calling. In Matthew 5:38-40, Jesus says,
You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if any one would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well.
In Greek culture, especially in Corinth, taking other people to court to settle disputes, especially over property, was almost a blood-sport. Such a way of approaching disputes was totally foreign to a Jewish way of thinking. A Jew in Paul’s time would never think of taking a dispute before a Roman court of law. The Jews would settle disputes among themselves. And Paul was an inheritor of this Jewish way of thinking. Thus, he was shocked to learn of his Christian converts in Corinth taking one another to court to settle their disputes. Paul says it would be better to accept being wronged than to demand recompense in such a way.
Finally, Paul reminds the Corinthian Christians of their changed identity.
The bottom line for Paul is that a Christian is not one who should be found doing wrong in any case. A Christian should suffer wrong rather than do wrong to others. “Wrongdoers,” Paul says, “will not inherit the kingdom.” Then Paul proceeds to offer a list of different types of wrongdoers who will not inherit the kingdom of God.
First, there are the sexually immoral. The word is one we saw in the last chapter: πόρνοι.This is the word for prostitutes.
It is intriguing that the second word in Paul’s list is: idolatry. Aphrodite was worshipped in a temple atop the acropolis in Corinth. Attached to her worship there were numerous temple prostitutes. Thus, the first thing and the second thing in Paul’s list of vices were connected: temple prostitution and idolatry.
The third type of person Paul mentions is the adulterer. Adultery was a violation of one of the Ten Commandments.
The next word in Paul’s list has an unfortunate translation in the New International Version of the Bible: “men who have sex with men”. There are two words used here in the Greek and they require some explanation.
The first Greek word is μαλακοὶ and it literally means “soft”. This was a commonly used term in ancient Greek. It appears elsewhere in the New Testament to refer to “fine clothing”. (See Matthew 11:8.)
Here is what Matthew Vines has to say about this word:
In a moral context, the term was used to describe a lack of self-control, weakness, laziness, or cowardice…. The word was an all-purpose insult for anything considered to be feminine. That’s why it was long translated as “effeminate” rather than “soft.” …
For writers of Paul’s day, to be effeminate was to be weak and out of control. That shortcoming was not necessarily related to sexual behavior, so most activities that were derided as being “soft” were not sexual….
New Testament scholar David Fredrickson has argued that malakoi in 1 Corinthians 6:9 be translated as “those who lack self-control.” Based on the evidence, that translation stands on firmer footing than any interpretation that defines the word as a specific reference to same-sex behavior.[1]
The next key word in 1 Corinthians 6:9 is the Greek word ἀρσενοκοῖται. This word was used very rarely in ancient Greek writings. In fact, some scholars think that Paul coined the term and that it is used here in 1 Corinthians for the first time. After Paul, the term appears mostly in lists of vices. The word is a compound of “arsen” which means “male” and “koites” which means “bed”. Thus, some translators take this compound word to mean “men who sleep with other men”.
But the problem with translating this word in that way is that the component parts of a word don’t necessarily tell us what it means. Think of the English word “understand”. It has nothing to do with either “standing” or being “under”.
Now here is something that may explain where Paul got this word from. In the Septuagint, the early Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, the words “arsenos” and “koiten” appear next to each other in the translation of Leviticus 20:13 where we read, “‘If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.” So, it is possible that Paul coined the term “arsenokoitai” based upon his familiarity with the Septuagint version of Leviticus 20:13.
But this still doesn’t tell us exactly what Paul was thinking of when he coined this term. He may have been thinking of one of the most common forms of same-sex behavior in the ancient world, either pederasty (the relationship between an older man and a teenage boy) or the relationship between a master and a slave, or he may have been thinking of male prostitutes. But we don’t know.
As New Testament scholar Dale Martin has written, “The only reliable way to define a word is to analyze its use in as many different contexts as possible.”
ἀρσενοκοῖται appears only one other time in the New Testament. That appearance is in 1 Timothy 1:10. Let’s look at this verse in context, beginning our reading with verse 8. Paul says,
We know that the law is good if one uses it properly. 9 We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, 10 for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine 11 that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me.
Here the word ἀρσενοκοῖται (translated as “those who practice homosexuality”) appears after fornicators and before slave traders. This context, just as in 1 Corinthians, suggests that the word has to do with some kind of sexual and economic exploitation.
The word μαλακοὶ does not appear in 1 Timothy 1:10. We have here only the word ἀρσενοκοῖται. But in 1 Corinthians the two words do appear together. Thus, some translators have taken these two words together as a reference to the passive and active partners in the context of same-sex behavior. However, μαλακοὶ and ἀρσενοκοῖται were never used as a pair by other ancient writers, so understanding the two words in this way is merely speculation. There were other word pairs that were commonly used in Greek to describe the two partners in a homosexual relationship, words like “erastes” and “eromenos” or “paiderastes” and “kinaidos”, but Paul and the New Testament do not use these words.
Even if Paul meant to use these two words μαλακοὶ and ἀρσενοκοῖται as a condemnation of same-sex behavior in his day, his cultural context differs quite a bit from our context today. Matthew Vines explains:
… same-sex behavior in the first century was not understood to be the expression of an exclusive sexual orientation. It was understood as excess on the part of those who could easily be content with heterosexual relationships, but who went beyond them in search of more exotic pleasures.[2]
One more important thing to note in reference to this subject is that the English word “homosexual” did not enter any of the biblical translations of these passages until 1946. Given all this information, I think it much better to translate μαλακοὶ as “those who lack self-control” and ἀρσενοκοῖται as “male prostitutes”. Eugene Peterson’s translation of this passage in The Message captures well the spirit of what Paul is saying…
Don’t you realize that this is not the way to live? Unjust people who don’t care about God will not be joining in his kingdom. Those who use and abuse each other, use and abuse sex, use and abuse the earth and everything in it, don’t qualify as citizens in God’s kingdom.
Paul finishes off his list of vices with five other descriptive terms. He says that neither thieves, nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. As far as I can tell, Paul’s list covers all of us in one way or another. If Paul’s words ended here, none of us would have any hope of salvation.
But here is the good news… Paul’s words do not end with verse 10. He continues in verse 11 and he says, “that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.” As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”
You are not your past! I am not my past! In Christ none of us need be identified anymore according to our vices, according to our sins. We are best identified as children of God in Christ, inheritors of the kingdom through the last will and testament of Jesus, sealed by his blood shed on the cross; and through his resurrection we have new and everlasting life.
Whoever you are, wherever you have come from, whatever you have done in the past, you are God’s beloved child. Stop flaunting your failures. Remember your eternal destiny, your amazing resources, your higher calling, and your changed identity.
[2] Ibid., p. 129.
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