We are continuing in Series One of our studies of 1 Corinthians

Recap and Background

Paul, who planted this church in Corinth, was now living and working in Asia Minor, or Turkey, in a city called Ephesus. Corinth was in Greece, and he had received information from members of the Corinthian church in the form of a visit and a letter about problems in the church.

I feel very sorry for Paul. He had spent eighteen months of time planting the church in Corinth, and now, within a year or two, he finds in this letter problem after problem. The church is in real trouble. As he read through the different issues that they wanted him to deal with, he came across many things that were very serious, but nothing more serious than what we are going to deal with in today’s episode. A sexual sin had taken place in Corinth, which was so serious that it needed urgent action. Paul wanted somebody removed entirely from the church.

In the last episode, Paul had talked about the importance of leadership underlying all the problems in Corinth is a problem of local church leadership. It was weak and ineffective, and so many problems arose as a result of that. In this letter, there is a focus on the role of church leaders to be servant leaders - humble people, pastors who care for the flock - but are also careful to make sure that the life in the church is healthy and that sin does not become a normal part of church life. This did not happen in Corinth; many difficulties and disasters took place. Paul was worried; he was genuinely afraid that by the time he got to Corinth, in the future, the church may not even exist. The church numbered, most people think about, one hundred to two hundred people at this time, so it wasn’t a huge church but there were big problems within it.

A Serious Sexual Sin.

“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. 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? 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 the Lord Jesus on the one who has been doing this. So when you’re assembled, and I’m with you in spirit and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, 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. Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? Get rid of the old yeast so that you may be in a new unleavened batch - as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. 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.”

1 Corinthians 5:1-8, NIV

Paul is describing a serious situation; he is dealing with a particularly evil sexual sin, the sin of incest - a sexual relationship between family members other than the husband and wife. He said that even the pagans - the Greeks and the Romans - didn’t approve of this. Why was it happening in the church? What was this man doing? It says he was having sex with ‘his father’s wife’. It doesn’t say his mother; it probably means his stepmother. His father had married again. The woman probably was not in the church because she is not mentioned in the same way as the man. The man is a member of the church in Corinth.

It is quite clear that everybody knows what is happening. Paul was horrified. The issue was written in the letter that Chloe’s household brought to him while he was in Ephesus, and he must have been shocked when he read it. How could this happen in the church that he planted? Paul needed to address this issue. In most societies throughout history, incest has been prohibited as a shameful, illegal, and immoral action. This was true in Jewish society, and in the Old Testament law. In Leviticus 18: 6, it says: “No one is to approach any close relative to have sexual relations. I am the Lord.” Amongst the Greeks and the Romans, it was prohibited. In the modern world, incest is prohibited in Hindu society, in Islamic cultures, and it is prohibited in most secular societies as well. And yet, it was taking place within the church that Paul had planted in Corinth. What was also very horrifying for Paul was to find that the church leaders were tolerating this. He is shocked. He said they should be ashamed that they were letting this man get away with this sexual activity which was publicly known in the church. He said, rather they should have been mourning; they should have been horrified and saddened that such a thing happened, but they seemed to be happy to allow this situation to take place.

We can assume that this man was unwilling to make any change. He had decided he was going to have this relationship, and no one was going to tell him what to do. What do you do with somebody who is in your church but is doing something that is clearly morally wrong? That is a big question for churches all over the world today. It applies to sexual morality, but also to other illegal and immoral activities that are clearly wrong in Christian ethics. Here it is being applied to incest. In simple terms, Paul said that the man needed to be removed from the church community. It is a case of church discipline. This is very difficult but is a subject that appears in the letter of 1 Corinthians because it is dealing with so many major problems. Paul, like Jesus, believed that certain obvious moral sins needed to be challenged, and ultimately people who continued in them needed to be removed from church communities.

In the Western world, Westerners generally are very reluctant to consider this possibility. It needs to be handled very carefully. Paul expected the New Testament churches, that he was overseeing, to deal with people who were disrupting the church by sin. The types of sins he often came across were sexual sins, but also doctrinal sins - teaching a false message. He never allowed people to continue to do that, and sometimes he excluded people from churches because they were contradicting the gospel.

In Paul’s understanding, everybody who has been baptised and who has acknowledged Jesus Christ as Lord, needs to live a different life, and be accountable to the local church for living a godly life. The people who have not been baptised, who attend the church community but are not committed and have not made a profession of faith, are not the people that Paul is thinking about here. He is thinking about the people who said, “I am a Christian. I follow Jesus Christ”, who must deal with major sins in their life. This man was not willing to do this, even though he was a member of the church.

In the ‘Life of Jesus’ in Word Online, we dealt with the question of church discipline. Paul would have known Jesus’ teaching, which is the foundation for our understanding of what church discipline is.

Matthew 18: 15 to 18:

“If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you’ve won them over.”

This is the first step. If somebody you know in your church is a very heavy drinker, they are in the bars several nights a week in your town or village, they often get drunk, and their behaviour is extremely poor and they say all sorts of terrible things when they are drunk, you should go to them and say that they should not be continuing to drink so much alcohol. If they listen to you, you have won them over. The very best thing that can happen when someone is persistently sinning in the church, is that a brother or sister goes to them and says, “Brother, sister, I’m concerned about your drinking.” And they say, ”Yes, I have a bit of a problem with it. I need to reach out for help. What should I do next?” That is where God’s grace comes in. God’s grace is there to help us when we are struggling with these things.

“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.”

I remember dealing a similar situation with a brother in Christ in a different church in my community many years ago. He had a responsible position in that church, but he had a drink problem. I often could smell drink on him even in public meetings. One day I spoke to him privately, as stated in verse 15, but he totally denied it.Following the second step, other people came along to talk to this man, and he denied it again. Eventually everything was discovered, and he lost his positions of responsibility in church and community. “Take one or two others along so that every method may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church;” that means bring the church leaders in and “If they refuse even to listen to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.”

In Jesus’ teaching, there are several steps of dealing with people who are obviously publicly sinning and undermining the testimony of the church. Firstly, you go quietly and gently to them, one to one. Secondly, you go with other people who know something about the situation and are reliable people. Then you tell the church leaders and the church leaders, according to Jesus and according to Paul in 1 Corinthians 5, have the authority under God to remove people from church if they persistently sin. In fact, Jesus says in Matthew 18:18, “Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” The meaning of this in context, is 'binding' is prevention or stopping people doing things; and the 'loosing' is releasing. So, when you bind somebody, you exclude them from the church; you are prohibiting them from being part of the church. If you loose them, you are releasing them; you are saying come and join the church, all is forgiven. That is the context in the original meaning of that passage. The church leaders have the authority and the responsibility of doing that.

Paul had all these thoughts in mind when he was dealing with the man who was committing incest, having sexual intercourse with his stepmother. He was quite clear that the church leaders should publicly remove him from the church, treat him as an outsider - ‘a pagan or a tax collector’ - says Jesus, that means a nonbeliever - somebody who is not functioning as a believer anymore - until they change from their sinful life.

This is what Paul has in mind here. He says in verse 5,

“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.”

Satan’s kingdom is everything outside the church. So, to ‘hand somebody over to Satan’ is to remove them from the protection of the Christian community and the immediate presence of the Holy Spirit, into the outside world, where they are open to the influence of demonic forces. ‘for the destruction of the flesh’ - means the sinful nature, not the body physically; the word in Greek means our sinful nature. Sometimes, the shock of experiencing church discipline and the negative experience of meaninglessness, that people get when they are outside God’s Kingdom, having known God before, causes them to wake up spiritually and repent and say, ”I want to come back.” That is what happens in the parable of the prodigal son - a very famous story that Jesus told. The son left his father’s farm and went to another country and ended up feeding the pigs; his situation became worse and worse - more and more meaningless, more and more futile. He became depressed and disconnected from reality. He woke up one day and said, ‘I must return’.

Paul had the same thing in mind - that this man in Corinth might one day return. His sinful nature would experience darkness and destruction in the world, but his spirit may be saved on the Day of the Lord. He wouldn’t lose his salvation because he is experiencing church discipline. He is under the discipline of the church, but still loved by God, and God wants to call him back to himself.

Christian Sexual Morality

“I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people - 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. But now I’m writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister, but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people. What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. ‘Expel the wicked person from among you’.”

1 Corinthians 5:9-13, NIV

Paul makes it clear here that he is not talking about unbelievers and how we relate to them. Many unbelievers have strange sexual relationships and practice sexual immorality of one sort or another. Paul is not talking about that issue here. He wants us to get close to unbelievers, to be their friends, to live in their world, to communicate Christ to them. He is only talking about the believer who says he, or she, is a Christian, but is living a double life and living in sexual immorality. He says, ‘Don’t associate with those people as brothers or sisters.’ Many people have wondered what it means. The probable meaning is not to share the Holy Communion, or the Lord’s Supper, with them as a sign of fellowship because they have been excluded from the church. Paul writes some very tough words to the Corinthian church about this issue. He is very concerned. One of his major concerns is that this action totally undermines the integrity of the church and its witness to the community; Corinthian society was filled with sexual immorality of all sorts. It was that kind of city and the church needed to be different. Paul’s main concern was to win people for Christ.

These are tough words - a passage that many Christians would like to ignore. But when we study the Bible comprehensively, passage by passage, we can’t ignore anything. We look at every text and see what we can learn from it.

Reflections

First of all, we need to handle this passage carefully. We need to keep in mind that Paul deeply loved the Corinthian church, and he probably knew the man that he was speaking about because he had been in the church a year or two earlier; he knew almost everybody in this small church. He wanted the man who was sinning to repent, to find his way back to a living faith, and he believed the best way to do that was to challenge his sin and exclude him from the church if he was not willing to change. This discipline can be an act of love, as long as we have the right motive and are willing to receive people back when they make a change. That is what some churches are not willing to do. Paul was always willing to do that. In the parable of the prodigal son, the father was willing to receive his son back; he was willing to forgive him. That is God’s love for us.

God’s love is also sometimes a tough love; the love of our heavenly Father challenges things that are fundamentally wrong. We learn from this that church discipline is very important, and in fact, it underlines the morale of the church and character of the church, if we don’t deal with problems in the church, Paul says that it is rather like bad yeast in a loaf of bread. In many cultures in the world, bread is a staple food. You may come from a country where rice is the staple food, or maize. If wheat and similar grains are the staple crop, then bread will be the staple food. Yeast is put in bread to make it grow, mature and ferment, and become good to eat. But a negative yeast in bread causes the bread to collapse, to become bitter, to not taste good, and to be useless. Sin can have this effect on the  church; it can undermine the character of the church. Paul was very concerned about that. This is a big responsibility for pastors who must be courageous. They must walk with integrity, but they must also be humble and only take action in these situations where they are absolutely sure that they are following biblical principles and have the best interests of everybody at heart.

Thanks for listening to this very challenging episode. I am aware that it raises many difficult questions in different cultures, but it is a very important passage, and it tells us something about Paul’s apostolic practice of keeping integrity at the heart of the local church.