What Our Bodies are For

Sermon preached on October 14, 2018

“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything. “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food”—and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.” But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

1 Corinthians 6:12-20

In addition to the obvious awkwardness of the subject matter, this truth today can come across as rather insulting. “The Body Book” for kids, or something like that. Yet who is more in need of such a lesson than those who, at the tail end of civilization, have cast off all common sense and any remaining semblance of humanity.

Paul is at once introducing us to his profound ethic in which the gospel affords him a flexibility by which to maximize both his own liberty and the highest moral aims. This doctrine is drawn out more plainly in Chapters 8 and 9 of this letter, as well as in Romans 14. Here he begins with the most obvious moral proving ground of all. It is an object that is both actor and stage: actor because man is a body-soul unity; stage because the mind is to have mastery over the body, and so, in that higher sense, is the true seat of rational action.

If we cannot master the flesh here, we cannot master it anywhere else. Paradoxically, these most obvious sins of the body are most powerful in their temptations (and so, we might excuse ourselves thereby, the most “natural”), and yet, they are also the ones whereby, if we resist temptation and achieve purity, each successive gain will make us more like Christ who Himself took on a body.

• What is Passing with the Body 

• What is Lasting with the Body 

• What is Unthinkable with the Body

• What is Demanded with the Body

Doctrine. Our bodies are a gift from God to tell the truth about God in Christ.  

What is Passing with the Body

He starts off with what was probably a common saying going around: “All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything’ (v. 12). This idea will come back in Chapter 8, but we see it also in Romans 14: namely, the lawful and the unlawful. To put it another way, we have first to distinguish between the essential and nonessential, or the primary and secondary. Paul’s “Romans 14 Way” was a greater morality precisely because his field of moral action was greater, and the law of liberty helped him see the whole. Think of it as a great moral mission that involves the dangers of immorality. Paul’s Master, Jesus Christ, had taken on a body and descended into a world of impurity, yet was not thereby rendered impure. Paul could write to Titus, “To the pure all things are pure” (1:15). Jesus (and Paul after His lead) was willing to achieve a greater moral aim by submerging the body into a field where bodies were nothing but abused. In Corinth that “Romans 14 Way,” or greater moral mission, was being used as a license to sin. So Paul is directly calling them out on that, saying in effect, “Yes, all things are lawful” in this sense: that physical things are not the problem. God is not passing laws against His material “stuff,” whether wine or bodies. His stuff is not the problem. However you who inhabit bodies and taste wine are! You and I have become a problem with His stuff. Peter adds to this subject that, “whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved” (2 Pet. 2:19).

This first principle is further clarified not only by distinguishing between the useful and its misuse, but between the lasting and the passing: ‘Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food”—and God will destroy both one and the other’ (v. 13a). That which is to be merely used and not enjoyed, in itself, to use an Augustinian distinction, is precisely that which will not last. This is not to say that the new heavens and new earth will not be populated with bodies, nor that those bodies will not be satisfied in any sense by food. They will. It is to keep constructing Paul’s hierarchy in which, thus far, the great moral mission (the redemption of body) is supreme over potential moral dangers (sexual temptation toward the body), and now that which is to be enjoyed in itself (so far unstated) is not to be sacrificed on the altar of that which is merely to be used (food and the bodily refreshment in food).

Notice also the simplicity of the analogy. Paul is perfectly happy to relate the misuse of the body through sex with its misuse by food and drink. His opponents were doing that. We can even imagine sayings of Jesus—though they did not have the completed canon, yet surely His sayings were frequently tossed about—taken out of context. “Didn’t our Lord even say that it’s not what the body takes in or expels that counts … you know, when Jesus declared all foods clean? But it’s what comes out of the heart that matters!” One can easily sense how such a line of reasoning can become an abuse of Mark 7:18-23. We do not know exactly how they made such an argument. What we can see is how Paul is responding to just such a line of reasoning in these few verses. He is agreeing at one level: Yes, the eating activity and sexual activity are both alike deeds of the body and will, in that sense, pass away.

But there is one difference, and it is very important. It is a difference which Aristotle famously captured in his doctrine of the mean in his Ethics. In the cases of growing in the virtues of temperance or courage, for example, we avoid the opposite extremes about each—namely profligacy and insensibility in the former, or cowardice and foolhardiness in the latter—so that the thing we call by each virtue “is a kind of mean.” Further, the shape of this moral mean is fashioned by doing this or that, “at the right times, with reference to the right objects, toward the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way.”1 This naturally raises an objection in the mind of the impatient student: “So, then, there is a moderate way to participate in x sin?” whatever the case may be. The Philosopher did not lack clarity here, as,

Not every action nor every passion admits of a mean; for some have names that already imply badness, e.g., spite, shamelessness, envy, and in the cases of actions adultery, theft, murder; for all of these and suchlike things imply by their names that they are themselves bad, and not the excesses and deficiencies of them. It is not possible, then, ever to be right with regard to them; one must always be wrong. Nor does goodness or badness with regard to such things depend on committing adultery with the right woman, at the right time, and in the right way, but simply to do any of them is to go wrong.2

Now these Corinthians surely knew this—these same Corinthians who gloried in the rhetoric of cheap contemporary philosophers, surely, at least some of whom knew Aristotle; and, at any rate, their conscience testified against them. Therefore the sins of food and drink are like the sins of sexuality, and yet not like them at all in another sense. The Apostle would have expected them to be able to make this further distinction between the like and the unlike.

Here one emerges from mere ethics to theology, as true ethics must follow true theology: ‘The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body’ (v. 13b). Here is an end the philosopher could not trace out, but requires the theologian. Every Christian is made a theologian. He or she at least had better be a theologian sufficient to conform their bodies in sanctification to the One whose image was made perfect in bodily form. There are two ways to see this: First, as I have hinted at in my excursion into Aristotle, there are clearer boundaries around sexual sin than around the sins of eating and drinking. The former is a boundary of kind and the latter of degrees. In other words, when we sin by eating and drinking, we have too much of a good thing. We go wrong by degrees. We are either ignorant of the mean, or else we have obscured it by blameworthy habit. When we sin in the sexual realm, it is not because we go too far in what is permissible, but because we do a fundamentally different thing that is never permitted. Marriage is of a different kind than other relationships and activities into which our culture has cast sex. 

The bottom line here is in this question: Who is right about what these bodies are for? God or the culture around us? God says that sex is for marriage only. He invented both. They were His idea. In this way, such bodily functions are not designed for any other thing than for this institution called marriage. And so when Paul uses these grounding words, “for the Lord,” here, we need to understand that, “Whether you eat or drink or [any action in the sexual realm] ... do it all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31). Do that act, only in a way that tells the truth about God. 

One more idea Paul brings in here is the concept of bondage. Remember, from verse 12 that you can escape from the fires of sexual sin; but his resolve is that he will not be brought into bondage, or, as he says it, under the dominion of this thing that occasions sin. What is the implication? Because all sin is bondage: “Everyone who sins is a slave to sin” (Jn. 8:34). This is a larger truth that Jesus spoke there than Paul is addressing here. For his use to the Corinthians, sexual sin has chains held by demons that the believer does not want to trifle with. The great tragedy is that all will know exactly what the Bible means by this either sooner or later. For many the truth will become clear only when it is too late to escape. This bondage includes all kinds of things that this passage does not get into. However it does address one which we will come to.

What is Lasting with the Body

‘And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power’ (v. 14). The reader may ask at this point: What on earth does the resurrection have to do with sexual immorality? Our first clue comes from the context. His last words were that the Lord was “for the body.” This is not Gnosticism. Christianity has a much higher view of bodies than those who we might call Sensualists. But there is a second clue in these words: that Christ’s resurrection is for our resurrection, and so “we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Rom. 6:5). Divine power has been ordained to work in favor of our bodies. Grace perfects the nature of bodies.

This tells us that the trouble with sexual sin is not too high of a view of the visual or the sensible, but just the opposite. When this world is over, God is not done with bodies. He is going to restore bodies to a far greater materiality, a far greater beauty, a far greater sensory experience.: greater indeed than that to which Adam and Eve had experience.

C. S. Lewis put it like this, 

[It] would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.3

The resurrection of the body condemns sexual sin precisely as a killjoy. What may seem like the height of sense-experience in the youth of this age will be soon revealed as both shadow and snare, whereas the light of sensual delights was further up the path if only we trusted the One who invented the whole. The resurrection of the body reminds us that sexual sin is waging war against lasting and ever-increasing physical delights, as well as spiritual delights. 

What is Unthinkable with the Body

‘Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh” (vv. 15-16). This calls for deeper thought than has frequently been given to it. Paul speaks of what is written, and therefore we must go to the text he speaks of: namely, Genesis 2:24 which we must consider the first marriage with first compatible bodies. One application of this is that bondage I mentioned before. Remember Paul snapped back at the liberty-mongers, “Oh yes, all things are lawful for me—but I WILL NOT be made a slave to anything in this time and this place!”

Perhaps they might ask further what he means. His answer could be imagined as something like this: “Don’t you know that when you join yourself, in sexual immorality, a bond of some kind has been formed, and your bond just made you a bond slave.” Now I do not think that has to mean something “spiritual” in the sense of something mystical and obscure. Unsurprisingly, like so many of the other Corinthians errors, the Charismatic movement of the past few generations have echoed the same brand of errors to us. Some of you have heard something like this, I am sure, about a sort of spiritual “connection” or “bond,” and then others have probably dismissed that altogether. In the spirit of not throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, we had better check to see if this is all bathwater and no baby. There is a more common sense meaning to this. In fact, Paul is using an analogy between earthly relations and marriages to our heavenly relation to Christ. He makes an analogy of this sort in Ephesians 5, albeit concerning a different subject. We should not be surprised by the same analogous speech here.

The anchoring words are here: ‘But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him’ (v. 17). The deeper reason that compromising the body in this way is unthinkable is because of who we are betrothed to in an ultimate sense. Paul says to these same Corinthians in the next letter, “For I feel a divine jealousy for you, since I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ” (2 Cor. 11:2). The whole church body is compared to a bride of Christ. It, collectively, is one in a partnership of two that is treated, again, as one. Thus, the whole of each man is body and soul oneness in a partnership of two (with his spouse) that is treated, again, as one.

Now, as the body of Christ—the church—is a visible sense of His glory shone through His bride, from the invisible to the visible, so those sins that transgress the clearest boundaries in the world bring the most disgrace to the body (See back in Chapter 5 if a reminder is needed). Paul’s next words then make complete the thought: ‘Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body’ (v. 18b). By now we have set down enough theological foundation for you to realize that this sin “against one’s own body” has a double meaning. Even if no deeper theological reflection is cultivated by this passage, all Christians must at least catch that in this misuse of the body in illicit sexual acts, you sin against your own individual body and you sin against the body of Christ (His bride) that is joined to him. 

What is Demanded with the Body

Paul moves to application in the passage itself. It is captured in the uninspired heading to this section in your Bible—at least it is in the ESV—but helpfully it is also in the inspired text down in verse 18: ‘Flee from sexual immorality.’ The upshot here is not hard. We have a plain action item: FLEE. Flee literally means flee! Get out or get away, or run from that person, or, if need be, get out of those circles, or take a different route, or pursue a different job, or get accountability on your internet use. Or, as Paul said elsewhere, “So flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness” (2 Tim. 2:22). If Paul could say that to a young man filled with the Spirit to join the Apostle in turning the world upside own for Christ, then let none of you take offense to be told such a “plain” thing, or such a “puritanical” thing.

Who makes this demand? The answer is that God does. Paul says, ‘Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?’ (v. 19a). We have talked, from the passage in Chapter 3, about how the church, as a whole, is the dwelling place of God.4 Now there is this other sense in which each individual Christian is the place where God lives. You are a temple of God. Specifically, your body is the temple of God. Your body just got the ultimate upgrade! If you have ever wondered about these words, we may rule out that this is merely some Christian cliche, since it is “the Holy Spirit who dwells within us” (2 Tim. 1:14); and, “Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (Jn. 14:23). Everywhere we bring our bodies, there we have brought the triune God with us, via the immediate agency of the Holy Spirit.

But he makes this demand even more pointed with the language of purchase and ownership: You are not your own, for you were bought with a price (19b-20a).

Then comes the ultimate imperative: So glorify God in your body (20b). Glorifying God in your body includes having a proper perspective, from a young age, that the world doesn’t get to define your body. 

To have been crafted by God and then purchased again by God, your body is owned by him to tell the truth about him in your body - YOU MUST choose a partner in marriage (and only this kind of husband or wife) who will tell the truth of God about your body. And you must do the same for them. Starting right now. That doesn’t start after the wedding. It starts years before. 

Practical Use of the Doctrine

Use 1. Admonition. Did you know that you were the temple of God in such a way that the Spirit of Christ dwells with a jealousy far greater than that of the most fearsome husband on earth? Everywhere we go, we bring God with us with such a will over our bodies. Everything we subject our bodies to—even the slightest, seemingly insignificant act—we presume to get away with as an act of adultery, if it is not within His good design of marriage. The Lord may celebrate over the marriage bed in the Song of Solomon, but He is no less present and His honor no less at stake during the acts of fornication, or pornography, or entertaining lustful thoughts, or resentments towards one’s own sexual design, and those that issue forth into the desecration of one’s own sexual organs and acting in self-hatred, hatred of parents, and hatred of God that pretends to have changed sexual identity. In all these things, violence is committed against the Spirit, unfaithfulness toward Christ, ingratitude toward the Father.

Use 2. Consolation. The author of Hebrews makes the literal body of Christ the center of the gospel:

Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me” (Heb. 10:5)

Our bodies—the same bodies that we have abused and misused, those temples that God knows full well all of the ways we have trashed—are on a path to renewal and perfection. Because Jesus had His body prepared for the ultimate demolition and renovation, He prepares a place for us. When He speaks of His Father’s house with many rooms in that Upper Room in John 14, He was also, by extension, having you look forward to the renewed building project of your body.  

Consider the temple of Jesus’ body. His building was demolished, yet not by His own misuse. He never sinned with His. Jesus’s body was prepared from all eternity: the ultimate, perfect, spotless, dwelling place of God, to be demolished by God. On the cross, all of our misdeeds of the body are demolished in Him there. Bodies formerly polluted by Christians were condemned buildings and buried there. Sexes supposedly transitioned were redeemed and restored there. Those who repent now have that now, though many may struggle in this life to ever wipe away the shame, or solve the many embarrassments and handicaps that former license brought about.

Because Jesus’s body was not destined to “see corruption” (Ps. 16:10), when He rose from the dead, The Body, and thus all of our bodies, are to be renovated by God. Because “[He] will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Phi. 3:21), God is making it exactly the place where He wants to live, and so He will do it.  

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1. Aristotle, Ethics, II.6 in The Works of Aristotle (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 958.

2. Aristotle, Ethics, II.6 [959]

3. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 26

4. cf. 1 Corinthians 3:9, 16-17; cf. Ephesians 2:19-22, 1 Peter. 2:5.