Scripture Daily

Context No. 1511 of 4322 · 1 Corinthians

Context · Reflection

1 Corinthians 6:9-20: in context

9Or don’t you know that the unrighteous will not inherit God’s Kingdom? Don’t be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor male prostitutes, nor homosexuals, 10nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor slanderers, nor extortionists, will inherit God’s Kingdom. 11Some of you were such, but you were washed. You were sanctified. You were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and in the Spirit of our God. 12“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are expedient. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be brought under the power of anything. 13“Foods for the belly, and the belly for foods,” but God will bring to nothing both it and them. But the body is not for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. 14Now God raised up the Lord, and will also raise us up by his power. 15Don’t you know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? May it never be! 16Or don’t you know that he who is joined to a prostitute is one body? For, “The two”, he says, “will become one flesh.” 17But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit. 18Flee sexual immorality! “Every sin that a man does is outside the body,” but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body. 19Or don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, 20for you were bought with a price. Therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.

Paul reminds the Corinthians that the unrighteous will not inherit God's kingdom, and lists the kinds of wrongdoing that, unrepented, shut a person out. But then he turns, with one of the great turns of hope in his letters: and such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God. He goes on to teach that the body belongs to the Lord, that it is a temple of the Holy Spirit, and that they are not their own but were bought with a price, and so should glorify God in their bodies.

The word to hold is a small one in the past tense: such were some of you. Paul has just listed serious sins, and rather than leave his readers condemned, he reminds them of what the gospel had done: whatever they had been, they were that no longer. You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified. The people he was writing to had come out of exactly the kinds of lives he described, and the gospel had changed them, cleansed them, made them new; and Paul will not let them forget it. There is enormous hope in that little word were. It means that no one is defined forever by their past, that no sin in the list puts a person beyond the reach of God's cleansing, that people genuinely change. The Corinthians were living proof: such were some of you, but you were washed. Whatever we have been, whatever we have done, is not the final word about us if we come to Christ; the gospel specializes in making the were true, in turning what someone is into what they used to be. This is not a minimizing of sin; Paul takes it with great seriousness, which is why he lists it plainly. But it is a refusal to let sin have the last word, because the blood of Christ and the Spirit of God can wash, sanctify, and justify even those who were what the list describes. No one is stuck in their past. One of the gospel's great notes of hope is the past tense of what we used to be.

Do I believe that my past does not define me forever, that whatever I have been, the gospel can make it were, and can I hold the hope of Paul's little word, such were some of you, but you were washed, for myself and for others?

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