‘Meats for the stomach, and the stomach for meats. But God will bring to nothing both it and them. But the body is not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God both raised the Lord and will raise us up through his power.'
Again this is probably dealing with a further argument brought against him, that sex is a natural appetite and that therefore we have a right to it. Meat, they say, is there to satisfy the stomach, and the stomach to receive meats, thus eating is right, and in the same way the body craves sexual expression and therefore any means of sexual expression is right.
To this he replies that the comparisons are not equal. It is true that the food is for the stomach, but both the food and the stomach will come to nothing. They are not important in the scheme of things. They are purely physical. But it is different with the body, for the body is for participating in eating, which is necessary for life, but it is not for fornication. The latter was forbidden from the beginning (implied in Genesis 2:24). It is an intrusion into God's perfect plan. Rather the body is for the Lord. Eating does no harm, indeed is helpful, but fornication is harmful. The body of the Christian is here seen as directly linked with the Lord and His body and belongs to Him, it is united with His body, and in a similar way He belongs to it, so much so that in 1 Corinthians 12:12-13 the body into which we have been baptised is Christ Himself.
‘The Lord is for the body.' Furthermore Christ Himself gives Himself to His body. He came so that by eating of His flesh and drinking of His blood they would find life through Him. That is, they partake of him as the Bread of life (John 6:35), the very source of continual spiritual life, and partake of Him through benefiting from His death in which they are seen to have participated. Christ's very purpose in coming was that He might deliver the body from sin, and incorporate each individual believer into His own body, in the course of which He cleanses them from sin and makes them one with His body (Ephesians 2:16). He came to gather to Himself all His own. So His coming is in order to possess the body which will share Heaven with Him.
The Christians' body is therefore in fact part of Christ's body (1 Corinthians 12:12-13), it is a ‘member', a limb or organ, of His body (1 Corinthians 6:15), for by partaking of Him through faith it has become united with Him, and His very purpose in coming was to possess it. That is why He came. And we are to partake of His One body (1 Corinthians 10:16-17). Our body thus has a wonderful and holy present and future in the closeness of its union with Christ, and thus a holy status, and because of its oneness with Christ it is to be raised by God (1 Corinthians 6:14). It has a very much a spiritual aspect which excludes its misuse in fornication. It is in all ways holy. To unite it with a prostitute would be to defile it.
While it is not Paul's main purpose here this once for all does away with the idea that the body is essentially sinful. The Greeks saw the body as a prison from which we needed to be released. The Bible teaches that it is a blessing yet to be made more wonderful.
‘And God both raised the Lord and will raise us up through his power.' This is another reason why the body is special, because it is to be raised a spiritual body (1 Corinthians 15:44). Its destiny is to be unfleshly. The same mighty power that raised up Christ from the dead will work in us to transform and renew our bodies so that we are presented before Him without spot and blameless (Ephesians 5:27), presented as a chaste virgin to Christ (2 Corinthians 11:2). How then can we commit it to the grossness of fleshly living, even worse, to a prostitute? Our destiny is Heaven. Can we then consort with anything that is degraded?