‘Or do you not know that your body is a sanctuary of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which you have from God, and you are not your own, for you were bought with a price. Therefore glorify God in your body.'
Now he expresses his incredulity that a Christian should forget his unique position in Christ. Are Christians not aware that they are each a sanctuary of the Holy Spirit? The sin of sexual uncleanness is made even more severe in view of the fact that the Holy Spirit dwells in us, the Holy Spirit Whom God has given us, and that we are His temple, and each His sanctuary. Thus we are each made holy (1 Corinthians 3:17). How then can we defile His sanctuary by uniting it with an idolatrous prostitute or with sexual uncleanness? Note how carefully he makes each sanctuary individual. The fornicator does not defile the whole temple, he defiles himself as one of the sanctuaries of the Holy Spirit.
This is similar to the idea in the previous verse where his body is defiled without contaminating the body of Christ. The defilement robs God, but does not defile God. It does however defile what belongs to Him.
And that is one further thing that we are to remember, that we no longer belong to ourselves. We have been bought with a price. We now belong to Him by purchase. 1 Corinthians 7:23 may be seen as suggesting that the prime idea here is that we have been bought by God from sin in the slave market, and are thus now His bondservants. Others see it as suggesting that just as a slave who has been ‘bought by a god' in order to set him free (a legal fiction) is seen as belonging to that god, so we too belong to the living God. But in our case He lives, and we are therefore really His, and we are responsible to Him as our Master. How then can we take what is His and use it in this dreadful way? We have no right. It is His body.
A third possibility is that slavery is not in mind at all and that the thought is that the sanctuary has been bought for its holy purpose at a great price. There is no thought of slavery in the context (whereas in 1 Corinthians 7:23 that is the context). The emphasis is on the buying and the price, the former stressing God's ownership, the latter stressing how much the purchase cost God in the death of His Son (1 Peter 1:18-19). And the context is of a sanctuary of God. This would tie in with the fact that we are a part of God's building (1 Corinthians 3:9), a part of the whole larger Sanctuary of God, the church of believers (1 Corinthians 3:16).
So the argument against immorality has revealed the positive side for the Christian. We are members of His body and will be raised by the power of God to be with Him, we are one spirit with the Lord, bound in the closest of unions, we are sanctuaries of the Holy Spirit Who dwells within us, Who was given to us by God, and we are bought with a price, the most precious price that was ever paid, the blood of Christ as of a Lamb without blemish and without spot (1 Corinthians 5:7; 1 Peter 1:18-19), a contract sealed by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 1:13-14; Ephesians 4:30). How then can we behave contrary to God's will and defile what we have contribute to Him?
We note here how Paul is also demolishing the doctrine that the body has no connection with the heavenly and will therefore be done away. He has firmly put the body within the heavenly. The body as well as the spirit has been redeemed. Thus all teaching that the body does not matter is done away with. What we do in the body does matter. (Pneumatics had probably argued that as we are to leave our bodies what our bodies do does not matter).
‘Therefore glorify God in your body.' What else can we do? Away sin, away evil, away immorality, for we in our bodies are His and His for ever. Thus our bodies must ever bring glory to God.