2 Corinthians 7:1 - Arthur Peake's Commentary on the Bible

2 Corinthians 6:14 to 2 Corinthians 7:1. These verses appear plainly out of place. They break what is otherwise a close connexion between 2 Corinthians 6:13 and 2 Corinthians 7:2: they introduce a new and very different subject, and they have a very different tone from what precedes and follows. They are best regarded as a scrap from another letter written by Paul to Corinth, possibly a fragment of the letter referred to in 1 Corinthians 5:9, which has accidentally crept into the sheets on which our letter was preserved. They contain an urgent, even passionate, demand for complete separation from the heathen, especially in their idolatrous practices. In a series of sharp questions Paul flashes scorn on every attempt to serve two masters, Christ and Belial, that is the devil (or, possibly, Antichrist, Proverbs 6:12 *). The last of these questions reminds him that Christians are meant to be God's temple; and he exposes the source and the significance of that conception by means of a series of quotations from OT, the first being freely reproduced from Ezekiel 37:27, the rest combined from Isaiah 52:11, Ex. 20:34, and 2 Kings 7:14. The description of God as the Almighty occurs in NT only here and in Rev. Men who rest in these promises seek to purify themselves (cf. 1 John 3:3) in flesh and spirit these words being used in the simple untechnical sense, as in 1 Corinthians 7:34 (body and spirit).