CRITICAL NOTES
TRANSITIONAL SECTION.— 1 Corinthians 6:9-11
1 Corinthians 6:9.—Query, is the particular “wrong” and “defrauding” in 1 Corinthians 6:8-9 connected with 2 Corinthians 7:12, the case of “the incestuous person”? Had the father been ready to appeal to a secular court for redress? Some such connection would explain the transition in this verse from “litigation” to “fornication.” [In 2 Corinthians 7:2 Paul uses in negatived connection with himself “wrong” and “defraud.”] N.B., like Romans 1:24 usque ad fincm, this chapter gives a significant glimpse of the every-day corruption of the heathen world, with all the civilization of Greece and Rome. Effeminate.—Euphemistic.
1 Corinthians 6:10.—Note in what company we find “covetousness.” Stanley suggests a connection between “thieves” and the lawsuits (but query?). Revilers.—Virulent, foul abuse; generally, not always. John 9:28; Acts 23:4; 1 Corinthians 4:12; 1 Peter 2:13; 1 Timothy 5:14; 1 Peter 3:9; 1 Corinthians 5:11; and here. Inherit.—Cf. Matthew 25:34; James 2:5, “heirs of the kingdom.”
1 Corinthians 6:11.—Observe “were … were … were.” Partly historical, partly ideal. In ideal, Faith, Baptism, Renewal, Separation from sins of old character and life, coincide in time; in fact, Baptism may be pre- or post-dated in regard to Faith and Renewal; Separation may very imperfectly accompany the rest. Justified.—Protestantism rightly lays stress upon the relative change involved in pardon of sin; makes this its definition of Justification (Acts 13:38-39). Yet (e.g. Wesley, Sermons) “some rare instances may be found wherein the terms ‘justified’ and ‘justification’ are used in so wide a sense as to include sanctification also; yet in general use they are sufficiently distinguished from each other both by St. Paul and the other inspired writers.” Also, cf. Romans 8:30, where attention is not so much fixed upon the initial act of God as upon the continuously accorded and maintained status of the justified man, covering the whole interval from pardon to glory. Also, no careful adherence here to the ordo salutis (Calvin, in Ellicott). Observe “in … in.” Observe “our God.”
HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.— 1 Corinthians 6:9-11
I. The kingdom of God.—
1. Observe how the phrase and idea had got cleared in Paul’s mind from all the foolish and ridiculous Rabbinical accretions and anticipations of a great temporal monarchy under Messiah, in which, freed from the Roman or other yoke, Israel should be the nation, and the Gentile world exist for the sake of the Jew.
2. We have here a case of the true Evolution.
(1) Israel had been the kingdom of God on earth. As Babylon was Nebuchadnezzar’s, or Egypt was Pharaoh’s, or Damascus Rezin’s or Hazael’s. Jehovah was the only, the real, King of the realm. David, Solomon, etc., were understood to be only viceroys under Jehovah. Jehovah’s law was State law. Idolatry was treason. Citizens were born into the citizenship [cf. in contrast, John 1:13]; Israel, in the midst of the nations, stood distinguished as the nation of God in the land of God. But it never perfectly realised the idea. The land never was cleared of enemies for Jehovah. The people never did perfectly keep Jehovah’s law. They were not satisfied with, or mindful of, the true King Jehovah. At last, when the mob howled wildly around Pilate’s judgment seat, “We have no king but Cæsar,” came the beginning of the end of even this imperfect embodiment of God’s idea.
(2) Next, the Church of Christ is made to exhibit “God’s kingdom.” Again there is a separate people, God’s “peculiar people,” but of no one nation, located in no one land. The kingdom is wherever a heart is in which Christ is accepted as God’s anointed King of His new Israel. “Kingdom of God within you.” Every heart won is a new piece of territory added to God’s realm on earth. God’s “royal,” “perfect, law of liberty” (James 1:25; James 2:8) is the State law, and rules the hearts of the citizens of this better setting forth of the “kingdom of God.”
(3) “Better,” but not perfect, or ideal. For that we look to Eternity. Heaven is at last the idea of God realised. A people all holy, all happy, in a land without sin or curse; every heart beating pulse and pulse in communion with the King; love to the King the one sufficient, all-embracing law for every subject, written in the heart; God ruling over a race, all His people, dwelling in a world [perhaps “a new earth”] undisputedly His dominion. Thus, as Israel, the Church, the inner Experience of believers, Heaven—God’s recovered idea of a “kingdom of God” has progressively been exhibited “in many parts and in many manners” (Hebrews 1:1); each “illustration” traced on the same lines as its predecessor, with additions, modifications, added detail.
II. Its citizens.—Not “the unrighteous.”
1. Only an absolute exclusion when the kingdom of God is Heaven. Separation made (Matthew 25:33; Matthew 25:46). Impossible to conceive of the Holy City admitting “what defileth,” etc. (Revelation 21:27; Revelation 22:15); cannot pass the gates.
2. Very imperfectly attempted in Israel. Levitical law had many enactments whose sanction was, “That soul shall be cut off from among the People.” But those—never actually enforced to any great extent—missed nearly all forms of “unrighteousness” which did not culminate in overt action.
3. Only partially to be accomplished in the Christian Church. In the sub-Pentecostal, almost ideal, days of the Church, the King vindicated the principle by the cutting off of Ananias and Sapphira [the New Testament analogue of the death of Achan]. But God is not perpetually stepping forth in acts of holy self-vindication against sin in His world or in the Church of His Son. All Church discipline, and forms (or tests) of Church membership, are so many humanly devised, often God honoured, methods of endeavouring to keep out the “unrighteous,” or to exclude them when in. But they never can secure more than an approximation to the idea of a kingdom in which no “unrighteous” are found. No method, actual or proposed, ever gets worked with perfect intelligence, or perfect faithfulness; no method of human administration can deal with heart-unrighteousness.
4. There is a perfect, self-acting, discipline of exclusion; a Divine excommunication. Sin means real incapacity for understanding, seeing, entering, the kingdom here; an utter unfitness for heaven, a moral impossibility, hereafter. Sin forfeits justification; the “blood” no longer “cleanses” (1 John 1:7); it negatives the possession of the holiness without some degree of which no man is really regenerate or sanctified, nor can be a child in the family or a citizen of the kingdom. “Every branch in Me that beareth not fruit He taketh away”; the Vine-dresser’s knife executes its sentence of excommunication. The Church must often leave the dead branch still attached to the Vine; or must be ignorant of the fulness of its death. “Be not deceived.”
III. Candidates for citizenship.—
1. Who but the “unrighteous”? What a catalogue! “Thieves,” “effeminate,” “drunkards,” cannibals, murderers, sinners of every type, degree, age, race! From such the citizens are recruited! No citizen who was not an alien once. [No quarry from which stones cannot be got fit for Christ’s building. No stone which cannot be utilised by Him. There is really no other stone than such as this in the building.] (Ephesians 2:1-3; Ephesians 2:11-13.) The life-history of every citizen follows the formula, “Such were you, but ye were washed.… Ye are citizens.”
2. To such the kingdom comes by “inheritance.” (True now, and true “when the Son of Man shall come in His glory,” ut supra.) Such became “joint-heirs with Christ” in the possession of the kingdom. By inheritance; a concomitant of the new status, the new life; so certainly as they are “washed,” etc., do they inherit. The “washing,” etc., brings with it, ipso facto, an entering into possession. And as certainly by-and-by, with an unbroken sequence, does the “washing,” etc., go with the “inheriting.” There is no other final goal and resting-place congruous with, and possible for, the renewed citizen life. No entering without a change preceding; no change without the inheritance following.
IV. The initiation.—“Washing, “sanctifying” justifying.” (See Critical Notes, above) Paul not speaking with any theological precision of order. Yet if sanctification be only the relative holiness, completed by a “separating” act (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:2), no necessary difficulty to find it followed by “justification” in the ordinary sense of pardon,—the (forensic) discharge from all liability to penalty on account of a broken law; the two acts of God’s grace, separable in thought. coincide in time. Or, better, remember that the status of a justified man is a perpetually renewed grace; underlying all after-developments of the gracious life; assumed as the foundation on which all the superstructure of holiness is reared. Even in heaven, the saint will be there, and will remain there, only as a sinner justified, accepted, for the sake of that “Lamb” in whose “blood” he has trusted for salvation. The basis of all is the objective work of that Christ, who is revealed in His name as exactly what He is to, and for, us. On this rests, and rises, the (subjective) work of the Spirit of God. As the eruption of the leprosy falls off when the new health courses through the system, so these old, foul sins fall away from the life, when the spiritual health is renewed and becomes full, by the entering and indwelling of the Spirit of God.
SEPARATE HOMILIES
1 Corinthians 6:11. Perpetual Miracles.
I. Changed men a patent evidence of the supernatural.—
1. Age of miracles past? Yes, in the technical sense. Miracles [and Inspiration] by definition coterminous, in time and extent of distribution, with the progressive impartation of Revelation. Outside that process they are not found; Revelation complete, they cease. Revelation and Christ its Centre and Subject are a standing miracle. [The miracles were credentials of the agents and messengers and message; but, still more, themselves parts of the Revelation.]
2. In lower sense, No. God always (and not only in “miracles”) was in closest touch with the visible, material, “natural” order; is still. The converted man, at Corinth or anywhere else, knows that a power has come upon him from without, and that not human, or creaturely, but Divine. Conversion meant the point when the unseen broke in effectively upon him and changed whole current of thought and will and life. The process has its “natural analogies.” “I live by the faith of [this truth, and in this Person] a Son of God, who loved me,” etc. (Galatians 2:20). I.e. a new ruling idea has taken possession and revolutionised life. A new affection is expelling all old evil affections. And this new idea, the new affection, has come with the “demonstration of the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 2:4; cf. 1 Thessalonians 1:5-7). “No man can say that Jesus is Lord [nor “my Lord”] but by the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3).
3. The man is an evidence to himself, and to others also. Men look at, observe, wonder at, the man whom they knew, who was yesterday “such” as they are; who is now pure, “washed, sanctified,” who has evidently laid hold of a power to do, and be, right which they do not possess; and of the secret of a life, for which no interest, or force of will, or ordinary human motives, can account. “God has touched that man!” A compendious evidence, and striking, appealing to all.
II. Vindication of universality of power and applicability of Gospel.—No case it cannot touch, etc. (as in Homiletic Analysis). Workers need this. Temptation in mission-fields, and at home, when evangelistic work is at a discount and conversions are few, to look at the difficulties in the way of producing conviction, and of inducing open confession even where conviction is secured; to adjust expectations to one’s narrower success; to acquiesce in meagre success with the cultured or rich; “our hope is with the poor” [and much Scripture can be quoted!]; to give up hope of the adults: “must not expect much from the generation of to-day, brought up in heathenism, with habits, training, etc., set; our hope is in the children; educate them Christianly.” [Good work, but not to leave other undone.] Every now and again, at home and in mission-fields, God does some such wonders as these at Corinth, and rebukes little faith, and too ready acquiescence in the “hopelessness” of the adult generation. Paul’s success everywhere was mainly with adult heathen, adult Jews. The Evangelical revival of eighteenth century in England began amongst adults, thieves, pugilists, unclean, worldlings, fashionables, every type. Every such case rebukes unfaithful thinkers and workers, and reassures and heartens all faithful but despondent ones. Again and again the Gospel matches itself against adult heathenism, adult sin, and wins. “Such were some of you, but.” It can touch and save all ages, classes, types.
III. Happy Paul, happy anybody who can appeal to such personal verifications of the truth of the message he preaches!—How confidently he makes his next appeal, when he can recall a dozen instances where his formula of the spiritual life was verified. How conclusive his appeals and arguments, to the men whom he can claim as evidences of the truth of what he advances. “I know—you know—how true is all I say. Ye were … ye are,” etc. Happy the man who “has his quiver full” of such spiritual children (Psalms 127:5). With such arrows he can meet “in the gate” his own doubts about his “call” or the denial of it by others. Good “letters of ordination” are such plain and unmistakable converts as these. The healed sick are the best diploma of a true physician.
HOMILETIC SUGGESTIONS
I. Delusion.—Its danger. Its folly. Its source—ignorance, from a blinded heart: “the deceitfulness of sin.” All in danger. The worst hope for impunity.
II. Inclusion.—Even for such sinners. All may hope for mercy. Its method: “ye were washed,” etc. Into a kingdom, and that of God.
III. Exclusion.—The real excommunication. What? Who? Why? How?
1 Corinthians 6:9-11. “Soul, remember.”
I. What thou wert, with a gracious sadness.
II. What thou art, with a sober gladness.
III. How the change was wrought, with a hallowed thankfulness.
1 Corinthians 6:11. The Great Contrast.—
1. With skill of an artist, Paul represents two portraits of same persons: Corinthians,—wretched, polluted, in rags, enslaved by sin;—then, morally changed, cleansed, robed in righteousness, enjoying high Christian privileges.
2. Not to discourage, to wound feelings; to impress two thoughts—(a) impossibility for impure man to partake the blessings of … kingdom; (b) obligation laid on them to renounce sin, live holy life.
3. Therefore, “examine both portraits; mark contrast.”
I. Past state of redeemed.—Applicable to all redeemed, everywhere; all sinners, by nature governed and influenced by same principles. Heart impure. Four things true of their past unregenerate state:
1. Void of moral rectitude. Conscience burdened with guilt. Heart’s throne occupied by intruder; they enslaved by sin.
2. Subject to impure influences. Affections defiled. If conscience loses authority, nothing to prevent most debasing slavery. Love of self, of pleasure, of the world—three mighty powers control soul. Every thought, emotion, feeling, under power of one of these. In us—in appearance better than Corinthians—these more successfully checked in outward development.
3. Slaves of wrong habits. Deeds evil. Conscience and affections wrong, deeds must be inconsistent with truth and righteousness.
4. Incapable of spiritual enjoyment. No capacity, no taste, no fitness, for the exalted pleasures of religion, the pure joys of the heavenly world. “New creatures” alone adapted to “new heaven.” A foul, old portrait.
II. The present state of the redeemed.—
1. The change.
(1) An initiatory act. “Washed;” allusion to baptism, striking emblem of moral cleansing. But evidently also reference to another washing, which alone can take away sin,—work of Holy Spirit on heart. “The commencement of wonderful change in believer’s soul: opening of understanding, impressing of heart, moving of affections, enkindling of new thoughts and desires. Separation from world, conversion to God.”
(2) Progressive development. “Sanctified.” No faultless perfection. A process of spiritual cleansing. An ascent by slow, gradual, continued progress.
(3) Beautiful completion. “Justified.” Mentioned last, considered first. Three great causes at work in Justification. Illustrate by drowning man saved by rope; the friend who throws the rope, the grasp of the hand, parallel to the Spirit’s exhibition of Christ, Saviour’s work, penitent’s own faith.
2. The means. “The name,” etc. No other could have moved depraved hearts of Corinthians; no other can change a heart
3. The agency. “The Spirit,” etc. Giving effect to the word preached; appealing to conscience, subduing enmity, gaining heart.
Application.—Need of calm and solemn reflection. Will produce humility, gratitude, deep, lively sense of mercy of God. Also, evidently no sinner need despair.—Condensed from J. H. Hughes, “Homilist,” New Series, i. 125.