1 Corinthians — Chapter 6

Authorship & Background

Deep Dive

Setting: Paul is still writing from Ephesus in about AD 53–55, to the church he founded in Corinth a few years earlier (Acts 18:1–18). Chapter 5 dealt with a man living with his father's wife, a sin the church was proud of tolerating, and told them to remove him from their fellowship. Paul ended it with a question: is it not those inside the church the church is to judge? (5:12). Chapter 6 runs straight on from there. The church that would not judge open sin in its midst was happy to drag its own members before pagan judges over money. Then Paul returns to sexual sin, this time men from the church visiting prostitutes and defending it with slogans about freedom. The thread through the whole chapter is the same: the Corinthians had not grasped who they now were in Christ, washed, set apart, bought, and indwelt by the Spirit.

Lawsuits Against Believers (vv1–11)

• "Does he dare go to law before the unrighteous?" (v1). "Dare" (tolmaō) carries a sense of outrage, as if to say "how can any of you bring yourself to do this?" A Roman province ran a court system that a citizen with means could use for civil claims over property, contracts and inheritance. In Corinth cases were heard publicly, and the judge's platform (bēma) stood in the forum, the same bēma where Gallio threw out the Jews' case against Paul (Acts 18:12–17). Its remains can still be seen in the ruins.
• "The unrighteous… the saints" (v1). "Unrighteous" (adikos) here does not mean the judges were corrupt, though Roman civil courts did favor the wealthy and well-connected. It means people outside God's people, as v6 makes plain with "unbelievers." The contrast is between two communities, not between bad and good judges. Jewish communities in the Roman world already settled their disputes among themselves, and Paul expects no less of the church.
• "The saints will judge the world" (v2). This picks up Daniel's vision, where judgment is given "for the saints of the Most High" and they possess the kingdom (Dan 7:22), and Jesus' promise that the Twelve will sit on thrones judging Israel (Matt 19:28; Rev 20:4). How exactly believers will share in judgment is not spelled out. Most commentators take it as sharing in Christ's rule and agreeing with his verdicts, not as believers handing out sentences on their own.
• "Are you incompetent to try trivial cases?" (v2). Literally "unworthy of the smallest courts." The word for "cases" (kritērion) means a tribunal or court of judgment (it is used again in v4 and James 2:6). People destined to share the judgment of the world can surely run a small claims court among themselves.
• "We are to judge angels" (v3). No other verse says this so directly. Most take these to be the fallen angels (2 Pet 2:4; Jude 6). If the saints will share in that, then disputes about "matters pertaining to this life," everyday business and property, are well within their reach.
• "Those who have no standing in the church" (v4). The Greek can be read two ways. The ESV, NIV and most modern versions take it as a question: why put these cases before outsiders, people the church does not look to for moral judgment? The KJV takes it as a command, an ironic one: "set them to judge who are least esteemed in the church," meaning even the lowliest believer would do better than a pagan court. The verb (exoutheneō) means to treat as nothing or despise, and Paul used it of the "despised" whom God chose (1:28). Either way the point is the same.
• "I say this to your shame" (v5). In 4:14 Paul said he was not writing to shame them. Now he is. A church that boasted of its wisdom (1:5; 4:10) apparently could not find one wise person to settle a quarrel.
• "Already a defeat for you" (v7). The word (hēttēma) means a loss or defeat. Before any judge gives a verdict, both sides have already lost, because brother has turned on brother in public. Paul's alternative is radical: "Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded?" This is Jesus' teaching on the other cheek and the cloak (Matt 5:39–40), and Peter's picture of Christ, who "when he suffered, did not threaten" (1 Pet 2:23).
• "You yourselves wrong and defraud—even your own brothers!" (v8). The turn is sharp. Some of them were not the wronged party at all. They were the ones cheating. The same two verbs from v7 come back, now aimed at the wrongdoers.
• What this does and does not forbid. Paul is dealing with civil disputes between believers, not crimes, and he says nothing here about cases with unbelievers. He himself appealed to Roman law and Caesar (Acts 22:25; 25:10–11), and he teaches that the state bears the sword to punish wrongdoing (Rom 13:3–4). Christians have applied this passage in different ways, from refusing all lawsuits to using church or Christian arbitration first. Most agree on the core: believers should go to great lengths, even accepting loss, before taking a fellow believer to a public court, and crimes such as abuse belong with the authorities.
• "The unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God" (v9). "Unrighteous" (adikoi) picks up "wrong" (adikeite) from v8. The cheaters in the church should not assume they are safe. "Do not be deceived" warns against a comfortable idea, perhaps already alive in Corinth, that what a believer does with his body or his money does not touch his standing with God.
• The list (vv9–10). Ten kinds of people, and it extends the list in 5:10–11. It mixes sexual sins (the sexually immoral, adulterers, men who practice homosexuality), religious sin (idolaters), and sins of money and mouth (thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, swindlers). The "greedy" (pleonektēs) is literally one who wants to have more. "Swindlers" (harpax) is the word for a ravenous wolf in Matthew 7:15, the grabber or extortioner. Greed sits beside adultery, and slander beside idolatry. No one reading the list honestly can stand outside it.
• "Men who practice homosexuality" (v9). The ESV uses one phrase for two Greek words, and its footnote says they refer to the passive and active partners in homosexual acts. Malakos literally means "soft." It is used of fine clothing in Matthew 11:8, and the lexicon says that here it is "probably in [an] obscene sense," used for the passive partner. Arsenokoitēs, from "male" and "bed," appears first in Paul (also 1 Tim 1:10). Many scholars think he formed it from the Greek of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, where those two words stand side by side. Some scholars have argued the terms are narrower, meaning exploitative relationships such as pederasty, or male prostitution. Most lexicons and commentators, including some who disagree about the ethics, conclude that the words cover male–male sexual relations generally, and that is how the church has read them throughout its history. Paul's concern here is acts and practice, not temptation or attraction. He names this sin alongside greed and drunkenness, not as a category of its own.
• "And such were some of you" (v11). This is the heart of the section and one of the most hopeful sentences in Paul. The Corinthian church was made up of former idolaters, thieves, drunkards, adulterers and men who had slept with men. Paul does not deny their past or pretend it was small. He puts it in the past tense. The list describes a life defined by sin and left unrepented, not a believer who stumbles and fights against it (Rom 7:21–25; 1 John 1:8–9). No one on the list is beyond God's reach, and no one is excused from turning.
• "Washed… sanctified… justified" (v11). Three past tense verbs describe what God has done. "Washed" (apolouō, to wash off) appears elsewhere only in Acts 22:16, where Ananias tells Paul to "be baptized and wash away your sins." Its form here is middle voice ("you had yourselves washed"), and most think baptism is in view as the outward sign of inward cleansing (Titus 3:5). "Sanctified" means set apart as God's own, the status the letter opened with (1:2). "Justified" means declared righteous before God (Rom 3:24). The order is not a sequence of steps. It describes one conversion from three angles. All of it happens "in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God," and the Father, Son and Spirit are all present in one sentence.
• Commentators: Matthew Henry, like the Tyndale notes, reads the passage as forbidding lawsuits between believers before unbelievers, not all legal action: "Christians should not contend with one another, for they are brethren," and "A Christian should rather put up with a little injury than tease himself, and provoke others, by a litigious contest." JFB quotes Bengel that "dare" "implies treason against Christian brotherhood" and calls the lawsuit a "fault," a word "not so strong as sin," meaning falling short of their calling. The lexicon backs the ESV's "defeat" and allows "loss," so JFB's softer sense fits. JFB takes v4 in the KJV's ironic sense and the angels of v3 as "namely, bad angels." Guzik paraphrased: Paul himself used Roman courts, so this is about civil disputes among believers. Guzik says malakoi literally means male prostitutes, but the lexicon gives the literal sense as "soft," with an obscene sense here only "probably," so that claim goes beyond it. Guzik does warn against singling out one sin from the list, since critics are often guilty of others in it. On v11 he notes the three persons of the Trinity together, and JFB notes the middle voice of "washed." Henry: "The blood of Christ, and the washing of regeneration, can take away all guilt."

Flee Sexual Immorality (vv12–20)

• "All things are lawful for me" (v12). The ESV's quotation marks show what most scholars think: Paul is quoting a slogan used in Corinth, perhaps a distortion of his own teaching on freedom from the law. He does not deny it outright. He limits it twice. "Not all things are helpful" (sympherō, to be profitable or of benefit; the same pair returns in 10:23). "I will not be dominated by anything." There is a pun in the Greek: "all things are exestin" (lawful), but "I will not be exousiasthēsomai" (brought under the authority of anything). Freedom that ends in slavery to an appetite is not freedom.
• "Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food" (v13). Another Corinthian slogan, and scholars debate whether "God will destroy both one and the other" belongs to the slogan or is Paul's reply. The Corinthians' logic seems to have been that the body is temporary, so what the body does doesn't matter. Food and stomach are made for each other, and sex is just another appetite. Many Greeks thought along those lines, valuing the soul and treating the body as a shell.
• "The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body" (v13). Paul turns their slogan on its head. The body is not just a stomach. "Sexual immorality" (porneia) is the broad word for sexual sin of every kind (the same word as 5:1), and its root is the word for a prostitute, pornē, used in v15. The body was made for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body. He cares what happens to it.
• "God raised the Lord and will also raise us up" (v14). This is why the body matters. Food and stomach will pass away, but the body will be raised. Christ's resurrection was bodily, and so will ours be (15:42–44). What God means to raise, he expects to be used for him now. Chapter 15 will show that some at Corinth denied a bodily resurrection (15:12), and this view of the body may be connected to that.
• "Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never!" (v15). "Never!" (mē genoito) is Paul's strongest no, the same phrase as Romans 6:2. The believer's body is joined to Christ (12:27). The image is stark: taking a limb of Christ and joining it to a prostitute.
• Corinth and prostitution. Ancient writers made Corinth a byword for sexual license. Greek even had a verb, "to Corinthianize," for living immorally. Strabo describes a thousand temple prostitutes at the temple of Aphrodite on the Acrocorinth, though he is speaking of the older Greek city destroyed in 146 BC, and many scholars doubt that applied to Roman Corinth. What is certain is that prostitution was legal, common and socially accepted, and dinners and festivals in pagan temples often ended in it. For a Corinthian man it would hardly have looked like a sin at all.
• "The two will become one flesh" (v16). Paul quotes Genesis 2:24, the foundation of marriage that Jesus himself quoted (Matt 19:5). "Joined" (kollaō) comes from the word for glue, to cement together. It is the same verb used in that verse in the Greek Old Testament for a man holding fast to his wife. Sex is never "just physical." Even with a prostitute it creates a bond God designed for marriage, and the Corinthian idea of a meaningless act is a fiction.
• "He who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him" (v17). The same verb, "joined," now for the believer and Christ. The union with the Lord is deeper than any bodily union, a union of spirit through the Spirit. That is exactly why the two cannot be held together.
• "Flee from sexual immorality" (v18). A present command: keep running. Some temptations are to be stood against (Eph 6:13). This one is to be run from. Joseph is the classic picture, leaving his garment in the hand of Potiphar's wife and fleeing outside (Gen 39:12). Paul gives the same command about idolatry (10:14) and youthful passions (2 Tim 2:22).
• "Every other sin… is outside the body" (v18). A hard line. Some think this is another Corinthian slogan ("every sin is outside the body") that Paul answers. Most take it as Paul's own words, and he does not mean sexual sin is the worst sin. He means it is unique: other sins use the body as a tool, while sexual sin gives away the body itself, joining it to another person. It goes against the body's nature and purpose, and against the union with Christ it was made for.
• "Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you" (v19). In 3:16 the church together was God's temple. Here it is each believer's body. "Temple" (naos) is the word for the sanctuary itself, the inner dwelling of God, not the whole temple complex. In Corinth, with temples on every side, the picture was vivid. God's presence that once filled the tabernacle and the temple now dwells in the bodies of ordinary believers. The Spirit is "from God" and not earned.
• "You are not your own, for you were bought with a price" (vv19–20). "Bought" (agorazō) is the everyday word for buying in the marketplace, the agora, and the slave market was part of that world. A purchased slave belonged to his new master. Paul uses the same words in 7:23. The price is not named here, but elsewhere it is plain: "the precious blood of Christ" (1 Pet 1:18–19; Rev 5:9). The church's own word "redemption" comes from this world of buying people free.
• "So glorify God in your body" (v20). The chapter ends not with a prohibition but a purpose. The body is not something to escape or to indulge, but a place to honor God. The KJV adds "and in your spirit, which are God's," but those words are missing from the oldest manuscripts, and modern versions such as the ESV leave them out. The meaning does not change. The point of the verse is the body.
• Commentators: All three read the slogans in vv12–13 as Corinthian excuses for sexual sin, and Henry says some argued that since fornication was not forbidden by local law, it was allowed for them. JFB: "Unlawful things ruin thousands; 'lawful' things (unlawfully used), ten thousands." Guzik observes that the verb for "dominated" appears in Paul only here and in 7:4, about husband and wife having authority over each other's bodies, and suggests Paul hints at a prostitute gaining that kind of authority. The lexicon confirms both uses, but the link is Guzik's suggestion, not certain. On v18 Henry puts it memorably: "Other vices may be conquered in fight; that here cautioned against, only by flight." Guzik makes the same point with Joseph. JFB says the "temple" of v19 is "the whole man," not the soul alone, and, like Guzik, notes that "and in your spirit" is missing in the oldest manuscripts. Henry ties the passage to the cross: "Our bodies have been redeemed from deserved condemnation and hopeless slavery by the atoning sacrifice of Christ," and to the future: "The hope of a resurrection to glory, should keep Christians from dishonouring their bodies by fleshly lusts." The Tyndale notes, like Henry, set the price paid in Christ's blood.

Pointing to Christ

Both halves of the chapter end at the same place: what Christ has done. Believers can suffer wrong instead of suing because the Lord himself was wronged and defrauded and did not answer back. They can flee sexual sin because their bodies are joined to him, will be raised as his was, and were bought with his blood. And the list of sins in vv9–10 is not the last word on anyone in it. "Such were some of you" is past tense because of the one who had no sin of his own and yet took ours (2 Cor 5:21). A congregation of former thieves, drunkards and adulterers, washed, sanctified and justified in his name, is a picture of what the gospel does, and the body each one lives in is now a temple of his Spirit.

Commentary

• Enduring Word (David Guzik): enduringword.com Guzik examines the lawsuits, the vice list, "such were some of you," the body as temple, and the command to flee fornication.
• Jamieson-Fausset-Brown (1871): blueletterbible.org A critical and explanatory commentary on the whole Bible, more concise than Matthew Henry and closer to the Hebrew and Greek, with attention to historical and geographical detail. Public domain.
• Matthew Henry's Exposition (1710): blueletterbible.org A devotional verse-by-verse commentary in the Puritan tradition, still among the most widely read three centuries on. Public domain.

Videos

Articles

• GotQuestions.org: gotquestions.org On the whole book: an overview of the book of 1 Corinthians -- who wrote it, when, why, and how it fits the rest of Scripture.

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Reflection

• A Future Role Worth Living Up To (vv.2-3) — Paul reminds believers that they will one day judge the world and even angels, so surely they can settle small disputes among themselves now. How does remembering your future role in Christ change the way you handle present-day conflicts?
• Better to Be Wronged Than to Wrong a Brother (v.7) — Paul says it would be better to simply accept being cheated than to drag a fellow believer into a lawsuit and damage the church's witness. Where might you need to absorb a wrong rather than fight for your rights, for the sake of the gospel?
• Washed, Sanctified, and Made New (vv.9-11) — After listing sins that once defined some of the Corinthians, Paul says they were washed, sanctified, and justified — past tense. Are you living out of your new identity in Christ, or still identifying with who you used to be?
• Refusing to Be Mastered (v.12) — Paul says that even though many things are permissible, he refuses to be mastered by anything. What currently has power over you — a habit, a substance, a screen — that reveals you aren't as free as you think?
• Fleeing Rather Than Resisting Temptation (v.18) — Paul's command isn't to resist sexual immorality but to flee from it entirely. What situations or habits do you need to physically remove yourself from rather than trying to white-knuckle through?
• Your Body as God's Temple (vv.19-20) — Paul says believers' bodies are the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, bought at a price, and therefore not their own. How does knowing your body belongs to God shape what you do with it and where you take it?