1 Corinthians 6:1-8

February 25, 2018

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

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The sermon starts at 14:30 in the audio file.

Or, What’s the Matter with Christians?

What is the matter with Christians? We really ought to know better, but we give so much ammunition to the unbelievers around us by acting just like them, or by putting our trust in them to fix our problems. It’s one thing to have stones thrown through the windows of your bus. It’s another thing to leave a pile of rocks sitting next to the bus. It should not surprise us that Christians get so much criticism; we paint targets on our backs.

In 1 Corinthians 6 Paul tackles yet another serious problem among the saints in Corinth. In the first four chapters the apostle confronted the church for dividing up according to their favorite teacher. They behaved this way because they failed to apply the word of the cross and instead they associated according to the same crowd-gathering rhetorical standards as the world.

Then in chapter 5 Paul confronted their unholy tolerance of allowing a professing believer and member of the church to remain in ongoing and gross sin with his step-mother. They should have judged the man and removed him from among them, yet they were busy boasting about their spiritual maturity. This was a specific and flagrant case of unrepentant sin that required action.

Now at the beginning of chapter 6 Paul addresses a specific and apparently acceptable practice among some of the Corinthians. It didn’t require church discipline, but it did require them to act differently. Some in the church were taking others in the church to court over relatively small matters, and they were looking for resolution from unrighteous and unbelieving judges. It was foolish to expect justice from these unjust courts, and it was foolish not to consider how it affected their witness to the world. It’s as if their promotional slogan was: “Believe in Christ, join our church, you can sue people over petty things just like before!”

Through a series of seriously sarcastic questions Paul points out how wrong their grasping disputes are.

His concern about these lawsuits has three parts in verses 1-11. First he deals with how wrong it is to go before the unrighteous in verses 1-6, then he deals with how wrong it is to treat family like this in verses 7-8, and then he deals with how wrong it is to trust the unrighteous and why we ought not behave like them in verses 9-11. We’re going to look at the first two points this morning.

Wrong Before Unbelievers (verses 1-6)

The ESV makes verses 1-8 a paragraph, and that’s fine. But there is an observable set of bookends in verse 1 (κρίνεσθαι ἐπὶ τῶν ἀδίκων) and verse 6 (κρίνεται…ἐπὶ ἀπίστων), as both verses include the verb “go to law” and “before” either “the unrighteous” or the “unbelievers.”

While the original manuscripts did not have punctuation, the standard Greek text punctuates seven rhetorical questions in these first six verses.

The Concern (verse 1)

The cheek of the Corinthians is on display again, but not the kind of cheek that could get slapped. When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? This could be anyone, one of you, and maybe a common occurrence to have a grievance, but Paul doesn’t seem to have a particular case in mind as he did with the incest in chapter 5.

The word grievance refers to something that is the matter, a dispute, and here it flares into a lawsuit. Based on the following verses, the grievances here are “trivial cases” (verse 2), “matters pertaining to this life” (verse 3), which are “ordinary matters” (NET). These are squabbles in the category of civil law, not criminal law, and are the kinds of tiffs that belong in small claims court, something you might see on Judge Judy. Go[...]