1 Corinthians 5:6-13

February 4, 2018

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

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The sermon starts at 14:55 in the audio file.

Or, Separation from So-Called Brothers

The church is really an amazing organism by God’s grace, and she is also full of problems. The church has so many responsibilities by God’s design, and one of those responsibilities is realizing what she is called not to do. The church is a fundamentally new group made up of those who used to be something else who need to become what they are. I’m not trying to be tricky with words, but God’s glory in the church takes His wisdom both in the showing and in the protecting.

The church in Corinth needed such wisdom. To get this wisdom they needed rebuke and reminders. Paul corrected them and commanded them about division (chapters 1-4) and now about tolerance of sin in their midst (chapter 5). The next section (chapter 6) will address their greed and their impurity.

It is not a sign of grace or kindness or love or forward thinking to allow an identified member of the church to continue in sin. At the start of chapter 5 Paul refers to a man in the church who has his father’s wife, a relationship that even first century Roman and Greek culture didn’t approve of. The believers allowed it to continue and were, at the same time, arrogant about their spiritual maturity. They were boasting about their spotless reputation from a sewer ditch.

What they should have done already, which Paul affirms from a distance, is to have “him who has done this be removed” (verse 2). With the authority of the Lord Jesus they were “to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord” (verse 5). The man wasn’t in a pattern of repenting and relapsing and repenting, he was apparently unwilling to give up his sin. This was bad for him, and it was bad for the church.

In verses 6-13 Paul reminds the Corinthians of the principle of holiness in the church (verses 6-8) and adds a proviso about where the church’s jurisdiction ends (verses 9-13).

The Principle: A Little Unholiness Never Stays Little within the Church (verses 6-8)

The previous paragraph aimed at application to a particular situation. In the rest of the chapter, starting in verse 6, Paul lifts up the house of discipline and pours a concrete principle underneath.

A Principle They Should Have Known (verse 6)

Paul calls out the Corinthians as proud people, puffed up, “arrogant” (verse 2). Your boasting is not good. Earlier in the letter he offered the right way to boast, quoted from Jeremiah, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:31). Whatever spiritual words they might have been using, the Corinthians were not boasting in the Lord. If they had been boasting in the Lord and in the word of the cross, they would not have maintained an arrogant air amidst sin that Christ died on the cross to forgive and cleanse.

The principle was something they knew, or should have known. Do you not know, a question that Paul asks about ten times in the letter, always comes before he lets them have it about how they’re not acting in accord with truth. Then Paul states the principle itself, an axiom observable without special revelation: a little leaven leavens the whole lump. This is obvious. What are they thinking?

“ ‘Leaven’ is not quite the same as yeast. In ancient times, instead of yeast, a piece of dough was held over from one week’s baking to the next. By then it was fermenting, and so could cause fermentation in the new lot of dough, causing it to rise in the heat. This was a useful practice, but not hygienic, since dirt and disease could be passed on from week to week.” (C.L. Mitton’s commentary on The Gospel of Mark quoted in Thiselton).

A tiny bit of leaven, just a little, spread through all the bread[...]