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August 24, 2008
I Corinthians 6:13
Exordium: Is it not amazing how the Holy Spirit uses specific situations in the history of His Church to teach some of the grandest themes in our faith?
In fact, the doctrines of the Church are almost never presented in a vacuum or in abstract passages. They are usually applied to particular events in the life of the early Church in which God wants us to discover some wonderful truths of His.
Explication: Take the matter of the human body. The Bible does not tell us directly that the Christian faith is the only world religion that takes the body as seriously as it does or the religion that gives to our bodies the greatest degree of dignity and honor. It doesn’t tell us that the stoic Greeks thought of the body as a prison house or a tomb, or how Epictetus said that he felt “like a poor soul, shackled to a corpse.”
Instead the Bible takes us back to a problem in the Church at Corinth. Corinth was a very wicked city, probably more evil than any city on the face of the earth today. The sins of the flesh and the mind abounded. The people who believed the message about Christ that Paul preached had themselves been caught up in those wicked ways- and some of them continued in them even after their baptism.
So Paul writes to them to show them that they were using their bodies in ways that did not honor the Lord. He is teaching them that their bodies were holy, and were to be used in holy ways.
He might have come out hard against them and said “no”, to this or that, or applied God’s commandments rigorously and perhaps harshly to their conduct, but he did not. He took a wiser approach. He puts himself in their place, and tries to understand how they are thinking and trying to justify their conduct. So he states their excuse for the wrong uses of their bodies as they would say it, “All things are lawful for me.”
There is truth in that statement. In Christ, we are free from the rigors of the Mosaic Law. The commandments of God will always be with us, but the additions to the law which the Jewish leaders had developed are not binding upon us as believers in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. He has set us free from those.
I. HOWEVER, THERE IS A FAILURE HERE IN THEIR UNDERSTANDING OF CHRISTIAN FREEDOM Read the rest of this entry »
