There was another case also: brother was going to law with brother (1 Cor. 6). We have no reason to think they had fallen so far as to go to law with those that were not brethren; this would seem to be a lower step still. But brother was going to law with brother, and this before the unjust. How often now-a-days one hears, “Well, one expects something better from a brother; and surely he ought to suffer the consequences of his ill-doing.” This was just the feeling of the Corinthian plaintiff. What, then, is the weapon that the Apostle uses in this case? The dignified place in the glory that God designs for the Christian: “Know ye not that we shall judge the world— judge angels?” Were such going before the Gentiles? Thus is seen how practical all truth is, and how God casts the bright light of the approaching day on the smallest matters of the life of today.
Again, there was no quarter in the world where personal purity was more unknown than at Corinth. Indeed, such were the habits of the ancient world, it would only defile the ears and minds of God’s children to have any proofs of the depravity in which the world then lay, and that too in its best estate, the wisest and the greatest not excepted, those, alas, whose writings are in the hands of the youth of our day, and more than ever, perhaps, in their hands. Those wits, poets, and philosophers of heathen antiquity lived in habitual, yea, often in unnatural grossness, and thought nothing of it. It is a danger for the saints of God to be tinctured by the atmosphere of the world outside when the first fervor of grace cools, and they begin to take up their old habits. It was certainly so at Corinth.
Accordingly the believers there were betrayed into their former uncleanness of life when the heavenly light got dim. And how does the Apostle deal with this? He recalls to them the Holy Spirit’s dwelling in them. What a truth, and of what force to the believer! He does not say simply that they were redeemed, though he brings it in also; still less does he merely reason on the moral heinousness of the sin; neither does he cite the law of God that condemned it. He presses upon them that which was proper to them as Christians. It was no question of man, let him be Gentile or Jew, but of a Christian. Thus he sets before them the distinctive Christian blessing—the Holy Spirit dwelling in the believer, and making his body (not his spirit but his body) a temple of the Holy Spirit; for here was precisely where the enemy seems to have misled these Corinthians. They affected to think they might be pure in spirit, but do what they liked with their bodies. But, answers the Apostle, it is the body which is the temple of the Holy Spirit. The body belongs to the Lord and Saviour; the body, therefore, and not the spirit only, He claims now. No doubt that the spirit be occupied with Christ is a grand matter; but the licentious flesh of man would talk, at any rate, about the Lord, and at the same time indulge in evil. This is set aside by the blessed fact that the Holy Spirit even now dwells in the Christian, and this on the ground of his being bought with a price. Thus the very call to holiness ever keeps the saint of God in the sense of his immense privileges as well as of his perfect deliverance.