Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you

 

Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you

 

(1 Corinthians 6:12-20)All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.  Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats: but God shall destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body.  And God hath both raised up the Lord, and will also raise up us by his own power. Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid. What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh.  But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit.  Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.  What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?  For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.

 

Among the members of the Corinthian Church, there were people with a morally disorderly attitude, and the apostle Paul's reproof and exhortation against them is recorded in 1 Corinthians. As is well known, the region of Corinth was the center of Greek culture, and following the social customs of the bustling Greek port towns at the time, it was common for female priests working in idol temples to engage in prostitution against men for money. So, the word “behave like a Corinthian” meant an act of prostitution. However, some of the Corinthian church members still did not give up the old habits they had before believing in Christ, and were committing the sin of prostitutes and fornication with the local people.

Therefore, Paul rebuked that "a saint, that is, a Christian, is a person who is united spiritually with Jesus," and that if he commits adultery with a prostitute, it is unacceptable because it is one body with a prostitute. 『Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid. .』

Nevertheless, if a believer uses his body as an instrument of fornication, it becomes a serious sin that defiles the temple where the Holy Spirit dwells. 『What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? 』

Therefore, 『Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body. .”A man's sin is outside his body, but committeth fornication sinneth against his own body. This means that all worldly sins in this world are forgiven of those who are united by the death of Jesus Christ, but sins that blaspheme the Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven. Fornication means sexual depravity in the eyes of the world, but it is because it defiles the temple of the Holy Spirit by saying that we believe in God spiritually.

The reason why the Corinthians fell into fornication was that there were some who could not abandon the habits and customs of the past and followed them, but the bigger reason was that Christians misunderstood the freedom they had gained. At the time when Greek philosophy was sweeping, people had a dualistic thinking about humans, that is, that the body and spirit were thoroughly separated, and that the body was evil and filthy and that it was irrelevant to any use. On the other hand, they misunderstood that since the spirit is a completely different noble being, the body has no effect on the soul even if the body does nothing.

Those who believe in these ideas are called Gnostics. All things are possible because Christians are free in that they are free from all sins and liberated from the law by the grace of the cross of Jesus. However, they changed the freedom in Christ to indulgence outside of Christ and considered it as freedom of crime. That is why the apostle Paul accurately summarizes and explains their wrong thoughts and logic. 『All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any. 』

In terms of jurisprudence, Christians have infinite freedom, but Christians have a spiritual and moral responsibility to God, and temperance is essential even for practical reasons of balance and order. Exemption from guilt does not mean that even the distinction between good and evil and the moral obligations of the saints have disappeared. Moreover, since the spirit and the body are inseparable for a person, spiritual holiness and moral responsibility are the most important duties of the saints. In Galatians 5:13, “For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. 』

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