1 Corinthians 5:1-13 It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles… (text, and 2 Corinthians 2:5-11; 2 Corinthians 7:8-13): — I. HIS SIN. 1. He had married his stepmother. Such a marriage, though forbidden by Moses, was, under certain conditions, permitted by the Scribes. Hence it has been thought that this man was a Jew. But from the gravity of Paul's censure it is more probable that he was a Gentile who had availed himself of the easy law of divorce and the licence of Corinthian manners. In itself the sin was not so heinous as many which were committed in that wicked city every day. 2. But there were circumstances which aggravated its guilt. (1) The father of this young man was alive and keenly resented the wrong (2 Corinthians 7:12). (2) Though Roman law and manners were loose, yet throughout the Empire the act was branded as a public scandal. (3) This man was a church member and therefore bound to walk by a higher law than that of Rome; and to create such a scandal in such a city might be fatal to the Christian society. 3. Let us, however, do him bare justice, and we shall find him a man like ourselves, open to similar temptations, and falling before them as we fall. From St. Paul's references to him he appears to have been of a sensitive passionate temperament. A few weeks after his expulsion he was in danger of being "swallowed up by a swelling and excessive sorrow" (2 Corinthians 2:7), and the apostle trembled lest he should sink into despair, and vehemently urged his restoration (2 Corinthians 2:5-10). Now a man of such temperament might be led almost unwittingly into the gravest sin. His mother is dead and he is deprived of her counsel and sympathy. His father brings home a new wife — a heathen apparently, probably young and fair, given to him by her parents because he is a man of wealth and position. By and by we discover that she is divorced from him and married to his son. Does it require a novelist to suspect that behind these facts lay a romance or a tragedy? The young man may have loved this girl before his father, and while she favoured him her parents may have favoured the elder suitor. Once married, she may have taken out a divorce, as for almost any reason she was able to do, and have given herself to the man she loved. Or, having willingly married the elder man, her heart may have gone over to the younger before she knew she had lost it. Or, more probably still, she may have been one of those fascinating, fatal women with a strange power for taking men captive, and a wicked delight in using it. On any one of these hypotheses the man at once becomes human to us and alive, and while we cannot palliate his sin, it must have had a strong motive, and being a man of like passions with us he does not stand outside the pale of our sympathy. II. HIS SENTENCE. 1. He had a terrible awaking from his brief passionate dream. One evening he leaves the fair heathen who has bewitched him and goes down to church. The brethren are at their common evening meal. An unusual animation prevails among them. Titus is there with a letter from Paul, and sits at the board with a clouded, anxious face. The meal over he unrolls the epistle and begins to read. We know how the letter opens. And then, after all this kindly weather, the storm breaks (1 Corinthians 4:21). Up to this point all may have listened with tolerable composure. No one had been singled out for blame. But here, surely more than one back must have shivered with prophetic twinge. Probably, however, the young man had no presentiment of what was coming. If so, so much the worse for him; for now the rod falls in earnest. It is impossible to describe the agony of shame with which a sensitive, impulsive man would listen to the sentences which follow. 2. There can be no doubt that St. Paul intended to supply the church with a formula of excommunication, and that they used it. After due consultation, and when the vote of the church had been taken — not an unanimous vote, as it proved (2 Corinthians 2:6) — we must suppose that the young man was summoned before the elders of the church, and that they pronounced over him the solemn words, "In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, we deliver thee, So-and-so, to Satan, for the destruction of thy flesh, that thy spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus." And we may well believe that the sentence fell on the offender like the doom of death. Not that the apostle meant to shut him out from the common requisites and courtesies of life, or to make him a son of perdition; he meant — (1) To have this open offender against the law of Christ cast out from the communion of the church, at least for a time, and so 'brought to a knowledge of his sin and sincere repentance. St. Paul habitually conceived of the heathen world as the domain of Satan, the prince of this world, and therefore to cut a man off from the church and cast him back on the world was to "deliver such an one to the power of Satan."(2) He habitually conceived of pain, disease, loss, obstruction, &c., as the work of the evil spirit, as indeed does all Scripture. Is any good purpose crossed? Satan hindered (1 Thessalonians 2:18). Is he tormented with a disabling malady? An angel of Satan buffets him (2 Corinthians 12:7). He had the highest authority for his conclusion (Luke 13:16). Probably, therefore, just as Job was given over into the hand of Satan for a time to be tried, or just as a darkness fell upon Elymas, so also when the Corinthian was excommunicated there came on him a succession of cruel losses. Perhaps even the loss of the fair heathen woman, or some disease which purged out the fever from his blood and brought him to himself. How all this differs from the ban to which the Church has again and again exposed the heretic, and from the mystic spiritual doom which some have discovered in this formula! For — (3) The apostle expressly says that the "destruction" was intended not for damnation, but for salvation (see also 1 Corinthians 11:32; 1 Timothy 1:20). III. HIS ABSOLUTION. If "the end crowns the work," who that has "seen the end of the Lord" with this young man can deny that even his excommunication was a work of mercy? His conscience was roused. He confessed and renounced his sin; his sorrow for it swelled till it threatened to prove fatal. And when Titus brings Paul the tidings, the heart of the apostle is profoundly moved (2 Corinthians 2:5-7). And in this passion of forgiving love to the penitent, Paul was a faithful expounder of the very spirit of the gospel. If there was mercy even for the wicked person no man need despair. (S. Cox, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father's wife. |
    |