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1 Corinthians 5:7-11

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Admin • Administrator Posts: 219 Likes: 9	Post by Admin on Sept 25, 2016 17:34:20 GMT -6 7 Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened. For Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed. 8 Therefore let us celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. 9 I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people; 10 I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world, or with the covetous and swindlers, or with idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world. 11 But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler—not even to eat with such a one. *New American Standard Bible (NASB)*

1 Corinthians 5:7-11 Posted Sept 25, 2016 17:34:20 GMT -6 Edited by Admin Oct 22, 2016 14:20:42 GMT -6 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top

JB • Dedicated TruthSeeker Posts: 308 Likes: 42 Gender: Male	Post by JB on Oct 22, 2016 16:23:48 GMT -6 So we’ve been learning about a church that was proud of its great teachers and had allowed worldly wisdom to creep into its decision making. Because of that, when they encountered incest in their own congregation – a sin worse than even pagans would tolerate (5:1) – they ignored it. Paul chastised them for not being “filled with grief” (5:2). Their worldly pride and their movement away from core Christian values blinded them to how to handle a major spiritual issue that was right in front of them. Had they focused as churches should upon restoring the corrupt world to God, rather than dividing over which teacher was the best, they would have known what to do. Instead, they had to write Paul and ask him. Shameful. Paul advised them to disfellowship the incestuous man and hand him over to Satan. We’ll encounter many sins in 1 Corinthians. But Paul never really focuses on the sin itself. His consistent focus is primarily on the fact that sins have entered the church, why they entered the church, how the church was handling them, and how the church should handle them. Missing that nuance will cause us to miss the core message of this personal letter to these Christians – and to miss its important application to our own lives. If I show my child someone who made a mess of life with drug abuse, he’ll likely walk away thinking it doesn’t apply to him since he doesn’t take drugs. But if I help him understand why people get into that lifestyle, the terrible consequences those choices create, how to prevent it from happening to him, the attitudes and core values he should adopt to avoid it, etc., I may dissuade him from ever going down that road. That’s what Paul is doing here. He’s digging deeper than the sins themselves and teaching these Christians how to live. 1COR 5:7 Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened. For Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed. 8 Therefore let us celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. In the current situation, “leaven” in these verses is their pride, which resulted in malice (arguing over their teachers) and wickedness (this grotesque sin in one of their members). More generally, leaven represents sin. The incestuous man was obviously sinful, but so were they. Their malice and his wickedness were both yeast, and both needed to be cleared away from the church. Paul’s statement in v.7 seems self-contradictory. First he said they need to be without yeast (sin), then he said they are a without yeast. His point is that they were living and acting like different people than they really were. You are pure in Christ because Christ has purified you. Yet you are allowing impurity to remain present – both his sexual sin and your own malice. The “feast” in v.8 is the Passover that we now live in – the age of the church, where we no longer die for our sins. Tradition says that when the children of Israel fled Egypt after Pharaoh discovered that all the firstborn in his land had been killed by God’s spirit, the people of Israel left so quickly that they didn’t have time to wait for their bread to rise. According to Jewish tradition, that is the reason the bread of the Passover celebration was unleavened. Of course, the firstborn of Israel were not killed because God’s people put the blood of a firstborn lamb on their doorposts. Our firstborn Lamb has been killed and His blood is sprinkled on our doorposts. His blood has saved us from death for our sins. Sincerity (which means purity – freedom from anything false) and truth are the result of the Passover. 1COR 5:9 I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people; 10 I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world, or with the covetous and swindlers, or with idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world. 11 But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler—not even to eat with such a one. Christians are not to associate with other Christians who practice gross sin. That message is clear. But what about non-Christians who practice gross sin? Are we to not associate with them either? Actually, they are exactly who we are called to spend time with. Jesus provided the example here. He hung out with sinners but refused fellowship with the hypocritical religious leaders of His day. Separately, I will post a focus study I did regarding the topic of disfellowshipping.

1 Corinthians 5:7-11 Posted Oct 22, 2016 16:23:48 GMT -6 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top

JB • Dedicated TruthSeeker Posts: 308 Likes: 42 Gender: Male	Post by JB on Oct 22, 2016 16:34:08 GMT -6 FOCUS STUDY: “HAND THIS MAN OVER TO SATAN, SO THAT THE SINFUL NATURE MAY BE DESTROYED” The congregation at Corinth included a man who called himself a brother (1Cor 5:11). This man was involved in an incestuous relationship with his father’s wife (1Cor 5:1). 1 Corinthians 5 is all about how the congregation handled this situation – and how they should have handled it. After pointing out that their congregational sin of pride de-motivated the church from addressing the problem, Paul wrote to them “In the name of our Lord Jesus, when you are assembled, and I with you in spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus, I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus” (1 Cor 5:4-5) He reminded them a few verses later that he had written them a previous letter where he warned them “not to associate with immoral people; I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world, or with the covetous and swindlers, or with idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world. But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler—not even to eat with such a one” (5:9-11). Delivering a man to Satan to destroy his flesh is a very uncomfortable thought. It sounds downright evil on the surface. Some churches call it disfellowshipping, some disenfranchising, others excommunicating. No matter what you call it, it’s an unpleasant practice for all involved, and in modern churches it doesn’t happen much anymore. Three major questions come to my mind: What does delivering someone to Satan mean in practice? When and how should we deliver someone to Satan? How does delivering someone to Satan help destroy his sinful nature? What does disfellowship mean in practice? To understand “disfellowship,” we need to understand “fellowship.” One meaning of fellowship in the Bible is “Partnership, sharing the same purpose and goals.” Think of a business partnership. Two owners of a business are obviously working toward the same goals. You may have seen the word “koinonia” before. That’s the Greek word in the New Testament that represents this type of fellowship. For instance, in Php 1:3-5 Paul thanks God for that church’s “partnership” in the gospel. And in 2 Cor 8:23 He said “Titus is my partner and fellow worker for your benefit.” Another meaning of fellowship in the Bible is “in the middle” or “among” in the sense of “among you.” The Greek word behind that is “Mesos.” It’s an extremely common word, occurring 56 times in the NT. This word is used in English as prefix in several contexts. For example, “Meso-America” refers to “middle America” and in science “mesoderm” is the middle stage of an embryo’s development when muscle and bone are formed. In the context of fellowship, you might call this “hanging out together.” So in the Bible, fellowship can mean working toward a shared goal or simply hanging out together. In 1Cor 5:2, Paul chose the word mesos. He simply told the church that this unrepentant incestuous Christian should not be allowed into their Christian assemblies. Clear enough. But how can we omit someone from our fellowship in a godly way? Jesus gave specific instruction for this. Take a look at Matt. 18:15-17. I’ve quoted it below but added numbers to show the steps Jesus outlined: “If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother. But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” You can see that, for both Jesus and Paul, the whole process is designed to restore the brother, and the whole process is an act of love. The final step in Jesus’ instruction is disfellowshipping him - treating him as an outsider - which Paul calls “turning him over to the hands of Satan.” We have to assume that the Corinthian church had already gone through Jesus’ first three steps with the incestuous man. After all, it had already become a whole-church issue (which was Jesus’ step 3). Now it was time to remove him, but the pride in this church made them reluctant to do so. How would turning this guy over to Satan help destroy his sinful nature? A church could have many motivations kicking this guy out: Disgust, revenge, reputation, etc. But those would be wrong. A congregation must remove a stubbornly sinful brother from its fellowship for a very specific purpose: “So that the sinful nature may be destroyed” and “so that his spirit may be saved” (1Cor 5:5). It must be strictly out of concern for the wayward believer. We can better understand how “kicking him out” helps him by understanding how he should be treated and understanding the benefits of getting together with Christians. How he should be treated: I don’t believe it means never talk to him. It means do not treat him like a brother. Jesus gave us a clue about that when He said “Treat him like you would a pagan or tax collector” (Matt 18:17). And we know that we should we treat pagans and tax collectors with love and grace and with determined attention to help them draw close to God. If that is how we should treat unbelievers, it’s certainly how we should treat sinful believers. We should help them repent and rid their lives of sin. The benefits of getting together with Christians: I searched the New Testament for clues about the benefits of getting together with other Christians. There may be more, but I found these 13 passages: Acts 11:23: “When he arrived and saw the evidence of the grace of God, he was glad and encouraged them all to remain true to the Lord with all their hearts.” Romans 1:11-12: “I long to see you so that... you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other's faith.” Romans 15:32: “by God's will I may come to you with joy and together with you be refreshed.” 1 Corinthians 16:18: “they refreshed my spirit and yours also. Such men deserve recognition.” 2 Corinthians 2:3: “I wrote as I did so that when I came... you would all share my joy.” 2 Corinthians 7:4: “I have great confidence in you; I take great pride in you. I am greatly encouraged; in all our troubles my joy knows no bounds.” 2 Corinthians 7:13: “... we were especially delighted to see how happy Titus was, because his spirit has been refreshed by all of you.” 1 Thessalonians 3:10: “Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you again and supply what is lacking in your faith.” 2 Timothy 1:4: “I long to see you, so that I may be filled with joy.” 2 Timothy 1:16: “Onesiphorus ...often refreshed me and was not ashamed of my chains.” Hebrews 10:24-25: “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another” Philemon 7: “... You, brother, have refreshed the hearts of the saints.” 3 John 3: “It gave me great joy to have some brothers come and tell about your faithfulness to the truth and how you continue to walk in the truth.” To condense that down, believers get together in order to: Strengthen and mutually encourage each other’s faith Refresh each other Share each other’s joy Supply what is lacking in each other’s faith Spur each other on to love and good deeds Additionally, the Hebrews writer tells us to “encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin's deceitfulness” (Heb 3:13) and Paul told the Thessalonians to “Encourage one another and build each other up” (1 Thes 5:11). CONCLUSION: A disfellowshipped believer loses all of the above privileges when he is turned over to Satan! It must be incredibly painful to have tasted the beauty of all of that and then lose it. When we remove a stubbornly sinful believer from such incredible support, encouragement, strengthening, and joy; when we turn him back to finding his own way and the hopelessness from which he was once rescued; when we minister to him the way we would minister to a pagan or tax collector in order to restore his fellowship with God... I guess if all of that doesn’t help destroy his sinful nature so that his spirit is saved on the day of the Lord, what will?

1 Corinthians 5:7-11 Posted Oct 22, 2016 16:34:08 GMT -6 Edited by JB Oct 22, 2016 16:34:54 GMT -6 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top