Bible Reading for June 5 – I Corinthians 5:1-13

“Purge the evil person from among you” (v. 13). That’s what Deuteronomy says time and time again when it prescribes the death penalty for people who commit various sorts of sins: false prophecy (13:5), worshipping other gods (17:7), failing to accept the judgment of the priests (17:12), failing to accept the discipline of parents (21:21), and committing adultery (22:21). In Old Testament times, because membership in the covenant community was largely determined by being born into it, the only way to be removed from it was to die.

Of course, all that is different in New Testament times. Now, God calls people from every tribe and tongue and nation into the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord (I Corinthians 1:9). We are joined to Christ by faith, not because we are born into a particular family or ethnic group.

But that doesn’t eliminate the need for the Christian community to make sure that all its members, that all those who profess faith in the Lord Jesus are in fact living according to that profession. For just as a little yeast causes the entire ball of dough to rise (5:6), so a few sins can derail anyone’s Christian walk. And the sad truth is that it only takes a few unfaithful Christians to pull a whole congregation away from Christ.

So, if the death penalty is not an appropriate way of dealing with those who have turned away from their profession of faith, Paul says that the Church still needs to be decisive about removing “so-called brothers” from their midst (5:11). Some congregations do this by not allowing the unrepentant to take the Lord’s Supper, or to continue to hold office as a deacon or elder.

Why do we need to do something that seems so harsh? The critical thing is clarity – helping one another to see our true spiritual condition. It does someone no good to imagine that he is still in Christ while he is actually living in radical, unrepentant sin. Just so, it does a congregation no good to accept and to trust someone as a Christian brother or sister while he or she refuses to repent.

So, we all need to recognize that we could have blind spots where it comes to the sin in our own lives. And we need to admit that sometimes the truly loving thing to do is to be honest with a Christian brother or sister about the sins we see in him or her. And if they won’t listen to us, or to the courts of the Church then we need to treat them as what they have demonstrated themselves to be – unbelievers (Matthew 18:15-17).

But that doesn’t mean we should practice the sort of shunning that Hester Prynne experienced in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. After all, in this very chapter Paul says that we are not supposed to avoid contact with sinners who haven’t yet come to faith in Christ (5:10). So, while we can’t associate with an unbeliever as if he were a Christian, welcoming him to the Lord’s Table or trusting him to serve as an elder or deacon, we should still seek to love him or her into the kingdom, sharing the good news of Jesus Christ in word and deed as we would with anyone who needs to know Christ or to know Him better. We just can’t let someone go on kidding himself about his spiritual condition – for his sake, or for the sake of the Church.

I Corinthians 5:1-13 (ESV)

It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father’s wife.
2 And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you.
3 For though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and as if present, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing.
4 When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus,
5 you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.
6 Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?
7 Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.
8 Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
9 I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people–
10 not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world.
11 But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler– not even to eat with such a one.
12 For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge?
13 God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.”