Church Discipline; 1
Corinthians 5:1-8
We begin a
section that goes down through chapter six and will deal with a subject that is
controversial for some, misunderstood by many, and misapplied by even more, and
that is the issue of church discipline. Church discipline is that doctrine that
refers to the execution of disciplinary action within a local body or assembly
of believers in order to protect it from the influence of licentious carnality
in its midst. A problem with church discipline on the one hand is that there
are those on the one hand who are so legalistic that they want to apply it to
just about any sort of overt sin that they see come along. The
problem that that is part of is that most evangelical Christians just don’t
understand the sin nature and the predominance of the sin nature in the
believer’s life. Just because you
are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ and are regenerated doesn’t mean that
you don’t have a sin nature and you don’t sin. The problem is that in the sin
nature there are opposing trends in the sin nature. Some folks have a trend
toward legalism and self-righteousness, and these are the folks that are not
really prone to the overt sins when it comes to committing some of the more infamous
overt sins. That is just not a weakness for them, so when someone fails in that
area they are just shocked. They can’t understand how Christians can succumb to
that kind of sin. Their problem is that their sins are the more insidious
hidden sins of arrogance and self-righteousness and thinking that somehow their
morality impresses God. They forget that Isaiah 64:6 tells us that all of our righteousnesses are as filthy rags,
and the sin nature produces good works as well as overt sin. Then there is the
party crowd whose trend us just the opposite. It is toward licentiousness and
they really like grace because God took care of all their sin and they don’t
have to worry about it any more, so let’s just go out and party. Their problem
is that they want to diminish and minimize the significance of sin in the life
of the believer, and they can come up with many good rationalisations and
justifications for that based on a distortion of the concept of grace. So they
want to flaunt their sinfulness as not really being an issue because, after
all, Christ paid the penalty for all my sins. All I need to do is confess it.
They want to overlook the whole concept of church discipline because that might
violate somebody’s privacy or it might upset somebody and, after all, if you
remove somebody from the local congregation where they can’t come to church and
they can’t hear the teaching of the Word of God how in the world are they ever
going to be reminded of what they need spiritually in order to recover from
their carnality?
Both of these
have distorted the whole concept of church discipline and one of the key
passages for church discipline is 1 Corinthians chapter 5. In the first eight
verses we come face to face with the particular problem. This is a case in
point in terms of church discipline and it is one that is often misunderstood,
especially by the legalistic crowd.
1 Corinthians 5:1 NASB
“It is actually reported that there is immorality among you, and immorality of
such a kind as does not exist even among the Gentiles, that someone has his
father’s wife.” For those who are a little sheltered, what we have at the end
there, “has his father’s wife,” is a euphemism for somebody who has sexual
relations with his step-mother. The first word in the Greek is HOLOS [O(lwj]. This word is the root from which we get our English
word “whole.” For that reason, in the KJV it was translated as “wholly” or “altogether.”
However the NKJV translates it “actually,” as does the NASB, and that
is closer to the concept but it doesn’t carry the full thrust. It is hard to
translate this and carry the full nuance of it in English without using four or
five different words, which renders the translation a little bit awkward. But
it indicates that this is a sin that is fully or completely or commonly known.
This is not something that this individual has engaged in that is only known to
a few people. It is something that is so well known that everybody in
The word for immorality is
the Greek word PORNEIA [porneia],
from which we get our English word pornography. PORNEIA in the Greek is the
general word for sexual immorality, i.e. any kind of sexual conduct outside of
marriage. Sometimes PORNEIA is translated fornication. Adultery in the ancient
world was between a man, married or single, and a married woman. Sex between a
man and a woman unmarried was usually just classified as fornication. It was
often associated in the ancient world with cultic prostitution in the worship
of the fertility gods. Greeks had developed an intricate set of values in order
to handle and justify extra-marital sex. Secular prostitution or brothels were
rarely known but in
We have to recognize that the
Bible condemns all categories of pre-marital sex or sex outside of marriage as
sin. It is all classified as PORNEIA, and just as it was a problem for the ancient world
it is a problem today. It is interesting that in the conflict between Jews and
Gentiles when it
became apparent in Acts that Gentiles were going to be included in the
church—up until Acts 10 the church was exclusively Jewish—and that something
new was happening in history, the apostles got together after some conflict
arose as to what was the relationship to the law and Jews to Gentiles and had a
conference in Jerusalem called the Jerusalem Conference. The consequence of
this was that they made a decision as to just exactly what was going to be
required of Gentiles. What is interesting is what that entails. In Acts
The problem in
From the context and the
information that Paul gives us in 1 Corinthians 5, when he states that this man
has his father’s wife there are a number of details that are left out. We don’t
know if they are simply living together, we don’t know if his father is still
alive or not, we don’t know if his father is still married to this woman, we
don’t know if the father has divorced this woman; but all of that would just be
secondary circ8umstancial detail. The issue is that this man is having sexual
relations with his step-mother and that was considered to be a horrible crime
and a terrible form of immorality by the unbeliever. Before we build a doctrine
of church discipline off of this we have to realize that the instance involved
here involves something that was known to everybody; it was widely known. It
was not something that was done in any sense of privacy whatsoever. Secondly,
he was violating the norms and standards and the laws of the pagan culture
around him. He is not committing a sin that shocked the Christians in
1 Corinthians 5:2 NASB
“You have become arrogant and have not mourned instead, so that the one who had
done this deed would be removed from your midst.” This tells us something about
their attitude. “You have become arrogant” is a compound word, it is the
present active indicative of the verb EIMI [e)imi], to be, and the perfect passive participle of PHUSIAO [fusiaw] which means to be arrogant. The perfect tense and
the participle indicates that this is something that
happens in the past but is a present reality. So they have become arrogant in
the past and they are still arrogant, they still think this is something
great—this guy is committing such a horrible sin but God’s grace is great
enough to cover it, so no problem. “…have not mourned instead” is the aorist
active of PENTHEO [penqew]
which means to grieve. This is where Paul emphasizes the fact that there is a
proper place in the spiritual life for us to mourn of grieve
over sin. Otherwise we are taking sin too lightly, and that is something we
lose sight of. If we treat sin lightly in our own spiritual lives then it is
going to retard our own spiritual growth. “…that the one who
had done this deed would be removed from your midst.” The point that he is
making is that they should have recognized the serious nature of this sin and
removed the one in their midst. The word for removal is the aorist passive
indicative of the Greek word AIRO [a)irw] which means to lift up or to remove, and it is the
idea that this individual needs to be excluded from meeting with the local
church. That is applicable. But notice is says, “the
one who had done this deed.” That is an inadequate translation. Actually that
is the aorist active participle of PRASSO [prassw]
which means “the one who has been practicing this deed.” This is not a one-shot
thing. Even though it is in the aorist tense it is a constative
aorist which means it is viewing from the standpoint that it is ongoing. He is
still involved in this sin, he is still practicing it.
There are two elements to the
discipline here. One relates to the execution of Paul’s apostolic authority.
That is unique, it was restricted to the kind of thing
that happened in the ancient world under the apostles during the establishment
of the local church. It that instance there were some rather
harsh things that took place in disciplining believers for their carnality.
E.g. Ananias and Sapphira, Acts chapter 5. That is not normal, other
wise many of us would not have survived the first three or four years of our
own Christian life because we would have committed some equally heinous sin and
not survived. In the early church the Holy Spirit and the apostles took some
extreme measures in order to establish the precedence of the seriousness of
sin.
[3] “For I, on my part [since
I am an apostle], though absent in body but present in spirit, have already
judged him who has so committed this, as though I were present.” The words
present in spirit” should be “present by means of the Spirit,” capital S. What
he is emphasizing is that even though he is absent physically we are all one in
the body of Christ. We are all unified in the body of Christ and just because
you happen to live a long distance away, when you are involved in a heinous sin
that brings dishonour on the body of Christ and it shocks the pagans and
everybody knows about it, it is going to have an implications
for us. So even though Paul is not there physically he knows that this sin has
consequences for the body of Christ and we are all one in the body of Christ. “I
have already judged him.” In other words, he has exercised his privilege and
prerogative as an apostle to judge this particular individual.
[4] “In the name of our Lord
Jesus, when you are assembled, and I with you in spirit, with the power of our
Lord Jesus, [5] {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.” This is a grammatically difficult passage. The first phrase is “In
the name of our Lord Jesus,” and the question is, to what does that refer? Does
it refer to assembling in the name of our Lord Jesus? Does it refer to Paul’s
authority in the name of our Lord Jesus? Or is it something that simply applies
to both of them? Probably the best grammatical solution is that he is
recognizing that both the assembly and his authority are representative of the
Lord Jesus Christ. So by stating this this way he is
emphasizing that it is the character and person and he is reminding the believers
that it is the assembly of believers that is the physical representation of
Jesus Christ on the earth today. What replaced our Lord’s physical resurrected
body on the earth is the universal church, believers in the Lord Jesus Christ.
So it is important for us to realize that we represent to the world the person
and character of our Lord Jesus Christ, and when we are treating overt,
well-known heinous sin lightly it casts aspersions on the character of Jesus
Christ. So that is what lies behind that statement.
“…to deliver such a one to
Satan for the destruction of his flesh.” That similar statement is made of Hymenaeus and Alexander in 1 Timothy
1:20, “…suffered shipwreck in regard to their faith.” That means they are
believers but they had shipwrecked their faith. They, too, were “handed over to
Satan, so that they will be taught not to blaspheme.” So what does Paul mean
when he says, “deliver such a one to Satan”? First of all, there is the idea
that when the individual is removed from the local congregation, and from the
teaching of the Word that you are basically giving him up to the consequences
of his sin nature. He wants to be a sinner; he wants to live a licentious
restraints. Great! Go and live that way all you want to and reap the consequences,
and in that process God will discipline you. The destruction of the flesh,
therefore, is not to be taken as the destruction of his physical body—physical suffering—but
the sin nature. It is the same idea as exemplified by tough love.
[6] “Your boasting is not
good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump {of dough?}” The problem was they were arrogant about this and had
missed the principle. Most of the lexicons and books try to equate leaven with
yeast, and leaven was not used, it was different, and leaven was something that
was freshly introduced into the process of making bread. If you have ever made
sour dough, this is what leaven is like. You would take a little bit of dough
from the previous loaf and then introduce it to the fresh dough, and then that
little bit of leaven would then permeate the new loaf. The problem they had in
the ancient world was that if there was bacteria or anything harmful in the
earlier loaf then this would be transmitted to the next loaf so that it was
contaminated by this little bit of leaven. That is why one of the reasons in
the ancient world the Jews cleaned out all the leaven at the feast of
unleavened bread. Paul is reminding them of this analogy to the Old Testament in
verse 7.
[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.” That is the principle as applied from the
Old Testament. “You are unleavened”—you were cleansed positionally
in Christ. Now you have to apply that experientially. So we are clean, the old
leaven has been removed because of Christ our Passover, but the reality is in
terms of our experience is that we have to deal with the sin in our life. It is
not just a matter of confessing it but it is a matter also of, through the
power of the Holy Spirit over time and the application of the Word, its removal
and we won’t be committing that particular sin as frequently.
[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.” Sincerity
there doesn’t have to do with the sincerity as we think of it,
it has to do with genuine objectivity in the application of God’s Word.