I Corinthians 6

This chapter has two scenes that look unrelated until you notice the hinge that connects them: what belongs to whom, and what that ownership costs you.

Scene one (verses 1–8): church members are dragging each other into pagan courtrooms over money and property disputes. Paul is genuinely stunned — "how dare you," he says Jamieson-Fausset-Brown. His argument builds like a staircase: you'll one day judge the world, even angels, so surely you can settle a property dispute between two Christians without hiring an unbelieving judge to do it for you (verses 2–4). The real gut-punch comes in verse 7: even winning is losing. The very fact that lawsuits exist among you means you're "already defeated" — your community has failed regardless of the verdict. He'd rather they be cheated than shame Christ in public court.

Scene two (verses 9–11) looks like a hard pivot — a vice list — but it's actually Paul widening the lens. The lawsuit problem is a symptom; the disease is a whole community still living like the "unrighteous" (the same word, ádikos, used for the pagan judges in verse 1) Strong's. Then comes one of the most tender verses in the letter: "such were some of you." Past tense. Washed, sanctified, justified — not by effort, but "in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit."

Scene three (verses 12–20) turns to sexual ethics, seemingly out of nowhere — until you see the thread: your body is not your own to do with as you please, because it belongs to Christ. Paul quotes a Corinthian slogan ("everything is permissible") twice and answers it both times — permissible isn't the same as good for you, and freedom that masters you isn't freedom. He grounds this not in rules but in resurrection: God raised Jesus bodily, and will raise yours too (verse 14), so your body matters eternally. Sex with a prostitute isn't a private transaction — it fuses you to her the way marriage fuses you to a spouse. The chapter lands on the "temple" image: your body houses the Holy Spirit. You were bought. Glorify God with it.

Christians disagree sharply on how verse 9's list translates into modern categories, especially the Greek terms behind "men who submit to or perform homosexual acts" — more on that below. They also disagree on whether verse 1 forbids all recourse to civil courts or just this specific abuse among believers.

Paul wrote this letter around AD 53–55, probably from Ephesus, to a church he had planted a few years earlier in Corinth — a booming Roman port city in Greece, rebuilt by Julius Caesar a century before as a colony for freedmen and veterans. Corinth had no old aristocracy, no inherited tradition — it was a city of climbers, a place where status was grabbed, not given, and lawsuits were a favorite weapon of the socially ambitious.

Roman civil courts weren't neutral. They were theater for the powerful — a wealthier or better-connected man could usually out-litigate a poorer one, and judges expected favors and flattery. Bringing a fellow believer to court wasn't just "settling a dispute" — it was publicly using the world's pecking order to dominate a brother, in front of the very unbelievers the church was supposed to be winning over Adam Clarke. Jewish communities living under Roman rule had their own internal courts precisely to avoid this humiliation of airing disputes before outsiders John Gill; Paul is asking Corinth to be at least that wise.

Corinth was also famous — even proverbial in the ancient world — for its temple culture and its sexual marketplace; "to Corinthianize" was slang for loose living. Many in this young church had come out of that world directly (verse 11's "such were some of you" is not rhetorical flourish — it's biography). The tension Paul's writing into is a church still tangled in the assumptions of the culture it just left: money and status settled by domination, sex treated as appetite with no more moral weight than eating dinner. Both halves of this chapter are Paul insisting that following Jesus reorders both.

τολμάω / tolmáō (G5111, v.1) — "how dare he." This isn't a mild question; it carries the sense of reckless boldness, almost audacity. Paul is expressing real shock that this is even happening Strong's.

ἄδικος / ádikos (G94) — appears in verse 1 describing the pagan judges ("the unrighteous") and again in verse 9 describing "the wicked" who won't inherit the kingdom. Same word, two verses apart. Paul is quietly making a point: the courtroom you're running to and the moral condition you're fleeing from share a name.

ἥττημα / hḗttēma (G2275, v.7) — translated "defeat," it literally means a deterioration or loss, the word you'd use for a military rout. Paul isn't saying "this is a shame" — he's saying you've already lost the battle, win or lose the case.

κριτήριον / kritḗrion (G2922, vv.2,4) — "tribunal" or "matter to judge." Its root gives us our word "criterion." Paul plays with the irony: you have no criterion for judging small matters, yet you'll one day be the criterion by which the world is judged.

ἀπολούω / apoloúō (G628), ἁγιάζω / hagiázō (G37), δικαιόω / dikaióō (G1344) — v.11 — "washed," "sanctified," "justified." All three are aorist tense in Greek — completed, decisive action, not an ongoing project. This is the grammar of a rescue that already happened to them.

σῶμα / sōma (G4983, v.13, 19, 20) — "body," from a root meaning "the sound whole" — the whole self, not just meat and bone. This is why Paul can say the body is a "temple" (v.19): the body isn't a shell you drive around, it's you.

ἐξαγοράζω-adjacent idea in v.20 — "bought at a price" uses commercial, market language — the language of the slave market, where a price freed a slave from one owner into another's household.

Verse 14 is the load-bearing beam of this whole chapter: "By His power God raised the Lord from the dead, and He will raise us also." Paul doesn't argue for sexual purity from abstract rules — he argues from the resurrection of Jesus. Your body isn't a disposable container for your "real self" (the soul) that gets tossed away at death; Jesus rose bodily, and that's the pattern for what happens to you. That means your body has a future, a destiny, and therefore a dignity right now that shapes what you do with it.

The "one flesh" language Paul quotes in verse 16 comes straight from Genesis 2:24, and Paul is doing something bold with it: he applies marriage-union language to any sexual joining, not just marriage. But then in verse 17 he pivots that same union-logic toward Christ: "he who unites himself with the Lord is one with Him in spirit." The union you were made for — the one every other union is a shadow or a counterfeit of — is union with Jesus himself. Paul will develop this same picture later, calling the church "the bride of Christ" and marriage a living picture of Christ and the church ( Ephesians 5:31–32).

And the temple language in verse 19 quietly completes something enormous: in the Old Testament, God's presence dwelt in a building — first the tabernacle, then Solomon's temple. Paul says that presence now dwells in you, individually, because of what Jesus purchased on the cross ("bought at a price" echoes the ransom language Jesus used of himself in Mark 10:45). The temple didn't move to a better building. It moved into people.

Here's the question this chapter actually asks you, underneath all the specifics about courtrooms and prostitutes: do you actually believe your body belongs to someone else?

Not in a creepy, controlling sense — in the sense that a ring on your finger means your hand belongs to your marriage, or a soldier's uniform means his life isn't fully his own hours anymore. Paul's whole argument in this chapter — about lawsuits, about sex, about everything — collapses into one sentence: you are not your own; you were bought at a price. That's either the most freeing sentence you'll read this week or the most offensive one, depending on how tightly you're gripping your own autonomy.

Think about where you quietly insist "this part is mine, not God's." Maybe it's how you handle a grudge or a financial dispute — you'll fight to win, even if winning costs your witness, because being right matters more to you than looking like Christ. Maybe it's your body — what you do with your eyes, your hands, your time in private, justified with some version of "everything's permissible for me." Paul doesn't answer that slogan by saying "no it's not" — he answers it by asking a better question: is it beneficial? Will it master you? That's a harder, more honest question than a rule.

The cost this chapter asks of you is real: giving up the right to settle scores your way, and giving up the right to decide what your body is for on your own terms. In exchange, Paul offers something better than autonomy — he offers you being washed. Not "try harder." Washed. Whatever you were, verse 11 says, that's past tense now. The question is whether you'll actually live like it.

• Lord, show me where I've been fighting to win instead of fighting to look like you — where being right has mattered more to me than your name.
• Forgive me for the places I treat my body as mine alone to do with as I please, forgetting it's your temple.
• Thank you that "such were some of you" is true of me too — that I was washed, sanctified, justified, not by my effort but by Jesus and your Spirit.
• Give me the wisdom to settle small disputes with humility instead of escalating them for the sake of pride.
• Teach me what it actually means that I was bought at a price — help that truth reach further into my choices than it currently does.

• Is there a conflict right now — with a friend, family member, or fellow believer — where I care more about winning than about honoring Christ in how it's resolved?
• What's my version of "everything is permissible for me"? What do I justify because technically it's allowed, even though I know it's not good for me?
• Is there anything in my life right now that has quietly mastered me, even though I'd insist I'm "free" to do it?
• Do I actually believe my body has a future — that it's headed for resurrection, not just decay — and does that belief show up in how I treat it?
• When I read "you were washed, sanctified, justified" — do I actually live like that's finished, or am I still trying to earn what's already been given?