You'll probably read this, cause it is about sex... (1Cor 6:9-10)

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. (1Cor 6:9-10)

One of the great blessings of studying the Bible verse by verse as we have done, is that our understanding of each verse becomes so much richer. So in these verses we find more than a list of sins that bring on the judgment of God.

We already saw in chapter 5 the connection between Gods condemnation and Church discipline. If God has rejected someone the church should not accept them. That is connected in here.

Another thing that is connected is our discussion last time about law suits. “Do not be deceived” takes on two different meanings here: Do not be deceived into thinking that if some brother has sinned against you, justice won’t be done unless an earthly court rules in your favor. God will certainly bring them to justice.

And do not be deceived into thinking you can get away with anything either. If you are taking your brother to court with the intention to defraud him, God knows your heart.

And on top of all that, these verses also transition us into a longer discussion on sexual immorality. We have here roughly the same list of sins that we found in chapter five, when we talked about church discipline. Except this time Paul is a bit more specific about some sexual sins that apparently must have been prevalent in Corinth.

First in the list is Fornicators, or “pornos” in Greek, that we discussed briefly back in chapter 5. The word means someone who commits any kind of sexual immorality.



What's in a word?


A question that has been much debated over the last few decades is what is actually immoral and what is not. For the first 1900 years or so after these words were written, “pornos” was more or less universally understood to mean any sex outside of marriage. Over the last 50 to 100 years, our culture has gone through a massive paradigm shift when it comes to sexual morality. And we seem to be almost at the point where it is considered immoral to even suggest that sex is limited only to marriage. But at the same time we know that God is unchanging, and what he considered immoral 2000 years ago, he still considers immoral today. So someone must be wrong here. It’s either us or everyone who lived before us.

So given our cultural context, I find myself being forced to look for a Bible verse that explicitly states that sex is immoral outside of marriage, without understanding the word “pornos” to mean what it has meant for nearly two millennia. It is a bit of a challenge, but even if we reduce the semantic range of the word to mean only marital unfaithfulness as many have suggested, we still have a rich supply of arguments and implications that support the traditional view of sex.


The true meaning of marriage

First we can look to God’s original design for marriage. The first marriage took place as early as Genesis 2:21-25:

So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. The LORD God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man. The man said, “This is now bone of my bones, And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, Because she was taken out of Man.” For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

When God instituted marriage he did it for a very specific reason. He didn’t let us know what that reason was right away, but in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians he makes it very clear:

Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless. So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body.

FOR THIS REASON A MAN SHALL LEAVE HIS FATHER AND MOTHER AND SHALL BE JOINED TO HIS WIFE, AND THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH. This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church. Nevertheless, each individual among you also is to love his own wife even as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband. (Eph 5:22-33)

What I want to impress on your minds is how highly God esteems marriage, and how profound that union really is. It is more than a couple of signatures on a document. Yet in our culture that is what it has been reduced to, and thus it’s easy to argue that those signatures make no significant difference. If you love one-another and are committed to one-another, what is really the difference morally if you sign a contract that you can get out of anyway if you want to?

That’s not what God designed marriage to be though. It is an unbreakable, life-long covenant between a man and a woman, where they play out a small-scale version of the unbreakable life-long covenant between Christ and the Church.

So marriage is a relation unlike any other. This is so lost in our culture, that I dare to say that many who are married on paper are still committing fornication because they are not married according to God’s definition of what marriage is. And God’s definition is what goes, no matter what documents our government decides to issue.

In light of what marriage is then, God commands us to esteem it, and keep the physical relation that comes with it undefiled:

Marriage is to be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed is to be undefiled; for fornicators and adulterers God will judge. (Heb 13:4)

Does all of this combined, even without the word “pornos” meaning what it actually means, add up to an explicit command not to have sex outside of marriage? I’d say we’re at least getting very, very close. And I chose to take you down this road because understanding the reason for a command is the best way to be convinced of it. It is a lot easier to obey commands when we understand why they exist.


What "pornos" means elsewhere...

But with this foundation being laid, I also want to take a few seconds to convince you that the Greek word “pornos” also includes sex out of marriage, and that Paul would uses that word to mean sex out of marriage just a few sentences away from where we’re at. We’ll jump a bit ahead of ourselves to chapter 7, verse 1 and 2:

Now concerning the things about which you wrote, it is good for a man not to touch a woman. But because of immoralities, each man is to have his own wife, and each woman is to have her own husband.

The word immoralities here is the “porneia” in Greek. It is a different form of the same word, both from the common root “porneo”. What Paul is saing here, is that there are some advantages to being unmarried (and we’ll learn more about that when we get here in our studies), but that because of the temptation to have sex outside of marriage, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband. It can not mean anything else. Try substituting it for adultery, and the sentence doesn’t make sense.


Homosexuality and scripture twisting

Having laid a solid foundation with God’s original design for marriage and sex, we are now better suited to understand the reasoning behind the two other sins that we didn’t already go through in chapter 5. We see that included in the list of people who will not inherit the kingdom of God are effeminate and homosexuals.

Of course the meaning of these words have been subject to some controversy as well. They refer to the passive and the active partner in a homosexual relationship. In Ancient Greek culture homosexuality was very common, and young boys were even dragged into this and abused by older men. Knowing this, many have tried to argue that it is only this practice Paul was forbidding. Not relationships between consenting adults.

So if this verse only forbids older men (the active parner) from abusing young boys (the passive partner, or the effeminate), let’s try to insert that meaning into the text: “...nor children who are molested, nor the people who molest them … shall inherit the kingdom of God.” How’s that interpretation working out for you?


God's unpopular stance on homosexuality

It is not politically correct to say this, and it is not unlikely that it will soon become illegal to say this, but we need to say it anyways. The Bible is crystal clear that homosexuality is a sin. Our culture has trained us from childhood to be abhorred at such a suggestion, and to automatically ascribe a motive of hatred, prejudice and self-righteousness to whoever dares say it. It is a sin worse than not rinsing and folding your milk cartons before you put them in the recycling bin.

But the Bible is still insistent:

You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination. (Lev 18:22)

For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error. (Rom 1:26-27)

These and several other passages are very clear in their condemnation of homosexuality. Not because God hates them, but because is is a sin which by nature obscures God’s original purpose for marriage. The picture of Christ and the church is obscured when marriage becomes anything else than a life-long covenant between a man and a woman.

That being said, it is a fact that many still find themselves primarily attracted to someone of the same sex. It is much debated whether they are born that way or become that way through cultural influence. The argument is that if they are born that way, then certainly God cannot blame them for being that way. So many feel like if we can prove that they weren’t born that way that would absolve God of responsibility in the matter.

On closer examination though, we realize that God holds us responsible for following all kinds of inclinations that we were born with. God commands us not to lie, yet we were all born with the inclination to lie. No one had to teach me how to do it. I figured it out all on my own the first time I found myself in a situation where the truth was to my disadvantage. My parents didn’t have to teach me how to do it, they had to teach me not to lie. Now just because I was not born with any inclination toward homosexuality, I discovered fairly early in my life that I had an inclination to be attracted to girls. I was born that way. But that doesn’t mean I’m not guilty for the sinful thoughts and actions that have resulted from that inclination.

Now I don’t mean to be insensitive to those who are experiencing same-sex attraction, because at the very least I had the hope of some day living out those inclinations that I had in a righteous and God-honoring way, even though I had to wait for a bit. They do not. Still the truth is we all at some level have to deny the inclinations we were born with to obey God. And the key to being able to do that comes to us in the next verse...

Stay tuned!