Don't prostitute Christ (1Cor 6:14-17)

Now God has not only raised the Lord, but will also raise us up through His power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take away the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? May it never be! Or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a prostitute is one body with her? For He says, “THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH.” But the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him. (1Cor 6:14-17)

The stomach and the food in it will pass away, we learnt in the last verse. But you are a member of the Body of Christ. And that is not temporary, but eternal. God raised him from his grave, to live eternally, and he has promised to raise us up to eternal life with him as well.

As members of the Body of Christ - his hands and his feet, his eyes and his ears and mouth - whatever we do with our bodies we also do with his body. If we prostitute our own bodies, we prostitute his body.

Now when Paul says “he who joins himself with a prostitute”, you need to know how common prostitution was in Corinth. In our culture prostitution is considered immoral, but it is not considered immoral to sleep with just about anyone you’re not married to as long as there’s no exchange of money involved. In Corinth it was almost the other way around. Ancient Greece was a society very much divided by class, and to defile a free woman was a very serious matter. A slave or a prostitute on the other hand was no big deal. So with the average age of marriage for men being 30 years, you can probably imagine how common this sin was.

In addition Corinth had a temple to the goddess Aphrodite. Like with modern paganism, Aphrodite worshippers saw sexuality as a pathway to religious experiences, and their ceremonies were very sexual in nature. That made the temple a natural marketplace for those who sold such services.

So when Paul is talking about joining oneself to a prostitute, he is not saying that prostitution is the only form of fornication that is wrong. But he’s addressing the most common form of fornication that took place in their culture.

While prostitutes were looked down upon, their clients were not accustomed to being under the same stigma. And telling them that if they sleep with prostitutes they are no better than them would be as strange to them as saying if you eat beef you’re no better than a cow.

But sex has the power to create a very unique and powerful union between a man and a woman. Indeed that was the purpose for which God created it. To tie a wife and a husband together for life with unbreakable bonds. Those who treat it as just another biological process soon end up discovering the pain for those bods being torn apart as you move from one partner to another. You have joined yourself to them. In Biblical terms, you have become one flesh with them.

Now when you make yourself one with a prostitute, than you’ve made yourself a prostitute. And if you are one spirit with Christ, if you are a member of his body, then you have prostituted him.