Introduction
1 Corinthians is good letter for pastors to read whenever they are feeling discouraged. They read about Paul’s pastoral problems with the Corinth church and think to themselves at least their problems aren’t that bad!
Let’s review for a moment the situation at First Church of Corinth. This is a spiritually gifted church, particularly in the area of knowledge and speech. They prophesy, speak in tongues, and think they have the inside track on spiritual knowledge. They have outgrown the pedantic teachings of their spiritual father Paul, who remains stuck on the old-fashioned (foolish) theme of the cross. They have spiritually arrived and would like to move to higher things. Meanwhile, there is blatant sexual immorality taking place, even the kind that scandalizes pagans – a man having sexual relations with his stepmother. They don’t seemed troubled by it. What they are troubled by is not getting their due, and so they sue one another in civil court. Our last passage in chapter six addresses the issue of a number of the church members going to prostitutes. How much weirder can these people get? We are about to find out.
Text
Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.”
We need to get straight the meaning of this verse. The KJ and NKJ reads that it is good for a man not to “touch” a woman. “Touch” is the literal rendering of the Greek word. The question is what is meant by that term in this context. The NIV interprets the word to mean “to marry.” The ESV has “sexual relations.” The latter seems the proper rendering. According to Gordon Fee, all other uses of the term in Greek antiquity refers to sexual relations. Commentators choosing “to marry” give no other grounds than the context, which itself is a matter of interpretation.
The question has to do with whom the phrase, It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman, belongs to. There are no quotations in the Greek manuscript. Thus, is Paul saying, “Now concerning the matters you wrote about, here is my response: It is good…”? Or is Paul saying, “Now concerning the matters you wrote about, and let me quote from your letter: ‘It is good…”? As in chapter 6:12ff, it appears that Paul is responding to comments of the Corinthians themselves. It is likely that they are using Paul’s own teaching, but distorting it so that some of them are making the following claim: It is good for husbands and wives to abstain from sexual relations within their marriages. The following verses, as we will see, put the context within marriage, not in getting married, but in the present state of married life.
Where did the Corinth saints come up with that strange idea? Some of it may be a misunderstanding of Paul’s teaching. As will be seen in the next passage, he was celibate and thought well of it as a spiritual gift. Perhaps some were thinking that celibacy was a higher gift and they should be practicing it, even if they were married. As Christians, they have entered into a new spiritual state where the old ways have passed and the new age has arrived. Speaking of arriving, they have demonstrated, have they not, their high spiritual state with their impressive gifts.
Whether they understand it or not, their “higher spiritual” mentality is influenced by their pagan wisdom culture, which teaches that the spiritual is real and the material is not or at least not of relevance. Such a teaching can lead to two contrasting lifestyles. The ascetic route is that one should give little attention to the material life, disciplining the body to be subservient to the spirit or soul. Have as little to do with physical pleasure as possible so one can be focused on the spiritual. The Epicurean route takes the opposite perspective. If the material is not real and does not matter, then, hey, do whatever you want with the body. It does not matter. That is the argument some of the Corinthians were making in chapter 6, verses 12 following.
In the Corinth church, then, are people of both persuasions. They all take the perspective of being “spiritually elite.” For some, that means to be above physical pleasures; for others, it means to indulge in them. How do you think such contrary views were affecting marriages? We learn from chapter six that some of the men were visiting the local temple to use the services of the “priestesses”; could it be they were married to wives convinced of celibacy? Verse two speaks of such a problem.
2 But because of the temptation to sexual immorality. The ESV does not give the accurate picture of what is going on. There is no word corresponding to “temptation.” The Corinthians’ problem is not that they are tempted to be sexually immoral; they have passed that stage. They are engaging in sexually immoral acts. That single word translated in the singular is plural. As noble as celibacy might seem, it is not working and, for that matter, should not work within a marriage.
Paul says the same thing three ways. First, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. Paul is not telling men and women to get married. He could have said as much as he will later in verse 9. He is telling husbands and wives to have physical relations with one another, so that they do not turn to others.
Second, 3 The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. The word translated “conjugal rights” is literally “debt.” Husband and wife owe to one another the duty of sexual relations as though owing a debt. Paul is pushing conjugal relations beyond a concession for couples to engage in because of temptation. Whether or not either is being tempted to commit outside indiscretions, they ought to consider such relations as required responsibility.
Third, Paul says in verse 4, For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Paul seems to go overboard with this statement. The first sentence certainly would raise emotions today of many women. “What do you mean I don’t have authority over my own body?” As much as women today would be perturbed by such a comment, men in Paul’s day would be all the more upset. Forget equality altogether. Men did in effect own their wives. They would have shouted out “Amen. Preacher it brother!” at the first sentence. To suggest that their wives had any kind of claim on their bodies would have been scandalous. Indeed, in the Greek-Roman culture, it was common for their wives to be seen as the bearers of their children. For love they had mistresses; for physical release…slaves and temple prostitutes were available. Here is Paul not only forbidding outside pursuits, but informing the husbands they owe their wives physical pleasure because their wives own their bodies. He must have gotten everyone’s attention with that claim.
Paul does make one concession about physical relations.
5 Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
This is a concession for abstaining from relations temporarily, not instruction to do so. The KJ gives the literal translation for what is recorded as “deprive.” It is defraud, the same term used in 6:7,8 for criminal conduct. In other words, he regards sexual abstention as not merely depriving one another of a pleasure, but of what rightfully belongs to each other in the marriage.
The “except perhaps” accurately conveys the hypothetical situation. Paul concedes that it is possible for a couple to want to set a time devoted to prayer, evidently that would last a few days. Just as people fast from food for such purpose, so married people may fast from physical relations. But, this must be for a limited time, not an indefinite period that continues until both feel that it is time to get back together. Don’t fall prey to Satan, who, as Peter says so vividly, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8).
Lessons
What are we to learn? First, it is made clear that sexual relations are integral to marriage, a fact that has escaped much Christian teaching over the centuries. Indeed, the traditional manner of interpreting our passage is to treat it as a discussion – as the NIV indicates – of whether Christians should get married. There is no compelling reason to translate “touch a woman” as “to marry a woman.” Such an interpretation comes from the tradition of earlier church interpretation, which in turn comes from an ambivalent view about sexual passion.
As strange as we might think the Corinthian situation was, it was fairly close to the position that the Church would later follow. Clement, a leading bishop in the Church from Alexandria, wrote around 200 A.D., “The man who has taken a wife in order to have children should also practice continence, not even seeking pleasure from his own wife, whom he ought to love, but with honorable and moderate desire having but one intention, children.” For Augustine, the most influential theologian of the Church who lived during the turn of the 5th century, sexual passion was an unfortunate experience because it “paralyzes deliberate thought (City of God, Bk. 14, Ch. 16). If only procreation could occur without it.
As you can see, procreation was regarded as the justification for marriage and the physical relations that went with it. God did, after all, command mankind to “Be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:28), and he instituted marriage for that command to be realized. It was not that sex in marriage, per se, was bad; it was the passion that accompanied it, a passion, Augustine speculated, did not accompany the sex act before the Fall.
Michael McClymond, to whom I am indebted for most of this material, writes that Martin Luther agreed to a certain measure with Augustine. He quotes Luther: “in Paradise marriage would have been most delightful. The heat and fury of sexual desire would not have been so intense there.” McClymond continues, “Though Luther spoke of marriage as a ‘remedy’ for lust, he also stated that those who enter into marriage ‘to avoid fornication’ are ‘not the equals’ of those who do so ‘looking for children.’
I don’t want to bore you with too much quotation, but you see the trend. The teachers of the Christian Church had trouble with marital sex. It was necessary for conceiving children, but to be avoided when not being engaged in for that purpose. As time, i.e. centuries went by, there was a slow progress towards accepting it as legitimate pleasure between husband and wife unconnected with procreation so that now sexual relations are recognized as appropriate pleasure for promoting love and well-being in a marriage.
Sexual relations are good and even necessary in a healthy marriage. That is the point this scripture is making. Each husband should have physical intimacy with his wife, likewise each wife with her husband. Genesis 2:24 says that, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. Paul quotes that verse in 6:16 to argue against sex outside of marriage, obviously with the understanding that sexually union constitutes becoming one flesh. Indeed, the Church has all along understood that it is the sexual union that consummates, i.e. turns the marriage vows into reality. Physical union should be the distinguishing act of a married couple.
What about the “passion,” the sexual drive that our church fathers were concerned about. All of us fathers and mothers of teenagers have the same concern! This passage realistic about this passion. Some of the Corinthians apparently thought they were above such things. Maybe it was a problem for them in their pagan life, and even a problem when they were less spiritual, as evidenced by the vulgar behavior of some church members; but they were devoted to God. Paul’s response is don’t be so foolish. You are married. You are already in a sexual relationship. Even if you think you are above physical passion, have you checked with your spouse? Those husbands going down to the temple prostitute house evidently don’t share your discipline. One of the blessings of marriage is not that it covers a sinful passion, but that it gives the passion legitimate expression. For a couple to get married and then one of the partners deny the other this expression is to violate the marriage covenant and tempt the other to sin by finding another outlet.
But one thing to note about the passion, which our teachers have understood well. Yes, you can commit sexual immorality with your spouse. You can be guilty of treating your spouse as an object and not as your partner to love and cherish. You can go too far together in what you do for pleasure, especially if you follow the teachings of our “anything goes” culture. From the perspective of our sex-saturated culture there is nothing wrong with anything that a couple may choose to do, and Scripture is diametrically opposed to that kind of thinking.
There are other lessons we need to catch here. Don’t get tripped up by spiritual pride. The Corinthians are stumbling all over it. They underestimate their physical passions, as well as the power of their enemy Satan to corrupt them. They overestimate their spiritual power to conquer temptation and to control their physical instincts. As usual with arrogance, they become inconsiderate of others, including their marital partners. “I am devoted to God. I must give myself wholly to him.” Such an attitude reveals idolatry, turning God into a high to be enjoyed at the cost of rejecting the people and good gifts he has given.
This passage really challenges us to understand marriage in the light of Christ’s kingdom values. Husbands and wives are called to give themselves completely to one another. Neither one is property to be at the disposal of the other. That is not the point. But this passage is saying the same thing as Ephesians 5:25-33 teaches. When a man and a woman marry, it is a full commitment. There are no exclusions in the contract. A man is not to marry a wife to be available as he might have need of her, nor is the wife to marry a husband to provide security as she pursues whatever it is that may be fulfilling.
This passage is not a mandate for one spouse to demand sex from one another. But it is a mandate for each spouse to give him or herself as fully to the other as possible. There are marriages in which this is difficult to do, such as when a believer is married to an unbeliever, or one of the spouses is abusive. The point is to try to make the marriage work. Do what you can and give what you can within moral and biblical principles.
Finally, appreciate the mystery of marriage. I don’t mean the mystery of that other person known as your spouse, that I suppose you should. What I mean is the mystery spoken of in Ephesians 5:31-32: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. There is that reference to Genesis again of becoming one flesh. Paul had been telling husbands to treat their wives as Christ treats the Church, his bride. Marriage is like the relationship between Jesus Christ and the Church in that both are unions. Christian believers are members of Christ’s body; we are united to him. That, Paul, says is a profound mystery. So is the union of a husband and wife. More takes place than we know, and the joy of marriage should be deepening that union in all its areas – mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically.
And then strive to make your marriage a good reflection of that spiritual marriage between Christ and his Bride. That is the marriage that is so misunderstood. Most people don’t even understand there is a spiritual union with Christ. They regard Christianity as some kind of mental agreement, a philosophy that one gives assent to as long as it seems logical or practical. In other words, they regard it as people regard modern marriage. Our union with Christ is a real marriage, and it is to be entered into with real commitment and with real expectation to experience the joys and the sorrows, the pleasures and the sufferings that go into any meaningful, life-long marriage.
It is to be a marriage in which our bodies belong to Christ. After all he has already given his body for us. In his complete devotion to God the Father, he has given himself fully to us. Love for God, far from meaning that he would to withdraw from people, meant that he would become linked even more closely us. That is the gospel, and the gospel is what our marriages are to be about.
