Does it bug you when you see someone that appears to be going backwards in their development? That was the deal for Paul writing to the Corinthians believers. He had to berate them about their disputes, and how they took each other to a secular court rather than finding a way together as brothers or sisters in Christ. In verse 8 he is effectively saying 'you behaviour is descending'!
It is with that backdrop that we get the 'vice list' of verse 9 through to 11. Yet two key words we need to hold in these verses are the word 'were' and 'but'! Paul says 'that is what some of you were', i.e. you used to live just like many others in Corinth, in a moral quagmire. He is challenging them: did their greed ever lead to peace, did their slandering every lead to wholeness, did any of these take you in the direction of the Kingdom of God? No - of course not! Then he says 'But!'. But one day they discovered Jesus, the Jesus who lived, died and was raised from them, who can and has washed them from their impurity, sanctified (i.e. made appropriate), and stamped on their lives 'justified', i.e. 'good to go'. This is the transition from old to new we have already talked about.
I see Christians make two mistakes with this vice list. Firstly they use the list for mission thinking: they go out to people and use the list to tell people how bad they are (this is known as 'clobbering people'!). I believe this is a mistake because the context here is nothing about mission, but rather believers going backwards. Yes it describes general malaise in the world, but it is about where believers have come from rather than how to do mission.
The second mistake is some focus on two words in the list (in the Greek) and promote them to an importance way above all else. The two words are translated in the NIV (for example) as 'men who have sex with men'. These two words are among the hardest of all words to translate in the New Testament, generating tomes of scholarship and continued debate. The first of the words could merely be translated as 'soft' or 'lacking moral strength' - the original King James version renders it 'effeminate'. The other word is a 'compound' word, i.e. made up of two individual words (like 'tentmaker' is 'tent' + 'maker'). The individual Greek words can render 'male' and 'bed' or 'place of governance', and so perhaps 'male-bedders' for the compound. Yet compound words can take on new meaning: for example Christian missionaries today would use the word 'tentmaker' to describe a missionary who uses a skill (e.g. fixing cars) to make a living while doing their outreach work (i.e. nothing to do with making tents!). Some scholarship suggests that usage of the compound elsewhere is about exploiting people for sex - so 'sex-trafficker' could be a contemporary translation for us. What if translations down the years had conveyed this kind of meaning?
The point is that Christians may read these words, delve into scholarship, and come to different conclusions. Just maybe that is okay? Especially because it is secondary to standing on the life/death/resurrection of Jesus.
Remember the key thing is that God wants us to be in relationship with Him, and for that to affect the whole of our lives and our interactions with each other. God wants spiritual intimacy with each of us, and how we live our lives (and what we do with our bodies) affects our ability for spiritual intimacy. Anything in our lives that promotes something else to be in the place of God, that undermines or destroys loving relationships (e.g. abusive or controlling), that is all about self, that is self at the expense of others, that goes against the character of God ... all of that destroys and impedes spiritual intimacy.
So let us not understand this (and other) lists as if they were a simple God-given moral code, as if they were almost arbitrary. Instead understand as behaviours that might be damaging, and that impede us being the human-spiritual beings that God intends. For example the football 'off-side' rule is somewhat arbitrary. Cricket having 6 balls in an over is arbitrary (why not 10!). But a morality that informs us to reserve our highest form of physical intimacy (i.e. our sexual intimacy) for one committed covenant relationship partner ... that is not arbitrary. That is because to behave differently devalues yourself, those around you, and undermines the link between the physical and the spiritual. The intimacy of two people (sexual intimacy in secure covenant relationship) somehow gives us a glimpse of understanding spiritual intimacy between us and God. It is a big mystery (hence the 'somehow'), but that is Paul's argument in verses 12 to 17. There is something in sexual intimacy that is about 'joining', which resonates (in Paul's thinking) with a believer's joining with Jesus.
And so in verse 18 Paul says 'Flee from sexual immorality'. Don't go near it, because your body is a Temple of the Holy Spirit. As a follower of Jesus you are a living walking container for the Holy Spirit, i.e. to be a holy place, a place where others might discover God because of your interaction with them. Do want that marred by that which undermines, destroys and obliterates the image of God? No - of course not! So Paul concludes 'honour God with your bodies'. Yet don't do that by simply reducing to moral codes "do this, don't do that", for we are talking living up to the intimacy God wants with us, and simple codes will never do that justice!
That of course does not mean "anything goes". Vice lists and moral examples are useful like individual spotlights that shine rays of light a certain angles (imagine a theatre or dark room with just one or two spotlights). As followers of Jesus we don't want to live just by the odd spotlight - No - we want to be ever closer to Jesus. That means learning to honour God fully: mind, soul and body so that we live in His Light - a whole set of floodlights that illuminates every corner.
We want that light to shine on us, to shine through us - our lives to be reflectors of that light because the Holy Spirit is pleased and able to dwell in us: our bodies as worthy Temples of the Holy Spirit.
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