It is universally reported [that there is] fornication among you, and such fornication as [is] not even among the nations, so that one should have his father's wife.
Paul has been dealing with divisions and boasting. Now he turns to something far uglier. A report was going round about the Corinthian believers, and it named a sin the pagan world around them would not accept. Two questions follow. How could this happen among Christians? And why did the assembly's calm trouble Paul more than the act?
The assembly had grown up inside a population known everywhere for its indulgence.
The apostle's work had formed a large assembly there, for God had many people in that city. It stood inside a very corrupt population. Wealth and luxury went together with a moral disorder that had made the city a byword.
That atmosphere does not stay outside the door.
God's people are in danger of being coloured by the atmosphere of the world outside. It happens when the first warmth of grace cools and they begin to take up their old habits. That is what happened at Corinth.
"His father's wife" is not vague. Writers name the woman and trace what the assembly finally did with the man.
This evil defiled the assembly at Corinth when a man took his father's wife, that is, his stepmother (1 Cor. 5:1). The assembly was told that such sin was not even named among the nations, and the man was put out from the assembly (v. 12). Only when the sin was judged and discontinued was the man restored (2 Cor. 2:6-8).
Two details of the wording matter. The ESV reads "actually reported," but the first word describes how widely the report had spread.
The Greek word in 1 Corinthians 5:1 does not mean "actually," but "commonly."
Older English versions added the words "is named" here. The best manuscripts do not carry them, and without them the line lands harder: such immorality is not found even among the pagans.
The best authorities leave out the words "is named" in 1 Corinthians 5:1. Dropping them gives the true and sharp sense.
The comparison with the pagans is the sting of the verse. People with the light were living below people who had none.
But there was another evil among them, and everyone knew about it. While it went unjudged, it dragged the Church of the living God below the moral level of the pagans. Among those people the Corinthians should have shone as a light in the dark. One of their number had done something that was not only a grievous sin against God. It was felt to be an outrage against natural morality, even in a society where loose living was a marked feature.
In Corinth a taste for clever thinking sat right next to something rotten.
Corinth's stress on human wisdom came, sadly, with a case of revolting moral corruption. Philosophy is very often far from spiritual power... This shows that grace, once known, can be abused in the most unholy way, if it does not hold living power over the soul. And a believer may slip into evil that shocks even the conscience of an unbeliever.
Paul writes to the church, not to the guilty man.
It was distressing enough that so monstrous an evil had found a way into the assembly of God. But what grieved the apostle most — and rightly so — was that they tolerated the offender among them. The assembly cannot stop a Christian from falling into the worst scandal. But it must deal with evil, because it carries the name of Christ before God and man. Now here, right among them, was a grossness beyond the heathen — a so-called brother living with his stepmother!
Part of the blame lay with men who wanted a following of their own. And even without instructions, something should have stirred in the assembly.
Those who wanted personal influence as teachers let them carry on in it... They did not yet know that it was their duty to cut off the wicked person. They did not know that God had given them the power to do it and laid the obligation on them. Even so, a moral sense of evil should have led them to humble themselves before God, and to pray that He would take the man away. Instead, they were puffed up with pride.
- Setting — Corinth was a byword for wealth and loose living. The assembly inside it took up the city's habits once the first warmth of grace cooled.
- Sin — the offence was a man living with his stepmother. Even the pagan nations did not name such a thing.
- Shame — left unjudged, it dropped the church of the living God below the moral level of the very people it should have shone among.
- Source — a taste for human wisdom sat beside the filth. Where grace holds no living power over the soul, a believer can fall into evil that shocks an unbeliever.
- Summons — the assembly could not have stopped the fall, but it had to act. Grief and prayer were open to them from the start. Instead they were puffed up.
And *ye* are puffed up, and ye have not rather mourned, in order that he that has done this deed might be taken away out of the midst of you.
A member of the church at Corinth was living in open immorality. Paul's rebuke here falls on the rest of the church, not on the offender. Why were they still pleased with themselves? And what should they have done instead?
Paul had already named the offence in the previous verse. What draws his sharpest words is the assembly's willingness to live with it.
It was bad enough that such a monstrous evil had found its way into the assembly of God. But what grieved the apostle most, and rightly so, was that they put up with the offender among them. The assembly cannot stop a Christian from falling into the worst scandal. But it is identified with Christ before God and man, so it must deal with evil.
"Puffed up" here does not mean they were proud of the sin. One writer reads it as the pride of comparison — and traces their helplessness back to it.
They are puffed up — not about the sin, but no doubt about the fact that they had not done it. They are puffed up that they could thank God they were not like this man who had fallen into it. They should have been crushed and broken, on their faces before God, crying to Him and confessing to Him their own moral state that had made such an evil possible. Instead they are puffed up. They carry on with their gifts and everything of that kind, and so they have no power to deal with the evil.
This case carries a warning about how far believers can fall. It also points to what was still open to them.
Here is a most solemn thing, first of all: if Christians fall into sin, we need not be surprised if they fall lower than the men of the world themselves… If they did not know how to deal with it, they could surely have cried to God in their sorrow, and He would have heard them. We always have this resource, but they were puffed up instead.
Were they simply ignorant of what to do? One writer allows for that, and still holds them responsible.
We must remember that they were quite inexperienced, and the Lord's mind about dealing with wickedness in the assembly had not yet been revealed to them. Still, as saints they ought to have felt the sin and scandal deeply, and if they did not know how to act, they should have turned to mourning.
Paul's question — "Ought you not rather to mourn?" — is put to the whole church. Those who remove an offender should first feel their own share in what happened.
When someone must be put out as a wicked person unfit for fellowship, the assembly should mourn and be searched deeply in heart. It should not act in a cold, judging, self-righteous way. There should be sorrow, humility, and confession of shared sin and shame that such a thing has happened in God's house. They may even have reason to blame themselves that it has come to this extreme step of cutting off. Did they look after the one who went wrong? Did they pray for him? Did they set him a godly example? Did they give him true shepherd care?
The verse ties grief to a result: the wrongdoer taken away. One writer draws from this a specific kind of gathering.
The assembly ought to meet more often to humble itself. This is implied in 1 Corinthians 5:2. When a sin comes to light in the assembly and the guilty person must be excluded, the assembly ought to express grief and humble itself about the sin, making it its own before the Lord. The assembly can announce the putting away at this meeting of humbling, and that gives the act great solemnity.
In the end Corinth did act. But the bare act of exclusion was not what satisfied Paul.
Simply getting the wicked person outside, important as that may be, is not what comforted the apostle's heart. What comforted him was deep moral feeling at work in them all together… To be done with the offender and nothing more would show in the others a conscience never stirred, or else the hardness of a judge.
- Pride blinds. They were not proud of the sin. They were proud that they had not done it. That pride left them powerless.
- Tolerance grieves. One believer's fall was not what distressed Paul most. The church's willingness to live with it was.
- Mourning is always available. Even without instructions on discipline, they could have cried to God in their sorrow, and He would have heard them.
- Grief is shared. The sin shamed the whole church. It called for confession, humility, and honest questions about the care they had given the man.
- Removal is the fruit, not the aim. Putting the offender out settles nothing by itself. What clears a church is the awakened conscience behind the act.
For *I*, [as] absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged as present,
Paul writes from far away about a scandal he never saw, and tells the Corinthians his verdict is already fixed. So what does it mean to be present with a church "in spirit," and how can a man judge a case from another city?
Paul is not an outside observer with an opinion. He speaks as one who belongs to that gathering and shares in what it does.
They should have acted without being told. Paul was not there in person, yet he had already acted — not as an outside witness, but as one present with them in spirit. These words deserve our close attention. In the unity of the body of Christ, the apostle was in spirit and sympathy wherever God's saints gathered, and he took a personal interest in what they did. Every true Christian has a proper interest in what the Church of God does and what it goes through.
The verse says "present" twice, and the two uses are not the same. One writer traces the difference to a single small word.
"As" belongs to the second "present," not the first. The first is clear enough from "in spirit," set against "absent in body." The second means the very opposite, so "as" is needed there — he means as if he were really there. Attached to the first, it would be wrong.
So the first is real: he is with them in spirit. The second is a comparison: he judges as if he stood in the room.
The judgment falls to Paul because nobody at Corinth would make it. Their failure was not just ignorance. It was pride — and pride over evil touches the whole gathering.
Those who feel a wrong but do not yet know the remedy have one resource: humbling themselves and prayer. Then the Lord would have acted for them, or given them to act for Him. Instead of this they were "puffed up" — which made the harm far worse… What strikes more directly at all common union in good, at all shared responsibility for evil? Where people allow such thoughts, they plainly ignore or forget the presence of the Holy Spirit. No believer would openly say that He can be a partner in sin. Yet that is what He must be, if evil is known and left unjudged where He dwells.
A verdict passed in advance sounds harsh until you see the case. The wrong was open and beyond dispute. At such a moment, sympathy for the offender pulls the conscience the wrong way.
The case was as bad as it could be, and there was no question about it. The facts could not be denied; the scandal was unheard of… Nobody raised the question whether the person might be converted. In fact, church discipline assumes that those it deals with are Christians. But when discipline is the question, it is not the time for a display of Christian affection. That would falsify the conscience and turn the eye away from the point where the Holy Spirit was directing attention.
Writers draw a careful line here. What Paul does rests on power that belongs to him as an apostle. It is not the ordinary act of a church.
Since Calvin's time especially, people have confused this with excommunication. But delivering to Satan is a power here linked with the assembly. It is like the giving of a gift in 1 Timothy 4:14, linked with the laying on of the hands of the elders. In both cases the result hinges on apostolic power. Yet the absence of that power in no way weakens the duty of putting away the guilty professing Christian, as verse 13 carefully lays down.
Yet Paul does not lean on that standing in the words he uses. He points instead to a power that is not his own.
He speaks as an apostle, yet he fully identifies himself with the church at Corinth as simply a member of the body of Christ. He does it by saying, "When you are gathered together and my spirit with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ" — not "with my apostolic power." He seeks to bring the consciences of the Corinthians into the presence of Christ, not into his own apostolic presence, so that they might act in the fear of Christ, and not in the fear of men.
- Absent — Paul's body was elsewhere, but the sin was not somebody else's business. Every Christian has a proper interest in what happens in the church of God.
- Present — The first "present" is real; the second is a comparison. He is with them in spirit, and judges as if he stood there.
- Judged — The facts were beyond dispute, so no debate was needed. When discipline is the question, it is not the moment for a display of affection.
- Unjudged — Corinth was puffed up instead of mourning. Evil known and left alone makes the Holy Spirit, who dwells there, look like a partner in it.
- Power — Paul names the power of the Lord Jesus, not his own apostolic weight. That moves their consciences into Christ's presence rather than his own.
[to deliver,] in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ (ye and my spirit being gathered together, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ), him that has so wrought this
The church at Corinth had a man living in gross sin among them, and they were doing nothing about it. Paul tells them how to deal with him. Verse 4 names three things that stand behind their action: a name, an assembly gathered, and a power.
Paul had already judged the case before his letter arrived. Working from an older translation, one writer weighs the small word "as":
"For I, absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged as present concerning him who so did this." The best authorities give the sense this way. The word "as" belongs with the second "present," not the first. The first needs no such word, since "in spirit" already qualifies it, in contrast with "absent in body." The second means the opposite. There "as" is essential, for he means as if he were really there.
That name is not a label on a meeting. It is what gives the meeting any right to act.
The assembly was to act, and it acted "with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ." It met in His name, and His presence gave it this authority. Suppose it had been only a voluntary society of believers, who agree on certain principles of church government or doctrine and stand apart from others because of that. Then it could not have used the power spoken of here, for it could not have had Christ's presence. Such an assembly would have no more scriptural authority to bind and loose — to receive into fellowship or to put out — than a group of members of Parliament, meeting by their own choice in a public hall, has to pass laws.
The Lord Himself gave this principle, and one writer hears its echo in this verse:
Here the Lord teaches that His being "in the midst of them" is the power behind all authority in disciplining those who go wrong. It is also the secret of success in united prayer. "For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them." (Matt. 18:15-20.) These words appear only here. Yet note the striking echo of them in a case of assembly discipline at Corinth.
The verse calls the whole church together. That rules out a decision made by a few on everyone else's behalf.
But it is the assembly that must act. It acts not merely to comply with Paul's word, but "in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ" — that is, as representing Him. This is their solemn responsibility, and His authority stands behind it. No assembly has an excuse for failing to judge evil that is plainly there. And all the saints share the responsibility: they must not leave the matter to just a few in the assembly.
The power named here is not the assembly's own. One writer names it, and shows how far the assembly's act reaches:
Here we have the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, which rests on the whole Church (1 Cor. 1:2, 10), and His power, which is the Holy Spirit, who lives in the whole Body. So this is no act of a small body, for some larger and more authoritative body to review. It is the act of the Holy Spirit through this assembly — an act for the whole Body of Christ throughout the world, and binding on it.
An apostle could have leaned on his own rank. Notice which power he names:
Though he speaks as an apostle, he fully identifies himself with the church at Corinth, simply as a member of the body of Christ. He says, "when you are gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ" — not "with my apostolic power." He wants to bring the consciences of the Corinthians into the presence of Christ, not into his own apostolic presence. Then they would act in the fear of Christ, and not in the fear of the apostle — that is, in the fear of men.
Verse 5 goes on to speak of handing this man over to Satan. One writer sets that act apart from ordinary excommunication:
Many, especially since Calvin's time, have confused this with excommunication. But delivering to Satan is a power tied here to the assembly, just as the giving of a gift in 1 Timothy 4:14 is tied to the laying on of the hands of the elders. In both cases the result hinges on apostolic power. Yet the lack of that power in no way weakens the duty of putting away the guilty person who professes to be a Christian, as verse 13 carefully lays down.
- Name — The assembly acts in the name of the Lord Jesus. That name, not the group's own agreement, gives its decision any authority.
- Presence — The Lord promised to be among two or three gathered in His name. That same promise stands behind discipline.
- Power — The power is His, and the Holy Spirit carries it out. So the act is not a small group's opinion. It binds the whole Body of Christ.
- Participation — All the saints are to be gathered for it. They cannot hand the responsibility to a few.
- Persistence — Delivering to Satan rested on apostolic power. The plain duty of verse 13, to put away the guilty person, still stands.
to deliver him, [I say,] [being] such, to Satan for destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.
This verse hands a sinning believer in the Corinthian assembly over to Satan, which sounds like abandonment. Yet its aim is rescue, not ruin — and that raises three questions: what "the flesh" means here, who could pass such a sentence, and how a man given to Satan can still be saved.
In that day, excommunication cost far more than a place in a group. One writer sets out what each side of the line meant.
Excommunication was a fearful thing in those days. The "within" was the sphere where God was known, and from which the light of His truth shone out. The "without" meant the world of paganism and Judaism — Satan's sphere. One might have thought the excommunication of this sinning believer would have been for his destruction. But no, it was for the destruction of the flesh. It was so that his spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.
Does this mean the man's body? One writer says no.
If anyone asks what the "destruction of the flesh" in 1 Corinthians 5:5 means, it does not refer to the body. It refers to the evil moral principle that is tied to the body in us all… The evil persons in question, having failed to learn their lessons in God's gracious school, had to be broken and humbled by Satan's cruel means. Divine discipline in all its forms is a deeply serious matter, but always with ultimate blessing in view.
Commentators differ here. One reads the delivering as the apostle's own act, resting on a power no longer available.
The first thing we may note is the apostolic power of delivering to Satan… Properly there is no such thing now. If a person is now put out of fellowship, he is not delivered to Satan, though he might come under Satan as a result… Throwing a man out into Satan's world is not delivering him or committing him to it. I know of nobody but the apostle who had the power… The church is not commanded to do it here. He says, I have judged already — to deliver such a one to Satan. This was his own act; he did not tell them to do so. He does tell them to put such a one out.
Another writer lays this act on the assembly, and draws a personal warning from it.
In 1 Corinthians 5 the assembly at Corinth is commanded to deliver the evildoer to Satan for the destruction of the flesh… A person put out of the assembly where the Holy Spirit ruled was handed over to the power of Satan. The aim was that his flesh might be thoroughly judged and crushed — serious but needed work! May we learn, dear friend, to judge ourselves in secret before our God, so the assembly may not have to deal with us. If the roots of evil are judged in private, the fruit will not appear above the surface of our practical life.
The enemy receives the man, but not what he wants.
Here we see a remarkable sample of God's power over the evil — indeed, of His use of it to fulfil His own holy purposes… The man is put into the hands of the adversary, who can now show himself plainly as the adversary he always is. He can serve himself no longer by the sin of one who has been expelled from the Christian assembly. So he has nothing left to do but show his hatred against one who has borne the name of Christ… God uses him, on the other hand, so that in the destruction of the flesh the spirit may yet be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.
The severity has a destination.
Verse 5 shows that the ultimate end of discipline should be restoration. You deal with him as a member of Christ, and discipline him as such while he is within, and you put him outside so that he might be broken down and brought in again.
And the outcome named in the verse is not a hope that might fail.
If flesh had been indulged without shame, flesh must be galled and broken to pieces under the adversary's hand. But it was for good in the end — "so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord." In fact, as the second epistle shows, the discipline blessed him in this world too. Yet the end named here cannot fail for anyone born of God, whatever the hindrances, or the shape of God's dealing with the soul.
- Sphere — Handing the man to Satan meant putting him outside, into Satan's world. Inside was the one place where God was known.
- Target — Not the body, but the evil principle in us — broken by the enemy's own cruel means.
- Overruled — Satan gets the man but not the outcome; God uses his hatred to fulfil His own holy purpose.
- Aim — The whole severe act aims at recovery: broken down outside, then brought in again.
- Certainty — For anyone born of God this end cannot fail: the spirit saved in the day of the Lord. So judge the roots in secret, and the assembly never has to deal with the fruit.