[I’ve modified this since first posted to include v.14 and to delete “God shall destroy” as coming from Paul. I’ll explain the deletion in the next post of this series.]
(1Co 6:12 ESV) “All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything. 13 “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food”– and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. 14 And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power.
In the King James, this is a very confusing passage —
(1Co 6:12 KJV) All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any. 13 Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats: but God shall destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body. 14 And God hath both raised up the Lord, and will also raise up us by his own power.
The KJV omits the quotation marks found in most modern translations. The original Greek had no punctuation at all, and so this is not surprising — but it’s made for some really strange Sunday school class lessons over the years!
Paul is quoting the Corinthians. They are arguing “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food,” clearly intending “Sex is for the genitals and genitals for sex.” They were making a “natural law” argument that will sound all too familiar: God gave us these urges; how can it be wrong to satisfy them? You see, the modern attitude toward sex is not new at all — it goes back to the Greeks (and far earlier).
Notice Paul’s rebuttals —
* Not all things are helpful
* I will not be brought under the power of any
* God shall destroy both it and them
* The body is for the Lord and the Lord for the body.
These are very un-modern arguments, and their power is cumulative. He first speaks of what is “helpful” or, in some translations, expedient, advantageous, or beneficial. In other words, letting your decisions be made by your genitalia is just not good for you. Whether or not sexual immorality is lawful (he does not concede the point), even if it were lawful, it would be harmful. Don’t do it.
The real question is not whether an action is “lawful” or “right” or even “all right,” but whether it is good, whether it benefits. In light of the full context of this section that may mean, “to one’s own benefit.” Elsewhere in 1 Corinthians, however, this word denotes benefiting someone else (it is parallel with “build up” in 10:23; cf. 10:33). Probably that is what lies behind the qualification here as well. Truly Christian conduct is not predicated on whether I have the right to do something, but whether my conduct is helpful to those about me.
Gordon Fee, New International Commentary, First Corinthians.
And yet, to modern ears, this sounds unconvincing. Who gets hurt? And I’ll not go long here. Just come to Tuscaloosa and tour the public schools and the prisons, and then tell me that sex outside of marriage is good for society’s children.
Paul next speaks of the importance of not being dominated by one’s sexual and other urges. C. S. Lewis deals with this question in Mere Christianity 
Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it; the Christian rule is, ‘Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.’ Now this is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong. One or the other. Of course, being a Christian, I think it is the instinct which has gone wrong. But I have other reasons for thinking so. …
Or take it another way. You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act — that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us? …
Here is a third point. You find very few people who want to eat things that really are not food or to do other things with food instead of eating it. In other words, perversions of the food appetite are rare. But perversions of the sex instinct are numerous, hard to cure, and frightful. I am sorry to have to go into all these details but I must.
The reason why I must is that you and I, for the last twenty years, have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex. We have been told, till one is sick of hearing it, that sexual desire is in the same state as any of our other natural desires and that if only we abandon the silly old Victorian idea of hushing it up, everything in the garden will be lovely. It is not true.
The moment you look at the facts, and away from the propaganda, you see that it is not. They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up. But for the last twenty years it has not been. It has been chattered about all day long. Yet it is still in a mess. If hushing up had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. But it has not. I think it is the other way round. I think the human race originally hushed it up because it had become such a mess. …
Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body — which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty and our energy. Christianity has glorified marriage more than any other religion: and nearly all the greatest love poetry in the world has been produced by Christians. If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once.
But, of course, when people say, ‘Sex is nothing to be ashamed of,’ they may mean ‘the state into which the sexual instinct has now got is nothing to be ashamed of. If they mean that, I think they are wrong. I think it is everything to be ashamed of. There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.
I do not say you and I are individually responsible for the present situation. Our ancestors have handed over to us organisms which are warped in this respect: and we grow up surrounded by propaganda in favour of unchastity. There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us. Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance. God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome.
What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them. Before we can be cured we must want to be cured. Those who really wish for help will get it; but for many modern people even the wish is difficult. It is easy to think that we want something when we do not really want it.
A famous Christian long ago told us that when he was a young man he prayed constantly for chastity; but years later he realised that while his lips had been saying, ‘Oh Lord, make me chaste,’ his heart had been secretly adding, ‘But please don’t do it just yet.’ This may happen in prayers for other virtues too; but there are three reasons why it is now specially difficult for us to desire — let alone to achieve — complete chastity. In the first place our warped natures, the devils who tempt us, and all the contemporary propaganda for lust, combine to make us feel that the desires we are resisting are so ‘natural’, so ‘healthy’, and so reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them.
Poster after poster, film after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual indulgence with the ideas of health, normality, youth, frankness, and good humour. Now this association is a lie. Like all powerful lies, it is based on a truth — the truth, acknowledged above, that sex in itself (apart from the excesses and obsessions that have grown round it) is ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’, and all the rest of it.
The lie consists in the suggestion that any sexual act to which you are tempted at the moment is also healthy and normal. Now this, on any conceivable view, and quite apart from Christianity, must be nonsense. Surrender to all our desires obviously leads to impotence, disease, jealousies, lies, concealment, and everything that is the reverse of health, good humour, and frankness.
For any happiness, even in this world, quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary; so the claim made by every desire, when it is strong, to be healthy and reasonable, counts for nothing. Every sane and civilised man must have some set of principles by which he chooses to reject some of his desires and to permit others. One man does this on Christian principles, another on hygienic principles, another on sociological principles.
The real conflict is not between Christianity and ‘nature’, but between Christian principles and other principles in the control of ‘nature’. For ‘nature’ (in the sense of natural desire) will have to be controlled anyway, unless you are going to ruin your whole life.
The Christian principles are, admittedly, stricter than the others; but then we think you will get help towards obeying them which you will not get towards obeying the others.
In the second place, many people are deterred from seriously attempting Christian chastity because they think (before trying) that it is impossible. But when a thing has to be attempted, one must never think about possibility or impossibility. … Not only in examinations but in war, in mountain climbing, in learning to skate, or swim, or ride a bicycle, even in fastening a stiff collar with cold fingers, people quite often do what seemed impossible before they did it. It is wonderful what you can do when you have to.
We may, indeed, be sure that perfect chastity — like perfect charity — will not be attained by any merely human efforts. You must ask for God’s help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again.
Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection. …
Finally, though I have had to speak at some length about sex, I want to make it as clear as I possibly can that the centre of Christian morality is not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong.The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred.
For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.
Sorry for the long quotation, but I’m a big fan. And who could I possibly say it better?
Promiscuity is indeed destructive. Paul’s alternative to fornication is marriage (“It is better to marry than to burn”). This is all the more reason for Christians to support marriage equality for all. Celibacy is never presented in Scripture as the answer to fornication and promiscuity.
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“and God will destroy both one and the other”.
So this verse has nothing to do with literal digestion but everything to do with unhealthy excessive desire? Just checkin, because some I believe are erroneously teaching we won’t eat in heaven based on this passage.
RJ asked,
I’ll cover in detail in the next 1 Cor post, but I think the NIV and NET Bible have it right by including “God shall destroy both it and them” in the language Paul is quoting from the Corinthians. That is, this is not Paul’s own assertion but an assertion he will contradict.d
In short, it says nothing about whether we will eat in heaven. But Rev and the prophets picture us eating at a great wedding banquet at the Second Coming — which could be entirely metaphor, but it’s as close as the scriptures come to addressing the question that I can find.