Paul began by arguing against his recipients' distortion of Christian freedom and their misunderstanding of the nature of the body.
6:12 Paul was and is famous as the apostle of Christian liberty. He saw early in his Christian life and clearly that the Christian is not under the Mosaic Law. His Epistle to the Galatians is an exposition of this theme. He preached this freedom wherever he went. Unfortunately he was always subject to misinterpretation. Some of his hearers concluded that he advocated no restraints whatsoever in Christian living.147Perhaps those in Corinth who were practicing sexual immorality and suing their brethren in pagan courts appealed to Paul to support their actions, though they took liberty farther than Paul did.148
"Everything is permissible for me' is almost certainly a Corinthian theological slogan."149
"It could have been argued in Corinth . . . that the right course was for a husband to keep his wife pure', and, if necessary, find occasional sexual satisfaction in a harlot."150
In this verse the apostle restated his general maxim but qualified it (cf. 10:23). Legality is not the only test the Christian should apply to his or her behavior. Is the practice also profitable (helpful, admirable, beneficial, expedient, good)? Furthermore even though I have authority over some practice, might it gain control over me? The Christian should always be able to submit to the Lord's control. We should give the Lord, not anyone or anything else, control of our bodies.
"Freedom is not to be for self but for others. The real question is not whether an action is lawful' or right' or even all right,' but whether it is good, whether it benefits. . . . 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."151
"We have no longer any right to do what in itself is innocent, when our doing it will have a bad effect on others. . . . We have no longer any right to do what in itself is innocent, when experience has proved that our doing it has a bad effect on ourselves"152
6:13-14 The first part of this verse is similar to the two parts of the previous verse. It contains a statement that is true, but a qualifier follows. Food is not a matter of spiritual significance for the Christian, except that gluttony is a sin. As far as what we eat goes, we may eat anything in the will of God (Mark 7:19). He has not forbidden any foods for spiritual reasons, though there may be physical reasons we may choose not to eat certain things. Both food and the stomach are temporal. Paul referred to food here not because it was an issue but to set up the issue of the body and sexual immorality. As food is for the stomach, so the body is for the Lord.
"Not only are meats made for the belly, but the belly, which is essential to physical existence, is made for meats, and cannot exist without them."153
Paul constructed his argument like this.
Proposition 1:
Part 1: Food is for the stomach [A, B], and the stomach is for food [B, A].
Part 2: God will destroy the stomach [B] and the food [A].
Proposition 2:
Part 1: The body is for the Lord [A, B] (not for sexual immorality), and the Lord is for the body [B, A].
Part 2: God has raised the Lord [B], and He will raise us [A] (by His power).
One might conclude, and some in Corinth were evidently doing so, that since sex was also physical and temporal it was also irrelevant spiritually.154However this is a false deduction. The body is part of what the Lord saved and sanctified. Therefore it is for Him, and we should use it for His glory, not for fornication. Furthermore the Lord has a noble purpose and destiny for our bodies. He is for them in that sense.
The Lord will resurrect the bodies of most Christians in the future, all but those that He catches away at the Rapture (1 Thess. 4:17). The resurrection of our bodies shows that God has plans for them. Some in Corinth did not believe in the resurrection, but Paul dealt with that later (ch. 15). Here he simply stated the facts without defending them.
"The body of the believer is forthe Lord because through Christ's resurrection God has set in motion the reality of our own resurrection. This means that the believer's physical body is to be understood as joined' to Christ's own body' that was raised from the dead."155
