Chapter 5 dealt with sin the church needed to judge and remove from within its own fellowship. Chapter 6 opens on the opposite failure: believers dragging each other into pagan courtrooms to settle disputes, airing the church’s dirty laundry in front of the very unbelievers chapters 1 through 3 already said know nothing of God’s wisdom. From there the chapter widens into one of this letter’s most striking arguments — that the human body itself, purchased at an actual price, has become something too significant to hand over carelessly to sin.
A study in 1 Corinthians 6 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 16 min read
Go To Law Before The Unjust
“Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unjust, and not before the saints? Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world? and if the world shall be judged by you, are ye unworthy to judge the smallest matters?”
1 Corinthians 6:1-2
“During the thousand years between the first and the second resurrection the judgment of the wicked takes place. … Daniel declares that when the Ancient of Days came, ‘judgment was given to the saints of the Most High.’ … It is at this time that, as foretold by Paul, ‘the saints shall judge the world.’ … In union with Christ they judge the wicked, comparing their acts with the statute book, the Bible, and deciding every case according to the deeds done in the body.”
Ellen G. White · The Great Controversy, p. 660
Paul’s argument works from the future backward into the present. This study’s own source locates “the saints shall judge the world” during the thousand years of Revelation 20, a genuinely cosmic role in which the redeemed review the very judgment records of the wicked alongside Christ. If believers are entrusted with that scale of responsibility in eternity, Paul reasons, surely they are equipped to settle an ordinary property dispute now, without needing a pagan magistrate’s help.
“Know ye not that we shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life?”
1 Corinthians 6:3
“Satan also and evil angels are judged by Christ and His people. Says Paul: ‘Know ye not that we shall judge angels?’ … And Jude declares that ‘the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, He hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.’”
Ellen G. White · The Great Controversy, p. 661
Verse 3 raises the stakes even higher — not merely the wicked among humanity, but fallen angels themselves, Satan included. If that judgment genuinely belongs to the redeemed, then “things that pertain to this life,” the ordinary business disputes and property claims Paul is actually addressing, are almost comically small by comparison.
“If then ye have judgments of things pertaining to this life, set them to judge who are least esteemed in the church. I speak to your shame. Is it so, that there is not a wise man among you? no, not one that shall be able to judge between his brethren?”
1 Corinthians 6:4-5
“I speak to your shame” is about as direct as Paul gets in this letter. His proposed solution is almost provocatively modest — not a panel of the church’s most respected elders, but literally anyone, even those “least esteemed,” because the real embarrassment is not a lack of qualified judges but the assumption that no believer could possibly be trusted with the job.
“But brother goeth to law with brother, and that before the unbelievers. Now therefore there is utterly a fault among you, because ye go to law one with another. Why do ye not rather take wrong? why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded?”
1 Corinthians 6:6-7
“Brother goeth to law with brother” repeats the very word that should have made the lawsuit unthinkable. Paul’s rhetorical questions in verse 7 push further than most readers expect — not simply “settle it privately,” but a genuine willingness to absorb the loss rather than win the case at the cost of public scandal before a watching, unbelieving city.
“Nay, ye do wrong, and defraud, and that your brethren.”
1 Corinthians 6:8
The one short verse reveals that this was never simply about disagreement over who was right; some members were actively wronging and defrauding their own brothers and sisters, and then compounding it by demanding a pagan court settle the matter instead of repenting of it.
Such Were Some Of You
“Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”
1 Corinthians 6:9-10
“Be not deceived” warns against a very specific self-deception — the comfortable assumption that a habitual, unrepented pattern of sin can somehow coexist with genuine standing in God’s kingdom. Paul lists nine categories in a row, deliberately broad enough to include the kind of respectable vices as well as the disreputable ones, so that no reader can quietly exempt their own particular weakness from the warning.
“And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.”
1 Corinthians 6:11
“And such were some of you” is one of the most hope-filled clauses in the entire letter, precisely because of how severe the list just before it was. Every single category named in verses 9 and 10 had an actual, living example sitting in the Corinthian congregation, already washed, sanctified, and justified. The very list meant to warn against unrepented sin doubles, in this one verse, as proof that none of it is beyond the reach of the gospel.
The Members Of Christ
“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.”
1 Corinthians 6:12
Paul appears to be quoting a Corinthian slogan back at them — “all things are lawful” sounds like something the congregation itself had been saying to excuse its own behavior — and answers it twice with the same qualifier: lawful is not the same as helpful, and lawful is not the same as safe from becoming a master over you. This exact argument will resurface in chapter 10 applied to food offered to idols.
“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.”
1 Corinthians 6:13
Paul concedes the food comparison and then breaks from it decisively. Digestion is a temporary, morally neutral function that will pass away with this present body; sexual union is something else entirely, tied directly to a purpose Paul states in the plainest terms available — the body exists for the Lord, not for whatever use the appetite happens to want.
“And God hath both raised up the Lord, and will also raise up us by his own power. Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid.”
1 Corinthians 6:14-15
The resurrection, oddly enough, is Paul’s argument here — the body is not a disposable shell to be treated as morally irrelevant, because this very body will be raised by the same power that raised Christ. A body with a future like that is not something to hand over carelessly to any use the world proposes for it.
“What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh. But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit.”
1 Corinthians 6:16-17
“‘He that is joined unto the Lord’ — bound up with Christ in the covenant of grace — ‘is one spirit. Flee fornication.’ … Do not stop for one moment to reason. Satan would rejoice to see you overthrown by temptation. Do not stop to argue the case with your weak conscience. Turn away from the first step of transgression.”
Ellen G. White · Counsels on Health, p. 587
Paul draws a real parallel, not a loose metaphor: physical union creates a genuine “one flesh” bond, quoting Genesis’s own account of marriage, and union with Christ is described in equally real terms as becoming “one spirit” with Him. This study’s own source draws out the practical urgency in Paul’s very next word — “flee” is not an invitation to reason with temptation, weigh its arguments, or negotiate a safe distance, but to leave immediately, before any debate with a weakened conscience even begins.
Ye Are Bought With A Price
“Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.”
1 Corinthians 6:18
Paul singles out this particular sin as uniquely internal to the body itself, in a way other sins are not — a genuinely striking claim, and one that fits the whole chapter’s argument that the body is not a morally neutral instrument used by the real self, but a thing that can itself be sinned against.
“What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.”
1 Corinthians 6:19-20
“He asks for a whole heart; give it to Him; it is His, both by creation and by redemption. He asks for your intellect; give it to Him; it is His. He asks for your money; give it to Him; it is His. ‘Ye are not your own, for ye are bought with a price.’”
Ellen G. White · The Acts of the Apostles, p. 566
Chapter 3 already called the whole congregation “the temple of God” together; here the same word narrows to the individual body of every believer. “Bought with a price” answers the question this whole chapter has actually been circling from its first verse — whose court, whose body, whose ultimate ownership. Every dispute over property, every temptation toward sexual sin, every claim to personal autonomy runs straight into the same fact: a purchased temple does not belong to the one living in it, and its only fitting use is to glorify the One who bought it.
