Sexual Immorality among Believers
1 Corinthians 5:1-8 · Roger Henderson · Apr 3, 2016
1 Corinthians, No. 14
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926531426484

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Today we're going to start Chapter 5. Actually, we'll have two lessons in Chapter 5. And Chapter 5 is one of those chapters which is... maybe I wish I didn't have to teach it. But it's in the Word of God, and so it's there. We have Verne's First Corinthians.

It's up to Randy and I to get down to the nitty gritty here. I think there's actually some things to be learned here. Some difficult things, but we'll just kind of jump into it here and hopefully the Lord will guide us through this and I'm sure he will. Okay, so first of all, I kind of like, I have Chester McCauley You can go to his website. He's been a great help to me and others have used him. I like his outline for this section. I'm just going to go through his outline.

He calls this chapter 5, 1-13, Problems of Immorality or the Corinthians Indifference. One thing we're going to learn here is that there's a sin of immorality that is kind of startling. It was startling to the Jewish culture, the Roman culture, almost every culture out there. But what's interesting is the Lord focuses as much on that particular immorality as he does on the fact that the body of believers there did not deal with that problem. So they did not, as far as we can tell, they did not confront the person involved in this.

And so that's going to be part of what we're going to see. Part of what Paul is going to teach us here is that it's important that when sin is discovered in the body of Christ that the leadership deal with that sin. Otherwise, you have someone professing to be a believer whose life doesn't match that. Not that our lives, you know, we all struggle, all have difficulties, but when there's something of this magnitude, it needs to be dealt with. And that's what he's going to talk about here a lot in this passage. Okay, so first of all, case involved, 5-1. There was immorality in this case. It was internal to the body of Christ in Corinth there. It was incestuous.

In fact, I actually, I had a poor understanding, I hate to say this, of incest. I didn't know, I sort of had an idea what incest was, but incest is any sexual misconduct within a family. So it actually goes beyond, I had a certain narrow review, it goes beyond that. And this is an area which I wouldn't have first called incest, but the more I thought about it, I looked in the dictionary, it fits the definition of incest. Okay, then basically the next part of the outline in 5.2, the indifference is rebuked. And there are two attitudes here. Basically, there's arrogance among the body.

It's hard to believe Corinth could be arrogant, but they were arrogant, according to what Paul tells us here. Not so much arrogant about the sin that was involved, but arrogant about their whole body of believers. Maybe they thought they were the greatest thing around, because since they may have been the only church there in Corinth, I don't know. But they were arrogant, but they should have been mourning. They should have been mourning over the sin that was in their midst. They should have been addressing it and confronting it, and they were not.

And then the action needed, in kind of three parts, And the warrant for the action, the nature of the action, the purpose of the action. We'll see all the details here as we go through this. And then danger described. And we're going to see in this last part, talking about Levin. Levin is kind of in scripture many times, not always, but many times, is the principle of evil. We're going to see that talked about a little bit. So it's a very interesting section, a very challenging section. OK. So can I get someone to read?

1-8 It is actually reported that there is immorality among you, and immorality of such a kind does not exist even among the Gentiles, that someone has his father's wife. You have become arrogant, and have not mourned instead, so that the one who has done this deed should be removed from your midst. For I on my part, though absent in body, and present in spirit, have already judged him who has so committed this, as though I were present. In the name of our Lord Jesus, when you are assembled, and I with you in spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus, I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan, for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

Your boasting is not good. You do not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough. Clean out the old leaven, so that you may be a new lump, just as you were in fact unleavened, for Christ our Passover has been sacrificed. Therefore, let us celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. Great. Thanks, Tom. Okay, so let's look at the first verse.

It's actually reported that there is immorality among you, and immorality of such a kind as does not exist among the Gentiles, that someone has his father's wife. So just to start with, before I do the first little phrase there. From best we can tell, this was not his mother. This was possibly his stepmother. And it also seems like his father probably was not alive. At least I hope so. I don't know. We don't argue in the details, but it looks like this was his stepmother. And that's where the concept of incest, I did not quite think about that situation, but that would be considered incest. immorality with his stepmother.

Okay, so actually in this case means assuredly or beyond doubt. And so one of the things we're going to learn here that this wasn't just gossip on this body of believers. This was something that was common knowledge. This wasn't something that apparently everybody knew about. And that's part of the problem. Everybody knew about it, but nobody did anything about it. They just left it alone. Maybe they were afraid. We're not told who the person was. He's not named in Scripture. And actually, this is an unusual situation. This is one of the few situations in Scripture where a particular sin is called out. and what God's view and what Paul did in response to that.

Could someone read 1 Corinthians, this word actually, just to get a further definition there. 1 Corinthians 6-7. be wrong, why not rather be deprived? So this kind of enforcing that word actually, actually reported, beyond a doubt, reported is the idea, actually it's this word akuo, which is to hear, and it's used a lot in scripture. If you do a search, if you have a computer Bible and do a search on akuo, or the word for hear, it shows up hundreds and hundreds of times. But in this case, it's kind of used in the idea of reporting something. It's in the present tense, meaning that this is actually reported in its continuous, common knowledge, continually to go on.

Common talk, common knowledge, not gossip. And there's some verses in Acts. We won't look at those verses right now, but you can look at them later on if you like. They talk about, it's not actually the same word, but it's the idea of reporting, reporting about things. So we'll just skip past those for now. Immorality is pornia, and it's actually fornication, lewdness, or any sexual sin. So let's see, there's some verses that kind of talk about God's view of immorality.

And the first one is in 1 Corinthians 6.18. So could someone read that? Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body. But the immoral man sins against his own body. Yeah, interesting. Immorality is one, you may think that, well, that's just like any other sin. Well, that sin is not only a way to flee from that sin, but it's something that you're hurting yourself.

Actually, look in Proverbs. Doesn't Proverbs talk about that a lot? It talks about flee the harlot. There's a harlot around or whatever. Proverbs has many declarations about fleeing immorality, fleeing the prostitute, which wouldn't exactly be immoral. It would be a sexual sin. So anyway, that's something that God warns us.

And there's another verse in 1 Corinthians 7.2. Can someone read that verse? Each man is to have his own wife and each woman is to have her own husband. This is coming down the road here.

God knows our fallen nature. He knows what we're capable of doing. Many times it's not pleasant. He says this is a protection for us. Marriage is a good thing. We can't constrain that. It's a proper place for sexual activity. OK. So the words among the Corinthians, so this is from Akali. This case in matter was going on with the local assembly in Corinth, and it was common knowledge. OK.

So it's immorality of such a kind as does not exist among the Gentiles, such as or sort. So here's an interesting passage. It talks about Cicero. I looked up some things about Cicero. He was a Roman philosopher and politician. His birth was around 107 BC, 107 years before Christ. So here's what Roman law taught. First of all, the relationship was not legal because the practice was forbidden by Roman law.

So Cicero says, and it's interesting, He didn't realize that down the road what he said was awful and said this is so unusual would be repeated again. Unfortunately, nothing is unusual. There's nothing new under the sun. Unfortunately, man's fallen nature is capable of repeating things at different time periods. A quote from Cicero referring to a similar situation. Oh, incredible crime of a woman such as has never been heard of in the world or in any other than her solitary case.

So that was highly unusual in Rome. And you think, you know, the Romans weren't exactly prudes, so to speak. They were pretty awful, pretty vile. You know, there are a lot of sexual sins that they were involved in, but this particular case was considered exceptional and particularly grievous. Okay. And then also in the Jewish culture, it also was considered pretty grievous. So let's look at, this is a case of Rubin. Before I start, Rubin has this encounter with his father's concubine. Once again, I was a little bit vague on concubine. So in my study of what a concubine is, it's actually a legitimate wife.

In that time period, It was important for men to have lots of everything. Lots of wives, lots of cattle. And so they did that. They had lots of wives, lots of cattle. Not too smart. Didn't Solomon say he was up all night with all these He had all these wives and all these possessions that he couldn't get any good sleep. I can tell you that having all these wives is not going to be good.

So anyway, Reuben's sin is that he has a relationship with his father's concubine. And concubine is a legitimate wife, but she's not a second-class wife. He has his first-class wives and he has his second-class wives, but they're all his wives. So Ruben's sin was that he had relationships with his father's wife. And so we'll just read a couple of passages on that. So Genesis 35, 12. So my point here is not to... I'm sorry. Thank you. 35, 22. Did someone read that?

It came about while Israel was dwelling in that land that Ruben went and lay with Bila, his father's concubine. Israel heard of it. There's also one if you turn over to Genesis 49. Reuben's going to suffer for this particular sexual sin here. 49, 3 and 4. Could someone read that? Reuben, you are my firstborn, my might, and the beginning of my strength, preeminent in dignity and power. Uncontrolled as water, you shall not have preeminence, because you went up to your father's bed, then you defiled it, he went up to my couch. Right.

Okay, then one last one in 1 Chronicles 5.1. Now the sons of Reuben, the firstborn of Israel, for he was the firstborn, but because he defiled his father's bed, his birthright was given to the sons of Joseph, the son of Israel, so that he is now not enrolled in the genealogy according to the birthright. So this is part of his punishment here. Because he defiled his father's bed, his birthright was given to the sons of Joseph, the sons of Israel. So we see that this particular sin is, among all the cultures, considered particularly grievous.

And we kind of talked about this already a little bit. Someone has his father's wife. To have is the idea to have and to hold, implying continuous possession. And like Constable, he said, the verb translate to have, when used in sexual or marital context, is a euphemism for a continuing relationship, in contrast to a one night stand. This man and woman were living together.

OK, so that's the issue that we've got with the rest of these eight verses. of this sexual sin of this man. In the context that it was well known in the body of believers there. So verse 2, you have become arrogant and have not mourned instead so that the one who had done this deed would be removed from your midst. So part of the idea, if they had been doing what they should have been doing, The verb tense here is going to tell us that this person will have been removed. This is kind of interesting. There's some speculation here, but it's interesting. First of all, this you, we've been kind of looking at singular yous and plural yous. This is a plural you, so I would say this is speaking of the body.

You, the body of Corinth, have become arrogant or puffed up. The idea of puffed up is shown in several verses here. in 1 Corinthians 4, 6 and the last part of that says, so that no one among you will become arrogant. So they are arrogant on behalf of one another.

Someone read the one in Colossians, Colossians 2.18. It translates the word a little bit differently than arrogant.

Colossians 2.18. Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding in those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind. Okay, so you have puffed up. That's good. That's kind of the basic idea. In my translation, I have inflated without cause by his fleshly mind. Okay. So you is emphatic. Basically, literally, you of all people.

When Paul says this, that they are arrogant, he does not mean, this is kind of a good inside thought, he's not talking about that they're proud of the sin, but they're just a proud body of believers. And it seems like they're, well, who cares about what this person does? We just kind of ignore it. But Paul's telling us here, if you ignore it, You then have committed a sin which is in the body of Christ. You've degraded the body of Christ. And he's very concerned about that. And actually, Weiss kind of picks up on that in the Weiss translation.

And as for you, you have become guilty of an inflated ego and are at the present time in the same state. So they're in the same state of inflated ego, kind of blind to the fact that this is going on. and have not mourned and said, and actually the Weiss translation there had, and you ought not to have, and ought you not to have rather gone into mourning. So they should have gone into mourning over this rather than just ignoring it. They should have gone into mourning over this and dealt with it. Mourning is lament for sin or condoning it.

The next part of this, so that, or the purpose at, so the subject here, the one who has done this deed, and it's kind of interesting, if you look at that word, the one who has done or actually practiced that deed, that kind of has the idea, it's this word proso, And it's the idea which refers to a practice arising from a belief. And in this case, apparently this man thought he didn't have a problem with that. He didn't have a problem with his sexual relationships with his stepmother. Which he should have, but he did not. So his mind was perverted. by that situation.

And actually, you know, there's several verses that talk about practicing something or doing evil. And that's that word. And that's the word process. So I may I won't go too far to that. So. So here's a couple of things. I just kind of my observation.

So it says here, so that the one who has done this deed will be removed from your midst. So I believe what my first bullet there, what they should have done, and it's in the passive voice, so you know, the way it works, the subject produces the action or receives the action. So in this case, the subject, the one, the man, receives the action. The action, the verb would be to remove. So the question is who's Is God's will for the body there to remove him? Or will God kind of work that out, so to speak? I kind of felt that it fell in the second category.

If you look in Matthew 18, this is what they should have done. They should have confirmed the man in accordance with Matthew 18. So let's look at Matthew 18 for a second here. Matthew 18. I'll just read start reading those first 15, 16, and 17. But if your brother sins, go and reprove him in private. So the first step they should have done is to reprove their brother in private.

If he listens to you, you have won your brother. But if he does not listen to you, take him, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses, every fact may be confirmed. If he refuses to listen, to them, tell it to the church. If he refuses to listen, even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax gatherer.

There are other verses that speak to the process, but apparently this wasn't done. They didn't mourn over that to the point where they went and confronted this person. Another thing to point out here, this wasn't somebody who had a situation where he had had a sexual problem and he wanted to be accepted by the church. He was in the church, accepted by the church, but he was engaged in an activity which brought shame and dishonor to the name of Christ in the body of believers. So what I thought, the second bullet here, the man would have been removed by the Lord.

And it sounds kind of well, he just floats away someplace. And I kind of thought about the situation, and unfortunately we see that today. Maybe a pastor, some sexual activity of a pastor, typically the pastor leaves. He leaves, and then sometimes he may come back. Or if a person, I think Verns referred to a person in a body in California, some sexual activity or whatever it was. He left for a while and he came back and he was restored.

So it seems like that's more the thing that should have happened in this case but did not happen. That the person would have been convicted by going through scripture with him and maybe at first he wasn't convinced but may eventually over time he would have been. And he would have left of his own accord and maybe at some time, I think actually, Randy, I think this guy shows up again down the road. I mean, at least I've heard, I've, I haven't, I haven't read far enough.

First Corinthians. I think that we see this gentleman appear again down the road and he is restored, but I, but hang on to that. Keep that in the back of your mind. We'll see. I think he actually is restored at some point because he's not named. It's not easy. You're, you're making, we're making some assumptions down the road, but I think at some point. the text indicates this man is restored and actually returns to the body. Keep that with a question mark in your mind. At this point, any questions? This is not fun stuff. It's important to remember that this was a person in the body and his sins were not being dealt with properly.

So now Paul's going to step in here and he's going to assert his apostolic authority. I was thinking, wouldn't it be cool if we had Paul as the elder here? It would be cool. I don't think I would want to be the same. He's going to say some things. He's going to talk about judging this person. He's going to say some things that that I couldn't say, that I couldn't accomplish.

This is an age when the apostles had power, they had power more than a normal believer has now. It says, for I on my part, so Paul is speaking here, So verse 3 begins with an emphatic pronoun, I. Paul is saying, my conviction on this matter are far different than yours. The other one, we kind of had a contrast. In verse 2, it was you, you basically didn't do this.

And Paul's going to say, I'm going to come along and say, but I believe you should do this. He's going to say, you did this, you should have mourned for this guy, but I think we should do this. And he's going to say, I'm with you. He says, I'm with you in spirit. I'm with you in this. I'm part of your body. I want this to be resolved for God's glory. Paul is absent from the body at Corinth and has come to a firm decision as if he were present.

He says, I have already judged him who has committed this as though I were present with you. So the word judged, he's already judged it to separate, to determine, to judge, to pronounce. I'm not sure I have any additional verses there to look at for that one. Basically, Weiss has already handed out my sentence. So verse 3 just says, I've come to a decision. I've made this judgment. And now we're going to see in verse 4, he's going to talk about the judgment. Well, actually, verse 4, he's going to talk about, how He's able to make this judgment. So verse 4 is almost like a digression in a sense.

It's going to talk about the Lord Jesus. And it's going to talk about acting in His name or with His authority. It says, In the name of our Lord Jesus, when you assemble, and I with you in spirit. So here's the deal. He's with them. It's just like He's not with them physically. I'm with your body. I'm part of your body. And that happens occasionally. There may be people that are so closely aligned with us that we consider them part of our body even though they're not present with us. So he was part of their body even though he wasn't present with them.

I'm with you in spirit and with the power of our Lord Jesus. So Paul now states the authority of making... This is the basis for him making what he's going to say next in verse 5. First of all, it's in the name of our Lord Jesus. taking this action in the name of our Lord Jesus means the church is to act on behalf of him and for his honor and glory. So they're acting not because they have a particular, they're particularly, we're the prudish church. They're acting based upon what scripture says. And what Christ is, and for his honor and for his glory.

And 2 Thessalonians 3.6, can someone read that? It uses that term in the name of our Lord Jesus. Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you keep away from every brother who leads an unruly life, and not according to the tradition which you received from us. Okay, so basically, now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus, and he goes, you keep away from every brother, and so on. So that's the same phraseology, in the name of our Lord Jesus, for his honor and for his glory. So it says, when you are assembled, so it seems like Right from there, this kind of tells us that it doesn't say, hold a special meeting. It says, when you assemble.

So it kind of gives the idea that they met, which is a good thing. The assembly met together on a regular basis. And so he says, when you are assembled, and I with you in spirit. So he identifies with them. At their regular meeting, they're going to do something with the power of our Lord Jesus. Paul and the body of believers have access, as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, we have access to his power.

Here's the decision. This is a unique situation. Paul actually made this kind of decision in one of the cases in scripture, and we'll see that shortly. I've decided to deliver such a one to Satan. for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus." So it's going to be kind of important to understand some definitions here of words. So Paul's an apostle, apparently had this power. He's going to deliver him over to Satan.

And if you think about that, there are cases, there's actually a positive case of this. I'm going to show this shortly. Think about the And this is God the Father. Think about Job. Satan comes along and he says, well, you're watching out for your God. You're all the ones that are yours. You keep hedge around them and you're protecting them. And so God offers up Job, so to speak. He says, well, I have Job here. And he first offers him up and he says, well, you can take his possessions. And Satan takes his possessions and his children. And eventually he says, well, you can touch his body. And I kind of saw a connection here.

You could say that's a positive example because God is using Job as a positive example and Job is going to suffer for that. Well, this is kind of a negative example. This man apparently is going to suffer something here, but we're not told exactly what he suffers. He doesn't suffer his salvation, we'll see, but he does apparently suffer something. So here's the other case where Paul exercises apostolic authority.

In 1 Timothy 1.20, He says, among these are Hymenaeus and Alexandria, whom I have handed over to Satan, so that they will be taught not to blaspheme. It also seems like, and I kind of struggle with this, there's kind of a positive outcome by trying to come over to Satan. Somehow it doesn't fit, but it seems like... Go ahead, Randy, if you have a thought here.

This for me is actually a really powerful principle that God uses. We don't have the authority. No, amen. No, I absolutely agree with that. But the thing that I've noticed is that when we look at the way that our flesh behaves, when you feed it enough of something, what does it want? It wants more of it and more of it and more of it. We reach a saturation point and we find out Because they're saved.

They already know the contrast here between, you know, this is not the righteousness of God. And you know, the AA group says, you know, you hit bottom or whatever else. But this isn't hitting bottom. This is God showing you that the destruction of the flesh and the wages of sin are death. And it's terrible when you watch it happen in the life of a believer. to see the pain, but you also see the Lord doing a destruction to the carnal way of thinking. Yeah, that's good. So apparently this man, his flesh is going to suffer here for the destruction of the flesh. So I think it's important to look at the definition of the destruction. It's not annihilation. He wasn't going to be annihilated But it's the idea of unavoidable distress and torment.

And that's where I kind of got into looking at Job. So I went back to Job. Job is kind of a positive example because the Lord, God the Father, offered up Job to Satan and said, here, you can do this and you can do that, but that's it. You can touch his possessions, you can touch his body, but you can't touch his life. There's constraints here too. This guy is also a believer because we're going to see that his spirit may be saved. Let's just turn to Job here for a little bit and look at Job. Job chapter 2 here. Can someone read Job chapter 2, 3-7? Job chapter 2, 3-7. The Lord said to Satan, where have you come from? Then Satan answered the Lord and said, from roaming about on the earth and walking around. How far do I go? Three through seven. The Lord said to Satan, have you considered my servant Job?

For there is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, fearing God and turning away from evil. And he still holds fast his integrity, although you incited me against him to ruin him without cause. Satan answered the Lord and said, Skin for skin. Yes, all that a man has he will give for his life. However, put forth your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh. He will curse you to your face. So the Lord said to Satan, Behold, he is in your power. Only spare his life.

Then Satan went about, from the presence of the Lord, and smote Job with sore boils, and the sole of his feet to the crown of his head. Okay, so I was just trying to get an idea of this idea of the destruction of the flesh and saying, well, here's an example of Job and here's what Satan was allowed to do.

So maybe it's kind of, I mean, this is just, you know, trying to make some, add some sense to this. So it talks about these sores and boils. And then if you look through those other verses, It talks about, I'll just give you kind of a summary of those. He kind of talks about things like, in 7.5, it talks about the flesh clothed with worms and crust of dirt.

Then in 13, Job 13.28, it talks about decaying like a rotten thing. His body was decaying like a rotten thing. That didn't sound very pleasant to me.

And then in 30.30, Job 30.30, his skin turned black. My skin turned black on me and my bones burned with a fever. So he was adamant.

He didn't have to go down to the local emergency room and say, what's your pain level? Today, I don't know, interesting, they always had this one through ten. They'd say, I want to get you down to here and we'll give you this to get you down to here. Joe didn't have somebody to do that. He had to suffer it, so it's pretty amazing. So this man apparently is going to suffer something, but we're not told about that. So let's go ahead here.

And the last part is, the purpose of this is that his spirit might be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus. So basically the day of our Lord Jesus is when the Lord returns, basically. So he's going to be saved, we know that, he's a believer. Paul is now going to return to the subject of the Corinthian pride. And he says, your boasting is not good. Which is probably pretty obvious. So boasting here is the idea of glorying something. And we saw that back in verse 2 where it talked about you have become arrogant.

And then in James 4.16, it talks about your boasting and arrogance.

So now we're going to start in the B part of 6, through the end of verse 8, we're going to talk about the idea of leaven or yeast. And leaven is used as a principle of evil. Leaven always refers to evil in the Bible. Except in the cases I say, obviously when you have to bake bread, you don't say your bread's evil. You're thankful that the bread rises so you can eat it. But otherwise, it's something that the Israelites were told to get rid of the leaven. It represented getting rid of evil. It pictures evil that tends to permeate and eventually dominate.

If you look in Galatians, it says, I think it's something we always remember, a little leaven, Galatians 5, a little leaven leavens a whole lump of dough. And then in Matthew it talks about the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. So now we're going to start in verse 7, it's going to clean out the old leaven.

So let's just kind of go down here for a second. So here's a picture. Remember the Passover when the angel of death, they're getting ready to leave in the Exodus into, they're actually leaving. So the night before the Lord tells them to slaughter a lamb. And let's read about that before we kind of get into this here.

Let's read about the turn to Exodus chapter 12. And this is the preparation they were to make for the Exodus. Exodus chapter 12. Could someone read? You guys have been reading a lot, I apologize. It's God's word, it's okay. That's okay. You won't be too mad at me, will you? It won't hurt you. It's good for you. Okay. Exodus 12, one through seven.

Now the LORD said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, This month shall be the beginning of months for you. It is to be the first month of the year to you. Speak to all the congregation of Israel, saying, On the tenth of this month they are each one to take a lamb for themselves, according to their father's households, a lamb for each household. Now if the household is too small for a lamb, and he and his neighbor nearest to his house are to take one according to the number of persons and them. According to what each man should eat, you are to divide the lamb. Your lamb shall be an unblemished male, a year old. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats.

You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month. Then the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel is to kill it at twilight. moreover they shall take the blood and put it on the two doorposts and on the lintel of the houses in which they are to eat it. They shall eat the flesh that same night roasted with fire and they shall eat it with unleavened bread and bitter herbs."

That's fine, thank you. Okay, so they're to take this lamb and we see a wonderful picture of our Lord Jesus and his sacrifice for us. They're to put it on the doorposts and the lintels and then we see later on the angel of death will Wherever he sees that, he'll pass over that house and will not slay the firstborn in that house. But what's going to be said here is that it was customary, and then they celebrated the Feast of the Unleavened Bread along with Passover. It was customary for them to throw away all the leaven, the yeast, in their house when the family prepared for the Passover. And we didn't actually read down all of that.

12.15 tells them to do that, basically. It says, seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, but on the first day you shall remove leaven from your house. Whoever eats anything leavened on the first day until the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel. And then 13.7 it talks about, let's see that for a second, 13.7, it says, For seven days you shall eat unleavened bread. On the seventh day shall be a feast of the Lord. Unleavened bread shall be eaten through the seven days, and nothing leavened shall be seen among you, nor shall any leaven be seen among you in all your borders.

So the leaven is to be pushed out. So basically, So then he goes in, you know, that first part is clean out the old leaven, and then he goes into this purpose clause, so that you, the body, plural speaking of the Corinthians here, may be a new lump just as you are in fact unleavened. I was kind of thinking about this, this is a little diversion kind of, and trying to explain that.

In our position in Christ, Every believer is unleavened. Because we are in Christ, and Christ is in us. So we are positionally there. But in our condition, in our daily walk, leaven may creep in. Sin may creep in. And that's a picture of leaven. The principle of sin or evil. So that's what he's kind of saying. He says, so that, clean out the old leaven. He's making kind of a general statement. So he's basically saying, keep the body of your believers in order. If sin creeps in, address it. Don't shy away from it.

Then he comes back and says, for Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed. So Christ, just like there was to be no leaven in there, he was sacrificed on their behalf. And then in Mark there it says, on the first day of unleavened bread, when the Passover lamb was being sacrificed.

And then Peter there, 1 Peter 1.18, talks about Christ as being a lamb, unblemished and spotless. So Christ pictures that lamb that was slain in the Old Testament there to protect each of the households there. And then in 8, he kind of continues on.

Therefore, let us celebrate the feast." One question was, he doesn't really say what feast he's talking about here. Do you guys have any ideas about this? He says, therefore, let us celebrate the feast. Obviously, we're not to celebrate the feast of the unleavened bread. It wasn't clear to me what feast he was He was talking about that our walk with the Lord will be in an unleavened sense, without evil.

Randy? One of the things that I think is, and you referenced this in Exodus, before all of the feasts, as a pattern, God has them get rid of the leaven. And the thing is, they didn't understand leaven. They didn't know where it came from. yeast wasn't discovered as a biological entity. I hadn't thought about that. About 100 years ago. 120 years ago. But what happened with this is there's this principle that before the feast there's purification. Right.

All of Israel goes through and I think he's using feast in a general sense because the Jewish We got to make sure we get the leaven out because we're going to have a feast. It doesn't matter which one it is because every time they got conquered they got a new feast. Good point.

As you were talking, I was thinking, since his admonishment to that church is to deal with the leaven in your midst, is to identify it and deal with it. They should have been not holding back, they should have been focused on, if there's sin in their myths, they should address it. I think that speaks of it too.

They had two options here. Option one, and this was a not option, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but option two, with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. So kind of a summary thing here is that the Corinthians are to deal with the sin of the man, and they are also to deal with their own sin. It would be hypocrisy for them to deal with a man and fail to deal with themselves. So God, in these first eight verses here, he's talking about the grievousness of the man's sin, as well as the arrogance and sin that the body of believers had there. So there's a two-fold message in this passage.

And then we're going to continue on. Randy's going to do it next week and close out this chapter five. But it's going to continue on with this body of believers here and talking about how they're to deal with sin in their midst. Any last thoughts or questions? Randy?

Not only is he referencing the beast there, but he talks about being a new mom. in the biology of the yeast basically to create a sourdough type bread and that's what they would call the leavened bread. You have sugar and flour and water and you mix those together and you let wild yeast fall on it. So you have an old lump that you actually would keep around this sugar and flour for as long as you're cooking until you came up to a feast and then you'd throw it out So after that, they'd have to go back and get that, you know, put that together and get it started again. What's it called?

A starter, right? Yeah. And so you're a new alum. You haven't been contaminated with the yeast yet. That's the illustration there. It takes a while for that to settle in. Right. Sorry. No, that's good. That's fine. That's fine. All right. Well, did you say at the start of the class that this, This man's father was dead? Well, okay.

That's a supposition. We don't know. It just seemed like that would be mind boggling. I don't know. This man is sleeping with his stepmother, right? Maybe they're divorced. You read through the commentaries and you get all kinds. People will try to go beyond what the text says.

And the text doesn't say whether his father was alive, whether they were divorced with his stepmother. It doesn't say anything about that at all. So I just said maybe he was dead. I don't know. Maybe for the man's sanity, the son would do such an awful thing.

Go ahead. On this idea of boasting, it sounds like they were boasting. And I was wondering, what are they boasting in that they're at a pretty good I don't know and that there's another thing we're not actually told exactly what they were well We know earlier remember in the first the first four chapters. They were boasting.

I'm a Paul. I'm a polis They were I think they thought they had the the really They're really good Well, they had the good teaching right they had an apostles and he teacher right they had a polis He's another super teacher. They had the good teaching and maybe we can say oh something that could happen to Holly Hills, we could get boastful and say, well we got Vern, we got Mike, we even got Roger.

I don't know about him too much. We know something about their boastfulness in terms of their leadership. One was, I'm behind this guy, I'm behind that guy, that's not a good thing to be in a body of believers. We're not really told, I think as we go through we may see more of that down the road. Did you have something Tom?

Often what we, and we'll find this throughout this book, this idea that liberty is license. And there's a really big difference between taking the opportunity of grace and instead of being motivated by grace. And it's like, oh, well, we're going to use the part of grace that says my sin is covered. And pretty much that's permission to do whatever, rather than grace motivates us to righteousness. And that's a really important distinction.

Obviously this guy took it to an extreme. Yeah, right. Do you think that's what they were boasting about? That they were uncovered? There's an air of things here about that, for sure. They're telling Timothy, who appears to be the one that was here present in Corinth.

Right. This is, you know, so-and-so over here and he's sleeping with this step. Right. That's another question here. Yeah. I think what Paul was upset about, too, mostly was the they accepted it. Exactly. They didn't. Instead of saying, OK, deal with it and let's correct it. Except it was kind of a boasting thing that it was not the right thing to do.

Well definitely, and we see that last part about the leaven. It's based on that picture. Let's go in and clean out. If there's issues, let's address them. Let's don't cover them up. That's so valuable in life in so many areas. Address the issue. Many times it's hard, but it's best to address the issue. Get the cards on the table so to speak. So you can deal with it. Let's close. We thank you, Father. Thank you for this day, the blessings we have, Father. We ask this in Christ's name. Amen.