1 Cor. vi. 20.
Therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.
The words, as the expression shews, are an inference from the preceding part of the Apostle’s discourse. The occasion was this. He had been reasoning, towards the close of this chapter, against fornication, or the vice of impurity; to which the Gentiles, in their unbelieving state, had been notoriously addicted; and for which the Corinthians (to whom he writes) were, even among the Gentiles themselves, branded to a proverb.
The topics, he chiefly insists upon, are taken, not from nature, but the principles of our holy religion, from the right and property, which God hath in Christians. By virtue of their profession, their bodies and souls are appropriated to him. Therefore, says he, glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.
To apprehend all the force of this conclusion, it will be proper to look back to the arguments themselves; to consider distinctly the substance of them, and the manner in which they are conducted.
This double attention will give us cause to admire, not the logick only, but the address, of the learned Apostle. I say, the address; which the occasion required: for, notwithstanding that no sin is more opposite to our holy religion, and that therefore St. Paul, in his epistles to the Gentile converts, gives it no quarter, yet, as became the wisdom and sanctity of his character, he forgets not of what, and to whom, he writes.
The vice itself is of no easy reprehension: not, for want of arguments against it, which are innumerable and irresistible; but from the reverence which is due to one’s self and others. An Apostle, especially, was to respect his own dignity. He was, besides, neither to offend the innocent, nor the guilty. Unhappily, these last, who needed his plainest reproof, had more than the delicacy of innocence about them, and were, of all men, the readiest to take offence. For so it is, the licentious of all times have seared consciences, and tender apprehensions. It alarms them to hear what they have no scruple to commit.
The persons addressed were, especially, to be considered. These were Corinthians: that is, a rich commercial people, voluptuous and dissolute. They were, besides, wits and reasoners, rhetoricians and philosophers: for under these characters they are represented to us. And all these characters required the Apostle’s attention. As a people addicted to pleasure, and supported in the habits of it by abounding wealth, they were to be awakened out of their lethargy, by an earnest and vehement expostulation: as pretending to be expert in the arts of reasoning, they were to be convinced by strict argument: and, as men of quick rhetorical fancies, a reasoner would find his account in presenting his argument to them through some apt and lively image.
Let us see, then, how the Apostle acquits himself in these nice circumstances.
After observing that the sin he had warned the Corinthians to avoid, was a sin against their own body; that is, was an abuse and defilement of it, he proceeds, “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.”
The address, we see, is poignant; the reasoning, close; and the expression, oratorical. The vehemence of his manner could not but take their attention: his argumentation, as being founded on Christian principles and ideas, must be conclusive to the persons addressed; and, as conveyed in remote and decent figures, the delicacy of their imaginations is respected by it.
The whole deserves to be opened and explained at large. Such an explanation, will be the best discourse I can frame on this subject.
I. First, then, the Apostle asks, What! know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost?—This question refers to that great Christian principle, that we live in the communion of the Holy Ghost[171]; not, in the sense in which we all live and move and have our being in God; but in a special and more exalted sense; the Gospel teaching, that God hath given to us Christians the Holy Spirit[172], to be with us, and in us; to purify and comfort us: that we are baptized by this spirit[173], sanctified, sealed by it to the day of redemption[174].
Now this being the case, the body of a Christian, which the Holy Ghost inhabits and sanctifies by his presence, is no longer to be considered as a worthless fabrick, to be put to sordid uses, but as the receptacle of God’s spirit, as the place of his residence; in a word, as his TEMPLE and sanctuary.
The figure, you see, presents an idea the most august and venerable. It carried this impression with it both to the Gentile and Jewish Christians. It did so to the Gentiles, whose superstitious reverence for their idol-temples is well known: and though many an abominable rite was done in them, yet the nature of the Deity, occupying this temple, which was the Holy Ghost, put an infinite difference between him and their impure deities, the impurest of which had engrossed the Corinthian worship. So that this contrast of the object could not but raise their ideas, and impress the reverence, which the Apostle would excite in them for such a temple, with full effect on their minds[175]. And then to Jews, the allusion must be singularly striking: for their supreme pride and boast was, the temple at Jerusalem, the tabernacle of the most high, dwelling between the cherubims, and the place of the habitation of God’s glory[176].
To both Jew and Gentile, the notion of a temple implied these two things, 1. That the divinity was in a more especial manner present in it: and, 2. That it was a place peculiarly set apart for his service. Whence the effect of this representation would be, That the body, having the Holy Spirit lodged within it, was to be kept pure and clean for this cælestial inhabitant: and, as being dedicated to his own use, it was not to be prophaned by any indecencies, much less by a gross sin, which is, emphatically, a sin against the body, and by heathens themselves accounted a pollution[177] of it.
Further; the Apostle does not leave the Corinthians to collect all this from the image presented to them, but asserts it expressly; What! know ye not, that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, WHICH IS IN YOU: Implying, that what they would naturally infer from their idea of a temple, was true, in fact, that the Holy Ghost was in them; that his actual occupancy and possession of their bodies appropriated the use of them to himself, and excluded all sordid practices in them, as prophane and SACRILEGIOUS. Nay, he further adds; AND WHICH [Holy Ghost] YE HAVE OF GOD: ye have received this adorable spirit, which is in you, from God himself; and so are obliged to entertain this heavenly guest with all sanctity and reverence; not only for his own sake, and for the honour he does you in dwelling in you, but for his sake who sent him, and from whose hands ye have received him.
This first argument, then, against the sin of uncleanness, divested of its figure, stands thus. In consequence of your Christian profession, ye must acknowledge, that the Holy Spirit is given to inform and consecrate your mortal bodies; that he is actually within you; and that he dwells and operates there, by the gracious appointment and commission of God. Ye are therefore to consider your body as the place of his more especial habitation; and as such, are bound to preserve it in such purity, as the nature of so sacred a presence demands.
This is the clear, obvious, and conclusive argument; liable to no objection, or even cavil, from a professor of Christianity. The figure of a temple is only employed to raise our apprehensions, and to convey the conclusion with more force and energy to our minds. But now,
II. The Apostle proceeds to another and distinct consideration, and shews that the Holy Ghost is not only the actual occupier and possessor of the body of Christians, whom the Almighty had, as it were, forced upon them, and by his sovereign authority enjoined them to receive, but that he was the true and rightful PROPRIETOR of it. Ye are not your own, continues the Apostle; not merely, as “God hath, by his spirit, taken possession of you, and sealed you up, as his own proper goods[178];” but as he hath redeemed and purchased you, as he hath done that, by which the property ye might before seem to have in your bodies, is actually made over and consigned to him. For ye are bought with a price.
The expression is, again, figurative; and refers to the notions and usages that obtained among the heathens, the Greeks especially, in regard to personal slavery. As passionate admirers, as they were, of liberty, every government, even the most republican, abounded in slaves; every family had its share of them. The purchase of them, as of brute beasts, was a considerable part of their traffick. Men and women were bought and sold publicly in their markets: the wealth of states and of individuals, in great measure, consisted in them. Thus was human nature degraded by the Heathen, and I wish it might be said, by heathens only. But my present concern is with them. It is too sad a truth that human creatures sold themselves, or were sold by their masters, to be employed in the basest services, even those of luxury and of lust. This infamous practice was common through all Greece, but was more especially a chief branch of the Corinthian commerce. Their city was the head-quarters of prostitution, and the great market for the supply of it.
Now to this practice the Apostle alludes, but in such a manner as implies the severest reproof of it. His remonstrance is to this effect. “Ye Corinthians, in your former pagan state, made no scruple to consider your slaves as your own absolute property. Your pretence was, that ye had bought them with a price; that is, with a piece of money, which could be no equivalent for the natural inestimable liberty and dignity of a fellow-creature; yet ye claimed to yourselves their entire, unreserved service; and often condemned them to the vilest and most ignominious.
“To turn now, says the Apostle, from these horrors to a fairer scene; for I take advantage only of your ideas in this matter, to lead you to just notions of your present Christian condition. God, the sole rightful proprietor of the persons of men, left you in the state of nature, to the enjoyment of your own liberty, with no other restraint upon it than what was necessary to preserve so great a blessing, the restraint of reason. Now, indeed, but still for your own infinite benefit, he claims a stricter property in you, and demands your more peculiar service. He first made you men, but now Christians. Still he condescends to proceed with you in your own way, and according to your own ideas of right and justice. He has bought you with a price: but, merciful heaven, with what price? With that, which exceeds all value and estimation, with the BLOOD of his only begotten Son; the least drop of which is of more virtue than all your hecatombs, and more precious than the treasures of the East. And for what was this price paid? Not to enslave, much less to insult and corrupt you (as ye wickedly served one another), but to redeem you into the glorious liberty of the sons of God: It was, to restore you from death to life, from servitude to freedom, from corruption to holiness, to make to himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works. Say, then, Is this ransom an equivalent for the purchase of you? And is the end for which ye are purchased, such as ye dare complain of, or have reason to refuse? Henceforth, then, ye are not your own: the property of your souls and bodies is freely, justly, equitably, with immense benefit to yourselves, and unspeakable mercy on the part of the purchaser, transferred to God. Your whole and best service is due to him, of strict right: what he demands of you is to serve him in all virtue and godliness of living, and particularly to respect and reverence yourselves; in a word, not to pollute yourselves with forbidden lusts. In this way ye are required to serve your new lord and master, who has the goodness to regard such service, as an honour and glory to himself. Therefore, do your part inviolably and conscientiously, Glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.”
This is the the Apostle’s idea, when drawn out and explained at large. The reasoning is decisive, as in the former case: and the expression admirably adapted to the circumstances of the persons addressed. In plain words, the argument is this. God has provided, by the sacrifice of the death of Christ, for your redemption from all iniquity, both the service, and the wages of it. By your profession of Christianity, and free acceptance of this inestimable benefit, freely offered to you, ye are become in a more especial manner, his servants: ye are bound, therefore, by every motive of duty and self-interest to preserve yourselves in all that purity of mind and body, which his laws require of you; and for the sake of which ye were taken into this nearer relation to himself. The figure of being bought with a price, was at once the most natural cover of this reasoning, as addressed to the Corinthian Christians; and the most poignant reproof of their country’s inhuman practice of trafficking in the bodies and souls of men.
The force both of the figure and the reasoning is apparently much weakened by this minute comment upon the Apostle’s words, which yet seemed necessary to make them understood.
To draw to a point, then, the substance of what has been said, and to conclude.
The vice which the Apostle had been arguing against, is condemned by natural reason. But Christians are bound by additional and peculiar considerations to abstain from it. Ye, says the Apostle, ARE THE TEMPLES OF THE HOLY GHOST. To defile yourselves with the sins of uncleanness is, then, to desecrate those bodies which the Holy Ghost sanctifies by his presence. It is, in the emphatic language of scripture, to grieve the holy Spirit, and to do despite to the spirit of grace. It is like, nay it is infinitely worse, than polluting the sanctuary: an abomination, which nature itself teaches all men to avoid and execrate. It is, in the highest sense of the words, PROPHANENESS, IMPIETY, SACRILEGE.
Again; YE ARE BOUGHT WITH A PRICE: ye are not your own, but God’s; having been ransomed by him, your souls and bodies, when both were lost, through the death of his Son: a price, of so immense, so inestimable a value, that worlds are not equal to it. To dispose of yourselves, then, in a way which he forbids and abhors: to corrupt by your impurities that which belongs to God, which is his right and property; to serve your lusts, when ye are redeemed at such a price to serve God only, through Jesus Christ; is an outrage which we poorly express, when language affords no other names for it, than those of INGRATITUDE, INFIDELITY, INJUSTICE.
Whatever excuses a poor heathen might alledge to palliate this sin, we Christians have none to offer. He, who knew not God, might be led by his pride, by his passions, and even by his religion, to conclude (as the idolatrous Corinthians seem to have done) that his own body was for fornication; or, at most, that he was only accountable to his own soul (if his philosophy would give him leave to think he had one) for the misuse of it. But this language is now out of date. The souls and bodies of us Christians are not ours, but the Lord’s: they are occupied by his spirit, and appropriated to his service. The conclusion follows, and cannot be inforced in stronger terms than those of the text: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.