The Expositor's Bible: The First Epistle to the CorinthiansDods, Marcus
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The First Epistle to the Corinthians
Dods, Marcus
Bible. Corinthians, 1st -- Commentaries
Again, "all things are lawful for me;" all things are in my power.
Yes, but for that very reason "I will not be brought under the power
of any." "The reasonable use of my liberty cannot go the length of
involving my own loss of it."[5] I am free from the law; I will not on
that account become the slave of indulgence. As Carlyle puts it,
"enjoying things which are pleasant--that is not the evil; it is the
reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is. Let a man
assert withal that he is king over his habitudes; that he could and
would shake them off on cause shown: this is an excellent law." There
are several practices and habits which no one would call immoral or
sinful, but which enslave a man quite as much as worse habits. He is
no longer a free man; he is uneasy and restless, and cannot settle to
his work until he obeys the craving he has created. And it is the very
lawfulness of these indulgences which has ensnared him. Had they been
sinful, the Christian man would not have indulged in them; but being
in his power, they have now assumed power over him. They have power to
compel him to waste his time, his money, sometimes even his health. He
alone attains the true dignity and freedom of the Christian man who
can say, with Paul, "I know both how to be full and to be hungry, both
to abound and to suffer need;" "All things are in my power, but I will
not be brought under the power of any."
[5] Godet.
Paul then proceeds more explicitly to apply these principles to the
matter in hand. The Corinthians argued that if meats were morally
indifferent, a man being morally neither the better nor the worse for
eating food which had been offered in an idol's temple, so also a man
was neither better nor worse for fornication. To expose the error of
this reasoning Paul draws a remarkable distinction between the
digestive, nutritive organs of the body and the body as a whole. Paul
believed that the body was an essential part of human nature, and that
in the future life the natural body would give place to the spiritual
body. He believed also that the spiritual body was connected with, and
had its birthplace in, the natural body, so that the body we now wear
is to be represented by that finer and more spiritual organism we are
hereafter to be clothed in. The connection of that future body with
the physical world and its dependence on material things we cannot
understand; but in some way inconceivable by us it is to carry on the
identity of our present body, and thereby it reflects a sacredness and
significance on this body. The body of the full-grown man or of the
white-bearded patriarch is very different from that of the babe in its
mother's arms, but there is a continuity that links them together and
gives them identity. So the future body may be very different from
and yet the same as the present. At the same time, the organs which
merely serve for the maintenance of our present natural body will be
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