Bulletin Articles
“Does the Flesh Matter?”
Categories: Iron sharpens iron“It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” (John 6.63)
The last issue of Iron Sharpens Iron asked the question, “are you fleshly, or spiritual?” We drew a distinction between these two mindsets and motivations, and highlighted a problem for even those who are already Christians: they’re still infants in Christ—still fleshly. Of course, most of these people don’t realize it. It’s not that they’re unaware of the need to be transformed—they became Christians, after all! But many Philosophy 101 students become hilariously overconfident in their ability to argue logically and effectively; and as a result they end up making fools of themselves. In the same way, many new Christians, having “tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come” (He 6.5), come to believe that they’ve experienced the fullness of the kingdom of God and its good fruits, when in fact the seed planted in their hearts has only just begun to sprout. Will there be any depth to their roots? Will the thorns choke out their attempts to bear fruit over the course of their life? Will they bear fruit a hundredfold? We don’t yet know. To continue the comparison to Jesus’ parable of the sower, these new Christians have received the word with joy—a good start! But they’re in only the earliest stage of this new life, and we shouldn’t expect them to be mature.
What kinds of mistakes is the spiritual infant likely to make? We can see, through some careful reading in 1 Corinthians, several examples. First, let’s remember from last time that Paul has lamented the Corinthian Christians’ fleshly mindset, saying, “I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh” (1Co 3.2-3a). He’s not done with this topic though! The very next thing he says is this:
For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not being merely human? (1 Corinthians 3.3b-4)
He’d spent the first two chapters of the letter telling them to cut it out with their internal divisions, putting themselves into competing factions. Along the way, he discussed their elevation of earthly wisdom, when they should have been seeking God’s. Where is their focus, then? On the pursuit of wisdom.
In itself, that’s a good thing, of course—provided it’s pursued in line with God’s instructions and revelations. But is that what the Christians of Corinth were doing? Let’s take a quick trip through the rest of the letter, and see.
Chapter 5 outlines a perverse sexual scandal that the church has not seen fit to address. Chapter 6 indicates that they’ve been taking fellow Christians to court over one grievance or another. It also implies very strongly that they’ve been visiting prostitutes. That’s a shock to us—Christians?!—but Paul, in the course of his argument to show them why this is so terrible, gives us an indication of what made them think this was acceptable.
“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything. “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food”—and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. (1 Corinthians 6.12-13)
The ESV puts the key phrases in quotation marks. Of course, those aren’t present in the Greek manuscripts—punctuation was used sparingly, if at all, during the time the New Testament books were written, and in most of the manuscripts there’s no punctuation to be found (there aren’t even spaces between words!). But it’s a good conclusion that Paul is putting these words into their mouths, as if they support the Corinthians’ freedom—as they saw it—to sin. Why would they believe such a thing? Some help comes from the next chapter, where we find this: “Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: ‘It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman’” (1Co 7.1). One faction at Corinth was championing celibacy; another was encouraging fornication—and both claimed to have been transformed by Christ!
This sort of thing continues through the rest of the letter, including the extended discussion of food offered to idols in chapters 8-10, and the extended discussion of supernatural spiritual gifts and their use in chapters 12-14. What had happened? The Christians of Corinth got wrapped up in the metaphysical musings of human philosophy, to the extent that they detached the spiritual from the physical. For some, that meant freeing their physical bodies to do whatever they wanted, on the grounds that it had no bearing on the spirit. For others, it meant freeing their minds from the physical through asceticism. Neither of these is what Christ wanted! Both extremes—the overly-permissive and the overly-restrictive—would have answered, “No!” to our question, “Does the flesh matter?” They were both wrong.
In this very letter, what did Paul say about the flesh? “I discipline my body and keep it under control” (1Co 9.27). The flesh is not to be the focus, but it does matter. The flesh is where the spiritual transformation plays out, in our actions in the physical world. We are not to be enslaved to the flesh; rather we are to put the flesh under the control of the spirit. What you do in the flesh matters. What you do in the flesh answers for all the question, “are you fleshly, or spiritual?"
Jeremy Nettles
