Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Corinthians · About this commentary
You Were Washed
1 Corinthians 6:7-11
7 Therefore it is already altogether a defect in you that you have lawsuits one with another. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be defrauded? · WEB
Winning the lawsuit is itself the defeat — and the list of the excluded is followed by the letter's most complete statement of what happened to these people.
Therefore it is already altogether a defect in you that you have lawsuits one with another. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be defrauded? 1 Corinthians 6:7.
The deepest point in the passage. The existence of the lawsuit is the loss, whatever the verdict; a church that has to litigate has already failed at something the litigation cannot repair. And then two questions that are not rhetorical flourishes but a real instruction: accept the wrong. This is the Sermon on the Mount applied to a property dispute Matthew 5:39–40 1 Peter 2:23 — and it is asked of the party in the right, since only someone with a case to win can decline to press it.
No, but you yourselves do wrong and defraud, and that against your brothers 1 Corinthians 6:8.
The charge sharpens. Some of them were not merely suing but were the wrongdoers, and against your brothers is the aggravation. The verbs are the same two from the previous verse, turned around: the people who would not suffer wrong were inflicting it.
Or don't you know that the unrighteous will not inherit God's Kingdom? Don't be deceived 1 Corinthians 6:9.
The warning that follows is a list of ten kinds of conduct — sexual sin in several forms, idolatry, theft, covetousness, drunkenness, slander, extortion 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 — and its placement is the point. It arrives in an argument about lawsuits, and the last four items are the ones the passage is actually prosecuting. A congregation prepared to be scandalized about immorality is handed a list in which defrauding a brother stands beside it. Don't be deceived implies they were: someone in Corinth held that conduct and inheritance were unrelated.
Some of you were such, but you were washed. You were sanctified. You were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and in the Spirit of our God 1 Corinthians 6:11.
And then the turn, and it is the whole gospel in one verse. Some of you were such — the list is not about outsiders; it is their own biography, and the tense says it is past. Then three verbs, all passive, all done to them: washed, sanctified, justified. Nothing here is presented as their achievement. The washing is the cleansing of guilt, the sanctifying is being set apart as God's, the justifying is the verdict of acquittal — and the order is not chronological but cumulative, three angles on one rescue.
The agency is named twice: in the name of the Lord Jesus, and in the Spirit of our God. This is the ground of every appeal in the letter. They are not being asked to become something in order to be accepted; they are being asked to stop behaving like what they no longer are.
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