Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Corinthians · About this commentary
To the Unmarried and the Widows
1 Corinthians 7:8-11
8 But I say to the unmarried and to widows, it is good for them if they remain even as I am. · WEB
Paul commends singleness as his own preference and then hands the married a command he attributes not to himself but to the Lord.
But I say to the unmarried and to widows, it is good for them if they remain even as I am 1 Corinthians 7:8.
He addresses two groups directly and recommends his own condition. Nothing in Scripture treats singleness as a deficiency to be remedied — this letter, unusually in its world, addresses unmarried adults as a settled class with a good option in front of them.
But if they don't have self-control, let them marry. For it's better to marry than to burn with passion 1 Corinthians 7:9.
The alternative is offered without disparagement and without romance. Better is a plain comparative: given the two states, one is preferable to a life consumed by what it cannot have. The counsel is realistic about people rather than idealistic about a condition, which is the chapter's consistent temper.
But to the married I command — not I, but the Lord — that the wife not leave her husband 1 Corinthians 7:10.
The attribution changes, and Paul is scrupulous about it throughout this chapter. Here he has the Lord's own teaching to hand on and says so; two verses later, where he does not, he will say that too 1 Corinthians 7:12, and later still he distinguishes his judgment from a commandment 1 Corinthians 7:25. That care is worth noticing: the apostle writing Scripture is visibly marking which of his instructions carry the Lord's explicit word and which are his own applied wisdom.
What he is handing on is the teaching recorded in the Gospels, where the permanence of marriage is grounded in the creation order and traced back past Moses to the beginning Matthew 19:4–6 Mark 10:9 Genesis 2:24.
(But if she departs, let her remain unmarried, or else be reconciled to her husband), and that the husband not leave his wife 1 Corinthians 7:11.
The parenthesis is realistic without weakening the command. A separation may happen; if it does, two doors remain open and only two — remain unmarried, or be reconciled — and the second is plainly the one hoped for. And the instruction closes as it began, symmetrically: the husband is bound by the same word as the wife. In a legal world where a man's freedom to dismiss a wife was far greater than hers to leave him, the even-handedness is itself part of the teaching.
This paragraph does not settle every question a reader brings to it. The Lord's own teaching records an exception Matthew 19:9, and the next paragraph takes up a situation this one does not cover 1 Corinthians 7:15. What the passage establishes is the direction of the obligation: marriage is to be kept, and where it has broken the aim is repair.
held with reason What this mark means