1 Corinthians 6:9-11 (NIV)
Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
The Church at Corinth had slid far from where they had begun with Paul’s careful cultivation, planting, weeding, and harvesting a few years earlier. Instead of a convocation of saints, it had become a nest of quarreling, sectarianism, unrighteousness, and even tolerance of outright sin.
Some in the Church had condoned such behavior by quoting Paul out of context, saying that there was freedom in Christ, and that Christians should not allow themselves to get caught up in the legalism that the Judaizers taught. To them, this meant not merely liberty from an external law and a self-made righteousness, but a throwing off of all restraint, leading to the ability to sin with a clear conscience, since they believed that the saved were already forgiven for whatever sins they would commit in the future (although there is no Scriptural teaching in either the Old Testament or the New that promises present forgiveness for future sins).
But now, Paul gives them the gospel principle on sin directly: the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God. And then he defines this wickedness by an impressive, but not exhaustive, list of sinful behaviors that will exclude people from the kingdom of God, and thus from eternal life. These sins need no explanation, because Paul purposefully names them without figures of speech or euphemism. His point is too important to allow it to be hidden or sidestepped by those who like to play games with words.
As if to supply clear bookends to his list, Paul repeats at the end that people who engage in this behavior are wicked, not saved, and thus have no part in the kingdom of heaven. There is no allowance in this clear and simple statement for a theology of antinomianism, or of the liberalism that tolerates sin, dismissing it, as “human weakness”.
Paul reminds the Corinthians, citizens of a city with a deserved reputation as one of the wickedest cities in the empire, that this lifestyle he is condemning as inadmissible for kingdom people, is the very lifestyle from which many of them had come in the first place. They had come to Jesus as horrible sinners, their lives characterized by sin, foulness, and the corruption that comes from allowing the sinful nature to have control over one’s life.
They came to Jesus as foul sinners, but He had not left them there, somehow “saved” and “set free” while still doing the very things that had corrupted and condemned them in the first place. He had washed them in His own sacred blood, so that every sin stain was gone. He had sanctified them, not merely calling them holy while leaving them sinful, but actually transforming them into new creations (2 Corinthians 5:17), holy saints of God. And he had justified them, giving them a clean record with every prior sin marked “Paid in Full”, with a clear command to “Go and sin no more” (John 5:14, 8:11).
Father, it is still all too common for Christians to wink at sin in our own lives, determining that since we can’t live as saints in our own strength, You must not care whether we sin or not. But all through Your word, we are clearly warned not to return to sin. Peter warns us against being dogs who return to their vomit, and cleaned-up pigs who go back to wallowing in the mud, saying that it would be better for us to have never known the way of righteousness than to have known it and then turned back to sin (2 Peter 2:20-22). It is an amazing thing to be forgiven by You, to be cleansed by the blood of Jesus, to be transformed by Your Spirit into true saints, genuinely holy men and women. How terrible it is to then turn away from that reality and go back to the life of sin from which we have been saved. Father, You are able to keep holy those whom you have saved from sin. And if we go back, it is because we loved sin too much to forsake it, not because You were unable to deliver us from it. Forgive us, Lord, for our lack of strength to trust You, and help us to turn away from any sin in our lives, so that we can live fully for You in Your strength and power. Amen.