1Cor 6:1-8 - Brethren Butting Heads

1-8 When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? 2 Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? 3 Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life! 4 So if you have such cases, why do you lay them before those who have no standing in the church? 5 I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to settle a dispute between the brothers, 6 but brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers? 7 To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded? 8 But you yourselves wrong and defraud—even your own brothers!


Ah, yes! The eternal view! The whole of the Christian life is supposed to be lived in the light of the eternal view that God so loved us that our eternal future bliss with Him is assured - and that it is thus assured because He graciously and willingly chose us in Christ to be forgiven for sins against Him that would otherwise have kept us justly in torment forever. Sounds simple does it not?

So why do we not do it? Why do those professing Jesus Christ as Saviour (from all that is mentioned above) and as Lord (on account of His rightful Godhood and His eternally effectual sacrifice) still fight and bicker and hate and slander and sue and resent each other? How can these things possibly be? Well, even though we are all saints, we are not Saints. We still have within us a residue of evil known as the flesh.

So we have a built in excuse, don’t we? After all, if God had wanted us to be perfect He could have done that couldn’t He? Isn’t the life, sacrifice (active and passive obedience) of Christ enough to bring us to perfection? Are we not now regarded by God as perfect in Christ? So why couldn’t God have made us actually perfect in Him in an instant? Why leave us with this abiding penchant for evil that wars against the spirit. Why must the flesh war against the spirit?

Well - I don’t know exhaustively what God’s reasons are. But it has something to do with faith and the glory of God. If we were all changed instantaneously into perfect little angels (so to speak) then we should not need faith, nor to live by faith - for we should be walking by sight. But God has decreed that we who are accounted righteous through faith shall also live by faith, and display the righteousness of Christ in the world. It is through the church (and ergo the saints) that the manifold wisdom of God is made known to both realms - the seen and the unseen. {Eph 3:8-12} And, furthermore, it can be demonstrated and will be seen and acknowledged that all of this righteousness was actually the treasure of God in earthen pots {2Co 4:7} - just as it was seen to be in the Apostles.

But we easily take our eyes off the eternal and let them fall upon the temporal. We lose sight of what was done for us and Who is upholding us and we look upon what serves our appetites and fears and fail to believe that Christ is in us to will and to do of His good pleasure - and not that of our old carnal nature. This is why church members sue each other. This is why litigation is threatened between members and elders over things that are paltry compared to the unsurpassed glories of what God had done for us in Christ.

If we bicker and argue over every slight, perceived or real - if we have bitter schisms over things indifferent - if we squabble because of pride or greed or jealousy - then we have lost our way. Would you let a disobedient and spoiled child adjudicate a matter of life and death? That was tried in Pohl Pot’s Cambodian regime under the Khmer Rouge, with devastating results. But Christians who argue over petty and perishable things - or who allow pride and envy to corrode their relationships are hardly displaying a fitness to judge those who are unregenerately living by those same passions. That makes us hypocrites.

Yet we are hypocrites. And the longer we have within our hearts the covert thought that we are not hypocrites - that we have escaped the corruption that is in the world without submitting to Christ, and when we are still experientially ensnared by sin - we shall lack power and authenticity in our lives. 2Pe 1:3-4 does indeed tell us that we have escaped this corruption of the world in Christ - but shows that it is through faith in the promise(s) that this escape is demonstrated or manifested or witnessed to. This is a faith that leans upon those promises through the process of living - faith translated, evidenced, manifested in a life lived out in the light of them, bearing the fruit promised by them.

The saints will do more than judge the world; they will judge angels. This cannot mean the holy angels who kept their first estate and are confirmed eternally as holy. It must mean the fallen angels who have sought the ruination of mankind and the destruction of Christ and His church throughout the ages. All judgement is given to the Son, it is true, but inasmuch as we are in Him, we shall also partake in the judgement. Christ is both God and man. How fitting, then, that He should judge His creatures as God and as perfect man. For the Evil One and his minions have troubled all those who are Christ’s brethren by race and also those who are His brethren by adoption in the Spirit. And so, as a brother, Christ’s indignation at all the wickedness perpetrated upon humanity on account of the evil principalities and powers is in some sense shared by we who share both His humanity and His Spirit.

We shall judge angels. And if we are destined to such a lofty and noble duty how can we let our eyes and our desires and hopes and affections be ensnared by the comparatively menial and fleeting call of the flesh? What shameful beings we are! How easily we give ourselves to the earth-bound view! How grace must abound upon grace towards us for us to persevere to the end, and to be actually lifted out of the miry clay that our flesh loves so much. Nothing but the very power that raised Christ from the dead can do it. And this is our hope and our prayer - that God will move our hearts to meditate and to look upon the eternal things to which we have been raised with Christ, and to regard all those earthly and carnal pursuits as something to which we died with and in Him.

It is true that, in the church body, there are many at various stages of Christian maturity. Nevertheless, what they all have in common is surely the concept of submission to Christ. God provides in congregations those who are mature and those who are given wisdom. Indeed, if any one lack wisdom he is but to ask and the Father will give it to him. God will withhold nothing that we need. So, in submission to Christ, we are to ask for and to look for the wisdom from God among us - a wisdom that He provides. Will we look for it? Are we ready to hear it? Whenever our carnal lusts and passions are aroused we can be sure that our spiritual ears will be dulled by the roar of our emotions and our senses. This is the test. Is Christ in us or not? Will we submit in the midst of the maelstrom or only when the zephyr whispers? Will we be still and know God by hearing Him? Or will we give way to the flesh and drown out the still small voice of God in the cacophony of the immediate?

We are exhorted to be or to hear the wisdom of God in our midst. To do this we must deny ourselves and submit. Until and unless we do it is impossible for us to know, let alone to do righteously. We will look like the world as long as we act like the world and we will act like the world as long as we fail to practice the belief that we belong to Christ by falling into His arms regardless of our circumstances, feelings and inflamed passions. We have been given the right to become children of God, if indeed we are born of God. We must be trained up in the way we should go. But it is we who must obey, we who must submit, we who must bend the knee, mortify the flesh and give ourselves to the righteousness of Christ at work in us.

If we truly believed how could we believers sue each other? How could we demand our rights and take retribution if they are denied? Is this the Spirit of Christ? Is this what He is like? Is this manifesting His righteousness? Is this the same Nature that "did not think equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made Himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men and being found in human form humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross?"

For Christians to sue each other in secular courts is doubly evil. Firstly, the parties are refusing that nature of Christ that would rather be wronged than wrong another; would rather suffer evil than do evil; that would prefer to see a brother kept from further sin by receiving an injustice from his hand with a forgiving spirit. Immediately some will call this "doormat theology," but most of those who rush in with such a condemnation have not taken the time to reflect upon the nature of their Redeemer. The loudest protesters are often the ones whose cries drown out their own ears in the interests of their own flesh. The very last thing that the flesh desires to do is to die. When we think we have it licked is the very moment it rises up in all of its deceptive and malevolent ferocity to cut us off at the knees.

To be sure there is a time for everything. There is a season for all things. There is a time to make peace and a time to make war. There is a time to rebuke and correct a brother and a time to bear silently with his faults. There is a time to stand upon a principle even though the whole world decries it. And there is a time to suffer the injustice of the world silently and without protest. Look to Christ and see that all these things are in Him. At various times He behaved in all these ways. He was the perfect man, perfectly walking in the Spirit, perfectly submitted to the will of the Father. He is our model. He is our power and source. He is our life. He is our (manifest) righteousness. He is the Light shining in the darkness, perfectly dividing truth from error and discerning good from evil. We, on the other hand, are none of these things apart from Him.

True Christians can be defeated temporarily. This means that we can’t go around declaring the ultimate condition of another professor’s soul based simply upon their spiritual misery. We all have many faults and we all fail in many ways every day. Some of us fail grievously and often - and for inordinately long periods of time, such that you would have to hold a spiritual mirror to their mouths in order to detect whether or not there is still life in them. At any one time some are "up" and some are "down". Some hover near death and some are filled with the glory or life. But what stays the same - what never changes - is the God who is at work in us all. His commands and standards remain the same whether we succeed or fail. When we are defeated we are no less the children of God than those who walk more steadily, and when we ourselves find our feet we are no more children of God than those around us in the faith who have tripped and fallen.

This is why Paul to the Corinthians is gentle and stern and longsuffering and rebuking and exhorting. He is employing, he is being - the means by which God chastens and encourages His true children towards maturity. This is why he doesn’t just throw his hands up and go found another congregation in another place. It’s not that the Corinthians are a great model of Christianity for they are surely one of the worst, but that Paul believes that Christ died to bring them to Himself and he labours in the Lord to see Christ formed in them - inch by inch, battle by battle. Yet he does it trusting in Christ, judging no one and nothing (not even himself) before the appointed time. He does not crush a bruised reed nor quench a smoking flax - yet neither does he compromise one iota on the gospel or upon the unchanging standards and principles of our eternal God. This is what a fallen and redeemed man striving to have the life of Christ manifested in Him looks like. He looks, to some degree like Christ.

The insistence upon the observance of our own personal "rights" is not the same as having a loving concern for the "rights" of others. One dislikes using the word "rights" in any Christian connection, but I use it here to show that no matter how much of a door mat a Christian may seem to be in personal matters, he can be ferocious in his concern for the good of others. Abraham - a normally peaceable man - went right postal when his Nephew Lot and his household was carried off by the five kings. David went to great lengths not to exert "rights" over then King Saul, despite great persecutions - but desired with great tenderness to provide for Mephibosheth as the last and most vulnerable of Saul’s family - a grandson through his son, Jonathan. (2Sam 9:1)

Finally, I have never understood those modern perverters of the gospel who bring in spurious and hissing ideas purporting to teach that there is a difference between Paul’s gospel and Christ’s. Such thoughts are from the pit. It is clear to the eye of faith that Christ is being manifested in Paul through the obedience of his faith; the same Christ that walked the earth and sits in heaven is plainly evidenced in Paul’s walk. True, Christ is the perfect and Paul the imperfect. Christ never misspoke, wondered (though he marveled) doubted, did wrong. None of these is true of Paul even after his conversion, yet the radiance is still there from the light that burns within. Light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it. To whatever degree, people looking at Paul are looking at Christ. Not at the Person of Christ, but at the nature of Christ, the life of Christ, the righteousness of Christ in Paul as he struggles along in his own journey to his heavenly home. Is this radiance of Christ that we see in Paul even so much as a faint smudge in me?