NOT TO COMPANY WITH FORNICATORS

The command in the opening part of the chapter to purge out the old leaven is followed by a reminder that, in a previous epistle that is not recorded for us in our Bibles, Paul had instructed the Corinthian believers not to company with fornicators. It is a matter of historical record that Corinth was a place where every kind of moral delinquency was practised, and those who had been saved out of that society were to have nothing more to do with such behaviour. Paul explains in verse 10 that they cannot be entirely separated from all fornicators, for that would literally involve removal from the world. In their daily round of business and domestic chores the believers would inevitably come into contact with men and women who were living dreadfully ungodly lives, but that was the nature of their society. Where the saints were to make a very definite distinction was in the case where ‘any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner’, v. 11. ‘With such an one’, the believers were not even to eat.

The main purpose of forbidding the believers to have any social contact with professing believers whose lives were openly sinful, was to make the guilty party feel the gravity of their offence. Their excommunication from the assembly was to be total and not undermined by the comforting attention of believers who, with misplaced sympathy, offered them hospitality. This complete exclusion from the fellowship of the Lord’s people would swiftly prove whether the person excommunicated was truly saved or not. If their profession had been false and their behaviour evidence of an unchanged spiritual state, excommunication would simply see them disappear back into the world of the ungodly. If, on the other hand, the offender was truly saved, then the total isolation from the warmth of Christian fellowship in the gatherings of the saints and their homes would drive them to repentance and subsequent restoration to the fellowship that their regenerate hearts craved. It is not for believers to sit in judgement upon the ungodly, but an assembly is responsible for judging ungodly behaviour in its midst.