1 Corinthians 6:11

Paul has just rebuked the Corinthians for taking fellow believers to the secular courts when they should have settled their quarrels inside the church (1 Corinthians 6:1–8). Now he widens the rebuke. “Know ye not” is a question meant to shake them. It appeals to something they had been taught and ought to have remembered, and it exposes how little their conduct showed of it.

The word for unrighteous, ádikos, means unjust, and by extension wicked or treacherous. It is also used especially of the heathen, those outside God’s people. Here it describes people whose character and conduct run against God’s righteousness, a settled state of injustice and wickedness that shows itself in what they do.

To inherit, klēronoméō, means to be an heir and to receive something as an inheritance. To inherit the kingdom of God is to receive the full blessings of his rule. Some of those blessings belong to the present: being part of God’s people, living under his authority and knowing his power to change a life. The rest belong to the age to come: eternal life, the resurrection and a full share in his eternal reign. Jesus speaks of the King saying to the blessed, “inherit the kingdom prepared for you” (Matthew 25:34), and Paul shuts the immoral person out of any inheritance in the kingdom in Ephesians 5:5. A life given over to the sins in this list is at odds with belonging to that kingdom, because God is holy, and sin and his presence are incompatible.

Paul is warning against two kinds of deception: the self-deception of a heart that excuses its own sin, and teaching that told people they could go on in these sins and still belong to God’s kingdom. Some in the Corinthian church had apparently come to think that their profession of faith excused their immoral behaviour, or that grace covered everything and left their conduct as it was. Paul breaks that illusion here.

Salvation is a gift received by grace through faith, and the faith God gives brings repentance and a changed life. A transformed life is the evidence that a person belongs to the kingdom, while the way into the kingdom remains God’s gift. The belief that grace sets God’s moral law aside, sometimes called antinomianism, is the very thing this warning answers.

The warning sits in a part of the letter, chapters 5 to 7, given over to sexual immorality and quarrels inside the church. In 1 Corinthians 5 Paul calls the church to purity, and after these verses he teaches that the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit and tells the Corinthians to flee fornication (1 Corinthians 6:12–20).

Paul names ten kinds of people, and the list gives clear examples of what he means by “unrighteous”. The repeated “nor” before each one leaves every one of them outside the kingdom.

Fornicators (pornoi) are those who commit any sexual sin outside marriage. Idolaters (eidōlolátrēs) worship false gods, which was everywhere in Corinth and often bound up with prostitution at the temples. Adulterers (moichoi) are unfaithful to their own marriage.

The next two words name men who have sex with men. “Effeminate” translates malakós, which literally means soft and is used of fine clothing. Figuratively it was used of a catamite, a man who takes the passive part with another man, and that is its meaning in this list. It can also carry the wider sense of a man who is morally weak and lacks self-control in sensual things. “Abusers of themselves with mankind” translates arsenokoítēs, a compound of arrhēn, male, and koítē, bed. It means a man who lies with a male, usually the active partner. Set side by side, the two words cover both partners, and Paul plainly names male homosexual practice among the sins of the unrighteous.

Verse 10 carries the list on to money, drink and the tongue. A thief (kléptēs) is one who steals, taking what belongs to someone else, often by stealth or deceit, and the word can reach any dishonest gain. The covetous (pleonéktēs), a word made from “more” and “to have”, are eager for gain and always want more than they have or are owed. That greed often leads them to exploit and defraud others. Drunkards are given to heavy drinking as a habit. Revilers use abusive or slanderous speech. Extortioners take what they want by force, threats or other unjust means.

Scripture gives similar lists elsewhere. Paul names many of the same sins as the works of the flesh in Galatians 5:19–21, and Revelation 21:8 gives a list of those whose end is the second death.

God forgives every one of them, as the very next verse shows: “And such were some of you.” Many in the Corinthian church had committed these sins, and Christ had washed and changed them. Paul’s warning is aimed at a way of life given over to these sins, and at anyone who goes on in them after claiming Christ. Every sin on this list is forgiven through repentance and faith in Jesus, and God’s grace reaches people out of the deepest of them.

With these words Paul turns from warning to the grace of God. “Such” points back to the whole list in 1 Corinthians 6:9–10, and “some of you” means that people in the Corinthian church had been fornicators, idolaters, thieves and drunkards. Paul names their past honestly, and he puts it in the past tense. Sin is common to all of us, and God’s redeeming work reaches people out of deeply rooted sinful lives. Remembering where they came from keeps believers humble and grateful.

Three times Paul says “but ye are”, and the Greek repeats alla, “but”, at the head of each clause. Each “but” marks the change, and the repetition drives home how certain and complete it is. Washed, sanctified and justified together describe the whole of salvation: the cleansing of sin, being set apart to God, and a right standing before him.

Paul names who did this. “In the name of the Lord Jesus” points to his authority, his person and his saving work: his atoning death, his resurrection and his ascension. Every part of the washing, the sanctifying and the justifying rests on what he has finished. “By the Spirit of our God” names the one who applies that work to believers. The Holy Spirit gives new birth, cleanses, sets apart and strengthens, and he sustains the new life. “Our God” brings in the Father, whose plan this is, so the Father, the Son and the Spirit are all at work in a single sentence.

Christ, who knew no sin, was made sin for us, so that we might be made the righteousness of God in him (2 Corinthians 5:21). He lives to make intercession for his people (Hebrews 7:25), and the Spirit who washes them is the Spirit of Christ, who dwells in believers (Romans 8:9–11).

The verses that shut the unrighteous out of the kingdom end with the unrighteous brought in. Through Christ the unrighteous are made righteous, and the kingdom that was closed to them is opened wide to all who are made righteous by him, by his obedience and his death and apart from their own works. God has delivered his people from the power of darkness and brought them into the kingdom of his dear Son (Colossians 1:13), and anyone in Christ is a new creature (2 Corinthians 5:17).

The grace that forgives is also the grace that teaches God’s people to live righteously (Titus 2:11–14). Believers walk in newness of life (Romans 6:4), and a few verses later Paul tells them that their bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, bought with a price (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). The warning of verses 9 and 10 shows how far sin reaches and what it costs. Verse 11 shows a God who washes, sets apart and acquits people with pasts like these, and whose Spirit gives them the strength to live as what he has made them.