Paul was doing business in a first-century world in which the Greeks looked down on the body. There was a proverbial saying, “The body is a tomb.” Epictetus said, “I am a poor soul, shackled to a corpse.” The important thing was the soul, the spirit of a person. The body really didn’t matter to many of these Greeks.

One expression of this was a Greek philosophy called Gnosticism. It espoused the idea of “dualism” between the body and the soul. The soul was recognized as good and of God. The body was considered bad and not of God. This produced two extreme attitudes. The first was “asceticism” in which everything possible was done to subject or humiliate the desires and instincts of the body. If the body was bad, we should deny its appetites, bringing it under severe discipline. Anything that feels good must be bad. This was the attitude behind many of the monastic movements. It is a distortion of biblical teaching.

At the other extreme, there was the more popular reaction, which chose not to neglect the body but to indulge it. We could call this “extreme sensuality.” This was the prevailing attitude in the city of Corinth. Since the body was of no importance, you could do with it what you liked. Sate and glut its appetites. If the soul is all that matters, what a person does with the body is of no significance. If they had bumper stickers on the chariots of those days, they would probably have read, “If it feels good, do it!”

You and I live in a similar society. Most of those around us have never heard of the Gnostics, but they treat sex as an appetite to be satisfied as casually as the need for food. It is met by having a snack. How many times has a person said to me, “My sexual needs are just like all the rest of my appetites. If I get hungry, I go get a cheeseburger with all the works. And if I feel the need for sex and there is someone attractive to me who is willing, why not do it? What’s wrong with that? If I’m out of town on business, what my wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her. After all, it’s just an appetite.”

This argument is nothing new. Paul heard it addressed in a similar fashion. That’s why he talks about food being meant for the stomach and the stomach for food. Both food and the stomach will someday be destroyed. But the body is not meant for sexual immorality; it is meant for the Lord and the Lord for the body. Even as Jesus was raised from the dead, so will you and I be raised from the dead. Ours is an eternal existence. We will have bodies in the life to come, even as we have bodies in this life.

Paul emphasizes that our bodies in this life are members of Jesus Christ. You and I are part of the Body of Christ. We are extensions of Christ in this world. Jesus is to be seen in us. God has created us sexual beings, male and female, privileged in our incompleteness to find oneness in assuming responsibility for each other that goes beyond using each other sexually.