“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11)
The Basket Case Chronicles #29
“If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are” (1 Cor. 3:17).
In Paul’s argument, this kind of defilement is brought about by sexual sin, and only by sexual sin. A few chapters later, when he tells the Corinthians to flee from fornication (1 Cor. 6:18), he says that every other sin is “without the body.” But the one who commits sexual uncleanness is the one who sins against his own body, which is the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19). And so this exhortation is not about doing the right number of sit ups in the morning, or avoiding refined sugar. The idea of urging the Corinthians to take up jogging never came into Paul’s head.
Of course, there are good stewardship arguments that can be marshaled against the practice of giving yourself lung cancer, or bungee jumping with frayed cords, or hitting your splayed fingers with a hammer. It is possible (and easy) to sin against God through a foolish stewardship. But such poor stewardship sins do not create the kind of defilement that Paul is addressing here.
It is worth noting that we are not just told that this defilement is something that God is “against.” We are explicitly told that God will undertake to destroy the one who does this. All of a sudden, cruising porn sites is not nearly as compelling as it once was.