“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11)
The Basket Case Chronicles #58
“Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of a harlot? God forbid. What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh. But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit” (1 Cor. 6:15-17).
We are dealing here with two mysterious kinds of bodily union. There is the physical one-flesh union that occurs between a man and a woman in sexual intercourse, and there is another kind of union between mankind and Christ, of which the first kind of union is a type.
Someone who is joined to the Lord is “one spirit” with Him, but this spiritual union is not an ethereal union. We can see this within the teaching of this passage because a Christian’s body is counted, on the basis of this spiritual union, as being a “member of Christ.” Moreover, if a Christian man sleeps with a prostitute, he is taking the holiness of that membership into the bed with him. So if a man is united to Christ in “this way,” and united to a prostitute “that way,” then this means that the members of Christ is taken to the prostitute, and made members of her. The two kinds of union are therefore “relatable”—they have something to do with one another.
Sexual union within marriage gives us a pure typology, and Paul shows us in the fifth chapter of Ephesians. This is a great mystery, Paul says, but he is speaking of Christ and the Church. We will not have sex in the resurrection, but we will have something much more glorious, we will have the antitype. Sexual union apart from marriage gives us an impure typology. Among its other pollutions and faults, fornication is also false teaching.