Your Body Is a Temple. Most People Quote That Verse Backwards

"Your body is a temple." You have probably seen that line on gym walls, water bottles and diet plans, used to mean take care of yourself, eat well, work out. There is some truth in that. But the sentence comes from Paul's first letter to the church in Corinth, and when you hear it where Paul put it, the point runs almost the opposite direction from the slogan. The slogan says my body is a temple, so I will take care of it for me. Paul adds the sentence the slogan always drops: "You are not your own; you were bought at a price." On Deep Made Simple we put 1 Corinthians 6:19 back where Paul wrote it. We start with Roman Corinth on its narrow isthmus, rebuilt by Rome in 44 BC, with the Acrocorinth rising above it and temples everywhere. Paul stayed a year and a half, making tents with Aquila and Priscilla, and a church grew, including Erastus, the city's director of public works. But the church was struggling: quarrels, lawsuits, and sexual sin that shocked even the pagans. In chapter six Paul keeps asking "do you not know?" and quotes their own slogans back to them: "I have the right to do anything," and "food for the stomach and the stomach for food." Many in the Greek world thought the body was a temporary shell and the real self lived somewhere else. That thinking is still around today: it's my body, it's just physical. The Bible starts somewhere else. In Genesis God formed the body and breathed life into it, made us in His image, and called it very good. Paul answers with a wordplay: exestin, it is permitted, against exousiazo, to have authority over. Freedom that leads to slavery is not freedom. The body is for the Lord, and God, who raised Jesus, will raise us also. Then Paul says our bodies are members of Christ, and gives a direct command: flee sexual immorality. The Greek verb is pheugo, to seek safety by flight, the word Joseph lived out when he left his cloak and ran. And right there comes the famous line about the temple. To a Corinthian, a temple was