Week 44 1 Corinthians
The church in Corinth had some true-to-life un-churchly-like things going on.
One example was that a guy in the church did something wrong to another guy in the church – might have been anything: theft, fraud, embezzlement? – and now they’re going to battle it out in municipal court.
Paul talked about that conflict and gave a couple of pieces of advice. A pretty practical one was that other people in the church were perfectly capable of making a fair judgment call on this dispute. Why not deal with it in-house? Which made sense.
But then he said something that didn’t have much to do with practicality and didn’t make much common sense. He said that: to have such lawsuits at all is a real defeat for you. Why not just accept the injustice and leave it at that? Why not let yourselves be cheated?
Why not accept injustice, why not let yourself be cheated?
Crazy questions, a crazy and unrealistic idea.
While I sat thinking about it I remembered the Lord had said: don’t resist an evil person. Even if he slaps you in the face. Which is another crazy and unrealistic idea.
The church in Corinth was just doing the normal thing, the natural thing, the thing anybody would do, the way everybody was doing it.
Which I guess from what Paul said, was maybe where the problem began.
Note: quote from I Corinthians 6:7 (NLT); and the Sermon on the Mount Matthew 5:39-41