Please turn with me this morning to 2 Corinthians chapter 6 as we consider Paul's exhortation to the church in light of God's presence in the church. Will discover that there is an inseparable relationship between the presence of God. and the holiness of God's people. Where God is, there is holiness. God is with his people, therefore They are holy.
We'll also discover what the implications of that holiness are. 2 Corinthians 6. Beginning at verse 14, and we'll read through the first verse of chapter 7. Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness?
Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Balil. Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols. For we are the temple of the living God.
As God said, I will make my dwelling among them, and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the LORD, and touch no unclean thing. Then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the LORD Almighty. Since we have these promises, beloved. Let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement.
of body and spirit. bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God. Let's pray. Holy, holy, holy. Lord God Almighty.
Who can stand in your presence? Who can dwell on your holy hill? He who walks blamelessly and does what is right. But Lord, we have not walked blamelessly, nor done what is right. We have indulged in sin because we have loved our idols more than we love you.
Forgive us, Lord, and help us. Make us who you say we are in Christ. Like the man who said to your son, Lord, I believe, help my unbelief. We say, Lord, you have made us holy, but make us holy. Open our eyes now, Holy Spirit, and give us understanding to hear and believe your voice in Scripture.
I pray in Jesus' name. Amen. In our passage today, Paul is going to repeatedly call the church to holiness. And he's going to ground that call to holiness in the presence of God within his church. His rationale goes something like this.
Wherever God is present, there is holiness. God is present within the church, therefore the church is holy. But Paul in these verses does not merely declare that the church is holy, he also commands the church to be holy. He states that the church is holy while at the same time commanding us to be what he says we are. And so there's a bit of tension here between what is and what ought to be.
A tension that we'll have to wrestle through. and draw some conclusions from. We are simultaneously holy and called to be holy. And it's all grounded in the fact that God, who is absolute holiness, is present. within the church.
So let's dig into this passage and see how Paul calls us to holy living in light of God's presence. He begins with a command that's grounded in an unconditional promise. This command is going to be repeated in one way or another three different times in these verses. The command appears first in verse 14. All says Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.
It's a call to separation. It's a call to holiness. To be separated unto God by not associating with, in this case, unbelievers.
Now, I suspect that immediately our minds go to the arena of marriage when we read that passage. 2 Corinthians 6.14 is often quoted in reference to Christians marrying non-Christians. And certainly that is an unequal yoking of two human beings and is something that ought to be avoided for the good of one's soul. What's interesting, though, is that Paul never brings up marriage in these verses.
So what exactly does he have in mind when he refers to being unequally yoked. with unbelievers. Theologians have differed over what Paul has in mind. The rhetorical questions that follow this prohibition have led some to conclude that Paul is referring to the many cultic practices that characterized first century Corinth. Paul asks in the latter part of verse 14, what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness?
Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? And Belial was the common name that rabbis and Pharisees of Paul's day used for Satan. Paul goes on in verse 16, What agreement has the temple of God with idols? And so these distinctions between Christ and Satan and between God's temple and idols seems to suggest that Paul has maybe cultic practices in mind when he forbids us to yoke ourselves to unbelievers.
In fact, in Paul's first letter to Corinth, the dangers of these cultic associations was a very prominent theme. In 1 Corinthians 8, Paul explains the dangers to one's conscience and witness of associating with pagan practices. In chapter 10 of that first letter, Paul goes to great lengths to warn the Corinthian church of not associating with idol worship and demons, because it was so common in Corinth. And these are real dangers that the wise Christian should steer clear of. But the context of our passage here in 2 Corinthians 6 and 7 is not idol worship in pagan temples.
any more than it is marriage between believers and unbelievers. The context is one in which Corinthian believers Had attached themselves, yoked themselves to false teachers. Their allegiance has been given to teachers who are stroking Corinth's idols rather than to the true apostles who are preaching the gospel. When we think of demonic associations or dangerous satanic practices, we probably think immediately of things like seances and Ouija boards, not of Bible teachers who are teaching falsehood. And yet, Paul's prohibition against yoking ourselves unequally is a prohibition against allegiance to a certain kind of person.
And not to some external activity or behavior.
So the context and the language that Paul uses makes it clear that he's referring to the false teachers that he's been talking about for five chapters now.
Now, that's not to say that seances and Ouija boards are spiritually safe. They're not. But Paul's point is that false teachers presenting themselves as teachers of the truth are in the same category as blatant demonic practices. He's not minimizing idol worship. He's increasing our awareness of the dangers of false teachers by essentially equating them.
with the pagan cultic worship that was so common in Corinth. When Paul tells Christians not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers, He's speaking of the great danger of those who profess to be believers. Perhaps even convincingly so, but who teach lies about our sinful nature. It's demonic, it's satanic. and it's more akin to idol worship than to Christianity.
And so Paul commands us to be holy, to keep ourselves from being yoked to that which leads to lawless, dark, satanic practice. practices that are contrary to Christ. And allegiance to false teachers and their false teaching is one of the ways. And in this context, the primary way in which Christians break the command to be holy.
Now look with me at the latter half of verse 16. Paul gives us the grounds, the basis. of this command to be holy. And it begins with the word for in verse 16. For we are the temple of the living God.
As God said, I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be. My people. Verse 16 is a quotation of Leviticus 26, 11 and 12. A passage in which God is declaring something that is fact. Because he has rescued Israel from Egyptian bondage, they are his.
They've been redeemed, they've been delivered, they belong now to the one who has redeemed and delivered them. They are associated with God, His power, His glory, His love, because God has associated with them. That's what's going on in Leviticus 26. Why is idolatry such a bad thing? Why should we not be yoked to unbelievers, such as false teachers who spread lies?
Well, because God is in us, we are His temple. The presence of God Himself, who is holy, is with us. We belong to Him and He to us, so much so that He calls us my people. The grounds of this command to be holy and separate. from the evil influence of unbelievers then is the fact that we belong to God.
And God does not share his people with pretenders and usurpers and idols. Paul takes that promise of divine ownership from the book of Leviticus and applies it to the church. If God has redeemed you through the blood of Jesus Christ, you are His. And if you are his, he is in you. There is an unbreakable association between God, who is holy, and his children who have been made holy through his Son.
That's the reality. That's the fact. Christians are in a category all their own because God has put them in that category. And when we betray allegiances to other gods, Other gospels, other temples. We are acting out of accord with who we are in Christ.
We're bringing dishonor and disrepute. To the God who has condescended to make us his own. It's spiritual adultery. It's disloyalty of the worst sort. And so this command to be holy.
To not be unequally yoked with unbelievers is a command that is grounded in a status that God has given by grace to every one of His children.
Now, it's very important that we understand Paul's logic. He is not saying, be holy, so that I will be your God. He's saying be holy For I am your God. God making himself ours and making us his precedes and is the basis of Paul's command to holiness. It's a command that's grounded in an unconditional, already fulfilled promise.
Verse 17 begins with the word therefore, and that word therefore might very well be the most important word in this passage. It indicates that the unconditional promise of God is the basis. for the conditional promise that we're about to read. In fact, let's read verses 17 and 18. Paul says.
Therefore. In light of the reality I just asserted, Go out from their midst and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing, then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty. This is a command grounded in a conditional promise. The command is there in the first part of verse 17. And it's a repetition, isn't it, of the command that we saw back in verse 14.
Essentially, Paul is repeating the command for God's people to be holy. He says, Go out from their midst and be separate from them. and touch no unclean thing. In other words, do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. morally unclean people.
Now this command And the conditional promise that follows is actually an amalgamation, a mashup of several different Old Testament verses. Paul is preaching a sermon from some Old Testament texts to the New Testament church, and his first text is Isaiah 52, 11. In Isaiah 52, 11, God is announcing that the Babylonian exile is over with. It's time to come home. And so he commands Israel, go out from there.
Go out from Babylon. Touch no unclean thing. Go out from the midst of Babylon.
Now, Babylon was unclean. Babylon was wicked. Babylon hated God. Babylon loved the demonic. Israel was to have no part in that.
And so God commands them not only to leave, but to leave with their hearts and loyalties, their allegiances intact. Don't even touch their wicked things, he says. Be holy, he says. In Corinth, the cultural setting was similar to that of Babylon. Idolatry was normalized.
Pagan worship was everywhere, and now false teachers posing as apostles were infiltrating the church. It was time for Corinth to come clean, to begin acting like the holy people that God had declared them to be. And that would require a clean break. from previous immoral allegiances. That's the command.
What about the promise? Look with me at the latter half of verse 17. Then which establishes a condition, then I will welcome you. and I will be a father to you. And you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.
When Paul says that God will welcome the faithful Corinthians who have separated themselves from uncleanness, he's quoting Ezekiel 20 verses 34 and 41, another Old Testament prophet who is giving the post-exilic community instruction and promise from the Lord. God is promising to welcome the exiles back to the promised land after years of exile in a pagan land. Similarly, if Corinth will abandon her loyalties to false teachers and the demonic life that the false teaching will lead to, God will welcome them into fellowship and ultimately welcome them into glory. And then finally, Paul quotes the Davidic covenant from 2 Samuel 7:14, when he tells Corinth that God will be a father to them. and they will be his children.
The fulfillment of God's covenant with no less than David himself is promised to these. Distracted, double-minded Corinthians, if they will but separate their hearts and lives from these unclean teachers and from the idolatries these teachers were feeding the Corinthians. And so in verses 14 and 16, God gives a promise and then grounds his people's status as holy in that promise. And then in verses 17 and 18, God gives a command and then grounds his promise to be with his people. in their obedience to that command.
So which is it? Is God's promise unconditional or conditional? Is God with us so that we can be holy? Or are we holy so that we can be with God?
Well, it's both. Theologians call this the tension between the already and the not yet. The already and the not yet. We are simultaneously holy and called to be holy. In verse 16, we are, present tense, the temple of the living God.
In verse 1 of chapter 7, we are commanded to cleanse ourselves and bring holiness to completion. It's both a reality of an already done deal and a promise of future blessings if we obey. Already But not yet. That's why the word therefore is so important in verse 17. It establishes an essential sequence that makes it clear that.
While God's promised presence is both unconditional and conditional, The unconditional promise precedes the conditional. The command is downstream of the unconditional promise. Church God's presence declares us to be holy. and then demands that we conform the rest of our lives to that declared holiness. In other words, the conditions are real.
But God meets the conditions for us. And then credits us with having met the conditions, and then enables us to actually meet the conditions. That's the gospel. And it's all of grace. I think this tension of the already and not yet is very obviously demonstrated in a confession that we read back in the Gospel of Mark from the father of a boy who.
The boy has an unclean spirit. This father wants so badly for his son to be healed, and Jesus says to him, All things are possible for one who believes.
So the father says I believe. But help my unbelief. Already, not yet. In our text, Paul is telling the church, you are holy. but you also need to be holy.
You have been declared holy by the grace of God.
Now go and increase. in holiness. Behave like the holy people God has made you to be. And so I think it is perfectly appropriate for us to pray to the Lord, Lord, I am. I am holy, but help me to be holy.
A commentator whose comments I've grown to really appreciate and love explains the tension this way. He said, It is not the case that our being accepted by God remains finally contingent upon our withdrawal and separation from evil. as if we could accomplish such a thing. It is rather that precisely because that work has been accomplished for us, we therefore are to so act and do. The conditional promise is fulfilled.
By the unconditional promise of God's gracious dwelling with his people.
Well, the unconditional and conditional promises of God are held in tens until Christ's return, but the command that flows from these promises is crystal clear. And Paul repeats it now for the third time in the first verse of chapter 7. Since we have these promises. That God will make his dwelling with us, that he is our God, that we are his people, that he welcomes us when we're faithful and true to him, that he will be a father to us, that we will be his children. Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness.
to completion. in the fear of God. In this verse, Paul takes all the promises of God that have been mentioned up to this point. Conditional and unconditional, negative and positive, temporal and eternal, and combines them into one big implication. Be holy in body and spirit in the fear of God.
Where God is present, there is holiness. God is present within his church. Therefore, Christian, you are holy, so be holy. For the Corinthians, the immediate threat to their holiness came in the form of loyalties to false teachers. They were yoking themselves to voices that were opposed to the gospel.
and contrary to the very truths that made Corinth a church that made Corinthians Christian. If they were to survive and persevere to the end, they would have to disentangle themselves from these harmful allegiances. That were leading them astray. They needed to unyoke themselves from false apostles. That while our immediate threat might not be people in our midst claiming to be apostles and speaking for God.
We should stop and ask ourselves. What are the unequal yokes that threaten our holiness? What are the unequal yokes that threaten our holiness? What allegiances and loyalties and affections and habits tempt us? to abandon our devotion to God.
This is a complex question. How separate must I be to be a faithful believer.
Some Christians have answered this question far too narrowly. while others have answered it too broadly. Perhaps the tension of this question is best summarized in that well-known assertion that we are to be in the world but not of the world.
Some Christians focus so much on not being of the world that they forget that they are in the world as witnesses, as the hands and feet of Jesus, as ambassadors of God. Other Christians focus so much on being those witnesses, being those ambassadors, that they forget they're not of the world. This world is not their home. Paul, in his first letter to Corinth, had to correct some of the extremism that. creeps into a command like, do not be unequally yoked to an unbeliever.
Some of the Corinthians had evidently taken this principle of separation to such an extreme that they refused to even interact with an unbeliever, to the point that Paul had to say in 1 Corinthians 5. I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with immoral people, not at all meaning sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy or swindlers or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. He didn't mean that. He even had to tell Christian spouses to stay married to their unbelieving spouses if the unbelieving spouse desired it.
So there is an extreme separation to which Paul never intended the church to go. And yet, here in his second letter, he clearly is addressing the other extreme: the extreme of not separating enough. from unbelieving, immoral. evil influences.
So, in thinking about applying this passage to our lives, we need to be aware. that there is an unhealthy imbalance in the direction of separating too much. But that's not what Scripture is addressing here. The question here is. How do we separate ourselves sufficiently?
adequately biblically from destructive allegiances. The last verse of our text, chapter 7, verse 1, gives us a helpful summary of Paul's instruction. And it begins by grounding our pursuit of holy living, not in our personal resolve and effort, but in the promises of God. Verse 1. Since we have these promises, beloved...
Since God is with us and has already given His children everything necessary for their sanctification, pursue holiness. If you come away from this passage of scripture thinking that God is waiting for you to do something in your own strength. in your own power, by your own effort, you've missed the point. The commands of Scripture, all of them flow from the promises of God. The technical way of putting it is that the imperative follows the indicative.
What God requires of us by way of obedience comes from what God has already given us by way of grace. And this ought to be an encouragement to us. God's command for us to unyoke ourselves from unbelievers. And to cleanse ourselves from defiling things should not be an overwhelming command, because with the command, God says, I will be with you. I am with you.
I will see your sanctification through to the end. I remember a story that Ben Ressler, a fellow pastor in our presbytery, told when he was preaching here at Grace one Sunday. He and his young daughter were walking out into the surf at the ocean, and the water was rough. His daughter was scared, but she really wanted to go out into the water, so Ben picked her up and carried her out there. Ben made the point that while his daughter was clinging to him as if her life depended on it, it was him clinging to her that was preserving her life.
From her vantage point, perhaps she thought that if she let go, she would be washed out to sea. But the reality was her father was holding tightly onto her and nothing could snatch her out of his grip. Church, while it is true that God commands his children To cling fast to him and follow him and obey him and trust him, it is simultaneously true that he is clinging to us. And our preservation from evil does not rely for one moment. on our ability to cling to him.
Rather, it depends from start to finish. on the fact that nothing can snatch us out of his hands.
So our pursuit of holiness is a pursuit that's first grounded in the promises of God, since we have these promises. But then Paul says. Let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit. I I suspect that most of us when we face a temptation to approach the pursuit of holiness as maybe primarily an external battle that involves our bodies, our flesh, the temporal, the visible aspects of who we are. And so we hear a sermon about abstaining from evil, and we immediately start making a list of vices that we need to give up.
Bad movies, filthy language, unhealthy food, bad relationships that pull us away from the Lord. And we may very well have some of the things of that nature that we should walk away from. But Paul doesn't leave it at that. He includes Things that defile the spirit. Those invisible internal hidden sins of the heart.
This would be things like the very desires that make you enjoy those external vices that you indulge in. Lost. pride, bitterness, selfishness, and so on. Idols of the heart are so much more difficult to identify and walk away from than external behaviors, aren't they? But Paul calls us to cleanse ourselves from both.
defilements of body and Spirits. In Corinth, the Christians were easily seduced by false teachers because these false teachers seemed credible. And worthy of following, but they seemed credible and worthy of following precisely because they appealed to the invisible idols of Corinthian hearts. Unequal yoking of our lives occurs whenever we begin to find our identity, our self-worth, our sense of purpose and value and delight in relationships and activities and attitudes that are opposed to God.
So ask yourself. What are the practices I'm engaged in that run contrary to God's moral demands? But also ask yourself, What are the spiritual desires and bents of my heart that incline me to those practices? And then begin cleansing your life of both. Finally, Paul says, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.
In church, we dare not run past that phrase in the fear. of God. Our divine motive. our driving motive in Pursuing holiness is not ultimately our own happiness. or self-respect.
Our driving motive is not ultimately our reputation before a watching world or even our witness to that world. Our ultimate motivation must be Godward. We pursue holiness because God is holy and God is present.
Someone wants to find the fear of the Lord. As living with the constant awareness that I'm in the presence of a holy God. Living with the constant awareness that I'm in the presence of a holy God. God is always present. present.
particularly and intimately present with his children. And as such, we ought to revere. and a door. and enjoy that divine presence by living Holy Lives. Let's pray.
Father, increase our hunger and thirst. for righteousness. and then satisfy that hunger and quench that thirst. In Jesus' name. Amen.
Mm-hmm.
