To be delivered unto Satan means you are kicked out of the church.
Why? The church is holy ground. It is a new Israel.
The church is the place where the presence of God is.
You know, sometimes there was restitution to be made,
you could try that with a sacrificial system.
There were other things that people did that had a more severe punishment,
there were death penalty offenses, and there were also
offenses, and this is where I want to park on here, that amounted to expulsion.
The Old Testament phrase is you would be "cut off from the people of God."
You're expelled, you're out of the community.
If you go off, and do you know, it was very small list of things,
but that was how it was dealt with.
Because that doesn't belong in the community.
If you're going to do that, or you're going to go, you know,
do this other thing that aligns yourself with some other deity.
You don't belong here. You don't belong in the community.
And so you'd be expelled.
Paul, in 1 Corinthians 5 does the same thing with the church, because now the church
is a new Israel, the church is the people of God, the church is holy ground.
I want you to think about those Old Testament laws and also think about
the Day of Atonement. Where was sin put in the Day of Atonement?
The two goats, one was sacrificed and the blood's sprinkled
on the tabernacle and different parts of the Holy of Holies.
It's sanctified the sanctuary.
Sort of hit the reset button, it goes back to its pristine state for a new year.
That's what the Day of Atonement was.
But the second goat had to do with the sins of the people.
And that goat was not killed.
Okay, that goat, the high priest would lay his hands on the head of the goat
and symbolically transfer the sins of the nation to the goat.
And then what would they do with the goat? The goat is driven outside the camp.
In Second Temple times and rabbinic times, they actually drove the thing over a cliff,
so it would never come back.
But the picture is the same; sin is sent to where it belongs, to the domain of Azazel.
And we read about this earlier last semester.
The name of a demon that was associated with Satan, a Satan figure out in the wilderness.
This is where you find Satan, because the wilderness is the anti-Eden.
It's the uneden, the opposite of Eden.
So this is where you put sin, it goes out into the world, to the domain of Satan.
Now, if you look at 1 Corinthians 5, look at what he does, look what Paul does.
He has both of these ideas in mind.
He says; "It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you,
and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans,
for a man has his father's wife. And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn?
Let him who has done this be removed from among you.
For though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and as if present,
I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing.
When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present,
with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan
for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord."
Again, basically kicked him out, put him out of the community.
Now, you know, it's true when Paul writes his second letter to the Corinthians,
he talks about this incident, this guy.
It's true that he wants this guy to repent and come back into the community.
That's true.
But what's also true is Paul is deeply concerned about the purity of the community.
To be delivered unto Satan means you're kicked out of the church.
Why? The church is holy ground. It is a new Israel.
The church is the place where the presence of God is, just like sacred geography,
cosmic geography, the Day of Atonement, sin is to be put out of the community.
Okay, the sinner needs to repent and forsake that so that he can be brought back
into the community.
So the whole concept of what we today, we call this church discipline,
is based upon cosmic geographical thinking in Paul's head,
you put sin outside of the community, it has no place in the community.
Now, obviously, you know, everybody's a sinner in church, okay, we know that.
But when sin becomes known to the community, like it would have been known in the act
of the high priests laying the sins of the nation on the goat's head,
it's not like you buddy up to the goat and take rides on it.
Okay, it doesn't get turned into a kiddie ride.
The goat is driven from the community, it's a symbolic ritual act.
It illustrates and teaches a point. Okay?
It's publicly known, and it's publicly dealt with. That's what he's talking about here.
So he's using, again, the concepts of the church as sacred space,
the kingdom of priests and the church has holy ground
to teach people in 1 Corinthians about what to do in these situations.
And this isn't the only one in the New Testament,
again there are different passages like this
but I think it's important to realize that it's based on not just Old Testament thinking
with very specific cosmic geographical thinking.
Now I've linked to Garland here.
I don't know how much of this I really want to comment on.
We have a few minutes left here.
But he says here, you know, how are we supposed to take these phrases.
This is Greek, it translates into the destruction of the flesh, okay, in order that the spirit
might be saved in the day of the Lord.
How are we supposed to understand these things?
Well, he says, first of all, this is over to the English here.
"you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh."
Let me turn on my interlinear here, "for" is "eis", is that preposition again,
and he discusses this here, he says, look, it can either be purpose or result,
it doesn't mean that you're expelling him, so that like with, you know,
for the purpose of, oh, let's hope he gets destroyed.
No, no. In other words, it can very well mean, and I think it does,
that when you put somebody out of the family of God, they're in the realm of Satan.
Basically they don't have the protection of the community,
out in the world of darkness, and it could devour them.
This behavior that they're engaging in could lead to destruction out in the world.
And Paul is saying, look, you expel him and this very well could be the result.
But this person has chosen this path because they refuse to repent. Okay.
And again, is the same situation in the Old Testament.
What do flesh and its destruction entail?
Garland discusses this, I think basically, let me just go down to his conclusion
to save some time.
Now, he says, most of the time, people will say the word olothreutēs (destruction)
denotes physical death, he doesn't really think that this is the point
and he's going to discuss why Paul's blessing in 1 Thessalonians 5:23.
You know, he wants believers to be sanctified, it reveals that he does not think that one
part of a person that will be destroyed and other parts save, it's not like you can
split the person into spirit and flesh and one gets destroyed and the other doesn't.
So he goes through all these different sorts of ideas.
When it comes down to this, he says, Let's see here.
"Another interpretation understands the handing over to Satan to mean
excluding the man entirely from the fellowship
and ejecting him into the realm of Satan, who is still unbound."
And I actually think this is the best way to understand this.
Destruction of the flesh could mean lots of things, it doesn't mean
he's instantly going to be killed.
It just means that if he's left to his flesh, and he's out in the world, where there's no
sanctifying influence, there's no good influence, he's out community now,
this very well could lead to physical destruction.
But if he wants to be there, if he doesn't want to come back,
then it can even be more, it can mean like he has given himself over to darkness,
this person, and that could have even more than physical consequences.
Again, Paul is thinking, with respect to this person, the believer,
just like they were in Israel, do you want to be part of the community or not?
You don't earn Yahweh's favor, you don't earn God's favor, Jesus favor.
It's not a performance contest.
He wants you to live a certain way to demonstrate that he is the object of your loyalty.
And if you refuse to do that, then that tells you that he is not the object of your loyalty.
Something else is or someone else's is, or some other entity is.
And so for Paul, it's this serious because of this worldview,
again, this cosmic worldview that he has