What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?

Your body - not 'bodies.' Proof of 1 Corinthians 6:18. As in 1 Corinthians 3:17 he represented the whole company of believers, the Church, as "the temple of God" the Spirit; so here, the body of each individual is viewed as the "temple of the Holy Spirit." So John 14:23. Still, though many, the several members form one temple, the whole collectively being that which each is in miniature individually. As the Jews had one temple only, so in the full sense all Christian churches and individual believers form one temple only. "YOUR (plural) body" is distinguished here from "HIS OWN (particular, individual) [ idion (G2398)] body" (1 Corinthians 6:18). In sinning against "his own body," the fornicator sins against "your body," that of "Christ," whose 'members your bodies' are (1 Corinthians 6:15). Fornication is a sacrilegious desecration of God's temple to profane uses. The unseen, but more efficient, Spirit of God in the spiritual temple now takes the place of the visible Shekinah in the material temple. The whole man is the temple, the soul the inmost shrine, the understanding and heart the holy place, the body the porch and exterior. Chastity is the guardian of the temple, to prevent anything unclean entering which might provoke the indwelling God to abandon it as defiled (Tertullian, 'De Cultu Foeminarum'). None but God can claim a temple: here the Holy Spirit is assigned one; therefore the Holy Spirit is God.

Not your own (1 Corinthians 6:18: cf. 1 Corinthians 6:20). We have no right to alienate our body, which is the Lord's. In ancient servitude the slave's person was wholly his master's property, not his own. Purchase was one way of acquiring a slave. Man has sold himself to sin (1 Kings 21:20; Romans 7:14). Christ buys him to Himself, to serve Him (Romans 6:16).

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