Joined With a Harlot

Joined With a Harlot (body). (1 Co 6:16).  The man and woman are in the eyes of God considered one flesh, but particularly the result of their union: the child.  Man is the active principle of fact and reason, the woman is the passive principle of love and experientialism. They combine in love to produce new life. These symbols translate into a PW made up of historical facts that impact the spirit in a penetrating but ineffable way.

If man were to be married to or have relations with a harlot, it is the figure for a union with an experientialism uncontrolled by these facts and without careful thought about them. The woman is indiscriminating in her relations with men except by their ability to carnally profit her. Paul reapplies these as the antithesis to the believer-to-Christ/Holy Spirit, body-to-spirit.

The key to Paul’s warnings to flee the sin of the body is found in 1Co 6:18: “Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body, but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.” Burkitt (1650-1703) remarks: “all other outward sins, as drunkenness, murder, theft, etc. have the body as an instrument for committing them; yet in this sin of uncleanness the body is not only the instrument, but the object also, for the unclean person doth not only sin with his body, but he sins against his body.” However true this is, while keeping the symbol in orbit around bodily sins, Paul obviously means that these sins are symbols of greater sins, and we should be teaching through this that there are greater sins. If when one commits fornication one also sins against his own body, it being both instrument and object, then to sin against the body of the prophetic scriptures is also a sin greater than a sin against any commandments, since it is also both instrument (means of application of the law) and object (quintessential cause of the law). A violation of any commandment is murder or theft, but a violation of the importance and outworking of the prophecies is also a sin against the whole of the scriptures, as fornication. If bodily fornication is an example of quintessential sin, then it is easy to accept that the PW is quintessentially a book of platitudes, stories, moralisms, sayings, religious declarations, and commandments for the behavior of the flesh, and the Messianic prophecies are therefore to be considered only mere addenda for less faithful and hardhearted people as a possible reason (instrument) for accepting Christ, not necessarily faith objects as well.