There is a verse in the third chapter of First Corinthians that has been used to frighten more believers than almost any other sentence Paul wrote. It is quoted at people who have sinned, at people who have quarrelled, at people who have left one congregation for another, and at people who have simply grown tired. It is quoted, nearly always, in a particular shortened form:

"If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy." (1 Corinthians 3:17 KJV)

Read that far and stop, and the meaning seems obvious and terrible. A man does a bad work. God kills him. Whatever else that is, it is not the gospel of the grace of God. It is not the message of the apostle who wrote that a man is justified "freely by his grace" (Romans 3:24 KJV), that salvation is "not of works, lest any man should boast" (Ephesians 2:9 KJV), and that God "justifieth the ungodly" (Romans 4:5 KJV).

The difficulty is real, and it deserves to be treated as real. But it is worth noticing before anything else that the difficulty is manufactured by where the quotation stops.

If that verse has ever been turned on you — if you have carried it since somebody quoted it at you, and have gone on carrying it because you could never quite work out what you were supposed to have done — then this study is for you, and I would ask you to read the whole of it before you decide anything. You were not careless to be troubled by it. Read the way it is usually handed out, it is troubling, and the men who handed it to you very likely believed every word. But it was handed to you cut in half, and the half that was left off is the half addressed to you.

The clause left off the end is the clause that answers the question

Here is the verse with a few more words of it — still not all:

"If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy." (1 Corinthians 3:17 KJV)

That is better. Now at least we know why God does it: because the temple is holy. But there is one clause still missing, four words long, and it is the one everything turns on. Here is the whole verse:

"If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are." (1 Corinthians 3:17 KJV)

Which temple ye are. Paul is not warning his readers about a temple. He is telling them they are it.

That single clause rearranges the entire sentence. As long as the temple is some third thing standing off at a distance, the reader has no part in the verse at all except as a candidate for the destroying. The moment the temple is identified as the people addressed, he has been given a part — and it is not that one. He is of the temple. He belongs to the holy thing the sentence is protecting.

Who the defiler is, and what the destroying falls on, are questions worth working out slowly, and this article works them out. But settle the reader's place first, because that is the part the shortened quotation robs him of, and it does not wait on the rest. Whatever else the verse is doing, it is not proposing to destroy the temple. It says the temple is holy, and it says that is the reason.

Everything below is unpacking that.

Paul has been talking about builders and building material for the whole chapter

The verse does not stand alone, and it is never rightly used alone. It closes a passage that began in the first verses of the chapter with a complaint about division — one saying "I am of Paul" and another "I am of Apollos" (1 Corinthians 3:4 KJV) — and Paul's answer to that division is to take the men down off the pedestal. They are not lords. They are labourers.

"Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man?" (1 Corinthians 3:5 KJV)

Then he gives the figure that governs the rest of the chapter:

"For we are labourers together with God: ye are God's husbandry, ye are God's building." (1 Corinthians 3:9 KJV)

Mark the two parties. There is a we who labour, and there is a ye who are the building. Paul and Apollos stand on one side of that sentence; the Corinthians on the other. And already here, seven verses before the temple is named, the men at Corinth are addressed as one thing rather than many. Not buildings. A building.

Note carefully what that does and does not settle. The point at verse 9 is the number — singular, one structure, a company addressed as a unit. It is not yet a claim about which structure. Paul is not telling the Corinthians they are a building of their own, a local house standing alongside other local houses; that is a reading the passage will not bear, and the letter has already guarded against it in its opening line, where the address runs past Corinth altogether — "with all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours" (1 Corinthians 1:2 KJV). They are being addressed as the thing they are part of. Which building it is, Paul will say plainly in a moment, and Ephesians will say plainer still.

And the two sides of that sentence are roles inside a picture — husbandry, building, planting and watering — not two classes of men. They tell you what Paul is doing in the argument, which is putting ministers back in their place. They do not sort men into those who are in the Body and those who are not.

Take the illustration exactly as far as Paul takes it and no further. What it asserts is fact — these people really are God's, really are one thing, really are indwelt; that much is not picture-language but plain statement, and the chapter will say it flatly seven verses on. What is picture-language is the scaffolding: labourers, materials, a structure going up. Press the scaffolding for doctrine it was never carrying and it will give you nonsense — such as that Paul stood outside the Body of Christ. He most certainly did not — "For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body" (1 Corinthians 12:13 KJV), and he counts himself in that we as plainly as he counts them. He suffers "for his body's sake, which is the church" (Colossians 1:24 KJV), a thing no outsider could say. When he wants the figure the other way round he takes it the other way round, and puts himself and his readers together inside the structure: "in whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit" (Ephesians 2:22 KJV).

Hold on to one thing from that, because it comes back. A man can be at work on the temple and be part of it at the same time. Paul was both, and so is every believer who ever taught anybody anything. That will matter a great deal when we come to ask who the any man of verse 17 could be.

And now take the roll of who is actually in these opening verses, because it settles something before we ever reach the hard verse. On one side stand the two ministers we have already met. On the other stand the Corinthians, and Paul does not spare them: "brethren … babes in Christ" (1 Corinthians 3:1 KJV), "ye are yet carnal: for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions" (1 Corinthians 3:3 KJV).

Now mark what Paul does with the first group. They are the worst-behaved people named anywhere in this chapter, and not one of the things he charges them with is called defiling. Envying is not. Strife is not. Division is not. Taking sides over a preacher is not. He answers all of it by telling them what they are: ye are God's building, ye are the temple of God.

So the chapter settles, before the difficulty even arrives, something the sermon never lets it settle: carnality is not defiling. Envying, strife, division, taking sides over teachers — all of it is named here, in these very verses, and none of it is what verse 17 is talking about. Paul answers it with identity, not with destruction. Which lands squarely on the misuse, because these are precisely the people the verse gets quoted at. The chapter's own quarrellers are exempted by the apostle himself.

From there the passage runs straight:

"According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise masterbuilder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth thereon. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon. For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ." (1 Corinthians 3:10–11 KJV)

One foundation. Many builders. And the builders are handling material of very different quality — "gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble" (1 Corinthians 3:12 KJV) — which is a figure for doctrine, for what a man teaches into the building he is working on. Then comes the day of examination:

"Every man's work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is." (1 Corinthians 3:13 KJV)

This is the judgment seat of Christ, and I have treated it at length in The Judgment Seat of Christ: Rewards, Not Condemnation. The point to carry forward is small and decisive. The fire tries the work. Paul says so in as many words. It does not try the man.

And be exact about what kind of material this is, because a great deal further down turns on it. Gold and stubble are not literal fabric going into a literal wall. They are the sort of a man's work, and Paul says so in the same sentence: the fire tries every man's work "of what sort it is" (1 Corinthians 3:13). That is an assay, not a demolition. What the fire determines is quality; what it consumes is a man's labour.

Take that now, because it quietly settles an objection that is coming. If the wood and hay were literally built into the fabric of the temple, then poor material would make a poorer temple, and burning it would take something out of the holy thing. Neither follows. The material is what a builder contributes and what the fire assays — it is not what the temple is made of. Its holiness is not accumulated out of what men bring to it. It is given, and given in Christ — "of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption" (1 Corinthians 1:30). Bad material does not make a bad temple. It makes a bad workman's day at the judgment seat.

The verse just before it has already ruled on what happens to a believer whose work is destroyed

This is the part that is nearly always skipped, and it settles more than anything else in the chapter.

"If any man's work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire." (1 Corinthians 3:14–15 KJV)

Paul has just told us what becomes of a builder whose work is a total loss. His work burns. He suffers loss. And he himself is saved. Not probably saved. Not saved if the loss was not too great. Saved — with the fire taking everything he built and touching nothing of him.

Now hold that beside the verse two lines later, and notice that Paul uses the same opening words. If any man's work shall be burned. If any man defile the temple of God. The same any man — and, on the face of it, two outcomes that will not sit together: saved in the one, destroyed in the other.

But look where that collision actually comes from, because it does not come from the text. It comes from an assumption we brought to the second word — that destroy must mean the ruin of the man. Grant that assumption and the two verses cannot both be describing the same person doing the same thing, and something has to give. Refuse it and they can.

So the passage puts a choice in front of us, and it is worth stating plainly rather than hurrying past. Between verse 15 and verse 17, either the man has changed, or the word has. Either the any man of verse 17 is somebody other than the builder of verse 15 — or destroy does not carry there what we assumed it carried, and the same man is in view throughout, with the fire taking his work and leaving him.

Those are the only two doors. What matters for the anxious reader is that both of them leave him saved. The verse cannot be turned against the believer's standing by either route, and anyone who quotes it to threaten a believer with the loss of his salvation has not read as far as verse 15.

The temple is the Body of Christ, and the Corinthians are addressed as being it

Which door we go through depends on knowing what the temple is, so take that first.

"Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?" (1 Corinthians 3:16 KJV)

Notice first how Paul introduces it: know ye not. That is a formula he uses eight times in this one epistle — here, and at 5:6, 6:3, 6:9, 6:15, 6:16, 6:19 and 9:24 — and in every single case it takes hold of something the readers already possess and makes it the ground of the argument he is already making. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump grounds the purging of the leaven. Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ grounds the fleeing of fornication. It never opens a new subject; it supplies the reason for the one in hand.

So verse 16 is not Paul turning to something else once the building passage is over. It is the capstone of the building passage. Let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon — and do you not know what you are building? It is God's temple. The whole weight of take heed rests on what is now disclosed about the structure, and that means verses 16 and 17 are not an appendix to the chapter. They are its point.

Look at how the sentence is built. Ye — plural, a company of people. The temple — singular, one thing. Plural subject, singular name. That construction says they are one thing together, not many of that thing separately. In this verse Paul is not telling each Corinthian that his own body is a temple — that is a true thing and Paul does say it, three chapters on, and we will come to it; he is simply not saying it here. Nor is he telling the assembly at Corinth that it is a temple, one of many scattered about the empire. He tells them they are the temple — the definite article is his, not mine, and he uses it three times in two verses.

He does the same thing again a few chapters on, and there he marks the pivot himself so that nobody can miss it:

"Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular." (1 Corinthians 12:27 KJV)

Body, singular — all of them, one. Members, plural — each of them, distinct. Paul swings from the joint to the several inside a single sentence, and he changes the number of the noun when he does it. He is being exact.

So ye are the temple of God is the same truth as ye are the body of Christ, said with a different figure. And that is precisely how he says it in Ephesians, where the building figure and the temple figure are laid over one another:

"In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord: in whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit." (Ephesians 2:21–22 KJV)

All the building. Not each building. One structure, framed together, growing into one holy temple. If a reader wonders whether Paul means one building or several fitted side by side, the verse has answered him before he finished asking: it is all the building, and what it grows into is an holy temple, singular.

This is the doctrine of the mystery in a figure. The temple of God today is not a place, a nation, or an institution. It is the joint-body of Christ, Jew and Gentile together, indwelt by the Spirit of God — the thing that had been kept secret and was revealed to Paul.

Your body in chapter six is a different construction, and a different subject

This is where the passage is most often collapsed, so it is worth separating carefully. Three chapters later Paul writes:

"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?" (1 Corinthians 6:19 KJV)

That is a true statement and a precious one, but it is not the same statement as chapter three. Chapter three has ye are the temple — a company addressed as one. Chapter six has your body is the temple — a possessive, which hands one body to each man, his own and nobody else's. No corporate body is in view there at all. Chapter six is about a particular sin committed against a man's "own body" (1 Corinthians 6:18 KJV), and the answer to it is that this body — his — houses the Spirit of God.

Notice how Paul got the individual. He did not get it by writing temples. He got it by rebuilding the sentence — and I have set the two constructions side by side in Can a Saved Person Continue in the Works of the Flesh.

Neither statement needs defending against the other. Your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost; the Body of Christ is the temple of God. Paul teaches both, and a believer loses nothing by holding both — he only has to hold them where Paul put them.

Keep them apart and a great deal of trouble disappears. Nearly every abusive use of 1 Corinthians 3:17 depends on quietly moving one into the other's chapter — taking the individual body out of chapter six, dropping it into chapter three, and then collecting chapter three's him shall God destroy on the way back out. The error is never the doctrine of chapter six. The error is the transfer, and what it produces: a verse about doctrine being built into the Body of Christ turned into a verse about personal conduct with a death penalty attached to it.

The smoking sermon runs on that collapse, and it exempts itself from its own rule

Anyone raised in a Baptist church has heard this one preached. The text announced is know ye not that your body is the temple of God, and the application is cigarettes. Smoking harms the body. The body is God's temple. Harming God's temple is defiling it. And then, to give the sermon its teeth, the preacher reaches back three chapters for a penalty that chapter six never supplied: if any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy.

Look again at the text he announced, because the collapse is already sitting in it. There is no verse in the Bible that reads your body is the temple of God. Chapter six says "your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost" (1 Corinthians 6:19 KJV); chapter three says "ye are the temple of God" (1 Corinthians 3:16 KJV). The announced text has taken the subject from one and the wording from the other and fused them into a sentence Paul never wrote — and the moment that is done, chapter three's penalty looks as though it belongs.

Let one thing be said plainly here, because it would be a poor argument otherwise. The point is not that the Holy Ghost and God are two different parties. The Holy Ghost is God, and Paul settles that in this very verse without appearing to notice a difficulty: "ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you" (1 Corinthians 3:16 KJV) — God's temple, indwelt by God's Spirit, in one breath. Nothing here turns on the divine name, and no one should read it that way.

What the two verses do not share is their subject — the distinction drawn in the section just above. That is what the fused text erases, and it is the only difference that matters here, because the ye of chapter three is what the rest of that chapter has been building on and threatening. Change the subject and every sentence in the neighbourhood changes with it.

Take the rest apart in the order it was built.

The verse that supplies the penalty is not about the body at all. Nothing in 1 Corinthians 3 concerns what a man puts into himself. The material under discussion is what a builder builds into the temple — gold and silver, or wood and stubble — and everything the chapter has said about that material, from the foundation onward, is about what a man teaches. Tobacco is not in the passage, and neither is any other substance. The subject had to be carried in from somewhere else.

And the verse that supplies the subject does not carry that penalty. Chapter six ends not with a threat but with a charge: "For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's." (1 Corinthians 6:20 KJV) Paul's conclusion is glorify God in your body. He does not append or He will destroy you, and no reader would ever have supplied that from the passage in front of him. It had to be fetched from chapter three. So the sermon takes its subject from one chapter and its sentence from another, and neither chapter, read by itself, produces the doctrine.

And weld them together anyway, and the sentence destroys itself. That is worth a section of its own and it gets one further down, where the readings of this verse are weighed against each other — because the fault it exposes is not really about tobacco at all. In short: if the temple is the man's own body, then the defiler and the temple are the same person, and Paul's for clause has God destroying the holy thing because it is holy. A reading that does that to the sentence has already answered itself. Meanwhile the sermon still has to face its own rule.

Then press the principle, and watch it come apart on its own. If the standard is that a believer defiles God's temple by taking into his body something known to harm it, that standard has vastly more work to do than one sermon ever gives it. It falls squarely on the medicine cabinet — on the prescription whose printed sheet of side effects runs to a column of fine print, on the common drug known to tax the liver or the heart, on the course of treatment that deliberately makes a man sick in order to make him well. If the rule is what it claims to be, none of that can be exempt.

Yet nobody preaches it. And nobody should — Paul told Timothy to take something "for thy stomach's sake and thine often infirmities" (1 Timothy 5:23 KJV), and a believer is entirely free to follow his doctor's counsel to the letter without answering to anyone for it. But notice what that exemption costs the sermon. The moment an entire category of known bodily harm is quietly set aside with no scriptural warrant offered for setting it aside, the thing being preached has stopped being a principle and has become a list. And a list that admits tobacco while excusing the pharmacy, and has generally had nothing whatever to say about the table or about the man working himself into an early grave, is not a scriptural standard being applied consistently. It is a cultural inheritance with a verse fastened to it afterward.

Paul had already answered this whole way of thinking, and answered it in advance:

"Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances, (Touch not; taste not; handle not; Which all are to perish with the using;) after the commandments and doctrines of men? Which things have indeed a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body; not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh." (Colossians 2:20–23 KJV)

Touch not; taste not; handle not. Paul does not dispute that such rules look wise — he grants it, in as many words: they have "a shew of wisdom" (Colossians 2:23 KJV). That is exactly why they are effective, and exactly why they have to be answered from the text rather than waved off. His verdict is not that the rules are foolish but that they are the commandments and doctrines of men, and that for all their severity they accomplish nothing against the flesh they were built to restrain. I have taken up that passage at length in Who Is Paul Protecting? Answering the Colossians 2 Objection, and the same machinery at the table in No Such Thing as a Biblical Diet: A Contradiction in Terms and Does the Bible Teach Total Abstinence from Wine and Strong Drink.

And it is worth observing — carefully, and as observation rather than as our authority — that this is not the first time such rules met that answer. What follows is the Lord Jesus in His earthly ministry to Israel, not doctrine addressed to the Body of Christ. We do not build on it. Our ground is Paul, and Paul settles the matter in one clause that a later section will take up properly: "Unto the pure all things are pure" (Titus 1:15 KJV). Defilement is not in the thing. That is the doctrine, and it stands without any help from what follows. But mark what the quarrel was about. Scribes and Pharisees came to Him complaining that His disciples ate "with unwashen hands" — and the charge they brought was not that the law had been broken but that "the tradition of the elders" had (Mark 7:5 KJV; compare Matthew 15:2). A rule of men, about what may touch the body, laid on other men's consciences. His answer:

"Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men." (Mark 7:7–8 KJV)

Set that beside what Paul wrote to the Colossians — "after the commandments and doctrines of men" (Colossians 2:22 KJV) — and the same words are answering the same kind of rule in two different programs. Whatever else divides those programs, and much does, God's estimate of men's traditions bound on other men's consciences is not one of the things that changed.

And He answered them with the word itself. This is worth quoting rather than summarising, because it is the plainest thing said anywhere in Scripture about where defiling comes from, and it uses the very word we have been tracking:

"There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man." (Mark 7:15 KJV)

"Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man." (Matthew 15:11 KJV)

And He said what does come out:

"For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders … All these evil things come from within, and defile the man." (Mark 7:21, 23 KJV)

Not the substance. The man. That is the same verdict Paul reaches in Titus, arriving from the other direction — unto the pure all things are pure, because the purity or the defilement was never in the thing to begin with.

Now take it in its narrow form, and no wider. It would be careless to lift nothing from without a man can defile him out as a flat rule standing over every age, because under the law there genuinely were things that defiled by contact and by eating, and Israel was bound by them — a man was unclean for touching a carcase, and no amount of right thinking made him clean. That is why this same passage speaks of "purging all meats" (Mark 7:19 KJV). He was signalling the end of that arrangement, not denying it had ever stood. Both are true, and each is exact for its own subject: the ceremonial uncleanness of Leviticus answered one question, and the Lord here is answering another one entirely — which the Pharisees had raised, and about a rule that was never in Leviticus at all.

One detail worth carrying away, because it is the whole method of this article in a single phrase. When Mark introduces the quarrel he writes that the disciples ate "with defiled, that is to say, with unwashen, hands" (Mark 7:2 KJV). That is to say. The text stops and tells you what defiled means in that setting — ceremonially unwashed, nothing more. It does not assume the word carries its content around with it. Neither should we. In Mark 7 the passage supplies the sense and says so; in 1 Corinthians 3 the passage supplies it too, only without the aside — and the sense it supplies there is not hands, and not meat, but the material a man builds into the people of God.

What does carry across, and what Paul says in his own words to us, is narrower and enough: the defilement that matters has never sat in the substance. It sits in the man. That is what "Unto the pure all things are pure" (Titus 1:15 KJV) says, and it is the reason a list of forbidden things was never going to reach the problem. A rule can take a thing out of a man's hand. It cannot touch what the thing was doing there.

None of this is a defence of the cigarette, and none of it touches the doctrine of chapter six. Let that be said as plainly as it can be: your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, it was bought with a price, and Paul draws a real charge from it — "therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's" (1 Corinthians 6:20 KJV). That doctrine is not what is under criticism here. It stands, and every believer is answerable to it.

What is wrong with the sermon is not its concern but its machinery: a text welded out of two chapters, a penalty fetched from a passage about doctrine, and a rule quietly exempted from its own consequences. Take those away and the concern is left standing — with a better handle under it, which Paul supplies two verses earlier in the very chapter the sermon was already in:

"All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any." (1 Corinthians 6:12 KJV)

Expedient, and not brought under the power of any. That is the test, and it is a far more searching one than a list, because a list can be kept by a man whose heart never comes into it while mastery cannot. It reaches the habit itself and asks who is holding whom. What it does not do — what nothing in either chapter does — is put the man's salvation on the table. Whether a believer smokes touches his walk, his testimony, his usefulness, and his stewardship of a body that was bought with a price. It does not touch his standing, and it never had the power to.

There is a second misuse built on the same collapse, and it belongs here beside the first. The temple is not the local congregation as an institution, and this verse hands no officer, board, or assembly any authority over anybody. Nothing in the passage creates a court, and the Body of Christ has never been given the keys that Israel's kingdom assembly held. That question I have taken up separately in Where Two or Three are Gathered: A Courtroom, Not a Prayer Meeting. A man who quotes 1 Corinthians 3:17 to make himself the guardian of a house he has appointed himself over has misread the verse twice — once in supposing his congregation is the temple, and again in supposing the verse put him in charge of it.

The verse never says what defiling is — the passage does, and the gap between them is where the abuse gets in

Here is the thing to notice about verse 17, and almost nobody notices it. Paul names an act and does not describe it in the sentence that names it. He writes if any man defile the temple of God and moves straight to the consequence. No object, no example, no definition — nothing inside that sentence tells you what a man would have to do in order to do it.

Be exact about the claim, because it is not that Paul left the word undefined. He defines it thoroughly, and we are about to watch him do it. What he does not do is define it in the one sentence that gets quoted. The definition sits in the verses on either side, where a man reading the passage cannot miss it and a man handed the verse alone will never see it. The gap is not in the text. It is in the quotation.

That is why this verse, of all verses, can be aimed at anything. A word left open in the sentence a man is quoting, inside a sentence that threatens, is an open jar — and every man who reaches for it pours in whatever he was already worried about. Smoking. Splitting a congregation. Missing the meetings. Marrying the wrong person. The verse never contradicts him, because the verse never said.

And now put that beside the other half of the sentence, because the two of them work on each other. Him shall God destroy is about as heavy as words get. Taken by itself, a heavy penalty is bearable — a man can hear a severe consequence attached to a named offence and go and find out whether he has committed it. Taken by itself, a vague word costs nothing; it is merely unclear, and nothing rides on it.

Put the two together and something worse than vagueness happens, and it is worth being exact about what. The blank does not stay a blank. Somebody fills it — and he fills it from outside the passage, out of his tradition or his upbringing or whatever he is most concerned about that year. So the man in the pew is not handed an undefined threat at all. He is handed a defined one, and the definition is not the Bible's.

Look at what that does to the two halves of the sentence. The severity is genuine Scripture — him shall God destroy is really there, and the hearer can look it up and find it. The content is a man's — supplied, unmarked, from somewhere the chapter never goes. And because the two arrive fused, the hearer cannot easily separate them. He checks the verse; the verse is real; the weight is real; and the thing he is being told it means comes along with it wearing the same authority.

That is the machinery, and it works the same whether or not anybody intends it. A rule that could never carry a death sentence on its own borrows one, and the borrowing is invisible because the sentence it borrowed from is inspired.

It also explains why the fear will not lift. A man can satisfy a rule; he cannot satisfy whoever holds the definition. Give up tobacco and the blank can be refilled — with the wrong music, the wrong version, the wrong friendships, the wrong hemline. There is no state he can reach in which the verse has nothing left to say to him, because the verse was never the thing setting the terms. That is not conviction, which names a thing and can be answered. It is dread, which names nothing and cannot.

So take the definition from where it actually is. Paul left the word open in the sentence and filled it in the paragraph, on both sides of the verse, and a reader who looks up from the one line will not miss it.

Before it, the whole passage is about what a man builds. Foundation, masterbuilder, material, "of what sort it is" (1 Corinthians 3:13 KJV), fire. Six verses of it, and every one about the same thing.

After it, Paul names the contaminants outright, and he does it in the very next breath:

"Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God." (1 Corinthians 3:18–19 KJV)

"Therefore let no man glory in men." (1 Corinthians 3:21 KJV)

The wisdom of this world, and glorying in men. There are the two, named in plain words within four verses of the defiling. And they are exactly what Paul opened the chapter with — "I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos" (1 Corinthians 3:4 KJV), which is glorying in men, and which he calls walking "as men" (1 Corinthians 3:3 KJV). The chapter closes its own circle. To defile the temple of God is to build the world's wisdom and the following of men into it, in the place where the foundation ought to be.

Now notice what the chapter never takes up. In twenty-three verses, not one is about a man's body, his appetites, or what he takes into himself. The subject the smoking sermon borrowed this penalty for is not raised anywhere in the chapter it borrowed the penalty from.

And the one place the chapter does reach for eating, it settles the whole question of how to read its figures. Paul opens it this way:

"I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able." (1 Corinthians 3:2 KJV)

Milk and meat — food language, in the third verse of the chapter, and nobody has ever supposed Paul was discussing the Corinthians' diet. Everyone reads it correctly without being told: he means what he had been able to teach them. The chapter's own opening establishes that when this passage talks about what goes into people, it means doctrine. Which is precisely how the wood, hay and stubble ought to have been read ten verses later, and precisely how defile ought to be read five verses after that.

Splitting a congregation comes nearer, and it should be given its due, because division is genuinely in this chapter at both ends. But it is there as the occasion, not the definition. The envying and strife of verse 3 are what prompted the letter; the defiling is what produced them. Paul treats the following of men as the disease and the split as the rash, and he goes after the disease.

Here is the rule underneath all of this, and it is worth more than the verse it came from. When the load-bearing word of a passage is left undefined in its own sentence, its meaning comes from the neighbourhood — and from nobody's concerns, neither the reader's nor those of the man teaching him. The authority over what a word means in a passage is the passage, and that authority is not transferable: not to a tradition, not to a pulpit, and not to you either. If the content of the key word has to be fetched from outside, whoever fetched it has put himself where the text belongs. And the test takes about ten seconds: does my definition appear anywhere in the surrounding verses? The wisdom of this world is in the next verse. Glorying in men is two verses further. Tobacco is not in the chapter, and neither is anything like it.

Paul's use of the word elsewhere says the same thing

The context settles it, and Paul's own vocabulary confirms it. He uses defile only four times in all his epistles, and this verse is one of them. Here are the other three:

"their conscience being weak is defiled" (1 Corinthians 8:7 KJV)

"Unto the pure all things are pure: but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure; but even their mind and conscience is defiled." (Titus 1:15 KJV)

"for them that defile themselves with mankind" (1 Timothy 1:10 KJV)

Two of the three name the same two things: the mind and the conscience. And the third sits in a sentence that closes "and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine" (1 Timothy 1:10 KJV) — the whole list is being measured against doctrine.

And take the whole of that middle verse, because its first clause is the thing itself. Unto the pure all things are pure. Paul is not saying that pure people may do as they like. He is saying something about where defilement is located — and he locates it in the man, not in the thing. The same object, handled by two men, defiles one and not the other; so whatever is doing the defiling cannot be the object. Then he says where it does sit: their mind and conscience.

That is the clause promised earlier, and it dismantles the whole method of the sermon examined above, which works by treating a substance as defiling in itself. It also tells you why a rule never reaches far enough. A rule operates on the thing. Paul has just said the thing was never where the trouble was.

Look where Titus 1:15 stands. It is in the middle of a passage about false teachers — "many unruly and vain talkers and deceivers" who "subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not" (Titus 1:10–11 KJV), men "giving heed to Jewish fables, and commandments of men, that turn from the truth" (Titus 1:14 KJV). Then: their mind and conscience is defiled. The defiling agent is teaching, and where it lands is the mind.

Both witnesses say one thing. You do not defile the temple of God by damaging a structure. You defile it the way Paul says defiling always happens — by getting corrupt material into the minds and consciences of the people who are the temple. Which is exactly what the wood, hay and stubble were the whole time: not lumber, but what a man teaches into the people he is building.

And that answers the objection this raises. If the temple is holy, someone will ask, what is left for anybody to spoil? This much: the standing is holy and out of reach, and the minds and consciences of its members are not. Those can be got at, and Paul spends whole epistles fighting men who were getting at them.

Two things are true of a believer at once, and holding them apart answers most of the difficulty in this passage. There is what he is — holy, sanctified, in Christ, a standing given to him and not built by him. And there is the order he presently lives in, which is not yet what it will be. His body belongs to that second order: "this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality" (1 Corinthians 15:53). And so does his mind. Paul uses the very same word of it, fearing lest "your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ" (2 Corinthians 11:3), and saying of false teachers that "even their mind and conscience is defiled" (Titus 1:15). The mind is not in the untouchable class. It is in the corruptible one, alongside the body.

And that second order does not last. What is changed at the coming is not a part of the man but the man — "we shall all be changed" (1 Corinthians 15:51) — and the inner man is named with him: "to the end he may stablish your hearts unblameable in holiness before God, even our Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Thessalonians 3:13). The church is presented "holy and without blemish" (Ephesians 5:27), which is no description of glorified bodies housing corrupted minds. Even knowing is completed: "now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" (1 Corinthians 13:12).

So defiling works entirely inside the order that is passing away, and cannot reach the order that is not. That is why Paul can fear for minds and pronounce anathema over doctrine, and never once suggest that a believer's standing is in question. The damage is real — he groans under the corruption of the body too, and it is no less real for being temporary. What it cannot do is touch the holy thing, because the holy thing was never made out of it.

Scripture sets the two facts side by side without the least embarrassment. In the same breath Paul can say what they are and call them to be cleansed:

"for ye are the temple of the living God … Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord" (2 Corinthians 6:16–17 KJV)

"Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God." (2 Corinthians 7:1 KJV)

Ye are the temple of the living God — then let us cleanse ourselves. Declared holy and called to cleanse, four verses apart, by the same apostle to the same people. If that is no contradiction there, it is none here.

Which brings the matter round to a place worth sitting with for a moment. If defiling means corrupt material worked into a believer's mind and conscience, then consider what is actually happening when this verse is preached with a meaning fetched from outside it. A man is handed God's penalty fastened to another man's definition, and his conscience is bound with a fear the passage never put there — bound by teaching, which is the one instrument Paul says does this. Apply the definition evenly and it lands where it lands: the verse is being used to do the very thing it describes.

So if that is where this verse has lived in your mind — as a dread you could never answer, because the terms were never yours to check — you may put it down. Not because the standard has been lowered, but because the word has a meaning the passage supplies, and you can go and read it for yourself. That is the difference between a conscience instructed and a conscience bound.

Two readings of the man, and both of them leave you saved

Now the fork, which the chapter genuinely presents and which honest men have taken both ways.

Paul's sentence has two parties in it. There is the temple of God, which he identifies — which temple ye are. And there is any man who defiles it. The whole question is whether those two are set against each other or not — whether the man doing the defiling stands outside the thing he defiles, or inside it.

This is no careless reading, and it should be given at its strongest. The argument runs like this. The second half of the verse presents no difficulty at all — the audience Paul is addressing is the temple of God, and it says so plainly, ye are. So if the defiler were part of that temple, he would be defiling himself, and God would be destroying His own temple on the very ground that it is holy. Since that will not stand, the man is not part of it: an unsaved deceiver, or a false teacher defiling the temple with wrong doctrine — the kind of man pronounced accursed in Galatians 1:6–8 and feared over in 2 Corinthians 11:3, which are the two passages this reading rests the identification on. Taken that way the difficulty dissolves at its root. The man destroyed was never one saved by the gospel of the grace of God, and there is no believer in the clause to lose anything.

One thing should be added in its defence, because it is usually left out. The reading is often waved away on the assumption that it needs the defiler to be a stranger at a distance, somehow injuring a worldwide Body from outside it. It needs nothing of the kind. A man may be in the meeting every week and not be in the Body, and Paul writes as though he expects precisely that: "there come in those that are unlearned, or unbelievers" (1 Corinthians 14:23 KJV). He closes this very letter with a line that makes little sense unless such a man might be sitting there hearing it read — "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha" (1 Corinthians 16:22 KJV) — and he warns elsewhere of "false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ" (2 Corinthians 11:13 KJV) and of "false brethren unawares brought in, who came in privily" (Galatians 2:4 KJV). So this reading puts the defiler outside the temple, not outside the room — and stated that way it is a good deal harder to answer than it is usually made to look.

And that yields a rule worth carrying past this verse, because it disciplines both sides equally. Scripture's words of place — among you, of your own selves, came in privily, brought in unawares — tell you where a man is standing in the room. They never tell you where he stands in Christ. Paul makes the distinction himself and in a single phrase: false brethren. The noun says where they were; the adjective says what they were; and he will not let the first imply the second. It is not a distinction we are importing to rescue a reading. It is his.

So neither side may take the fork by locating the man. The objector cannot say he must be a stranger, and I cannot say the reverse — that "any man among you" (1 Corinthians 3:18 KJV) proves the defiler saved, or that Paul's "of your own selves shall men arise" (Acts 20:30 KJV), spoken to the Ephesian elders, settles it either. Both phrases put a man in the company and leave his standing exactly where they found it. Location is not evidence here, and an argument that leans on it is leaning on nothing.

The second reading keeps any man where the chapter has had him all along. That phrase runs through the passage — if any man build upon this foundation (v.12), if any man's work abide (v.14), if any man's work shall be burned (v.15) — and of the last of them Paul says outright that the man is saved though his work burns. Nothing in verse 17 announces that the subject has changed. On this reading the defiler is a builder bringing corrupt material, what God destroys is what he built, and verse 17 says severely what verse 15 said gently. The next section tests that against Paul's use of the word.

And it answers the strain the first reading pressed — in two places.

The objection was that a defiler inside the temple would be defiling himself. That only sounds absurd while builder and building are held apart as separate classes of men, and verse 9 does not hold them apart; it assigns roles in a picture. Paul was a labourer on this temple and a member of it at once. And a man harming the very thing he belongs to is not a paradox in this epistle — it is the thing Paul says schism does: "whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it" (1 Corinthians 12:26 KJV). A builder who works corrupt material into the Body damages a house he himself lives in. That is not absurd. It is ordinary, and it is tragic.

The second half of the objection — that God would be tearing down His own holy house — has force only for as long as the destroying is falling on the man. Let it fall on what the man built, and nothing holy is torn down at all. The temple stands. The builder is saved, exactly as verse 15 has already said. The fire takes the wood and the hay, and takes nothing else. On that reading the reason Paul gives is not undone by the destroying but served by it: God burns the corrupt material because the house it was going into is holy.

Hold that before anything else, because it is the whole of what an anxious reader needs: on either reading, no believer is destroyed. One says the destroyed man was never saved; the other says what is destroyed is not the man but his work. They differ over who stands in the clause. They do not differ by a hair over the security of anyone in Christ. When a verse has two possible readings and both leave your salvation exactly where it was, that verse is not a threat to you, and no amount of quoting it at you can make it one.

But mark that this second half is not always answerable, and that is worth saying. It is answerable here only because the work and the man are two different things, so that destroying the one leaves the other standing. Where no such distinction is available it is fatal — and there is a third reading of this verse, mentioned earlier, on which no distinction is available at all.

Why the third reading cannot stand at all

Set beside the two above it the reading most people are actually handed: that the temple is the believer's own body, and that chapter three's penalty attaches to it. Run it out and the sentence destroys itself. On that reading the man who defiles the temple and the temple he defiles are the same person, and Paul's words come out like this:

If any man defile [himself], [himself] shall God destroy; for [himself] is holy, which [himself] ye are.

God destroys the holy thing — and the reason given for destroying it is that it is holy. That is not a hard saying; it is a sentence that has been made to contradict itself. Notice exactly where it breaks. It breaks at for. Paul does not merely mention the holiness in passing; he offers it as the ground of the destroying. So any reading that makes the destroyed thing and the holy thing one and the same turns his reason into his refutation.

The pattern he is drawing on never does this. Wherever Scripture puts defiling and destroying in one sentence, the defiler and the sanctuary are two parties — the man is cut off, the holy place stands (Leviticus 15:31; 20:3; Numbers 19:20; Ezekiel 5:11), and a section below sets those passages out. The fused reading collapses the two into one, and the sentence cannot survive it.

Be exact here, because chapter six is the apparent exception and is not one. Paul does say a man can harm the very temple he himself is: "he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body" (1 Corinthians 6:18 KJV), and the next verse calls that body the temple of the Holy Ghost. So the objection is not that a man cannot damage what he is. It is that where Scripture does say this, it attaches no destroying — chapter six answers such a man with glorify God in your body, and not one word about God destroying him. The penalty is the imported part, and it is the imported part that breaks.

So none of this touches chapter six. Your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, and that stands. What cannot stand is chapter three's penalty bolted onto it. Which leaves the two readings weighed above, and nothing else on the table.

What is built into the temple is doctrine, and Paul names the men who corrupt it

Whichever man is in view, what he does is the same, and the chapter has already told us what it is. The material going into this building is gold and silver or wood and stubble — doctrine. So the defiler is a man bringing corrupt material to the work — and Paul's letters are full of such men.

Paul has a great deal to say about that man, and none of it is gentle.

"But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed." (Galatians 1:8 KJV)

"But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ." (2 Corinthians 11:3 KJV)

"For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ." (2 Corinthians 11:13 KJV)

Accursed. Corrupted. Deceitful workers. Paul reserves his hardest words for men who bring another gospel to the people of God.

Now keep two things apart that are easily run together, because running them together would license a conclusion this article denies. The man of Galatians 1:8 is preaching another gospel — he is not on the foundation at all. The builder of 1 Corinthians 3:12 is on the right foundation and building poorly upon it; Paul has just said so in the previous verse, "other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ" (1 Corinthians 3:11 KJV), and only then does he describe the wood and the hay going up on it. Those are two different men, and only one of them is accursed. A believer who has built badly is not under Galatians 1:8, and nothing here should be read as putting him there. His work burns; the anathema is for the man who lays a different foundation.

What both have in common is only this: the damage is done with doctrine. And on the question of where such a man comes from, Paul does not choose. He warns of both, in one breath, to the elders at Ephesus:

"For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock. Also of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them." (Acts 20:29–30 KJV)

Grievous wolves coming in, and men rising of your own selves. Paul does not treat those as rival theories to be chosen between. He expects both, and tells the men responsible for the flock to watch for both. I have traced how that corrupting work has run through the centuries in Borrowed Words, Borrowed Doctrine and Satan's Two Campaigns: His War on the Remnant and His War on the Body of Christ.

The holiness of the temple is the reason for the destroying, not the thing at risk

We have seen what defiling reaches — minds and consciences. Now see what it never reaches, because Paul makes a point of it in the sentence itself, and the point is easy to read straight past. The clue is the small word joining the two halves: for.

"If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are." (1 Corinthians 3:17 KJV)

The holiness of the temple is not offered as the thing in danger. It is offered as the reason the destroying happens at all. Whatever God destroys here, He destroys it because what the man laid hands on is holy. The holiness does not put the temple at risk; it puts the defiling work under sentence.

And it is worth saying why Paul calls them a temple at all, because he does not leave it to us to guess. He gives the ground himself every time he uses the figure, and it is always the same one: God dwells there. "ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you" (1 Corinthians 3:16) — the reason is inside the very verse this study is about. "your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you" (1 Corinthians 6:19). "builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit" (Ephesians 2:22). Every time he uses it, the ground he gives is the same.

And on the one occasion he reaches back into the Old Testament to support the designation, mark carefully what he reaches for:

"for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people." (2 Corinthians 6:16 KJV)

The text he cites is the dwelling promise, not a purity provision. So the figure is not borrowed out of the law's machinery, and it does not bring that machinery with it. It rests on a fact: God has taken up residence. That is the same reason the body figure is available — we are made members of Christ's body, and that body is indwelt. Two figures, one reality, and both of them grounded in the same thing. Four times Paul names the figure, and four times he names the reason — and not once is the reason Leviticus.

Which is why the holiness in this verse is not an analogy. The temple of God is holy because God is in it. Nothing is being argued here from a resemblance to a building in Jerusalem.

That said, the law does show the pattern by which defiling and destroying work together, and it is the material promised earlier. The tabernacle was holy, and the danger ran one direction only:

"Thus shall ye separate the children of Israel from their uncleanness; that they die not in their uncleanness, when they defile my tabernacle that is among them." (Leviticus 15:31 KJV)

"But the man that shall be unclean, and shall not purify himself, that soul shall be cut off from among the congregation, because he hath defiled the sanctuary of the LORD." (Numbers 19:20 KJV)

"And I will set my face against that man, and will cut him off from among his people; because he hath given of his seed unto Molech, to defile my sanctuary, and to profane my holy name." (Leviticus 20:3 KJV)

"Surely, because thou hast defiled my sanctuary with all thy detestable things, and with all thine abominations, therefore will I also diminish thee" (Ezekiel 5:11 KJV)

Four passages, and the same shape in every one. The unclean man dies, or is cut off, or is diminished. The sanctuary stands. Under those provisions the uncleanness never imperils the holy place — only the man who brought it. There was fire enough there — "The fire shall ever be burning upon the altar; it shall never go out" (Leviticus 6:13 KJV) — and it consumed the offerings without consuming the house. The holiness of the place was not its vulnerability. It was its defence.

So it is here. A man may assail the temple of God; he may teach against it, corrupt minds, draw disciples after himself, build his wood and hay into it for a generation. What he cannot do is make it unholy. It is holy because of who set it there and what it is built on, and the whole force of Paul's for is that this holiness is what answers whoever touches it.

Hold the two halves together and the verse stops being strange. What a man defiles is minds — real damage, and Paul spends whole epistles fighting it. What he cannot defile is the temple's holiness, because that was never his to reach. And the holiness he could not touch is the very thing that answers him.

Paul's use of destroy settles what the word can prove, and what it cannot

The whole weight of the difficulty has always rested on one word. Him shall God destroy sounds final, and the argument that the man cannot be a believer leans hard on that finality. So test the word against Paul's own use of it, and a plain pattern comes out.

Every place Paul uses it of a man's ruin, the object is someone outside the Body of Christ.

• "as some of them also tempted, and were destroyed of serpents … as some of them also murmured, and were destroyed of the destroyer" (1 Corinthians 10:9–10 KJV) — and verse 1 names them: "our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea" (1 Corinthians 10:1 KJV). Israel in the wilderness, under Moses and the law. Paul frames it twice as borrowed material — "these things were our examples" (1 Corinthians 10:6 KJV) and "written for our admonition" (1 Corinthians 10:11 KJV).
• "punished with everlasting destruction" (2 Thessalonians 1:9 KJV) — of "them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel" (2 Thessalonians 1:8 KJV), set apart in the same breath from "you who are troubled" (2 Thessalonians 1:7 KJV).
• "shall destroy with the brightness of his coming" (2 Thessalonians 2:8 KJV) — of "that man of sin … the son of perdition" (2 Thessalonians 2:3 KJV).
• "Whose end is destruction" (Philippians 3:19 KJV) — of "the enemies of the cross of Christ" (Philippians 3:18 KJV), the party named at the head of the chapter as "dogs … evil workers … the concision" (Philippians 3:2 KJV), and marked off from us in the next verse: "For our conversation is in heaven" (Philippians 3:20 KJV).

One passage sits closer to the line than the rest, and it should be produced rather than left for somebody else to produce. "They that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition" (1 Timothy 6:9 KJV) is spoken of men in general. But watch what Paul assigns to believers when he turns to them in the very next verse: "which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows" (1 Timothy 6:10 KJV). Sorrows — not perdition. Even at the closest point, the believer's portion is named as something other than the destruction of the previous verse.

And every place he uses it of somebody in the Body, it stops well short of the man. The sharpest instance is the hardest case in the epistle, and it holds the line inside its own sentence: the man put out at Corinth is a saved man, and what is named for destruction is "the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus" (1 Corinthians 5:5 KJV). Whatever else that verse is doing, it states the bound in the same breath as the severity.

The clearest instance of all is a single paragraph in Romans, where Paul uses both constructions over the same dispute:

"Destroy not him with thy meat, for whom Christ died." (Romans 14:15 KJV)

"For meat destroy not the work of God." (Romans 14:20 KJV)

Destroy not him. A brother — and Paul says in the same clause that Christ died for him. Nobody has died and nobody has been damned; a conscience has been wounded and a walk hindered. Then five verses on, the identical charge about the identical dispute comes out as destroy not the work of God. Paul moves between destroying the man and destroying the work as two ways of saying one thing.

That matters here more than anything else in the passage, because the standing objection to the second reading is that the verse says him and not his work. Romans 14 answers it. Paul writes destroy not him of a man who is neither dying nor perishing, and treats it as interchangeable with destroying a work.

Set beside that the pairing Paul uses twice for his own ministry — authority given "for edification, and not for your destruction" (2 Corinthians 10:8 KJV), and again in 2 Corinthians 13:10 — and "if I build again the things which I destroyed" (Galatians 2:18 KJV). Destruction is the opposite of building up. And 1 Corinthians 3 is a building chapter from end to end: foundation, masterbuilder, material, the man who builds thereupon. In that setting, destroy is the building word's own opposite.

So here is what the pattern establishes, stated no wider than it holds. The severity of destroy in Paul is not a property of the word. It is set by who the object is. Which means no one may argue backward from the word's severity to the identity of the man — not in either direction. That particular move is closed, and it was the move the whole difficulty rested on.

Be precise about what that does and does not close. It does not put the word out of the argument altogether; the word still has a setting, and a setting is evidence of a different kind. In a chapter about foundations and material and building thereupon, destroy stands where the builder's opposite belongs, and that observation is about the neighbourhood rather than about how heavy the word is. What is now unavailable is the inference the sermon depends on: this word sounds final, therefore the man cannot be a believer. That does not follow, and Paul's own usage is why.

The paragraph is scoped to men on the foundation, and that decides it

One more thing has to be cleared away before the two readings can be weighed against each other, because it is often offered as a middle way between them. It is sometimes said that verse 17 is God chastening a wayward saint — striking him, shortening his life, dealing with his flesh as He dealt with Israel. That is not available to us, and it should be refused plainly. The believer in this dispensation faces exactly one judgment, and it is the one this very chapter describes: the judgment seat of Christ, where the fire tries the work and the man himself is saved. There is no second track of physical retribution running alongside it. I have set that out at length in The Judgment Seat of Christ: Rewards, Not Condemnation, and dealt with the passage most often produced against it in The Lord's Supper.

If verse 17 touches a believer at all, it can only touch his work — because our doctrine gives the believer no other judgment to be touched by. That closes a door, and closing it tightens everything.

So the two readings stand as they were, and I take the second. The reasons are structural rather than verbal.

First, the paragraph tells you who is in it. "Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble" (1 Corinthians 3:12 KJV). That phrase is not decorating the men; it is scoping the passage. Everyone in view from verse 10 forward is building upon this foundation, and the foundation has just been named: "other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ" (1 Corinthians 3:11 KJV). A man who has not got that foundation cannot be building upon it. So the unsaved corrupter is not merely outside the temple on this reading — he is outside the paragraph, and has to be carried into it from elsewhere.

Do not press that further than it goes, because it will go further if you let it. This is not a claim that an unsaved man cannot corrupt the people of God. Of course he can, and Paul says so repeatedly and with alarm — "grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock" (Acts 20:29 KJV), false apostles transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ, another gospel preached and its preacher accursed. Such men are real and they do great damage. The claim here is narrower and concerns only this paragraph: Paul has framed these verses around men building on a foundation they have, and whatever the outsider does elsewhere in the epistles, he is not the man this frame has in view.

Second, the reckoning in view seats only the saved. The fire of verses 13 to 15 is the judgment seat of Christ, and Paul calls it ours — "we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ" (2 Corinthians 5:10 KJV), "we shall all stand" (Romans 14:10 KJV). And it is not only that an unbeliever is absent from it. Every part of the machinery is meaningless applied to him. There is no reward in prospect for him, so "he shall suffer loss" describes the loss of nothing. And the clause governing the whole scene — "but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire" (1 Corinthians 3:15 KJV) — is exactly what is not true of him.

Which puts the other reading to a choice, and neither branch is comfortable. If God destroys the man himself, verse 17 has nothing to do with works and floats free of the six verses it stands on — the foundation, the material, the sort, the fire, the reward, the loss, all abandoned mid-paragraph and resumed nowhere. If instead God destroys that man's works, then we are at a tribunal he does not attend, describing a loss he cannot suffer, under a rule that would have saved him.

Third — and this is the part most often missed — both readings already agree what defiling is. The reading I am setting aside describes the defiler as corrupting the temple with wrong doctrine. That is the same operation as building wood and hay: corrupt material worked into the people of God. So the two readings never divided over the act at all. They divide only over the actor — and once the act is agreed, the paragraph's own scope answers the actor.

Behind those three stand the verbal reasons, which are real but lighter: any man has meant a builder three times running, at verses 12, 14 and 15, and nothing announces a change; know ye not makes verses 16 and 17 the capstone of the building argument rather than a new subject; and destroy is what this chapter's vocabulary sets against building up.

And there is a cost to leaving it open that is worth naming. If a man declines the definition the context supplies and offers none in its place, he has not merely lost an argument — he has handed the blank back. A severe penalty with no stated cause is the exact condition set out earlier in this study, and it is what every misuse of this verse has been living on. The interpretive question and the pastoral damage turn out to be one fault at two scales, which is why taking the definition from the passage is not a technicality.

I hold this without heat, and I would not divide over it. The other reading is held by careful men who have laboured over this text and who concede its weak points rather than covering them; it is a real door, not a straw one. It is also worth knowing how it is usually arrived at — not first, but second, after the gentler sense of destroy has been weighed and judged uncertain. That is an honest route to it. But Paul's own usage, set out above, removes the difficulty that sends men down it.

What neither door does — what no honest reading of this verse can be made to do — is put your salvation on the table.

What the verse actually declares about you

Come back now to the clause the quotation always leaves off, and read it as what it is — not a warning, but a declaration.

"For the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are." (1 Corinthians 3:17 KJV)

Ye are. Present tense. Stated as fact. Not ye shall be, if the divisions are mended. Not ye would be, were your conduct in order. Paul says this to the most disorderly assembly in his epistles — a company with factions, a lawsuit problem, disgrace at the Lord's table, and a man in open immorality among them — and he says it flatly. Not that they are holy on their own account, and not that their assembly is a holy thing in itself — but that they belong to the temple of God, and the temple of God is holy.

He had already told them the same thing in the letter's opening breath:

"Unto the church of God which is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints" (1 Corinthians 1:2 KJV)

Sanctified. Holy ones. Before a word of correction, before a single problem is addressed. And the reason is given a few verses later — it is not of their doing at all:

"But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption:" (1 Corinthians 1:30 KJV)

Their holiness is Christ, made unto them of God. That is why Paul can call a carnal assembly holy without flattering it and without lying. He is not describing their behaviour. He is describing their position, and their position was purchased and given, not earned and maintained.

This is the same ground I have covered in The Hope of the Gospel and If Ye Continue in the Faith — What Colossians 1:23 Really Means, and it is the settled Pauline doctrine laid out in Once Saved, Always Saved: The Eternal Security of the Believer in the Body of Christ. The verse that has been used for generations to make believers doubt their standing turns out, read whole, to be one of the plainest assertions of that standing in the epistles. It does not say God will destroy you if you defile His temple. It says you belong to His temple, and His temple is holy, and that is exactly why nobody who comes against it will prosper.

Take heed how you build

None of this leaves the reader with nothing to do. It leaves him with the right thing to do.

Paul's charge in this chapter was never watch your standing. It was "let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon" (1 Corinthians 3:10 KJV) — and that charge falls hardest on those who teach. A man's salvation is not on the scales. His work is, and it will be tried by fire in a day that will declare exactly what sort it was. Serving grace carries a weight of accountability that receiving grace does not, and the difference between gold and stubble is nothing more mysterious than whether a man built the rightly divided word of God into the people of God, or built in his own traditions and called it ministry. That distinction I have drawn out in Salvation and Rewards: Two Different Things.

So do two things with this verse.

Stop letting it be used against you. The next time it is quoted at you with the last clause missing, supply the clause. Which temple ye are. Then ask the man who quoted it to show you, from this chapter, where the thing he is charging you with is called defiling — and whether he has read as far as verse 15. If the sermon is about a habit rather than a doctrine, ask him one more thing: whether he applies his rule to everything it would have to cover if it were true.

And take heed what you are building. The man in verse 17 does his damage with doctrine, and so does every man who follows him in it. There are men bringing wood and hay and another gospel to this temple, then and now — and every believer who teaches anything to anybody is himself putting material into it. So know the foundation well enough to recognize what does not belong on it, in what you are handed and in what you hand on.

Paul gave that charge once more, at the end, to men who would have to keep a flock after he was gone. He warned them of corrupters coming in and corrupters rising up, told them to watch — and then told them what to build with:

"And now, brethren, I commend you to God, and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up, and to give you an inheritance among all them which are sanctified." (Acts 20:32 KJV)

The word of his grace, which is able to build you up. There is the gold of the third chapter, named at last by the apostle himself — and notice that he answers the threat of corrupters not with a threat of his own but with sound doctrine put into faithful hands. Get it straight, hold it, and build with it.

The temple of God is holy. Which temple ye are.

© 2026 Edward R. Cross