Destruction of the Flesh
The law keeps one instrument for the man who will not hear anything gentler, and it is not a cage.
He left his wife for the woman in March and told the elders in April that he did not need their input, and they gave him what the book required anyway: two men at his door, then four, then the whole body told on a Sunday night with his name said out loud, and then the letter. He was no longer a member. He could not take the bread. The men he had hunted with for twelve years were instructed not to treat him as one of them, and most of them did not call, because they had been told not to, and he said that proved what he had always suspected about them.
One of the elders called him on the first of every month for nineteen months. He did not argue. He did not ask how it was going. He said one sentence, which was that the door was where it had always been, and hung up. In the fourteenth month the woman left, and in the seventeenth the business did, and in the nineteenth the man drove to the elder's house at eleven at night and sat in the driveway for an hour before he knocked.
What he said in the kitchen was not that he was sorry. It was that everything he had built the last two years on had come down, all of it, and that he had been standing in the wreckage for a month and could not find anything in it that was his, and that he had come because the sentence on the first of the month was the only thing in nineteen months that had not fallen. The elder said the door had been there the whole time. The man said he knew. He said he had needed everything else to come down first before he could see it.
The bench passed its sentence, the sentence split inside the man into the voice that names the act and the voice that condemns the self, and most men do the work the last two rooms describe and walk on. This room is for the man who does not. He hears neither voice. He will not name the act, he will not come to the door, and he fortifies himself against every gentler instrument the court has used, the admonishment and the reproof and the patient discipline of a man who is still listening, and calls the fortress strength. The flesh has built a wall around the part of him that was supposed to govern, and the wall has begun to mistake itself for the man.
At that point the law has one instrument left before the case is closed, and the apostle named it in the harshest clause in his letters. It is not a cage, and it is not revenge. It is the removal of the man from the covering of the fellowship so that what he refused to put to death can exhaust itself against the consequences of its own choices, and the stated aim is not his destruction. It is his survival. The flesh is destroyed so that the man inside it can live through what the flesh was about to do to him, and this room holds the matter at the depth the apostle put it on the table.
Destruction of the Flesh
"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" — 1 Corinthians 5:5
So that his spirit may be saved. Read the clause the sentence is built to arrive at, because men read the first half and stop. Paul is instructing a church, under his authority and the Lord's, to hand a man over, and the handing over is real and the one he is handed to is real, and the sentence does not end there. It ends with the purpose, and the purpose is the man's rescue, and everything before the purpose is the price of it. That is the instrument. A severity aimed at salvation, by men who would rather not use it, on a man who has refused everything else. The room runs the way the case ran: what happened at Corinth, then what being delivered over means, then the steps that come before the last step, then what came back, then the daily version of the same knife, then what the flesh is and is not, then why destruction is the word, and the door.
The Case at Corinth
The church at Corinth had a member living openly with his father's wife, and the apostle's first complaint was not about the man. It was about the church: "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?" — 1 Corinthians 5:1-2. And you are arrogant. The fellowship had not addressed the thing. Some of them had congratulated themselves on their breadth for tolerating it, and Paul's instruction was corporate, formal, and grave: when they were assembled, with his spirit and the power of the Lord present, they were to put the man out. Not a private rebuke. The gathered body acting under authority to remove a brother from the covering the body provides, and the man was to be placed outside, in the territory the enemy holds, where the flesh he had refused to kill would be left to run until it ran out.
The apostle's stated purpose was the man's spirit, saved, in the day of the Lord. The instrument was severe because the alternative, a brother carried in unrepentance all the way to that day, was worse, and the church's love for him was going to be expressed in its willingness to do the hard thing now so that the worst thing later would not have to fall.
Delivered Over
The phrase sounds like execution and it was not. Paul used it twice more, about two men who had wrecked the faith of others, and said what it was for: "Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme" — 1 Timothy 1:20. That they may learn. The handing over was a school with the walls taken off, a man set down outside the protection of the body so that reality could teach him what the body had been shielding him from, and the apostle told another church how the man was to be regarded while he was out there: "have nothing to do with him, that he may be ashamed. Do not regard him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother" — 2 Thessalonians 3:14-15. Not as an enemy. As a brother. The removal was not a severing of the relationship. It was the relationship, conducted at a distance, with one door left open and a man calling on the first of every month to say where it was.
That is what the hunters were told not to do, and most of them obeyed the instruction and not the spirit of it, and the man used their silence as evidence for his wall. One man kept the spirit of it, and nineteen months later the spirit of it was the only thing standing.
The Steps Before the Last Step
The last step is reached only after the ones before it, and the Lord laid them down himself: the private word between the two men, then the one or two witnesses, then the matter before the body, and only then the man treated as outside it. The sequence is graduated on purpose. The escalation is not the satisfaction of catching an offender. It is the alarm sounded louder each time so that the man might hear it, and by the time a body reaches the formal removal every quieter instrument has been tried and refused. The man has not been ambushed. He has been called, and called again, and has said no to each call in turn, and the elders at the door in April were the second step, and the four were the third, and the Sunday night was the fourth, and the man sat through all of them with his jaw set and said they had proved his point.
A body that skips the steps and goes straight to the letter is not administering the instrument. It is swinging it, and a body that never reaches the letter because it cannot bear to is not loving the man. It is sparing itself, and leaving him inside a fortress that is going to be his coffin.
What Came Back
The record holds the end of the Corinthian case, and it is the reason the case is in Scripture. The man repented. And the apostle, who had ordered the removal, wrote to the same church with a different urgency: "For such a one, this punishment by the majority is enough, so you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. So I beg you to reaffirm your love for him" — 2 Corinthians 2:6-8. This punishment is enough. Turn to forgive. Reaffirm your love. The instrument had done its work and the apostle was now afraid of the opposite failure, a man broken past the point the breaking was for, and he begged the body to receive him. The full cycle is in the book because the cycle is the point. A discipline that does not aim at the man's return is not what Paul was naming. It is something else wearing the apostle's words.
The elder's kitchen at eleven at night was the second letter. The man had been outside for nineteen months and the wall had come down, all of it, and what he found in the kitchen was not a tribunal. It was a man who had been waiting with the door open and who said so, and the reaffirming began that night, and the hunters called the next week, every one of them, because the elder told them to.
The Daily Version of the Knife
The formal removal is the corporate expression of a thing every man is supposed to be doing privately every day, and the Lord described the private version in the plainest surgical terms he ever used: "And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell" — Mark 9:43. Cut it off. Paul said the men who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions, and Peter said what the daily cutting produces: "whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for human passions but for the will of God" — 1 Peter 4:1-2. Has ceased from sin. The suffering in the flesh and the ceasing are one sentence, and the man who does the cutting daily, who kills the appetite before it governs and the imagination before it commits and the affection before it relocates, is the man who will never need the corporate knife, because he has been using the private one.
The fight itself, the toolkit and the brothers it takes, fills a whole room in the practices hall. Here only the relation between the two knives is drawn. The destruction of the flesh as daily practice is the alternative to the destruction of the flesh as catastrophic intervention. The first is hard. The second is harder. A man who runs from the first will meet the second, and the man in the driveway had run from the first for two years.
What the Flesh Is and Is Not
The flesh in the apostle's sense is not the body. The body is good; God made it and called it good and intends to raise it. The flesh is the sin-nature running through the body's appetites and the soul's distortions, and Paul described the two as at war inside one man: "I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members" — Romans 7:23. Another law waging war. The same body can be the temple or the instrument, and what makes the difference is who is governing, and a man who confuses flesh with body will make one of two errors. He will hate his body and treat its legitimate functions as corrupt, adopting a severity against himself that Scripture does not authorize and the first column's room on rival roads already named as a counterfeit. Or he will indulge it and treat every restraint as hatred of a good gift, which is the license the apostle spent a chapter of Romans foreclosing.
The flesh is the pattern. The body is the instrument the pattern was using and the spirit can reclaim. Destroying the flesh is destroying the pattern's authority over the appetites and the imagination and the will, and the body remains, and after the killing it is available again for what it was made for.
Why Destruction Is the Word
Brokenness has its own room in the doctrines hall, and the practices hall explains why it comes before the fight. What neither of them holds is the engine, and the engine is here. Before the destruction a man is still managing. He has explanations, and the energy to defend the position, and the flesh is intact and in command. After it he has no explanations left. He is on the floor, and the structure that was telling him he had it under control is gone, and he is available, for the first time in years, to a truth the structure had been keeping out. Nothing softer than destruction would have done it, which is why the apostle did not choose a softer word, and why the man in the kitchen said he had needed everything to come down first.
Hosea had the sentence for what the tearing is for: "Come, let us return to the LORD; for he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up" (Hosea 6:1). Torn us, that he may heal us. The tearing and the healing have one subject and one purpose, and a man who has only felt the tearing has read half the verse. The severity is in service of the salvation, and the man who keeps that order keeps his footing in the hardest room of the court. The man who loses it gets lost in the severity and forgets what the severity is for, and the law's hardest instrument is still the law's, and the law, in the end, was for the man.
How Men Misread the Instrument
The man who reads it as a cage. He hears the handing over as a sentence served and misses the clause the sentence was built to reach, and he thinks the body that removed him hated him, and one of them called on the first of the month for nineteen months.
The body that swings it. It skipped the private word and the witnesses and went to the letter, and it was not administering an instrument. It was getting a man out of the building.
The body that cannot bear to. It never reaches the letter, and it calls the never-reaching grace, and the man is still inside the fortress, and the fortress is going to be a coffin.
The man who hates his body. He has confused the flesh with the frame and is at war with a good gift, and the apostle named his severity a counterfeit with a show of wisdom.
The man who ran from the private knife. Two years of not cutting what could have been cut at the sink in the morning, and he met the corporate one at eleven at night in a driveway, and it was harder.
The man in the kitchen. He did not come to say he was sorry. He came to say that everything had come down and the one sentence had not, and that was the beginning, and the elder knew it.
Three Questions in the Driveway at Eleven
TRUTH: What has a man fortified, and what is he calling the fortress? Strength, conviction, privacy, standing his ground. The wall around the thing that was supposed to govern has a name he uses for it, and the name is not wall.
LOVE: Who is he keeping outside, and has he mistaken their silence for their verdict? The hunters obeyed the letter and not the spirit, and he used it as evidence. One man kept the spirit. He is answerable for whether he has been hearing the one or the many.
LAW: What is he cutting daily, so that nothing has to be cut for him? He is answerable for the private knife, because the corporate one exists for the man who put it down, and the choice between the two has never once been nothing.
Until They Seek My Face
The handing over has an older form than Corinth, and a man who has been outside for nineteen months should read it. God said of a people who would not hear him that he was going to do the one thing they had not planned for, which was leave: "I will return again to my place, until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face, and in their distress earnestly seek me" — Hosea 5:15. I will return to my place, until. The withdrawal was the instrument, and the sentence has an until in it, and the until is the whole of it. He did not go back to his place to be rid of them. He went so that the distress would do what his presence had not, and the next verse in the book is the people saying come, let us return, which is the kitchen at eleven at night, and the prophet wrote both verses knowing the second one was coming.
Malachi described the one who would come after the withdrawal and what his arrival would be like for the men it was meant for: "But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner's fire" — Malachi 3:2. Who can stand. A refiner's fire is a destruction aimed at what the metal was for, and the metal does not enjoy it, and a man who has been through the nineteen months knows that the fire and the one who was coming were never two different things. This room does not say what the refiner does with the silver when it is clean. It only says that the tearing had a purpose and the withdrawal had an until, and that the man in the wreckage who could find nothing in it that was his had found, at last, the only condition in which the next thing can be seen for what it is.
Where the Last Room Lets Out
A man who has walked this room knows the case at Corinth and what the church's arrogance was, knows what being delivered over means and the brother it is done to, knows the steps before the last step and the two ways a body fails them, knows what came back and the second letter, knows the daily knife and why the man who uses it never meets the other, knows the flesh from the body and the two errors, and knows why destruction is the word and what the tearing is for. He sat in a driveway for an hour at eleven at night and knocked, and the door was where it had always been.
This is the deepest room in the building, and the law has now done the last thing it owns, which is break a man in order to keep him. He should stand in the wreckage and take an honest inventory of what is in it, because the inventory is short. The sentence from the bench is in it. The figure is in it. The thing that was killing him is not, and that is the court's whole gift, and the man is alive, and he has nothing. Nothing is not a figure of speech. The wall is gone, the explanations are gone, the business and the woman and the two years are gone, and what he owes is still exactly what the bench said he owed, to the dollar, and he is standing with his hands open because there is nothing left in them to close. Every room in this court has been about what a man did and what he is and what it costs. Not one of them has been about who pays. He is about to find out that the question was never idle, and that the only man who has ever been able to hear the answer is the one standing where he is standing, with his hands like that.