Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

1 Corinthians 5:8

1 Corinthians 5:8. therefore let us keep the feast ‘keep festival' as the word signifies. As the Passover meal was designed to strengthen the Israelites for their wilderness journey, so is this for ours heavenward. Theirs was an annual festival; ours is the continuous, uninterrupted, glad festival-keeping of a redeemed and consecrated life. But just as theirs had to be celebrated with unleavened bread, so must ours be free from corrupt admixtures.

not with old leaven forgetting that we have been purged from our old sins' (2 Peter 1:9).

neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness not their “ old sins,” but such corrupt elements as are apt to spring up in Christian communities, creeping in under new and subtle forms. (This seems better than taking both clauses as saying the same thing in different forms.)

but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth with entire consistency of character and conduct.

Note. What a sublime idea does this give of the Christian life, as a lifelong Paschal celebration of our “eternal redemption” by the sacrificial death of the Lord Jesus! Is it necessary to add that, save on the strict vicarious principle of that death, all such allusions would either be unintelligible or would certainly be misleading? As to the Lord's Supper, though it certainly embodies, in their highest and simplest form, all the highest Paschal ideas, there is no reason to think that there is here any express reference to that ordinance. [1]

[1] Bengel's hint, as to the bearing of this statement on the Romish doctrine of the sacrifice of the mass, has something in it namely, that if the apostle had taught that doctrine, he would naturally have used the present tense, and not the aorist, as he does here (“was sacrificed”); and all the more as the whole strain of his argument would have suggested and been strengthened by the use of the present tense.

So much for this peculiar case of impurity. But since the injunction to keep aloof from this offender might be misunderstood, as applying equally to all the unholy, the apostle now draws a sharp distinction between those within and those without the Church; instructing them, that while keeping no company at all with the former, they were not with the latter to decline the ordinary intercourses and courtesies of life.

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Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

1 Corinthians 5:8

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