1 Corinthians 6:7, ‘To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather be defrauded?’
Paul’s question forces examination: “Why not” or “For what reason” would you not rather be defrauded? What is it that causes you to refuse to release your possessions—even if the situation IS unjust? Why do you instead subject the Name of Christ to shame in the courts of the world? Do we not believe that all things are ours in Christ? Do we not believe that God is able to care for us if we trust ourselves to Him? Do we not believe that God is sovereign over all that takes place? Do we not believe that God is supremely glorified in, and supremely revealed by the one who has nothing at all in this world, and pours Himself out in obedient dependence on the Father at the cross? Is it because these things are not (this one is not) recognized as The Truth that we—when faced with actually being treated unjustly or deprived of what is ours—cling to ‘what is mine’ and so reveal ourselves to be no different than the world?
Remember that all Paul teaches the Corinthians is an outworking of one single truth: Christ, crucified and risen (1 Cor.2:2). So here we see how onαe whose reality has been re-shaped to conform to the truth of God as it is in Jesus thinks about something as mundane as a legal dispute. Part of that answer seems to be a recognition—to draw on Philippians 3—that all things are already “lost” to me, since I have been crucified with Christ (Gal.2:20) such that He Himself is now my life (Col.3:1-3).
He is now my life, not only in the fact that all I have is He Himself (though that is gloriously true), but also in the sense that my life is now defined by His own life, and so will continually take on the same anastasiform (death-and-resurrection) shape as His own. Let us, then, cling to Him with whom we have been crucified to the world and raised to God, Jesus Christ who is our life. And, clinging to Him, may we exhibit a counter-cultural freedom to allow the possessions of this life to flee from us—even unjustly if need be—as a witness that He Himself is our all in all.
