📖WEB · 1 Corinthians 5:7
What does 1 Corinthians 5:7 mean?
"Purge out the old yeast, that you may be a new lump, even as you are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed in our place."
— 1 Corinthians 5:7 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, you being gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ,
are to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.
Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole lump?
Purge out the old yeast, that you may be a new lump, even as you are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed in our place.
Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old yeast, neither with the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
I wrote to you in my letter to have no company with sexual sinners;
yet not at all meaning with the sexual sinners of this world, or with the covetous and extortionists, or with idolaters; for then you would have to leave the world.
Explanation
Paul is using a vivid image drawn from Jewish Passover practice to make a point about moral purity within the Corinthian church. In plain language, he is telling the believers to get rid of the corrupting influence in their midst—just as a Jewish household would remove every trace of old, fermented yeast from the house before Passover—so that the whole community can be what it truly is: clean, fresh, and unleavened. He grounds this command in a stunning theological claim: Christ himself is the true Passover lamb, already sacrificed on their behalf. The imagery is not decorative; it is the logical foundation for the ethical instruction.
The context is crucial. Paul is writing to the church in Corinth, a congregation he had founded, which was tolerating a case of blatant sexual immorality among its members (a man living with his father's wife, described earlier in chapter 5). Rather than confronting or disciplining this sin, the church had apparently grown proud or indifferent, perhaps even boasting about their spiritual sophistication while ignoring the corrosive effect this sin was having on the whole community. Paul draws on the Passover tradition, familiar to Jews and increasingly to Gentile converts taught the Old Testament story, in which Israelites removed all leaven from their homes before the Passover meal (Exodus 12:15, 19-20) as a symbol of a clean break with their old, enslaved life in Egypt. Just prior to this verse, Paul says "a little yeast leavens the whole lump" (5:6), meaning that tolerated sin does not stay cont
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