Paul tells the Corinthians that when he was first with them, he was not able to talk to them as he would have talked to people who were filled with the Holy Spirit because they had been so spiritually immature, like children. He is very disappointed because their present behaviour indicates that they are still spiritually immature and are not making any spiritual progress at all. There had been evidence when he left them that they were living by the power of the Holy Spirit (3: 16, 6: 11 and 19, 12:13). Paul indicates here that life in the Spirit has very practical consequences. In another letter he lists the practical results in day-to-day living that he expects to see in a person who is filled with the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5 :22). The Spirit-filled Christian should demonstrate in his behaviour the love, peace, patience, kindness and gentleness which the power of the Holy Spirit has actually produced in him or her. The jealousy and quarrelling which is going on amongst the Corinthians proves to Paul that they are still in a state of spiritual immaturity.

In 3 :3-4, Paul rebukes the Corinthians by calling them people who belong to the world, or men of the flesh, and we need to understand what Paul meant by this, and why he said it to the Corinthians. In Greek philosophy, there was teaching that the physical body or the flesh w1s like the prison of the soul. This idea had its origin in the belief that physical matter was essentially evil, and contrasted with physical matter was spirit. In Greek understanding, a human being experienced the dualism or double nature of his existence. He had a body and he had a spirit and according to Greek ideas about death, when the body died, the spirit would be freed for immortality. Immortality was understood in an abstract way. Greek ideas about the immortality of the disembodied spirit were quite different from the Christian belief in the resurrection of the believer, in which the whole human being would be restored by God to a new kind of life. One result of the Greek belief that the spirit or soul of a person was absolutely distinct from the body was the conclusion that however a person used his or her body, difference at all to the person's soul. It was therefore possible for a Greek who thought in this way to follow his bodily impulses, ea drinking until he was surfeited, indulging his sexual appetites and bodily satisfaction above everything else, and at the same time that his soul would ultimately rise above all this and find union death with a World Soul or divine Being. However, there were other ideas about the relationship between the body and soul, such found in Stoic philosophy, which upheld the need for strict as disregarding bodily impulses and treating the body rigorously as not matter at all.

The Jewish understanding of the human person was different, taken into Christian belief. Its basis is in the story of Creation, The human being was created by God as the climax of his C with which God was pleased and which he saw to be good (Gen 10, 12, 18,21,25,26-31). God's Spirit 'breathes' life into the dead of the vision of Ezekiel 37 and it is the power or Spirit of God creates (Genesis 1:2). The spirit which is in man is therefore him by God and man's body is created by God. Man's whole body and spirit, is therefore God's creation. Although the entry of sin into God's creation broke the original relationship between man and God, the hope of the Old Testament is that God will restore it. Against this background of Jewish understanding, we can understand why Paul calls Jesus the second Adam from heaven.

In Jewish understanding, it mattered a great deal how the body was used, and the Jewish Law had a great deal to say about that. Jesus taught in Mark 7:14-21, that the origin of all the evil actions of the body was in the sinful inner attitudes of the person. The body did not have dependent existence of its own; because the whole person is aft sin, inner evil attitudes result in external evil actions such as ad murder, robbery, greed, deceit, jealous and proud behaviour. From the beginning, the early Church understood that it was the whole human being who needed to be saved. The inner spiritual change should be shown in a new kind of outward behaviour. In 3: 16-17, Paul say 'Surely you know that you are God's temple and that God's Spire in you ... For God's temple is holy and you yourselves are his temple. In the life of Christians who had been filled with the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, there should be no place at all for behaviour which resembled that of the pagan Greeks. Christians were not men of the flesh, Greeks understood it. We can now see that when Paul uses the phrase 'of the world' or 'of the flesh', as he quite often does in his letters, he is referring to human nature which has not been saved, human nature without Jesus Christ. The unspiritual man, according to Paul, is in the grip of his sinful nature and cannot live in harmony with others. The spiritual man is able to live in loving harmony with his fellow-Christians, through the power of the Holy Spirit working in him.