Because they were persistently blaspheming, ‘Hymenaeus and Alexander, [were] yielded up to Satan, the adversarial accuser, in order that they may be trained not to blaspheme,’ (I Timothy 1 v 19b – 20). A similar phrase is used in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. ‘Delivering to Satan’ conveys the same idea as when Jesus said, “If he is continuing to disregard the fellowship [then] he is to you just like the ‘outsider’ and [like] the one who gathers taxes from the Jews for ‘outsiders’”. In other words he or she is serving the opposition. At Corinth the Christian leaders and assembly were to regard the man who was excommunicated as separated away from them. As cut off from the Kingdom of God, like foreskin is cut off in circumcision, as belonging within the orderly arrangement of the world under the delegated authority of Satan. To exclude someone from the Kingdom of God is by default to place him or her into the dominion of Satan.
Paul says that the purpose or aim in handing Hymenaeus and Alexander over to Satan was that they will be trained, educated and disciplined not to blaspheme. We are not to interpret Paul’s action as a punishment, or as an attempt to make them pay off the debt that their improper speech incurred. Rather it is about training and education towards godliness and cleanliness. And about the maintenance of the cleanliness of the assembly and reverence for God and the gospel.
In Corinth the aim was to bring the excommunicated man’s physical body and its fleshly raw passions to ruination and loss. He was not being handed over for the destruction of his body, or to die. Rather he was being handed over for the ruination of his flesh. For bringing about the end result of his fleshly passions – the proportionate recompense within himself - so that he might be humbled and brought back to the path of godly cleanliness and be recalled to virtue by means of his suffering, discomfort and loss. The aim was that this man’s mind and body would be shaken, buffeted and afflicted such that he would be brought to his senses regarding his gross sexual behaviour, and then repent of it by making humble acknowledgment of it and turning away from it.
Paul teaches that this affliction and torment, this ruination of the flesh, is the work of Satan. He presents Satan as the author of bodily diseases such that even of himself, Paul says that ‘in order to keep me from becoming conceited I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me’, (II Corinthians 12 v 7). Similarly, we also have this statement regarding Jesus healing on the Sabbath: ‘a woman was there whom a breath had crippled for eighteen years. She was bent over and could not straighten up at all.... [Jesus said] “Shouldn’t this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free?”’ (Luke 13 v 11, 16).
The divinely disapproved-of and God-opposing speech, attitudes and behaviours of both the man in Corinth and of Hymenaeus and Alexander, were extremely unacceptable. They were opposed to God and public. Their behaviours were not ‘hidden away out of sight’ but were clearly known about and heard both within the Christian assemblies and by ‘outsiders’. More than this, these three men, who declared that they were Christians, were disregarding the assembly and in many ways serving the purposes of those were opposed to God. For these reasons they had to be removed from the fellowship, they had to be dis-identified with and separated away from the assembly in order to protect the honour of God and the reputation of the fellowship. But the aim was that they might turn around and away from such speech and behaviours.
