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As if the apostle had said, "Come I will among you, to regulate disorders, and to rectify abuses: now choose how I shall come; whether in the milder way of kindness, love, and meekness towards you, or exercising the power God has given me, of inflicting corporal punishments on offenders, by delivering them to Satan as God's executioner upon their bodies."
Note here, 1. A power, which the apostle intimates himself to have in the Christian church; namely, the power of the rod, that is, a power of inflicting the severest of corporal punishments, even death itself, upon notorious offenders.
Thus Elymas the sorcerer was smitten with blindness by St. Paul, Act_13:8-11.
Ananias and Sapphira struck dead by St. Peter, Act_5:1-10.
Hymenaeus and Philetus delivered unto Satan, 1Ti_1:20.
It was usual with God, in the earlier days of the gospel, to give Satan leave to seize the bodies of such as were, for their obstinate perseverance in sin, cut off from the communion of the church; who plagued them with diseases, and sometimes with death, which is called the destruction of the flesh, 1Co_5:5.
Note, 2. The necessary reason for investing such a power, so great a power as this, in the apostle; because then there being no civil power of the magistrate on his side, had he been destitute of this extraordinary power, to punish bold and hardened transgressors, he could never have vindicated Christianity from contempt, much less have conciliated any tolerable respect either to himself or it. People would have despised his person, and made a mock of his new religion; whereas, finding him clothed with this power, great fear fell upon the church, yea, on as many as heard these things, and the name of the Lord Jesus was magnified, Act_5:11.
Note, 3. How loath and unwilling the apostle was to exercise this power of his, and to come unto them with a rod, desiring rather to use fair and gentle methods, and to come unto them in love, and in the spirit of meekness. His paternal tenderness and fatherly affection prompted him to menace and threaten punishment, but only to the end that he might not execute and inflict it, provided they would by but obliged by kindness, and reclaimed by candid usage.
Note, 4. That the apostle was sometimes forced out of mere pity to take his rod into his hand, to use sharpness, though with great reluctancy; scourging them, to show his compassion to them.
In like manner must ecclesiastical rulers, to the end of the world, in order to maintain the church's purity and peace, by church-censures chastise that vice which doth deface the one, and those divisions that do disturb the other.