For today, One Year Bible Online links here.
God prefers us to do what is right and just to following rituals. No matter what rituals or sacrifices we make, they will not offset doing evil.
Even when we are suffering and ostracized because of our sins, we can turn to God. If we turn to God in our distress, and allow Him to turn us from our sin, He will rescue us and redeem us. Those who remain in their sins will be silenced. God will not allow the accusations of the wicked against the godly to stand. The wicked will not avoid judgement by leveling false accusations against the godly.
If we have a dispute with a fellow believer, we should find someone in the Church to resolve the issue for us. It is better to be defrauded and cheated than to take our disputes to the courts. Paul is unequivocal here, no matter what the circumstances we should not take our disputes with those who claim to be our fellow Christians to the courts. Our disputes with our fellow believers should be resolved by the moving of the Spirit and God’s will, not by the letter of the law. If we are not willing to accept the judgement of a tribunal of believers to settle our disputes, we reveal ourselves to be more interested in worldly matters than God’s kingdom.
As believers in, and followers of, Christ we have been granted complete freedom. However, just because we are free to do anything that does not mean that some things are not bad for us. Self-destructive behavior us a sin and something which we are called to avoid. Sexual immorality of all sorts is bad for us and destructive of both our bodies and our souls. Most sins involve and affect our spirits and our souls, but sexual immorality also affects our very bodies. When we have sex with someone, we form a bond with them. That bond involves changes in our hormones and the way we physically react to that person. Having sex with a different person disrupts that bond causing physical and spiritual damage. No matter what position the Church takes on the issue of sexual immorality, it cannot change this fact. When the Church condones any sort of sexual immorality (including homosexual behavior), it is conspiring to encourage people to act in a self-destructive way.
This passage has always troubled me because most translations use the words “foreign wives” where the NLT uses the words “pagan wives”. However, as I read this today I realized that the NLT is probably in some ways more accurate than those other translations. The reason this seems to be the case is because the answer was not just to send these wives and their children away. Those with foreign wives needed to appear before a tribunal, with witnesses from the elders and leaders of his town. This suggests that some sort of judgement was being made on a case by case basis. I may be reading too much into that, but it appears to me that the only possible judgement regarded whether the foreign wife had embraced the worship of God and given up pagan practices.