(Flower Arrangements)

Coming spiritual adultery:

See how the faithful city

has become a harlot!

She once was full of justice;

righteousness used to dwell in her –

but now murderers!

Your silver has become dross,

your choice wine is diluted with water. –  NIV Isaiah 1:21-22

“The faithful city” refers to Jerusalem, representing all of Judah. God compares the actions of his people to a harlot.  The people had turned from the worship of the true God to worshipping idols.  Their faith was defective, impure, and diluted.  Idolatry, outward or inward, is spiritual adultery, breaking our commitment to God in order to love something else.  Jesus described the people of his day as adulterous, even though they were religiously strict.  As the church, we are the “bride” of Christ (Revelation 19:7), and, by faith, we can be clothed in his righteousness.  Has your faith become impure?  Ask God to restore you.  Keep your devotion to him strong and pure.

Committing mental adultery:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.  –  NIV Matthew 5:27-28

The Old Testament law said that it is wrong for a person to have sex with someone other than his or her spouse (Exodus 20:14). But Jesus said that the desire to have sex with someone other than your spouse is mental adultery and thus sin.  Jesus emphasised that if the act is wrong, then so is the intention.  To be faithful to your spouse with your body but not your mind is to break the trust so vital to a strong marriage.  Jesus is not condemning natural interest in the opposite sex or even healthy sexual desire, but the deliberate and repeated filling of one’s mind with fantasies that would be evil if acted out.

How lust can lead to:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.  –  NIV Matthew 5:27-28

Some think that if lustful thoughts are sin, why shouldn’t a person go ahead and do the lustful actions too? Acting out sinful desires is harmful in several ways: (1) it causes people to excuse sin rather than to stop sinning; (2) it destroys marriages; (3) it is deliberate rebellion against God’s word; (4) it always hurts someone else in addition to the sinner.  Sinful action is more dangerous than sinful desire, and that is why desires should not be acted out.  Nevertheless, sinful desire is just as damaging to righteousness.  Left unchecked, wrong desires will result in wrong actions and turn people away from God.

And divorce:

“No-one, sir,” she said.

“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”  –  NIV John 8:11

Jesus didn’t condemn the woman accused of adultery, but neither did he ignore or condemned her sin. He told her to leave her life of sin, Jesus stands ready to forgive any sin in your life, but confession and repentance mean a change of heart.  With God’s help we can accept Christ’s forgiveness and stop our wrongdoing.

A theological doctrine arguing that all humans at the moment of conception inherit collective responsibility and guilt for the sins of Adam and Eve along with an innate tendency towards evil. The idea is largely inspired by Romans 5:12, which reads, “Wherefore as by one man sin entered into this world and by sin death; and so death passed upon all men.” Many modern interpreters consider the “one man” to be Adam, and thus Adam’s actions caused innate sinfulness and the cycle of death-and-life to enter the world. The term “original sin” (Latin, peccatum origine) does not appear in the Bible, however. Tertullian coined the phrase in the second century, and Saint Augustine popularized it and elaborated upon it in his theological writings. Many modern Christians think of original sin as the consequence of Adam eating the fruit in the Garden of Eden. For Saint Augustine and Tertullian, however, when they first developed the doctrine, the source of original sin in later generations was not that Adam and Eve ate the fruit, but that he and Eve engaged in sex later while in a state of sin. It was this secondary sinful act, argued Augustine, that passed along the taint of original sin to subsequent generations, rendering humanity incapable of achieving salvation without divine grace.

Original sin as a theological component of soteriology has had a profound effect on both medieval Catholicism and modern Protestant Christianity. Responses to it include on one extreme from the Calvinist doctrine of “infant damnation” with its the related Calvinist model of humanity’s “total depravity“; this theology embraces the doctrine fully. On the opposite extreme, Pelagian heresies rejected original sin altogether, holding that each human is only accountable for his or her own actions rather than inheriting sin from one’s ancestors. The modern doctrine of “Prevenient Grace” in Methodism is in many ways a watered-down version of medieval Pelagianism.

Most of the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ ministry had died by the time John composed this letter. Some of the second- or third-generation Christians began to have doubts about what they had been taught about Jesus.  Christians with a Greek background had a hard time believing that Jesus was human as well as divine, because in Platonic thought the spirit was all-important.  The body was only a prison from which one desired to escape.  Heresies developed from a uniting of this kind of Platonic thought and Christianity.

A particularly widespread false teaching, later called Docetism (from a Greek word meaning “to seem”), held that Jesus was actually a spirit who only appeared to have a body. In reality he cast no shadow and left no footprints; he was God [Wall], but not man.  Another heretical teaching, related to Gnosticism (from a Greek word meaning “knowledge”), held that all physical [Sternum] matter was evil, the spirit was good, and only the intellectually enlightened could enjoy the benefits of religion.  Both groups found it hard to believe in a Saviour who was fully human.

John answers these false teachers as an eyewitness to Jesus’ life on earth. He saw Jesus, talked with him, touched him – he knew that Jesus was more than a mere spirit.  In the very first sentence of this letter, John establishes that Jesus had been alive before the world began and also that he lived as a man among men and women.  In other words, he was both divine and human.

Through the centuries, many heretics have denied that Jesus was both God [Wall] and man. In John’s day people had trouble believing he was human; today more people have problems seeing him as God [Wall].  But Jesus’ divine-human nature is the pivotal issue of Christianity.  Before you accept what religious teachers say about any topic, listen carefully to what they believe about Jesus.  To deny either his divinity or his humanity is to consider him less than Christ, the Saviour.