The mission’s Bible class has been studying 1 Corinthians. 1 Corinthians 5: 1ff, the Apostle has to address a major pastoral problem:
“It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father’s wife.”
How did things get to this? Yes, people do wrong. This is the reason God sent His only-begotten Son. The Apostle most assuredly knew that:1 Timothy 1:11! The Apostle quotes back to the Corinthians one of their theological slogans twice: “All things are lawful for me” (1 Cor. 6: 12 and 1. Cor. 10: 23). In chapter 6 Paul addresses another pastoral and theological problem: prostitution. By the time the Apostle is constrained to write to the Church in Corinth, they had justified all sorts of immorality, sexual and otherwise.
How did they get to that point? My guess is that the Church in Corinth did nothing about it when they first began to hear about the wrongs and that was the problem. They saw their brother sin and did nothing. They were living by a dubious ‘virtue’: they were “nice”.
So many have queried in the Church: “How did we get to the point of same-sex marriage?!?!” Back in the ’60s, we accepted divorce and remarriage as “no-fault”, and also masturbation, our children living together, restricting gestation, etc. to the point that these “new moralities” were also justified by theological jargon within the denominations and became dogma. The old saying is true: “If I give an inch, you’ll take a mile”. For instance, “Living together will make for stronger marriages” and so less divorce. It has not. Christians in Corinth utilized what had become a heretical dogma when intoned by itself, “All things are lawful”, or the Greek can be rendered: “All things are in my power” (sounds like televangelists!) or “I am free to do anything” (sounds like Americans!). Yes, Paul says, all things are lawful, but not all things are helpful (1. Cor. 6) nor do they build up (1 Cor. 10).
“…they failed to understand that Christian freedom from sin and the Law’s condemnation is not freedom to sin, but instead is freedom to live by the power of the Spirit in accord with God’s Law (e. g. Romans 6; 13:10). (Concordia Commentary, CPH, Gregory Lockwood).
As Luther wrote in The Freedom of the Christian as his central thesis:
A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one.
The editorial cartoon above is descriptive of this process of little by little we allow a wrong until it gets too late. Politically free and/or spiritually freed people have to be alert. Another old saying is true: The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
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