(Did you notice that we skipped two verses in the Romans
passage from yesterday to today. The
reading yesterday ended at verse 25 and yet today we begin at verse 28. Do you wonder what verses we skipped? Here they are, could the motive be
clearer? "For this reason God
gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural
relations for those that are contrary to nature; 27 and
the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with
passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and
receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error." This goes all the way back to 1979 and the
BCP, it isn't something that was done recently.)
There are several things to note in this passage from
Numbers. Moses took seventy of the
elders and God took some of the Spirit from Moses and put it on the other men
and there was proof this happened, they prophesied, but they did not continue
to do so. It is as though there were
some finite amount of Spirit and whatever one got reduced the amount available
to anyone else. Now this could certainly
be a lack of understanding of the Spirit of God at the time that we see. The Spirit, in the Old Testament, was
typically given for a reason and a season.
It was given for a task and for the time needed to do that task. That is the reason in Psalm 51 David prays
that the Holy Spirit not be taken from Him.
We believe that we are given the Holy Spirit as a Helper and He is a
constant presence in our lives whether we acknowledge Him or not, He is the
fulfillment of Jesus' promise to be with us always, even to the end of the
age. These men were confirmed as God's
anointed by the prophecy. God, however,
proved His sovereignty by giving also the Spirit to Eldad and Medad, precursors
in some ways of His choice of Paul when the disciples had chosen Matthias to
take the place of Judas. Finally, the
hoarding of the quail was the thing that roused God's anger against the
people. The plague was probably brought
about through spoilt meat from the hoarding without refrigeration. God was disgusted with their desire for meat
overcoming them and causing them to gather unlike they had been commanded with
the manna.
We live in a child-centered culture while in the ancient
world children were valued, if at all, for their validation of the parents as
accepted by God, for their ability to provide additional labor, and little
else. They were not responsible for
their own actions until they attained a certain age. Prior to that they were extensions of the
parent. Jesus said to the disciples that
they must become like this child whom He had singled out and brought to the
center of the group in order to enter the kingdom of heaven much less become
greatest. They would never have
considered such an idea without His suggestion.
What would it mean to be like a child?
It would mean submission to one who was greater, accepting the
limitation of dependence and humility.
We have made the relationship with God too much "buddy" and
too little humble dependence. We have
become like the Israelites in our first reading and too little like Jesus in
His earthly life.
Had we not left out the two verses at the beginning of the
reading we would have seen that there is a flow from first failing to
recognizing God's way of things in the created order of men and women to all
other kinds of sin, choosing our own desires over God's plan. Sin begets sinfulness. The first commandment in Scripture is to be
fruitful and multiply, that can only be obeyed between a man and a woman. When we fail to accept God's will in that
place, where can we set other boundaries on human conduct? People today don't understand the Roman
Catholic stance on birth control but look at the world and sexual ethics since
birth control became readily available and you will see that Paul's argument
makes perfect sense. When we make
possible sexual profligacy without consequences we ensure the result. Confining desire into God-prescribed
boundaries is an act of humble submission and when we fail to do so, all manner
of evil and sin is the result. Sexual
ethics matter more than we realize, all sexual ethics, not just homosexuality. Desire is strong, we must always submit not
to desire but to God's Word in such matters.
The judgment of God is on untrammeled desire, see the first passage for
proof.
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