SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 4/20/2017 10:48 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-2 “Sins of Perverted Love”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Colossians
3:5b
Message of the verses: “immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry.”
Passion and Evil Desire: John MacArthur states that the distinction between these two is not great. “Pathos (‘Passion’) refers to sexual passion set loose in the body, as its two other occurrences in the New Testament indicate (cf. Rom. 1:26; 1 Thess. 4:5). In this context, evil desire undoubtedly also refers to the sexual lust created in the mind (cf. James 1:15). Perhaps the difference between the two terms is that passion is the physical and evil desire the mental side of the same vice. The two terms appear together in 1 Thessalonians 4:5, where Paul commands Christians not to live ‘in lustful passion, like the Gentiles who do not know God.’ Such behavior is completely inappropriate for believer.”
Greed: We could
also see this word as covetousness and it is last because this is the evil root
from which every one of the previous sins spring up from. I might add that in the Ten Commandments that
Covetousness is also listed last.
“Pleonexia” is the Greek word for greed “greedy desire to have more,
covetousness, avarice.” It is translated
covetousness eight times in the KJV.
MacArthur adds that this word in the Greek “comes from two Greek
words: pleon, ‘more,’ and ‘exo’
‘to have.’ It is the insatiable desire
to have more, to have what is forbidden. As such, it is the source of fights and
quarrels (James 4:2), as well as lusts, passion, and sin.”
Why do we see this at the
end of our verse “which amounts to idolatry?”
Answer is because it places these selfish desires above obedience to God
as greed amounts to idolatry. John
MacArthur quotes William Barclay who wrote “It is, therefore, a sin with a very
wide range. If it is the desire for
money, it leads to theft. If it is the
desire for prestige, it leads to evil ambition.
If it is the desire for power, it leads to sadistic tyranny. If it is the desire for a person, it leads to
sexual sin.” MacArthur states that
covetousness is the root cause of all sin.
When we look at the fall of Lucifer we see that he coveted what God had,
and so we could say that this being the first sin makes a good case for
this. However I have been thinking that
perhaps selfishness is the root of all sins and the reason is similar to covetousness
in that when one sins he is most always thinking about himself, thus being
selfish, as people are doing what they desire to do, and perhaps we could say
that this is the opposite of love. God
so loved that He gave. When we sin we
are doing something for ourselves and not doing what God desires and this is,
in essence, to worship ourselves instead of God and that makes it
idolatry.
John MacArthur quotes the Puritan Stephen Charnock:
“All sin is founded in
secret atheism…All the wicked inclinations in the heart…are sparks from this latent
(hidden) fire; the language of every one of these is, ‘I would be a Lord
myself, and would not have a God superior to me.’…In sins of omission we own
not God, in neglecting to perform what is enjoins; in sins of commission we set
up some lust in the place of God, and pay to that the homage which is due to
our Maker…We deny his sovereignty when we violate his laws…Every sin invades
the rights of God, and strips him of one or other of his perfections…Every sin
is a kind of cursing God in the heart; an aim at the destruction of the being
of God; not actually, but virtually…A man in every sin aims to set up his own
will as his rule, and his own glory as the end of his actions against the will
and glory of God.”
4/20/2017 11:17 PM
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