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The New Covenant


          For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.  Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.  Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones.  In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error. Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them. (Romans 1:21-32)

         It’s not my goal to pick on any particular sin. What this passage shows is that the things that were considered sin under the Old Covenant are still considered sin under the New Covenant. There is also a pattern in which sin progresses. It begins with not treating God the way God should be treated. It begins with not loving the Lord our God with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strengths. After that, not treating one another the way we are supposed to. We do not love our neighbors as ourselves. We do not seek what is in their best interests. And finally, we reach the point of approving of those who practice such behavior. Instead of loving our neighbors, we applaud them. I am tempted to include an addendum to the final step: we attack those who don’t approve.
          This isn’t new. It’s been going on since the days of Adam, not always in the same way. The key is this – any time you’re approving of behavior that violates the teaching of Scripture, you are hating both the “neighbor” doing it and God.

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