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Chapter 106

End Time Religion:

Fake Love

Back home from college for a family visit, I told my high school best friend about my great interest in Margie Brown. Then he asked, “But how do you know you love her?”

I hadn’t thought about that. It seemed like a Hollywood test question, like from a movie. How do I know that I love her?

After some consideration I concluded –

I could spend my life with Margie, or without her. Those were the only two options.

Spending my life without her?

Well, I couldn’t stand that idea. I spent all the spare time with her that I could, and when I was not with her I was thinking about her. So what I most wanted to do was to spend my whole life with her. That was the only good option.

I reckoned I loved her.

The following decades have proven that to be mutual true love. Hollywood love as portrayed in movies is feel-good fake love, more for show than go. The world today is full of fake love.

The Corinth assembly was the epitome of fake love. They were tolerant, inclusive – and hard hearted. Christian congregations can learn much from them, about what real love is.

1Cor 5
1) It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and such sexual immorality as is not even named among the Gentiles, that one has his father’s wife.
2) You are puffed up, and didn’t rather mourn, that he who had done this deed might be removed from among you.
3) For I most certainly, as being absent in body but present in spirit, have already, as though I were present, judged him who has done this thing.
4) In the name of our Lord Yeshua Christ, you being gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Yeshua Christ,
5) are to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Yeshua.
6) Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole lump?

In Corinth, a man was adulterizing with his father’s wife. His step-mother.

As you might expect, God forbids lying with your stepmother.

Lev 18
8) “‘You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s wife: it is your father’s nakedness.

Deut 22
30) A man shall not take his father’s wife, and shall not uncover his father’s skirt.

This sin was so perverse that even the Gentiles considered it –

Perverse.

“The ancient Roman writer and statesman Cicero said this type of incest was an incredible crime and practically unheard of…” Guzik’s Commentary, 1 Cor 5:1.

Step-mother adultery was a sin that even Gentiles wouldn’t tolerate. So if God doesn’t tolerate that sin, and if the Gentiles wouldn’t tolerate it, then who would tolerate it?

The Corinthian Christians.

To corinthianize is, from Collins English Dictionary, “to live a promiscuous life.” In other words, to corinthianize is to live like somebody from Corinth.

[I]ts reputation for moral corruption made the “Corinthian life” synonymous with luxury and licentiousness, its pretensions to philosophy and literary culture made the phrase “Corinthian words” a token of polished and cultivated speech;
https://zondervanacademic.com/blog/what-was-the-city-and-church-of-corinth-like-an-excerpt-from-ralph-martins-2-corinthians-wbc

“Corinthian words” meant sophisticated speaking and “Corinthian life” meant back alley morals. So while the Corinthian congregation allowed penultimate perversity, they made it sound real good.

Much as mainline churches do today – sophisticated sinning. They approve sin with eloquent words of “wokeness”.

Amazingly, it seems there was nobody in the Corinth congregation who condemned the sin. Apparently, they all approved what was going on. Not only did they approve the sin, they boasted about approving it.

How could they boast about that? What was their thinking?

Surely they bragged about how accepting and loving they were!

Just like liberals do today. Will wonders never cease?

You see, even though that was nearly two thousand years ago in Greece, human nature is still the same; and God’s Commandments are still the same. So all through time, when people disobey those Commandments, they try to make themselves feel good about it.

As Corinth did – “you are inflated with pride…Your boasting is not good,” Lexham English Bible, 1 Cor 5:2, 6.

How about today’s churches? How about Joe and Nancy?

Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi regularly take communion in their Roman Catholic Churches. Yet every day of their lives they stand for abortion, for sexual perversity and against marriage. They totally contradict their church. So why are they allowed to take part in what is considered the most holy part of the RCC service?

Because of the old Corinthian Christian attitude.

How about that? The Church of Rome is actually from Corinth.

No matter how evil Joe and Nancy are, the Roman church allows them to be a central part of their church. Why do they do that? Because they “love” Joe and Nancy. Just as the Corinth Christians loved the guy that Paul said to send to Satan.

Don’t most Protestant churches today do the same thing? Don’t almost all churches have people in their congregations who believe that to love someone you must approve their sins? That God is approachable, not reproaching; inclusive, not excluding anyone; and all loving, but never correcting.

The tolerance, diversity and inclusive movement in the western world today is just a natural extension of the modern Christian approach to God. That approach says God is love, and to refuse to accept a sinning sinner is to hate him. If you don’t approve a sinner’s sins, you’re a hater. Haven’t you talked with Christians who argue that people who live perverse lives were “just born that way?”

Congregations and individuals who oppose opposing sin consider themselves to be paragons of love. And in a way they are paragons of love –

Self-love.

As in Corinth, they puff themselves up by their love-without-limit posturing. Plus by not opposing sin, and this is a big point, they do not put their social standing at risk.

Amos 5
10) They hate him who reproves in the gate, and they abhor him who speaks blamelessly.

Lot was abhorred when he told the people of Sodom not “to act so wickedly”.

Gen 19
9) They said, “Stand back!” Then they said, “This one fellow [Lot] came in to live as a foreigner, and he appoints himself a judge. Now will we deal worse with you, than with them!” They pressed hard on the man Lot, and drew near to break the door.

To the liberals, in Sodom, Lot was judgmental. Almost everybody unfriended him on Facebook.

The same will happen to any Christian who tells a sinner to repent and be renewed. And any congregation that follows Paul’s example with the step-mother lover will be vilified as unloving, judgmental and unchristian. Those who tolerate sin, as Corinth did, are considered the real Christians. Those who call for repentance are called haters.

Tolerating sin causes sin, whether in a congregation, in a person, or in yourself. As Paul wrote to Corinth, “a little leaven leavens the whole lump”. If they allow sin in their midst, their midst will begin sinning. Any sin they approve in others, they will approve in themselves.

That’s the reason Yahweh forbid Israel from mixing with the Canaanites.

Judg 2
1) The angel of Yahweh came up from Gilgal to Bochim. He said, “I made you to go up out of Egypt, and have brought you to the land which I swore to your fathers; and I said, ‘I will never break my covenant with you:
2) and you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land; you shall break down their altars.’ But you have not listened to my voice: why have you done this?
3) Therefore I also said, I will not drive them out from before you; but they shall be in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare to you.”

That was the angel of Yahweh who said that, the one who became the Messiah. He said the Canaanites Israel left in their midst would be a snare to them.

Indeed, Israel was snared by the evil in their midst.

Judg 2
11) The children of Israel did that which was evil in the sight of Yahweh, and served the Baals;
12) and they forsook Yahweh, the God of their fathers, who brought them out of the land of Egypt, and followed other gods, of the gods of the peoples who were around them, and bowed themselves down to them: and they provoked Yahweh to anger.
13) They forsook Yahweh, and served Baal and the Ashtaroth.

Wise Solomon was snared by tolerating evil in the wives he chose to marry.

1Kgs 11
1) Now king Solomon loved many foreign women, together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, and Hittites;
2) of the nations concerning which Yahweh said to the children of Israel, “You shall not go among them, neither shall they come among you; for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods.” Solomon joined to these in love.
3) H