Week 40, Straying from God
Discussion Questions
Old Testament
Jeremiah 3:1 mentions a man divorcing his wife. Is he referring to something besides marriage?
New Testament
What is the “persuasiveness of speech” that is deluding the Colossians?
Notes and Commentary
Old Testament
Jeremiah 3:1 mentions a man divorcing his wife. Is he referring to something besides marriage?
[1] “They say, ‘If a man puts away his wife, and she goes from him, and become another man’s, will he return to her again?’ Wouldn’t that land be greatly polluted? But you have played the prostitute with many lovers; yet return again to me,” says the LORD. Jeremiah 3:1 (WEBME).
[1] When a man takes a wife and marries her, then it shall be, if she finds no favor in his eyes, because he has found some unseemly thing in her, that he shall write her a bill of divorce, and put it in her hand, and send her out of his house. [2] When she has departed out of his house, she may go and be another man’s wife. [3] If the latter husband hates her, and write her a bill of divorce, and puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house; or if the latter husband die, who took her to be his wife; [4] her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife, after that she is defiled; for that is abomination before the LORD. You shall not cause the land to sin, which the LORD your God gives you for an inheritance. Deuteronomy 24:1-4 (WEBME).
Jewish law considered the situation in which a man divorced his wife. The wife then married another man. The second husband then divorced the woman. It was unlawful for the wife to return to the first/original husband and remarry him again. Apparently this was a real problem in this time. Serial marriage then, as now, became a formalized means to accomplish promiscuity. In the same manner, God had the right to permanently disown his wayward people. But God was willing to take his people back, though He had had no obligation to do so.
Matthew Henry’s Complete Commentary on the Whole Bible. How basely this people had forsaken God and gone a whoring from him. The charge runs very high here... How gently God had corrected them for their sins. Instead of raining fire and brimstone upon them, because, like Sodom, they had avowed their sin and had gone after strange gods as Sodom after strange flesh, he only withheld the showers from them... How graciously he not only invites them, but directs them, to return to him.
New Testament.
What is the “persuasiveness of speech” that is deluding the Colossians?
[4] Now this I say that no one may delude you with persuasiveness of speech. Colossians 2:4 (WEB)
Random Quotes
"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
―Rick Cook, The Wizardry Compiled
Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.
I’m afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning. ―Andy Warhol
Notes:
© Tom Truex 2014, Davie, FL