Theological term
Spiritual Adultery
4 sermons · All terms
Wednesday Night Bible Study - November 8, 2023
Leviticus 20 prescribes specific penal sanctions for covenant violations, and this study surveys those sanctions before turning to the broader biblical teaching on capital punishment. The Noahic Covenant (Genesis 9:6), understood as a universal common grace covenant never abrogated, grounds the death penalty for murder in the imago Dei and assigns its execution to the civil magistrate. Old Covenant Israel adds further distinctions — between accidental homicide and murder, between first-table and second-table offenses — and Numbers 35 establishes that no monetary ransom may substitute for the execution of a murderer. The study closes by noting that blood guilt defiles the land and can only be expiated by the blood of the one who shed it, setting up a subsequent session on the New Testament's treatment of capital punishment.
The Call to Repentance
James 4:7–12 contains ten imperatives calling the people of God to repentance — first toward God and then toward one another. The sermon traces the gracious foundation of this call in verse 6 ('he gives more grace'), showing that compliance with these commands is possible only by divine provision, not by human self-improvement. Repentance toward God encompasses submission, resistance of the devil, drawing near to God, moral purity, mourning over sin, and humility; repentance toward one another requires laying aside evil speech, judgmentalism, and the arrogance of treating personal preferences as law. The conspicuous order — fix the vertical relationship first, then the horizontal — is shown to be the theological logic of both the Decalogue and James' own chiastic structure.
Free Grace Baptist Church - February 11, 2018 PM
James 4:1-6 exposes two devastating fruits of what James calls 'demonic wisdom': conflict with one another (vv. 1-2a) and enmity with God (vv. 2b-6). The source of both is unmortified lust — the unrestrained desire for pleasure, riches, and worldly greatness that breeds wars, fights, covetousness, and wicked prayer among professing believers. The sermon presses the congregation to trace every form of church conflict and spiritual adultery back to pride, and closes with the transitional mercy of verse 6: that despite all this, God gives more grace to the humble.
The Description of Israel's Apostasy
Israel's apostasy in Judges 2:7–3:6 is traced to a second generation that possessed cognitive knowledge of Yahweh but had no experiential, saving faith — a spiritual death that issued inevitably in Baal worship, covenant judgment, and escalating moral degradation. The passage unfolds three movements: the root of apostasy in the failure to know the Lord, the description of that apostasy in the service of Baals and Ashtoreths, and the divine response of covenant judgment followed by sovereign, gracious deliverance through imperfect human judges. Each judge prefigures the one deliverer — Jesus Christ — who alone can break the power of reigning sin where no left-handed savior can. The sermon calls believers to mortify spiritual amnesia through faithful use of the means of grace, and calls the unconverted to believe the gospel of Christ rather than await a full intellectual resolution of divine sovereignty.