November 10, 2015
Adulteress
It was frosty early Sunday morning
as I looked out my kitchen window into my neighbor’s backyard. Three young
adults dressed in jackets and hoodies were moving around trying to stay warm
while they shared a joint and lite up a pipe. I know I’m naïve, but seriously, who
smokes marijuana for breakfast? Although Proverbs 7 is a warning against adultery,
marijuana might well fit the image of an adulteress, “At the window of my house
I looked out through the lattice. I saw among the simple, I noticed
among the young men, a youth who lacked judgment” (Proverbs 7:6-7 NIV).
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2 comments:
I don't know how many times I have read that in the past few years and the parallel never occurred to me. Good observation. Good insight.
Grace and peace.
Gail;
-----I had a friend whose hobby-horse was adultery. To him, it seemed everything fit the scope of adultery. And I’m not talking about just lust in the heart and such. I’m talking about even burning the morning toast was adultery, that is, if the morning toast was a big deal for the other spouse. I never really argued against his point, because I could see it. Marriage is a commitment to the mental, physical, and spiritual good of the one you marry. It is a commitment to their happiness and joy gained in propriety with the Lord’s constructs (a fancy way of saying, “Don’t spoil the spouse.”) It is a commitment to just doing right towards the one you’ve proclaimed to love. Then any breach of that commitment unbalancing what is right towards your own favor to the point your spouse is wronged is adultery.
-----OK. That stretches the word pretty thin, but everything the stretch covers shares the substance of cheating. Perk the coffee too strong and get a caffeine rush. If it was a mistake of inattention, no big deal. But if it was done for the caffeine rush, somebody’s doing drugs again. Same with that box of chocolates for the sweetheart. She might just love the chewy strawberry flavored ones. Or she might love even more the tryptophan in them all. Oh no! Sweety’s doing drugs again! I once told a friend that nobody needs drug dealers. We have little drug factories in our own heads cooking away on adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin (the release of which tryptophan causes,) and many other neurotransmitters and inhibiters, uh, drugs.
-----For me, high school was a hop, skip, and a joint away. Well, until the second semester of my senior year anyway; that’s when the Lord took over. A few years ago, one of my friends employed in the psych field, after many long discussions and conversations about sociology, psychology, and plain old human nature offered that I was what they call “metacognitive”, because I not only had a conscious awareness of the functioning of my own thought processes, but because I also studied those processes. I had been far too contemplative for too many years even before high school, so it was not the joints on the way to school which turned up my metacognition. What the THC did was to stimulate the inescapable fact of reality, that reality extends beyond what is seen, and that unseen realities can be known by the patterns of their effects upon seen realities. It stood my emotions naked on their feet in front of the fact that the Bible very well fit the description of idea patterns made upon this seen reality by what could only be an overarching unseen reality. Therefore, the Bible must be given serious consideration in the ordering of your life. Actually, the Lord took over only as I handed Him the reins. And in the following forty plus years I’ve come to learn the Bible’s historical patterns as well, all of it being revelation, all of it being for real, the most important set of ideas there is.
-----I often ponder what I might be like if I had not hopped, skipped, and jointed to high school in those days. I can’t imagine. But I don’t know if I would consider it as being better or not. I’ve had a lot of obedience issues in my life, but I’ve overcome most in the emotional sobriety by which I learned to receive His Word. Drugs are like everything else in this world: when used properly to do right they are good. Seeing so many drugs advertised on TV, even to the point of drugs for relieving you of your duty to relieve your full bladder, I think there’s a lot more drug problems in addition to pot for breakfast. Still the first issue of matter to any person is: will you submit to the Lord and not cheat on Him? Everything else works out in the light the Word sheds upon that idea.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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