A New Perspective

Imagine you are someone still unmarried who grew up a Christian. Your parents taught you to carefully guard your purity until marriage, so you are still a virgin. While ministering among new believers who are still learning what it is to be in the faith, you feel somewhat estranged from them, hearing about all their horrible sexually perverted backgrounds, and you start pulling yourself away from them.

One day while you are praying in your room, you have a vision. A door appears in front of you and opens. Inside the room is a bed and on the bed is a very attractive prostitute beckoning to you. A voice from heaven says to you, "Rise and indulge!" The very thought of doing this absolutely repulses you, and you deny the command, saying that you would never partake in such unclean acts. Three times you are told to indulge, and three times you refuse. Finally, the door is shut, and a voice says, "What God has cleansed, you must not call unclean." Moments later, some new converts arrive at your home, and you are suddenly convicted over how you were treating these people as though they were still prostitutes and sexually immoral. You see God was showing you that you must treat them as new creations, no longer unclean but pure in God's eyes, and not refrain from fellowshipping with them the way you would with the truly unclean.

Before the appearance of these guests, it would be quite understandable if you were confused after seeing this vision, but do you think you would immediately conclude, "Wow, God has changed His instructions and made sexual immorality clean. Now I can indulge in it without being afraid that I am going to displease Him!"

I certainly hope you would not think this...

You know those Jenga block towers where you try to pull out a block without knocking down the whole tower? This is what happens when you try to eliminate even one of God's laws. The whole tower comes crumbling down. If one law is no longer applicable, then all the rest start falling apart, and that is why we have such a lawless church these days, with homosexuality and all kinds of perversions going on inside the assembly. When James said if you break one law, you break them all, he wasn't saying the law was impossible to keep. He was saying they are all interconnected with each other, eternally linked. If you break one and think it's okay, you're fooling yourself! James was saying, stop showing partiality (breaking the Torah) and repent!