But I have a few things against you, namely that you have some there who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to place an occasion for sin before the sons of Israel, to eat food offered to idols and to commit fornication. Rev. 2:14.
Eating food offered to an idol may seem a rather small issue to complain about. And young people often ask, "What could possibly be wrong with 'a little harmless sex'?" The actions that Balaam and Balak led Israel into must not have seemed so wrong to many Israelites. But when temptation leads to sin, we often discover that its consequences vastly outweigh any pleasure that may have occurred. The end result of Baal-Peor, the event in the Old Testament that our text refers to, was the death of 24,000 Israelites.
Recent discoveries give us a new understanding of the complexities of outer space. Long supposed by theory but never confirmed, scientists now know that so-called black holes are massive fields of gravity that can literally rip a star apart. Invisible to the naked eye, X-ray telescopes such as those at the Chandra X-ray Observatory Center, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, can detect them.
Photographs made at Chandra are the first strong evidence for this phenomenon. They show a star disintegrating from the pull of a black hole. "Stars can survive being stretched a small amount, as they are in binary star systems, but this star was stretched beyond its breaking point," said Stefanie Komossa of he Max Planick Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany. "This unlucky star just wandered into the wrong neighborhood."
The interesting part is that the black hole did not swallow the star. It consumed only 1 percent of the star's total mass. But the momentum and energy it triggered actually flung most of the star's gas away from the black hole. All the black hole did was initiate the process by eroding the star's critical mass. Once the black hole disrupted the star in this way, the star's destruction took on a life of its own, and it disintegrated from there.
Sin is like this black hole. Its attraction on our lives is as powerful as gravity. Seductive temptations draw us constantly and steadily into the hold of its gravitational pull. And like the black hole that destroys the star by just breaking apart its vital structure, yielding to sin can damage us just enough to set a process of ultimate annihilation into motion. The Word of God is clear that even small sins can lead to destruction and eventually death!
Lord, help me to take sin very seriously. I know that salvation is by grace, yet sin attracts me away from You and Your grace, leading in dangerous and destructive directions. I therefore choose to yield my body and mind to Your complete control today.
Eating food offered to an idol may seem a rather small issue to complain about. And young people often ask, "What could possibly be wrong with 'a little harmless sex'?" The actions that Balaam and Balak led Israel into must not have seemed so wrong to many Israelites. But when temptation leads to sin, we often discover that its consequences vastly outweigh any pleasure that may have occurred. The end result of Baal-Peor, the event in the Old Testament that our text refers to, was the death of 24,000 Israelites.
Recent discoveries give us a new understanding of the complexities of outer space. Long supposed by theory but never confirmed, scientists now know that so-called black holes are massive fields of gravity that can literally rip a star apart. Invisible to the naked eye, X-ray telescopes such as those at the Chandra X-ray Observatory Center, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, can detect them.
Photographs made at Chandra are the first strong evidence for this phenomenon. They show a star disintegrating from the pull of a black hole. "Stars can survive being stretched a small amount, as they are in binary star systems, but this star was stretched beyond its breaking point," said Stefanie Komossa of he Max Planick Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany. "This unlucky star just wandered into the wrong neighborhood."
The interesting part is that the black hole did not swallow the star. It consumed only 1 percent of the star's total mass. But the momentum and energy it triggered actually flung most of the star's gas away from the black hole. All the black hole did was initiate the process by eroding the star's critical mass. Once the black hole disrupted the star in this way, the star's destruction took on a life of its own, and it disintegrated from there.
Sin is like this black hole. Its attraction on our lives is as powerful as gravity. Seductive temptations draw us constantly and steadily into the hold of its gravitational pull. And like the black hole that destroys the star by just breaking apart its vital structure, yielding to sin can damage us just enough to set a process of ultimate annihilation into motion. The Word of God is clear that even small sins can lead to destruction and eventually death!
Lord, help me to take sin very seriously. I know that salvation is by grace, yet sin attracts me away from You and Your grace, leading in dangerous and destructive directions. I therefore choose to yield my body and mind to Your complete control today.
RSS Feed
