Other People’s Lack of Holiness

Other People’s Lack of Holiness

We must learn to deal with our brothers and sisters’ lack of holiness in a holy manner. As priests, we must bear their faults into the sanctuary of God and not out into the camp of the people, where, as a rule, one sin is added to another, and many others are thereby defiled. Heb. 12:14,15. A priest in Israel, who had carried the sins of his brethren out into the camp to the people instead of into the sanctuary, was stoned. They said: “He has committed a mortal sin; he must die!”

When your brother sins against you, you shalt not hold your peace from him, nor tell it to others: but you shall punish your brother, and when he listens to you, you shall hold your peace from his fault. Lev. 19:16,17. And when you see your brother’s fault, and another sees it, then you shall agree with one another to pray for your brother’s offence, and not to carry his fault anywhere except into the sanctuary, where you pray for clarity and deliverance for him. Thus, the word is first and foremost to be understood according to the context: “Again I say to you that if two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven.” Have you ever agreed with your brother in this way?

It is indeed priestly!

According to the parable in this chapter, you can not only lose the forgiveness for your own sins, but you can even be called to account for them again, by God Himself, if you show no mercy to others for their mistakes. This unmerciful fellow-servant had received remission of his great debt from his master; but because he was unmerciful to his fellow-servant, the remission was taken from him again, and the whole debt again laid upon him. In this way many become captives under this dark cloud, often for s life in darkness and a fog of confusion, and they don’t even know why. Here’s an answer in this chapter.

1. Do you know which people God breaks fellowship with? With people who are irreconcilable. In Matthew 5:24 we see people who are sent away from the face of God, and to whom God says: Depart from me! We can never enjoy fellowship with God when fellowship with our brothers is disrupted by sin.

2. Do you know how someone becomes a wilderness and a desolate place? When one commits acts of violence against his brother! In Joel 3:19 we read: “Egypt shall be a desolation, and Edom a desolate wilderness, because of violence against the people of Judah, For they have shed innocent blood in their land.”

3. Do you know which people the scriptures say have “forgotten God?” We can read it in Ps. 50:19-22. You give your mouth to evil, and your tongue frames deceit. You sit and speak against your brother; you slander your mother’s son. These things you have done, and I kept silent; you thought that I was altogether like you; but I will rebuke you and set them in order before your eyes. “Now consider this, you who forget God, lest I tear you in pieces, and there be none to deliver:” To broadcast a brother’s faults to others in a heartless way, who is as heartless as ourselves, is “to judge,” Matt. 7:1, and it will not be without judgment.

4. Do you know how to make progress? It is written in Isaiah 58:6-9: Loose the bonds of wickedness, undo the heavy burdens, let the oppressed go free, and you break every yoke of sin.—then your light shall break forth like the morning, your healing shall spring forth speedily.—then you shall cry out, and He will say, Here I am! “The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your soul in drought, and strengthen your bones.”

Paul exhorts the Romans in chap. 6:13, “And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.” Your eyes, your ears, and your tongue, shall be as instruments of God, whereby the kingdom of his righteousness shall be spread abroad upon the earth: and not as instruments which the enemy can take in his hand, and spread his kingdom of iniquity and confusion.

“We are debtors—not to the flesh,” Rom. 8:12, that is, we must not feed, but bear what is still in my brothers’ flesh; for our brother is not improved by our lack of love but will only sink deeper into his own nature.