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Spiritual Adultery - Isaiah 57

Isaiah 57:8

“Also behind the doors and their posts you have set up your remembrance; for you have uncovered yourself to those other than Me, and have gone up to them; you have enlarged your bed and made a covenant with them; you have loved their bed, where you saw their nudity.”

In comparing Israel’s worship of false gods and allegiance to worldly practices to adultery, God is saying that worship—of God or of the world—is as intimate an act as sexual intercourse. Indeed, more so, because worship deals with the soul and not the body only. Worship is a submission of self—soul and body—to a greater force, real or perceived. Mere existence requires the submission of your soul to an external force. In the simplest interactions of life with life, there are concessions to be made, choices of one thing over another, forces of will and thought behind every action. If the driving force behind these things is the law of God, we are in submission to God. If it is the law of the world, we are in submission to the world and are already spiritual adulterers (“If you are not for me, you are against me”). There is no in-between. God’s existence is preeminent—the benchmark for all existence. There is God, and there is not God. There is truth and there is untruth. There is good and there is evil. To be in submission to neither is to not exist, and to be in submission to an existence that is not God is condemnation. We are God’s, or we are condemned.

See also Is. 62:4-5, in which God promises to fully cleanse Israel of her spiritual adultery and make her pure and chaste, a virgin entering into the holy covenant of marriage. God redeems completely, not in half measures.

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