Taking Every Warning Seriously

Paul says, "This is the third time I'm coming to you." That's his plan.

He's going to come to Corinth.

He says, "Every charge must be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses." Now, if you've got a Bible, that should say very clearly at some point, some footnote there, that this is a quotation from Deuteronomy 19:15.

This is an Old Testament text that it, it seems weird and out of place that he puts it this way.

It almost seems like a, a stretch even to quote this text in this particular context This is, you might remember, the very last book of Moses as he's about to hand off the baton to Joshua, who's going to take these people into the Promised Land.

They've been wandering for 40 years, this nomadic group of people, uh, that have been, you know, under God's discipline.

They've come out of Egypt where they had a, a, a nation, the, the strongest, most populous, you know, powerful, wealthy nation, Egypt, that, that they were under the, the leadership of.

And now they were going to be their own nation, a nation among nations, and they needed a civil law code.

And so they were gonna get a civil law code, and a lot of the details of that were given by God through Moses in the Book of Deuteronomy.

Uh, we saw it in Exodus as well, but we see a lot of it in the Book of Deuteronomy.

And a lot of what we get in Deuteronomy are things like this, that, you know, if, if, if, if, you know, Levi steals the farmer's daughter, uh, you, you don't put him on trial just because, you know, Dan over there says, "Well, that's what happened." Right? You have to have two or three witnesses before you bring some kind of a punishment.

You can't be punitive about something without the jurisprudence of something that we know for sure has happened.

There ought to be confidence in this.

Now, Paul is saying, "This is the third time I'm coming to you." In other words, "I've witnessed how bad things are in Corinth.

I've witnessed your disobedience." And so now he's saying, kinda like the law code says in the Old Testament, that you don't punish someone, one, you don't bring any kind of justice to them unless you've got two or three witnesses.

Paul's saying, "I've witnessed myself what's going on there three times." I see the connection, but it's kind of a weird, you know, employment of this text, and I'll show you why in a minute.

I'm not saying it's wrong.

It's certainly right.

It's absolutely right.

But, but it, it, at first blush, it, it's strange, uh, to see it there.

We'll look at it in a minute.

And here's what he's saying.

"I warned those who sinned before." Now, we can even go to 1 Corinthians and say, okay, we do know that there were a lot of sins that were pointed out in 1 Corinthians.

The most notorious, I assume, was the fact that there was incest going on with some people that sat there in the pews, if you will, of the Church of Corinth, and, um, no one was seeming to care about it.

Matter of fact, they seemed magnanimous about it, if you know that word.