For some reason, a number of current translations of the New Testament “omit” today’s subject! Today’s “sin” I should say. But others include it with a note, “not in some manuscripts!”
But it IS in the old Textus Receptus, the Greek Bible from which our King James Version translators worked. Men of scholarly repute indeed.
I am speaking of “murders.”
Nestled in the last verse of this “sins of the flesh” litany.
The (Greek) word is spelled “phonos,” as Paul would have written it.
Its root, “pheno,” means “to murder” 8 times in the Bible, and then “to slaughter” 1 more time. (It is certainly not the HOLY SPIRIT Who leads a human being to cold-bloodedly “murder” a fellow man or woman!)
Matthew 15:19-20 is really Jesus’ Own “works of the flesh” list, and our Lord includes “murder.” That’s good enough for me! (Paul may have been building off this list, in fact.) “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, MURDERS, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. These are the things which defile a man ….”
We learn in Luke 23 that Barabbas was a “murderer!” (“Who for a certain sedition made in the city, and for MURDER, was cast into prison.”)
And Saul (Paul) himself, when still a lost Pharisee and persecutor of the Church, was apparently a “murderer!” So recorded Dr. Luke anyway: “And Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and SLAUGHTER against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest, And desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem.”
And Hebrews 11:37 mentions the saints (martyrs) through the ages who have been “slain” for Jesus’ sake, using a form of our verb here.
So, Paul in Galatians 5:21 (our Text this morning) certainly means “murder” literally … as a “work” of the flesh.
But could he also means it metaphorically, spiritually? I think so! In this sense, quoting John now. “Whosoever HATETH his brother is a MURDERER: and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him.” 1 John 3:15
And we have already been told (back in Galatians 5:20) that one of these disgusting expressions of the flesh is vicious “hatred!”
That’s enough information.
At least for me, to know that I want no part of such a lifestyle.
I want to belong to that crowd that tries “to love one another.”
Don’t you?
— Dr. Mike Bagwell
A realization of which (that type of unselfish loving) is only possible via God the Holy Spirit!