Dear Friends,

One reason some people get so little out of the Bible is that they just skim the words and don’t stop and think about them. Today’s text is a proverb. Think about what it means (1) for your own life; (2) for the people you choose as friends; (3) for the life of your children; (4) for the life of your church; (5) for the life of our nation. God bless you as you meditate (see Psalm 1:1-3).

Because of Calvary,

John Janney

I Corinthians 5:6

“The Law of Infection” [The Speaker’s Bible XIV, edited by James Hastings and Edward Hastings, (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, n.d.), p. 115]

“He makes use of a proverbial saying, by which he intimates that a whole multitude is infected by the contagion of a single individual. For this proverb has in this passage the same meaning as in those expressions of Juvenal: ‘A whole herd of swine falls down in the fields through disease in one of their number, and one discolored grape infects another.’” [John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentaries XX, (Grand Rapids, Baker Book House, n.d.), p. 187]

“In a more modern figure he was saying, ‘Don’t you know that one rotten apple can spoil the whole barrel?’” [John F. MacArthur, Jr., “1 Corinthians,” The MacArthur New Testament Commentary, (Chicago: Moody Press, 1984), p. 127-128]

“Or, as our country proverb has it, one scabbed sheep infects a whole flock.” [Ralph Venning, The Plague of Plagues: A Treatise on Sin, (London: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1669), p. 166]

“The most famous teacher in Philadelphia, in his day, said once to a rich, indulgent father, ‘You must take your boy out of my school if you are not willing to have me chastise him; he and the school too will be ruined if I have no discipline.’” [Theodore L. Cuyler, God’s Light on Dark Clouds, (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1882), p. 54]

During World War I, Germany guaranteed Lenin’s safe passage through Europe. He traveled “in a sealed boxcar (‘a plague bacillus,’ Winston Churchill would later write, directed across Europe into the veins of the Russian nation)…” [Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster, The Century, (New York: Doubleday, 1998) p. 83]

“In hell everything begins with little innocuous things. The history of the world began with an insignificant grab for an apple. In ordinary speech one would never think of calling it stealing, but probably only ‘rigging’ or ‘cutting corners,’ and yet Cain’s murder of his brother, the building of the tower of Babel, wars and rumors of wars are all related to these little manipulations. A murder begins with the slender, silken fibers of a few thoughts, quite internal, naturally, and well concealed in the precincts of the heart where thoughts have their privileged freedom and nobody can be forbidden to think. And adultery begins with a glance. And the bonds of the greatest passions were once but silken threads. Just as that which at first hardly moves the balance finally tips the scales in the Last Judgment, so the delicate web of trivialities becomes a closely woven net of ropes in which the Accuser seeks to catch us and bring us as spoils to the Last Judgment.” [Helmut Thielicke, Life Can Begin Again in Ken Gire, Reflections on the Word, (Colorado Springs, CO: Chariot Victor Publishing, 1998), p. 180]