A Price Tag
Good Morning,
Everything we purchase has a price tag. Some high-end stores that cater to rich people who do not pay attention to price tags may not have a tag, but the average person considers the price tag when buying something.
In America, as in many other circumstances throughout history, people are trying to create social and political solutions, but their primary complaint is the cost. If we balance the budget, some people will see their businesses suffer. If we change the political world by term limits or other political reform, a price will be paid. People do not like it. In a culture where we know we have to pay for everything, people want to reform wrong business or social philosophies, but they do not want it to cost anything.
If someone wants to control immigration and deport those who are not in our country legally, there is a price tag that will need to be paid. The problem will not be solved without someone paying a severe price. Many folks think the solution is to not pay the price and not correct the problem; they simply want to live with the situation. If a teenager is a drug addict and a whore monger, but the price tag of trying to correct the problem is too high, should we simply allow the child to continue the next thirteen years as a perverted addict? That’s not the solution most of us would want, but we must ask ourselves if we do want to pay the price of fixing the problem.
I know people who’s private businesses have suffered greatly with the world of tariffs, but these are the kind of people who understand business enough to know we need these changes, and they are willing to pay the price. The better the product, the higher the cost. If you want a great country, it will cost.
Ezra 9-10 bring us into a very tragic situation. Ezra and some spiritual leaders had returned to Jerusalem after the seventy-year captivity. The people who remained in the land or those who had returned to their own land, had mingled their lifestyles with that of the land. The chief sin was marrying the women who were not Jewish or taking the girls of the land and giving them to their Jewish sons to marry. The wrong committed was monumental. As they wept and prayed, the people gathered with Ezra and hammered out a solution, but it was a very costly one.
Ezra 10:3 “Now therefore let us make a covenant with our God to put away all the wives, and such as are born of them…”
Even as many Christians read this text today, there will be a question of whether this was the right thing to do or not. How could it possibly be right? How could it be right to take the wife you chose and the children who were born to the two of you and put them away? What about responsibility? What about vows? The big question that should be asked is what about right? What about holiness? What about obedience to God? We will find the same people questioning the Scriptures and doubting the behavior of biblical characters; especially Jepthah, who made a vow to sacrifice the first thing that came out of the gate after the battle was won. (Judges 11:30)
I would like to remind you that in order for God to solve the sin problem in the world, He had to brutally punish His own Son. The Father had to take His only begotten Son and punish Him beyond description, humiliate Him publicly, shame Him before society, and put Him through tremendous physical pain and suffering of the body and soul - a pain words cannot express.
Fixing the problem of sin has a price tag attached. It may be that someone needs to give up a good job to do right. It could be that a young couple who is serious about marriage needs to break their relationship because of right and wrong. It could be a parent who dearly loves their child, but needs to take a stand against the behavior of that child. Sin has a price. Sin and the byproducts of sin cannot be corrected without someone paying a price.
This warm and fuzzy culture of nice people who want to play with sin, ignore the Scriptures, drift in and out of church as is convenient, and ignore the Bible will have trouble – and that trouble will be costly to repair. Someone will need to pay a high price. The Christian who marries someone who is not saved, will pay an incredibly high price for being bound in marriage to someone who clearly was not the will of God. If they are to try and be the spouse God commands them to be, it will be extremely difficult and in some cases the suffering will be great.
There is a price tag on our behavior. There is a price tag on correcting the suffering that goes with our behavior. It would be far better to carefully guard our thinking so that we do not need to correct things in which we foolishly became involved.
Pastor