Please Help Us Keep These Thousands of Blog Posts Growing and Free for All

$5.00

NOTE: We have been reading the Book of Proverbs verse by verse for a couple of years and are only halfway through the book. We will return to our verse by verse after December. We have enough ready devotionals to get us through December that are already prepared. The Proverbs are being done each day and it takes 2-3 hours to research and do each one. I am the Chief Translator of the UASV that is coming out in December after 16 years of work. It is getting close, and I need all the time I can put toward that for now. Apologies! Note to that this journey through proverbs that we have been doing is going to be a commentary volume well over 700 pages when done. Maybe over 800 pages. So, it will be either a book one volume or a two volume set of about 400+ pages each.

Must We Pay Our Vows?

Ecclesiastes 5:4-5 Updated American Standard Version (UASV)
⁴When you make a vow to God, do not delay paying it, for he finds no pleasure in fools. What you vow, pay. ⁵It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay.

It is that time of year again when many of us will make New Year’s resolutions. We should heed Solomon’s counsel and not enter lightly into promises to God or man. We cannot do anything to make God love us more, and we cannot do anything to make God love us less. That is grace (though not an excuse for moral laxity). But there is value in making resolutions. Setting goals for ourselves is good. There are characters in the Bible who made resolutions. Jacob resolved to give a tithe, “And of all that you give me I will give a full tenth to you” (Genesis 28:22). Is it a sin not to give? Is it a sin not to give a tenth? Is giving a private matter of conscience? It is voluntary. Nobody is going to demand it. So it is up to us. There are sins of commission and sins of omission. Sin is not just the bad things we do it is also the good things we fail to do, ‘whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin’ (James 4:17).

Abram commenced tithing when he gave Melchizedek (priest/king) a tenth of everything. Jacob continued it. Malachi commanded it, ‘Bring all the tenth parts[23] into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says Jehovah of armies,[24] if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is nothing lacking.’ (Malachi 3:10). Jesus condoned it, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others” (Matthew 23:23).