Will Smith got all worked up about a joke being made by Chris Rock. Mrs. Smith's alopecia is off-limits, it turns out, so Will got jiggy with cuffing Mr. Rock really hard for all the world to see. An open marriage, meanwhile, is nothing to blush at, as Hollywood sees it.
Marriage equality is of a piece with deconstructing gender and sexuality. But if you hold fast to the conviction that God instituted marriage you are either phobic or a hateful bigot. Either way, you are the embodiment of deviance, whereas the abolishment of gender, or else the multiplication thereof into oblivion, is both normal and necessary.
On the flipside, all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable - that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work - but the story of Ehud and Eglon will never be adapted for Veggie Tales and flannelgraph, except perhaps by satirists.
Meanwhile the Apostle Paul writes to the same Timothy he gave qualifications for overseers and deacons to about having a little wine for the sake of his digestion. But even one drink in the evening will be used in some churches to say a man is unfit to pursue an unmarried woman's hand.
Whatever form it takes, being wise in our own eyes is a dangerous thing. And whether excessively severe with regards to disciplining the body, or else rabidly licentious - good things and blessings do not come from supposing we know better than God.
But what does Paul say? He admonishes us to study diligently so we can rightly handle the truth and not be embarrassed. That means more than sloganeering and mantras comprised of Bible verses taken wholly out of context, sometimes very deliberately. In fact, often these two things are exact opposites.
This is not to say we are forbidden from having opinions or focusing in on certain aspects one at a time, or taking some time to develop an appreciation for the whole counsel. But it is to say that we are called to not miss forests for the trees. We are warned against straining out gnats while swallowing camels. A properly reverential treatment of truth, goodness, and beauty does not use the Lord's name in vain - as if He were a sanctifying abra kadabra enchantment to sanctify our agenda. Reverence for God will, however, see us approach what is true, good, and beautiful with a candid and humble appreciation for the fact that God has given us very great blessings in life which are not to be squandered - either by over-emphasis or else exclusion.
Two things are true at the same time: that all things are permissible, and that not all things are beneficial. And when Paul writes that he refuses to make himself a slave to anything, this is because he is resolutely committed to being a slave to Christ. The counterintuitive feature of this slavery is that it is a mutually exclusive state of being to every other kind of slavery. Yet as soon as we say that, we have to qualify the remark by reminding that slavery to Christ requires a commitment to good stewardship of every good gift which the Lord has given us, offering ourselves as living sacrifices holy and acceptable to God as our spiritual act of worship.
