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2 Corinthians

Living Set Apart as God’s Covenant People Please turn in your Bibles to 2 Corinthains 6. We’ll be looking at verses 14 through chapter 7, verse 1. You can find that on page 1148. In the first half of chapter 6, the apostle Paul called the church in Corinth to return to him and Christ. He pleaded with them to open their hearts - to turn their affections back to the true Gospel – salvation in Jesus Christ. The question that remains is “what does that mean?” What needed to happen in the church for them to be restored? And that question is answered in our verses this morning. Reading of 2 Corinthians 6:14 to 7:1 Prayer #1: Be not unequally yoked (6:14) Do not be unequally yoked. You’ve likely heard that phrase in verse 14 before. But what does it actually mean? And how does it apply? Those are the two critical questions in this text. Being yoked is not used much in our common vernacular today. And that’s because the term is a farming term used back when animals powered the farm equipment. If you go to a modern farm today, you will likely find massive tractors. They have air conditioning. They are driven by GPS. The farmer can be working on other business in the cab while his combine is harvesting the crop. But of course, that is not how it used to be. No, before the tractor, animals like oxen, or horses, or mules would be hitched together. A wood harness was carved with neck shaped holes that would fit over two animals. That wood harness was called a yoke. The yoke would have ropes or cables that would attach to other devices, which would either pull a wagon or a plow or some other farming implement. The whole purpose of the yoke was to balance the load so both animals would equally pull the load behind them. However, if a farmer tried to put a horse and an ox together, or a horse and donkey or a mule and ox, those animals would be unequally yoked. That’s where the phrase comes from. And it didn’t work well. The farmer would have a big problem. Even if a horse and an ox had similar strength, they have different gates, different heights, different temperaments, and different speeds. It would be difficult to plow in a straight line. The yoke itself would dig into the necks of both animals. It often caused them to be restless and could result in chaos, especially if one of the animals started bucking or kicking or biting. So to be unequally yoked is to be mismatched in a way that is untenable. It’s unworkable. It ought not be done. In verse 14, the apostle writes, “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.” Now, I’m guessing that many of you have heard this verse before. And likely you’ve heard it applied to marriage. Right? However, there’s nothing in the entire book of 2 Corinthians about marriage. There’s only one reference to a husband and that is in chapter 11. But that reference is explicitly about Christ as our husband, betrothed to us, his bride, the church. In other words, when Paul wrote verse 14, he was not explicitly writing about marriage. Now, to be sure, a second or third layer of application could be about marriage. After all, marriage is the most intimate partnership between a man and a woman. So, verse 14 would certainly have relevance. And we do learn elsewhere in the Bible that we should only marry “in the Lord.” My point is that the context of verse 14 is not about marriage. You ask, then, what was the apostle Paul referring to in verse 14? Well, think about this. We’ve been studying 2 Corinthians now for 4 full months. What has been the big issue in the church in Corinth? The big issue has been false teachers. There was a group who claimed to be apostles, but who were teaching “a different gospel” (as Paul put it) and whose lives did not display godliness. So, with whom should the church in Corinth not be yoked? They should not be yoked with this group. And in verse 14, how does Paul refer to them? He calls them “unbelievers.” They had been received into the church… at least by some… but they should not have been. And Paul calls on the church to separate themselves from partnering with them. Let me make one more contextual comment. In our 2 Corinthians study, we’ve also considered the city of Corinth. Corinth, if you remember, was very religious in a pagan sort of way, and also culturally diverse. The temple of Aphrodite overlooked the city – she was the so-called goddess of love. Corinth had a big prostitution problem and had many idols. In Paul’s first letter to the church there, he addresses many of these sins. In fact, the language in our text this morning shares many parallels to 1 Corinthians chapter 10 … especially in regard to idols and partnering with demons. The Corinthian church was not be unequally yoked with either the false teachers or the broader secular and pagan community. Furthermore, we’re not just told “to be not unequally yoked,” but we’re also given some explanation. Look again at ...