What are the duties required in the seventh commandment?

The duties required in the seventh commandment are, chastity in body, mind, affections,[1] words,[2] and behavior;[3] and the preservation of it in ourselves and others;[4] watchfulness over the eyes and all the senses;[5] temperance,[6] keeping of chaste company,[7] modesty in apparel;[8] marriage by those that have not the gift of continency,[9] conjugal love,[10] and cohabitation;[11] diligent labor in our callings;[12] shunning all occasions of uncleanness, and resisting temptations thereunto.[13]

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Being Thankful on November 10

Peasants Lifting Potatoes
Vincent Van GoghI’m thankful for my garden potatoes. Potatoes take very little work to grow, and the taste payoff is big. I had one of my garden potatoes baked for supper and I really enjoyed it. A bonus benefit from garden potatoes is that their skins are so tender that they don’t need to be peeled—ever. I don’t even peel them to make mashed potatoes and no one’s complained yet. In fact, they say they like their mashed potatoes better that way. So I thank God for providing potatoes for us, and the sun, rain, and soil to grow them.

• Dawn is thankful for snow.
• Willow is thankful for tea, chocolate and roses.
• Five things from Tulipgirl.
  
• Dorothy is thankful for her husband’s job.
• Liz is thankful for snow..and more.
• Suzanne is thankful for “all of the Psalms and all of God’s Word, but the 23rd Psalm holds a special place in my heart.”
• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful for “my blogging friends, for my Google Reader, and for the positive impact that blogging has had on my life.”
• Kim of the Upward Call is thankful for people with servant’s hearts.

What are you thankful for?

Updates

• Ann is thankful for God’s protection.
  

I’m celebrating good gifts from God during the month of November and hoping you’ll be thankful for your good gifts, too. Here’s how you can join in the thanksgiving and even, perhaps, get something material from it. If you’ve posted something you’ve posted something you’ve expected me to include and you don’t see it on the list, please let me know. I do miss things sometimes.

Theological Term of the Week

Moving on to terms having to do with Christ’s work.

propitiation
a sacrifice that satisfies the wrath of God and thus averts God’s wrath toward sinners.

• From scripture:
  

  …God put [Christ] forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. (Romans 3:25 ESV)
  

• From the Belgic Confession, Article 21:
  

  We believe that Jesus Christ is a high priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek— made such by an oath— and that he presented himself in our name before his Father, to appease his wrath with full satisfaction by offering himself on the tree of the cross and pouring out his precious blood for the cleansing of our sins, as the prophets had predicted.

  For it is written that “the chastisement of our peace” was placed on the Son of God and that “we are healed by his wounds.” He was “led to death as a lamb”; he was “numbered among sinners” and condemned as a criminal by Pontius Pilate, though Pilate had declared that he was innocent.

• From The Atonement: Its Meaning and Significance by Leon Morris, page 151:
  

  The trouble is that nobody seems to have been able to make propitiation simple. To most of us the term is just plain incomprehensible. Accordingly, it does not seem to matter much what it means and the result is a pronounced disinclination to make the effort needed to see whether anything much is at stake. But there is in fact quite a lot at stake; the concept is important for biblical religion. So, if we are serious about our Christianity, we must at least make the effort to attempt to understand it.

  …[I]f we speak of propitiation, we are thinking of a personal process. We are saying that God is angry when people sin and that, if thay are to be forgiven, something must be done about that anger. We are saying further that the death of Christ is the means of removing the divine wrath from sinners. The issue is far from being superficial.

  We may perhaps feel that ‘propitiation’ is not a good word. It is a long word, a word which most of us rarely use, which many of us do not understand…. It is natural that translators often feel that it should be replaced by something more intelligible. I go along with this, with the sole proviso that the essential meaning of the term must be preserved. My quarrel with almost all modern translations is that they do not retain the essential meaning; specifically, they adopt some rendering that glosses over the wrath of God. But this is a very important concept…, and it cannot be ignored in any satisfying understanding of the work of Christ.

• From The Atonement by John Murray:

  The disposition to deny or even underrate the doctrine of propitiation betrays a bias that is prejudicial to the atonement as such. The atonement means that Christ bore our sins and in bearing sin bore its judgment (cf. Isa. 53:5). Death itself is the judgment of God upon sin (cf. Rom. 5:12; 6:23). And Christ died for no other reason than that death is the wages of sin. But the epitome of the judgment of God upon sin is His wrath. If Jesus in our place met the whole judgment of God upon our sin, He must have endured that which constitutes the essence of this judgment How superficial is the notion that the vicarious endurance of wrath is incompatible with the immutable love of the Father to Him! Of course, the Father loved the Son with unchangeable and infinite love. And the discharge of the Father’s will in the extremities of Gethsemane’s agony and the abandonment of Calvary elicited the supreme delight of the Father (cf. John 10:17). But love and wrath are not contradictory; love and hatred are. It is only because Jesus was the Son, loved immutably as such and loved increasingly in His messianic capacity as He progressively fulfilled the demands of the Father’s commission, that He could bear the full stroke of judicial wrath. This is inscribed on the most mysterious utterance that ever ascended from earth to heaven, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Ps. 22:1; Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34). God in our nature forsaken of God! Here is the wonder of the Father’s love and of the Son’s love, too. Eternity will not scale its heights or fathom its depths. How pitiable is the shortsightedness that blinds us to its grandeur and that fails to see the necessity and glory of the propitiation. “Herein is love,” John wrote, “not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son a propitiation for our sins” (I John 4:10). Christ is truly the propitiation for our sins because He propitiated the wrath which was our damnation. The language of propitiation may not be diluted; it bespeaks the essence of Calvary.

Learn more:

1. Theopedia: Propitiation
   
2. GotQuestions.org: What is Propitiation?
3. John Murray: The Atonement
4. Frederick S. Leahy: The Wrath of God in Relation to the Atonement
5. My old blog: Propitiation: What does it mean?
6. Mark Dever: Propitiation (mp3)

Do you have a a theological term you’d like to see featured here as a Theological Term of the Week? If you email it to me, I’ll seriously consider using it, giving you credit for the suggestion, and linking back to your blog when I do.

Clicking on the Theological Term graphic at the top of this post will take you to a list of all the previous theological terms in alphabetical order.