Ezekiel 35:6 “Therefore, as I live, saith the Lord GOD, I will prepare thee unto blood, and blood shall pursue thee: sith thou hast not hated blood, even blood shall pursue thee.”

As I was reading my Bible I found this verse. The last of the verse says, “sith thou hast not hated blood, even blood shall purse thee.” My first thought was that I had found a misspelling in my old King James Bible. I thought the publisher has made a mistake. I checked my other Bible (also King James). This Bible was printed by another printing company and it had the exact same word.

Now I was puzzled. I checked with my concordance by Brown-Driver-Briggs that specializes in Hebrew words. First, I found this was the only place in scripture sith was used even though the Hebrew word it is translated from is used 775 times in the Old Testament Scriptures. It is translated into various things, but all of them are what is called “conditional” like the word “if”. The Scriptures are filled with if-then clauses or promises. If you do this, then I will do this, is a common theme in scripture, but what of the word sith? Other translations of the Bible (that I do not recommend in any way) remove sith and replace it with since. This is not as accurate and they have lost some of God’s purposed scripture by changing it. The term sith means – “subsequent to” or as it is worded in scripture, subsequent to the fact that you do not hate blood (or the taking of it), even blood (or the taking of it) will pursue (chase) you. There is a subtle but meaningful thought behind this that is not conveyed by the term “since”. Can you see the difference?

Then I began to think of the word “sith” itself in relationship with the text. I have an over-active imagination. First, I thought about it as an acronym. S.I.T.H. Sin In The Heart. Hum, that would cause the reaction of God against Israel, wouldn’t it? How about Sin In The Head? Sin has to start somewhere, right? Does it start in the head or the heart?

Jeremiah 17:9 “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

But let’s keep thinking here.. .Sin In The Home. If you check with psychologists they will tell you that bad things are learned behavior. The monkey see, monkey do behavior is how they analyze homes, but I have seen homes that were completely different. I don’t want to tell ‘too many tales out of school’, but I’ll be honest, I came not from a broken home, but a fractured home. My mother was married 4 or 5 times. My father was married 3 times. My wife has so many stepmothers inflicted on her that she still has bad memories about that time in her life. If ‘monkey see, monkey do’ was a correct assumption, then my wife and I should have be remarried several time by this time in our life, yet this year on July 17th we will have been married 54 years.

What was the deciding difference in our parent’s home and ours? I’m not exactly sure, but I will say this, we made a conscience decision to remain married even when we had trials in the home. ‘Sin In The Home’ would not tear us apart. I’d like to tell you that all 54 years was married bliss, but you would know that I wasn’t telling the truth, right?

We included God in our marriage and learned from the forgiveness of God to be able to continue our lives together. It is still working today. When sin is recognized in our home, we deal with it using 1 John 1:9 “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

Make it a habit to spend 10 minutes alone with God at the end of each day and thank Him for His presence in your life and ask Him to forgive the sins committed that day. Ask with the purpose of not repeating them (repentance). Strive to be better tomorrow than you were today. We will fall, just like Israel did. We will fail at the grace of God that the writer of Hebrews spoke of in Chapter 12. We can mend all relationships between man or between us and God, but simply (repenting) which means a direction change. Instead of going into more sin to justify the first one, we need to walk away from sin and ask God to help us remain true to the principles of God.

Israel could have had a direction change and God would have blessed them again. So it is with us today. Be more concerned about what God wants for you than what you want for yourself. If you have questions about this article, come see us at church any Sunday morning. Sunday School is at 10 a.m. and Worship service is at 11 a.m. Sunday night is at 6 p.m. and Wednesday Bible study is at 6 p.m. Come join us this Sunday.