Genesis 38:9

Plain English Version

So Onan married Er’s wife. But Onan didn’t want to have kids with her, because he knew that those kids will not belong to him. So Onan did a bad thing. Every time they slept together, like married people do, he didn’t sleep with her properly. He always stopped early, so she didn’t get any babies growing inside her.

Cross References

Genesis 38:10

But God was angry with Onan for doing that bad thing, so God finished up Onan too.

Titus 3:3

You know, we were like that before we believed in Jesus. We did silly things too. We didn’t do what God told us to do. People tricked us, and we believed things that were not true. And we wanted to do all sorts of bad things. We couldn’t stop ourselves. If anybody had a lot of things, we wanted those things for ourselves, and we were angry with those people. We hated people, and people hated us.

James 3:14

But if you only think about things that are good for yourself, and if you are jealous of other people, and if you hate other people, you are not thinking God’s way. That’s the devil’s way. He is the boss over the bad spirits. You can’t hide the way you think by telling lies about it, and by saying that you are really good.

James 3:16

You see, sometimes people get jealous of each other, and sometimes they only do things to make themselves happy, and they don’t think about anyone else. Whenever that happens, those people start fighting each other, and they get into all sorts of trouble.

James 4:5

God says something important about this in his book. He says that he put his Holy Spirit in us, and he says that if we leave him and follow some other way, his spirit gets really upset.