Deuteronomy 7-8 When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than you,2 and when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction.[a] You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them.3 You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, 4 for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the LORD would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly. 5 But thus shall you deal with them: you shall break down their altars and dash in pieces their pillars and chop down their Asherim and burn their carved images with fire. God commanded the Israelites to show no quarter or mercy to the peoples of the land they were going into to take for their own. They were not to spare any of these peoples, letting none of them remain in the land, not even to marry and intermingle with the Israelites. This command of complete destruction and genocide or banishment is pretty extreme, and is in no way normative or reflective of the way we are to treat other peoples or people groups today. Our Gospel is not the same as the Mosaic covenant. Our promised land is not a terrestrial strip of land but a celestial eternal home. There is a major similarity between this command and our new covenant though. Christians must not intermarry with those who do not hold our faith. We must not allow sin to creep into and sit in our lives. We can make no place for other gods in our lives. There are peoples out there who try to syncretize elements of the Christian faith with parts of other belief systems and seek to make one jumbled up mixture of voodoo or astrology or eastern mysticism and Christianity. God will have none of this. We are to worship the Lord alone. 9 Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations, 10 and repays to their face those who hate him, by destroying them. He will not be slack with one who hates him. He will repay him to his face. 11 You shall therefore be careful to do the commandment and the statutes and the rules that I command you today. We are quick in today’s generation to oversimplify God. We remember the part about God’s steadfast love, and forget the part about him destroying those who hate Him. God calls us to be faithful to Him, to commit our lives to Him, to put our faith in Jesus Christ and to live that faith daily. Those who reject God’s love and goodness will experience God’s wrath and fierceness. It is a hard thing to say that the Living God damns as well as dotes. When we lose sight of the power of God, the realness of His intolerance for unfaithfulness, we end up with some cosmic grandpa who is harmless and placid and forgettable. God made it absolutely clear to the Israelites and makes it clear to us today, he is King and Lord. We live in His realm and he has authority and control. 11 “Take care lest you forget the LORD your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today, 12 lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, 13 and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, 14 then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, 15 who led you through the great and terrifying wilderness, with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water, who brought you water out of the flinty rock, 16 who fed you in the wilderness with manna that your fathers did not know, that he might humble you and test you, to do you good in the end. 17 Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ We are a forgetful people. No matter what great things God does in our lives, we are still prone to forget God and live as though we were in charge of our own lives, as though we exist simply to serve ourselves and make ourselves look great. A servant’s job is not to serve himself. We have a kind, good, loving, caring, gentle, merciful Savior. God saved the Israelites from Egypt’s domination and cruelty. He has saved those of us who trust in Christ from sin and Satan’s domination and cruelty. Those who reject God’s goodness and do not give him honor as Lord are on a path to destruction. We are not great; HE is great. Give glory to the Lord, your God today.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 16:59:53 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015