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Following God is serious business. Today we read about ultimate consequences for those who lead others away from God. Death comes to those who worship other gods, and to those who lead others to join them. Following God is literally a matter of life and death in this passage.
We hear all the time from people that a God of love would never command His people to kill someone just for breaking one of His laws or having a different opinion (usually stated as “thinking for themselves”). Two things about this line of thought. First, it passes judgement on a society not our own, distant from us in both time and space. Things were different back then. And things still are different in the Middle East. We cannot pass judgement on a time and place this far removed from our own. Second, it contains a philosophy that has been killing the church for centuries, namely that following God isn’t that important. It’s not a matter of life and death, but of opinion. We can think differently and it’s ok. God just wants an hour or two of your time each week, a prayer before bed or before meals, and the rest is up to you.
Few in their right minds advocate today for a death penalty for religious tolerance. But taken too far, this belief that God isn’t all that important leads us to sleeping through church, having only a “private faith”, or living out our faith only when we don’t need to be at work, with family, at the game, or in bed napping.
God matters. In fact, God is truly the most important part of our lives, for only through Jesus Christ can we find truth, hope, and eternal purpose in this life and the next. What could possibly be more important than that?
What does God want from us? People have been asking that forever. People have tried to work to answer this with their lives throughout time. They worship harder and they serve more and we get bigger and bigger churches and we follow more and more rules. And all the time we have this nagging sense that God still isn’t happy with us. We get more frustrated and more guilty feeling and still we cry out, “What does God want from us?”
This passage has some ideas:
Fear (“revere” might be a more accurate word for our time) the Lord.
Walk in obedience to Him.
Love Him.
Serve Him with all you have.
Observe God’s laws.
Circumcise your hearts (check with Apostle Paul for specifics on what this means)
Don’t be stiff-necked anymore.
Love foreigners.
Serve God.
Cling to Him.
Take your oaths in His name, not that of another god.
Boiled down, it means to put God first in your heart (Love Him) and your life (serve and obey Him). The problem with doing more and more to try to please Him is that usually we do “more and more” not for Him but for us. We do more to try to get Him to love us more so we’ll feel better, safer, more loved. It is when we learn to put God first, even above our own wants, hopes, and plans, that we begin to realize we are loved already, that God has “set His affections on us”. It is our love that God wants, not our success or our fame or our accomplishments.
“One bad apple spoils the bunch.”
We used to have a game we’d play in youth group to illustrate one of the first main points of today’s reading. We’d have one of the youth, usually the strongest, stand on top of a chair. His job was to pull everyone else up on the chair with him. Everyone else’s job was to pull him down off the chair. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the outcome of this contest – every time, no matter how strong or big the chair person was, they were brought down, and often by the first person to try. The point was that it is impossible for us to make the people around us more righteous, more Godly, by force, or alone, or against their will.
God’s command to His people about the folk who lived in the Promised Land seems cruel, if not genocidal to us today. Given our own history with the Native American population in America, and our current issues with other races, with immigrants and with those different than us have taught us the dangers of what God commanded His people back then. To completely wipe out everyone, destroy any remnant of their culture and religion, “without mercy” seems very un-Godlike to us.
But these people were to be God’s people, and God knew they were too weak to stand against a rival culture. He knew they would succumb to the temptations of the foreign culture around them and in so doing, they would lose their identity as God’s people. And so the command to remain pure, seal themselves away from other cultures, and eliminate anything that was not Hebrew, from people to religions to philosophies.
As we look at Christians today, we have to see that God was correct in His assessment of our ability to remain pure in an impure culture. While pure Christianity would put an end to abuse and violence, to divorce and adultery, to STD’s and racism, to gun violence and abortions, we are more known for being just like the culture around us, with the same divorce rates, addiction rates, and habits as our non-Christian neighbors.
I’m not advocating any kind of violence, but what would it take for us to recapture a pure Christianity, one based on love and the fruit of the spirit, one that was truly a light on a hill, attractive and healing for the whole world?