SYNOPSIS: The Puritan preacher John Owen said, “be always at it while you live; cease not a day from this work; be killing sin or it will be killing you.” Whether it is flat-out disobedience or benign neglect, our disobedience always allows sin to grow. And where sin grows, sin festers, and spiritual anemia, sickness and death will ultimately result. This is a matter of kill or be killed! Go with kill!
The Journey// Focus: Joshua 16:5-6,10
The boundary of their homeland began at Ataroth-addar in the east. From there it ran to Upper Beth-horon. then on to the Mediterranean Sea…. [But] they did not drive the Canaanites out of Gezer, however, so the people of Gezer live as slaves among the people of Ephraim to this day.
The modern reader of Scripture cannot help but read the Old Testament through the eyes of twenty-first century western culture. For that reason, much of what we read seems harsh and unfair, if not brutal and primitive, and definitely at odds with our current values of acceptance and inclusiveness. Even in warfare, how we treat our enemy is much different than it was in Old Testament days—and for that, I am sure our enemies are grateful (although I don’t think they would take the same approach with us).
Case in point: God told the Israelites to totally annihilate the Canaanites and purge them from the land as they went in to possess it. As the people of God moved in, by Divine command, the current residents had to go—every single last one of them.
Now while most Bible-believing Christians today accept that, we are certainly uncomfortable with both God’s command to displace the nations and his method for displacing them. When non-believing people question the harshness of the God of the Old Testament in light of these kinds of stories, we have no adequate answer, although there are reasonable explanations. We simply surrender territory on this issue of the sovereign God’s loving but just nature. My point here is not to defend God. For one thing, he can defend himself. And for another, if we truly understood the wickedness and brutality of the people who occupied Canaan in the days of the conquest—people who would make ISIS look like a Girl Scout pack—we would feel a little better about God’s commands.
Let’s set that aside for now. The point I want to make here is that when we fail to do what God commands, for whatever reason, we will suffer the logical consequences of that failure. Whether if is flat-out disobedience or benign neglect, our disobedience always allows sin to grow. And where sin grows, sin festers, and spiritual anemia, sickness and death will ultimately result. God told the Israelites to drive out the Canaanites; they didn’t. They had their reasons: the Canaanites were harder to get rid of than we might imagine; most of them had been decimated anyway, so what would leaving just a few really hurt; the few that were left actually made good slaves for menial labor that no one else really wanted to do, so leaving them actually made better sense than driving them out. The Israelites had their reasons, and I suspect many of the reasons sounded good.
But sin always has consequences, and the outcome of sin is never good! What was true for Israel is true for you and me today. We are not called to drive out a people from our neighborhood; that kind of literal biblical conquest is over. Yet there is another conquest God has assigned his people: to get rid of sin from their lives. The Apostle Peter spoke of being done with sin:
Therefore, since Christ suffered in his body, arm yourselves also with the same attitude, because whoever suffers in the body is done with sin. (1 Peter 4:1)
Theologically, we know that; we understand that sin must go. And like the Canaanites, that is not always as easy as it sounds. For that, God gives the Holy Spirit to help us do away with sin in our lives; and he gives the grace of forgiveness when we fail. Moreover, he walks with us as we give continuous effort to mortify our sinful nature. That is not the real problem here: it is when we accept what God calls sin; it is when we enslave what will ultimately enslave us and we allow sin to hang around in our lives—that is the problem. When we justify anger, lust, pride, judgmental attitudes, and other sins that are easy to camouflage, we commit the sin of the Israelites. We have allowed Canaan to camp out in our hearts.
The Bible should serve as a cautionary tale in this regard, for there is story after story of how allowing Canaan to camp out paved the way for Canaan to rise up and bite Israel in the backside. The end result of inattention to sin is always far greater than the pain of sin when it is in full bloom in our lives—and it will always grow into bloom if we neglect our call to decimate it.
Got sin? Deal with it! Even the little, leftover stuff. The good news is, God stands ready to assist those who get serious about being done with sin.
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