“I will heap disasters on them
and use up all my arrows against them.
Fatigued by hunger, they will be
consumed by fever and bitter defeat;
I will send them the fangs of wild beasts,
and the poison of reptiles crawling in the dust.
Outside, the sword makes parents childless;
inside, there is panic,
as young men and girls alike are slain,
sucklings and graybeards together.”
-Deuteronomy 32:22-23
Okay we’re now in that part of the Song of Moses where the Lord is quite literally declaring war against His own chosen people for their disobedience.
Let me make clear the exact nature of the disobedience we’re talking about here.
See, when a lot of folks think about disobedience, they think it means an outright complete and utter rejection of the Lord.
That’s not the Biblical picture being presented to us.
The Israelites never reached the point where they said…“Hashem is no longer our God”.
The route to idolatry was much more subtle than that.
The Israelites persisted in professing allegiance to Hashem.
They kept observing His festivals, sacrifices and ritual baths.
However, at that same time they began adding other unauthorized practices into their worship and lives.
We’re talking about a mix of a little bit of pagan this and a little bit of heathen that.
The Israelites didn’t want to burn any bridges.
Their thinking was to give the Lord just enough of His due so He didn’t abandon them.
Yet, they reasoned…
…let’s give these other gods of the gentiles their due too so as not to offend them and keep our options open.
Well that dog ain’t gonna hunt for Hashem.
In the Lord’s eyes such mixing of the things of the world with worship of Him equals abandoning Him plain and simple.
For those folks who have never really read the OT (Only Testament), you should know that in the New Testament when it draws that line between Israel and the world, without exception the world is always represented as a wicked thing the believer is to have nothing to do with.
To put it another way, in the New Testament the “world” is just another term referring to those people who are not of God or LO-AMMI in Hebrew.
If that’s the case it would logically follow that we are to separate ourselves from the world and only be married to Adonai.
To mix with the world (not necessarily fully diving deep into it but to even just mix with the world) is to be rendered a LO-AMMI from God’s perspective.
We are literally abandoning the covenant from Hashem’s perspective.
Do you wanna know what a good example of this brazen apostasy is?
How about the ridiculous “prosperity doctrine” that was all the rage a couple of years back?
I can understand why the world worships money because they don’t have anything else to live for.
But for a believer to throw aside Hashem’s commands and laws because all he’s got are dollar signs in his eyes…well that’s a problem homie.
But you know what’s even worse?
What’s worse is how some churches use one’s wealth as a sort of measurement of one’s spiritual health.
The wealthier one is…
…the healthier one’s relationship with the Lord is…
…is the warped reasoning these folks hold to.
In fact the entirety of the Scriptures takes great pains to let us know that having a ton of money and material possessions is NOT the Lord’s definition of prosperity.
In the Bible, it ain’t the case that the wicked are always poor or always end up poor.
And it ain’t always the case that the righteous are rich or always end up materially rich.
Heck, the most righteous man in the world ended up being nailed naked to a cross and held up in shame for the whole world to see.
Just understand that there is hardly anything Biblical about the prosperity doctrine being preached in some churches today.
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