When Destruction is Worship

Deuteronomy 13:12-16: "If you hear it said about one of the towns the LORD your God is giving you to live in that wicked men have arisen among you and have led the people of their town astray, saying, 'Let us go and worship other gods' (gods you have not known), then you must inquire, probe and investigate it thoroughly. And if it is true and it has been proved that this detestable thing has been done among you, you must certainly put to the sword all who live in that town. Destroy it completely, both its people and its livestock. Gather all the plunder of the town into the middle of the public square and completely burn the town and all its plunder as a whole burnt offering to the LORD your God."

In this Old Testament passage, we find a rather interesting directive from the LORD to the covenant community. Specifically, they are to eliminate completely any town that would attempt to lead them astray from worshipping God alone. God told the Israelites to destroy all people and things in the town, so that nothing would be left to entice them away from their allegiance to the Lord.

How can we use such a directive in our lives today? While we will not take the same measures to destroy those who would attempt to entice us away from the Lord, we still must remove those people and things from our lives. If we are finding that our friends or dating companions are compromising our commitment to the Lord, we may have to disfellowship ourselves from their ungodly influence. Remember that "bad company corrupts good character" (I Corinthians 15:33), thus there is a great likelihood that your ungodly friends will draw you away from your commitment to Christ; this necessitates your conscious decision to remove yourselves from regular engagement with them.

We must also remove those things that would lead us to fall away from allegiance to God. Whereas the covenant community in the Deuteronomy passage were called to burn everything that was associated with ungodliness, we should be no less intentional at destroying those things that would cause us to compromise our submission to the Lord. If there is a nagging sin that lingers in our lives, tempting us to do those things that we know are disobedient to God's will, we must remove it from our lives. This does not mean that we are to remove it with the intent of keeping it on a figurative string so that we can draw it in when we desire it; rather, we are to completely sever the sin from our lives. We must take assertive measures to eliminate the alluring items so that they will not revisit us when we are weak and vulnerable to temptation.

Notice in the passage above that the elimination of those people and things that would entice us to sin is an offering to the Lord. When we remove people and things from our lives that would draw us away from the Lord, we too offer a sacrifice of worship acceptable to the Holy God. We would do well to practice regularly the "discipline of removal" as an offering of praise to the Lord of Hosts.