When God brought the nation of Israel to the promised land, Canaan, He told them to destroy all of the inhabitants of that land. The people who lived in the land were wicked people, they worshipped many false gods, and even sacrificed their own children to the gods. The people were perverse and corrupt, and God didn’t want their way of life to become a temptation to the nation of Israel. He told them in Deuteronomy 20:16-18, “But in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the LORD your God has commanded, that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices that they have done for their gods, and so you sin against the LORD your God.”
However, as you read the history of the nation of Israel, you’ll find that they stopped doing what God told them, and even began to follow after and participate in the wicked acts of the cities they came to. They even began to take wives and husbands from these wicked people, and began to adopt their actions into their own lives. And, when the prophet Jeremiah came and preached against what they were doing, rather than repent and turn back to God, they beat him, threw him in prison, tried to kill him, and basically just set out to destroy the message from God.
And in 1 Samuel 8, we read how the nation of Israel tried to become more and more like the wicked nations that surrounded them. “Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah and said to him, “Behold, you are old and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations.” Notice that last phrase “…like all the nations.” We’re tired of trying to be different from everyone else – we want to be like the rest of the world….Sounds familiar doesn’t it? These and other choices that Isreal made where what began to destroy them as a nation and a people of God. In fact, the entire reason they were overcome by the nation of Babylon, killed, and brought into slavery, was because they REFUSED to do what GOD had told them to do…BE SEPERATE FROM THE WORLD, and FOLLOW HIM!
God told the nation of Isreal in Exodus 19:4-5, “You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples…” But, we read in Judges 10:6, “The people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the LORD and served the Baals and the Ashtaroth, the gods of Syria, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the Ammonites, and the gods of the Philistines. And they forsook the LORD and did not serve him.”
As Christians, we also are to be seperate from this world. When we give our lives to follow Jesus Christ, we are to DIE to SELF, and do ONLY what is pleasing to God. Too many times, we envy the world, and seek to be as close to the world as we can get. The Bible PLAINLY warns us in 1 John 2:15, “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” Instead of trying to be as close to this world as we can get, we should seek to get as close to ALMIGHTY GOD as we possibly can! WAY too many Christians make those same fatal decisions in their lives, they pay so much attention to the world around them that they begin to envy and seek to be like the world rather than seeking to be like Jesus, and thus they end up destroying their lives.
Jeremiah warned the nation of Isreal for forty years, that their choices would destroy them, yet the people just ignored him until it was too late. Don’t make the same fatal mistakes in your life. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2) When God commands us to “not be conformed to this world”, that is EXACTLY what He means. The choice is ours, we can either obey God and enjoy His blessing, or ignore Him and find out too late that it WILL COST us more than we want to pay.