Faithfulness to the Lord can be tested.

You shall walk after the LORD your God and fear him and keep his commandments and obey his voice, and you shall serve him and hold fast to him.
Deuteronomy 13:4

This is a call to faithfulness to the Lord. It is a command surrounded by a warning to not drift into any kind of idolatry. There are three ways in which the worship of other gods might drift into Israeli society. These were to be guarded against.

The first warning (Deuteronomy 13:1-5) is to guard against false prophecy. It was likely that someone might initially seem to speak words from God. They might twist His words to their own agenda. That kind of thing might even be accompanied by some display of unusual spiritual power. But if the prophet leads people away from the worship of the Lord, he is to be rejected by the people and executed. He is an idolater.

The second source to guard against was close association of family or friends (Deuteronomy 13:6-11). If anyone wants to advocate the worship of anyone by the Lord God of Israel, they are leading people into idolatry. The temptation might come from close associations and thus be socially complicated, but it is still to be dealt with severely.

The third influence in this chapter (Deuteronomy 13:12-18) was from cultural forces outside immediate personal contact. These cultural forces were never to be allowed to twist thinking towards the acceptance of idolatry. Fierce loyalty to God was to mark all the relationships with family, with friends, and even with the culture in Israel. And they serve as reminders to watch these relationships in ourselves today.

- Posted with my iPad. The Apple Kool-Aide tastes fine.

The Idol Factory

Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, When you pass over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, then you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you and destroy all their figured stones and destroy all their metal images and demolish all their high places.

Numbers 33:51-52

 

God wanted the idolatry of the Canaanites eradicated. Israel was supposed to do this fully when they moved into the Promised Land. God warned them that if they did not obey Him in this matter, idolatry would lead to their own regrettable demise (see Numbers 33:55-56).

 

By now in the story, this generation of Israel should have had ample opportunity to have this taught to them. They had grown up with the Ten Commandments. The first two of these explicitly deal with the exclusivity of a relationship with God and forbid any semblance of idolatry (Exodus 20:3-6). They had seen their parents flagrantly disobey with the golden calf. They had seen the more recent Midianite flirtation with idolatry and sexuality and how it devastated the camp. This warning was quite real.

 

The propensity of the human heart for idolatry is enormous. We always want to make our own god that we can control. We want tangible gods with tangible results. And this is not just an Old Testament warning. The apostle John warns us today of the idol-making and idol-following ways of the human heart (1 John 5:21). Left to myself, my heart is an idol-making factory looking for something other than God to worship. I have to shut it down in real worship and obedience to God my Father!

 

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