Turning Away from Following God

The People of God Set Priorities
Living as a Community of Believers
Overcoming Temptation

Deuteronomy 7:1-6 The Message

7 ^1-2 When God, your God, brings you into the country that you are about to enter and take over, he will clear out the superpowers that were there before you: the Hittite, the Girgashite, the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite. Those seven nations are all bigger and stronger than you are. God, your God, will turn them over to you and you will conquer them. You must completely destroy them, offering them up as a holy destruction to God.

Don’t make a treaty with them.
Don’t let them off in any way.
^3-4 Don’t marry them: Don’t give your daughters to their sons and don’t take their daughters for your sons—before you know it they’d involve you in worshiping their gods, and God would explode in anger, putting a quick end to you.
⁵ Here’s what you are to do:

Tear apart their altars stone by stone,
smash their phallic pillars,
chop down their sex-and-religion Asherah groves,
set fire to their carved god-images.

⁶ Do this because you are a people set apart as holy to God, your God. God, your God, chose you out of all the people on Earth for himself as a cherished, personal treasure.

For Reflection

Is this passage really about a ruthless god or is it a myth intended to instruct believers in the risks of adopting the faiths of others?  The pressure to conform to cultural pressures has always and will always be one of the most faith corrupting influences one faces.  How do you differentiate God derived influences from cultural influences? 

Pray

for the wisdom to differentiate between cultural pressures to act and God-centered influences.  Pray that you will have the courage to act in ways counter to your culture when it conflicts with a God-centered life.  Pray for the wisdom to follow a life influenced by the obedience to the principles of justice, peace, love and reconciliation.