Completely Destroy Sin

I champion the Israelites as our (current Christians) people because we are, in so many ways, exactly like them. Put simply, we are mirror images of each other in every way that matters, which is why it’s so brilliant to read through the struggles of the Israelite people and identify with them as I do so. It also makes for great teaching material because we can see exactly what helped them succeed and what caused them to fail. If our God is a God of metaphors, which I say He is, then the Israelites are our big metaphor, our great comparison.

And in Deuteronomy, they have quite a lot to teach us on how to best sin.

Doing What We Don’t Want

For me, it’s a fact of the matter that I sometimes feel too weak to stand up to the sin I perpetuate in my life. When I’m in a cycle of, as Paul says, doing things I don’t want to do, that I know are wrong, I frequently feel incapable of driving out the feelings, temptations, and behaviors I know are incorrect.

But what is truly factual is that I, and we, have the strength to destroy sin at its source in the flesh, just as the Israelites did, thanks to the power of God going before us and fighting the battle.

The Big Metaphor

If you pay close attention as you read the Old Testament, you’ll find an incredibly stark contrast between the Israelites and everyone else, and if you break that contrast down to its simplest pieces, you get two different adjectives to describe them. For the Israelites, we have righteous; for everyone else, we have sinful.

It’s fairly easy to work out: God’s people are righteous, just as we are made righteous when we become His today, and everything that is not with God is against God. Every person and thing that does not belong to God is sin.

It’s simple, then, to carry on this idea of the Israelites driving other peoples out of the Promised Land as driving out sin. (It’s even easier to carry on the idea when you read Deut. 7 because the Bible just tells you, but I had to explain the big comparison between the Israelites and us for teaching’s sake.)

The Strength to Thoroughly Destroy Sin

Jumping back up to the idea from the introduction in this post, the Israelites, then, felt too weak to destroy the sin they faced in the Promised Land. If you’ll remember, they were exiled from the land for 40 years because they were too afraid to fight for it, thinking they would be destroyed by the nations in it.

But, what the Israelites, and we, often forgot in fear, is that they had the strength from God to drive out that which does not belong, that which is not good.

Deuteronomy 7:15b, 17-19 says, “He will not put on you all the terrible diseases of Egypt that you know about, but He will inflict them on all who hate you. (17) If you say to yourself, ‘These nations are greater than I; how can I drive them out?’ do not be afraid of them. Be sure to remember what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and all Egypt: the great trials that you saw, the signs and wonders, the strong hand and outstretched arm, by which the Lord your God brought you out. The Lord your God will do the same to all the peoples you fear.”

Fear of being incapable, fear of the sin we face, even fear of facing God in our failures can hold us back from defeating sin. But God has given us the strength to destroy it, just like He gave the Israelites strength to destroy the nations inhabiting the Promised Land if they would stop being afraid of the people because of what they looked like.

But if we remember the strength of God to defeat our sinful natures and pull us to Him for salvation, if we remember the miracles He worked to draw us away from death in the first place, we’ll remember He easily has the power to inflict destruction on our sin now that we are His.

Why We Fail to Defeat Sin

Sometimes, even though we have the strength of God on our side, we still fail to defeat sin, though, right? Paul most certainly had the Lord with him whenever he was tempted, and still he sinned and did things he didn’t want to do. That’s because, so often, we fail to completely drive out and annihilate sin in the place we live.

Deuteronomy 7:1-2 says, “When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess, and He drives out many nations before you—the Hittities, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and powerful than you—and when the Lord your God delivers them over to you and you defeat them, you must completely destroy them. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.”

And just like the Israelites, when we fail to completely destroy sin and route any chances it has at coming back to us, it slithers its way back into our lives. That’s why Matthew 5:29-30 urges us to gouge out our eye or cut off our hand if it causes us to sin because that’s the kind of extremism we need to go to in order to completely eliminate sin. (Please don’t actually go cutting your hands off and pulling your eyes out at the behest of this blog post.) It’s a metaphorical expression of extremism: whatever it takes for you, do it to stop yourself from sinning.

Extremist Application Methods

God’s goal with the Israelites was to create a land without even the barest hint of potential temptation for idolatry because He knew that was the only way the Israelites could resist putting the gods of Earth above Himself. That’s why Deuteronomy 7 is almost completely full of God telling them to destroy literally every last bit of the culture, practices, and evidences of the people who once lived there.

For us, it’s much of the same. When you allow yourself to even briefly consider sin, you’ve opened yourself up to temptation that is difficult to resist (Matthew 5:27-28). That’s why you must go to incredible extremes to avoid the hints of sin all around us. If that means you have to give up social media, TV, music, reading, sports, games, whatever, you should do it until you are capable of standing up to the temptation with God-given strength.

You have to destroy the world around you (metaphorically) to keep it from infecting you with sin until you glow brightly enough with the power of God to walk through the darkness without stumbling.

God of Metaphors

Our God is a God of metaphors. Whenever you can’t understand something about His nature, character, choices, actions, etc., it’s fairly likely that you will be able to find a metaphor in the Bible or in His creation, Earth, to help you grasp that part of God.

Metaphors are pretty unique because they excel at turning the abstract into concrete, along with other forms of comparison, such as similes and analogies. And when it comes to God, you can find millions of concrete existences that serve to reveal a small part of the picture of who God is.

My favorite is the marriage/family metaphor because the further you dig into it, the more it reveals of God’s nature. You can literally go as far down the rabbit hole as you like, and you’ll always be finding revelation after revelation. And I loved it even more when I discovered how it applies to free will.

To start from the top, let’s acknowledge and prove that marriage is an earthly representation of the divine relationship we are to have with God.

God, through Paul, states this in Ephesians 5:23, 25. “For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the savior of the body. (25) Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her.”

There’s a reason marriage is a holy institution, and that is solely because it is meant to represent a holy relationship on Earth. When you apply the selfless love of Christ in the context of marriage, you get a godly relationship in which a man sacrifices himself to provide and care for his wife, and a wife sacrifices herself to love her husband and follow him.

This is the ideal relationship of Christ and church. Christ sacrificed Himself in fully selfless love for his bride, the church, and He provides for us, taking care of our needs. In exchange, we need only sacrifice ourselves and wholly commit ourselves to following Him.

Let’s move beyond marriage, then, and turn to the family structure. The family structure flows from the divine marriage structure, and it then becomes an example of something divine as well. The relationship of parents to kids is literal inasmuch as it is figurative.

In the literal sense, children are just that, children. They are the children of their parents, and they are also children of the church. In both manners, they are meant to be raised and taught about Christ as they grow. A community of believers is meant to come together and train and teach children (Deuteronomy 6:4-9).

But the figurative begins to stretch and define the relationship we are to have with God. When we become believers, we become children of God, and our relationship with God then functions like a child’s relationship with his/her parents does.

When we examine it from the side of faith, we are to look to God as children look to their parents. Like children view their parents as having no ability to do wrong, we are to look to God. Children have the utmost faith in their parents; it’s practically unshakable. We are to have that same faith in God, as Jesus implies in Mark 10:13-15.

From a discipline point of view, we can gather how God disciplines us for doing wrong and rewards us for doing what is right. I think this one is one of the simplest because it’s fairly clear. When a child breaks a rule, the parent provides a consequence, and especially when the child is young, teaches them something in the process. The parent provides this consequence, not out of anger, but from love so the child does not do something they may regret later.

To put the metaphor into another metaphor, let’s say a parent tells their four-year-old not to touch the stove. The child doesn’t listen, touches the stove, and nearly burns their hand after turning it on. The parent, then, stops the child from touching the stove, and puts the child in timeout after explaining what they did wrong and why it was bad. The parent doesn’t take this action just to punish the child, but to keep the child from getting hurt.

Sometimes, even, God allows us to experience the consequences of our own actions to teach us rather than do it Himself. Some parents may choose, in lieu of punishing the child afterward, to allow the child to briefly touch the stove while it’s hot. They do this not to cause the child pain but because they know that’s the only way their child will truly learn the lesson. We’re stubborn people, and sometimes the only way God can be sure we learn to avoid sin is to let us experience the consequences of sin.

If we take the parent/child relationship yet another way, we can discover how free will works in alignment with God’s plan. Typically, parents have plans for their children when they are born. Whether their plans are just as simple as a name or as complex as having everything they want their child to do planned out through high school, parents don’t wing it when it comes to their children. They’re too precious to do that to.

Likely, parents plan out where their kids go to school, what sports they play, who they interact with around home and with family and family friends, where they go to church, what they get to do at home, etc. I think you get the point. But kids are not perfect little angels who are willing to do everything at their parents’ behest. As they grow into their own person, there will be times they go against the will of their parents. They’ll make friends they shouldn’t, do things they shouldn’t, skip church a few times, skip school just as much.

Likewise, God has a plan laid out for each of us before we are born. He knows who He wants us to know, where we should go to school, what friends we should make, what career we should choose, who we should witness to, everything. But we’re not perfect little angels, either. As we go through life, we’ll inevitably choose to go against God’s plan sometimes. We’ll make friends with the wrong people, not witness to someone we needed to, skip church a few too many times, choose the wrong career for us.

See how perfectly that fits? There’s a ton more, too, but I don’t have space in this post to fit it in. God is incredibly complex—He is literally more than our minds are able to comprehend in so many ways—but when you take a look around, you can turn parts of Him into simple, easy to understand ideas so that you can get to know Him better.

I challenge you to look around the next time you find yourself struggling to understand God or why He would do something one way or the other. You may find that the answer is in something as small as the flower by your front porch or as convenient as your best friend.