Day 3518 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Joshua 23:7 NIV

Because to not succumb to our surroundings has been among the most pervasive and thus resounding soundings suggested since the very first of we who are His creation.

Indeed, it’s almost as if God’s always known just how open to alternative ideas and societal suggestion we’d eventually become.

For when considered from a not-at-all hard to imagine perspective, it seems that even that very first command to not eat of that one tree was a blessing aimed at helping us to realize that the environment in which we find ourselves was never meant to inspire this idea, that it has anyway, in that we anymore seem only to believe that the place we’re in and the people we’re among have somehow more that it, that they can offer us than what all God’s already given. Indeed, we’ve almost completely lost that sort of radical simplicity as seen inside His reminding us incessantly that He is a jealous God and that as such we should have none other before Him.

Let alone the innumerable idols to which we now awake only to bow before every single day.

Because we’ve become so committed to this idea of community and our needing it to not only thrive but in our minds to even survive that we can’t compute as to how we might recuse ourselves from the suggested assumptions into which we’re asked daily to join those many around us who all but live and die by them anymore. And as those suggestions, those interpretations, those endless exhortations continue to bombard us by the day, by the moment, we’ve become all but ourselves bombastic within this socially shouted agreement that we too do believe we belong here.

Simply because we are here.

I guess we just don’t need any reason other than that one to decide for us who we become as defined anymore by the directions we’re called unto daily in order to continue chasing a life otherwise confined to the expectations of those around us for us. Yes, we all but live to become but replicas of the world in which we walk for nothing other than the fact that we’ve accepted that suggestion that our surroundings have something to either add to our lives, or, and more commonly, out of fear that those around us have something they can remove from our lives.

Perhaps even our lives, us from them and them from here. Death, in other words.

Yes, we’re so far gone into this elation over the suggestion that we’re to be part of what’s become a melting-pot now twice burned and eternally singed that we ourselves have signed off in regard to our responsibility to not be like those around us. Which was again, right from the start, one of the very pinnacles of personal responsibility as perhaps best understood within that well-known and oft-quoted Scripture which teaches that the fear of man would prove a snare.

Ah yes, a snare.

If you’ve read throughout the Word, almost any at all, you’ll likely have seen that word snare or some derivative or derivation thereof scattered all throughout the Bible’s entirety. Again, Proverbs 29:25 is perhaps the best known, or at least the one known most widely within the world around us. But further still, the concept of a snare ensnaring our considerations or actions or expectations or exhortations is found in Exodus 23:33, Exodus 34:12, Deuteronomy 7:25, Proverbs 7:23 (one of a quite particular poignancy for this discussion today), and we’re not even out of the Old Testament!

Indeed, Proverbs 7:23 is found within the warnings against the allures of an adulteress woman. Specifically that passage, as starting in verse 21 says, “With persuasive words she led him astray; she seduced him with her smooth talk. All at once he followed her like an ox going to the slaughter, like a deer stepping into a noose till an arrow pierces his liver, like a bird darting into a snare, little knowing it will cost him his life.”

“Like a bird darting into a snare, little knowing it will cost him his life.”

Like a criminal breaking INTO prison. Like a civilian slapping a police officer. Like a numbskull bringing a Red Rider and a box of bb’s to a gun fight. It’s death in waiting! For that is all that a snare can do.

It you don’t know the overall purpose of snares, they’re used primarily in hunting. They’re laid in hiding along game trails for unsuspecting prey that’s presumed to soon become dinner. And once said target has become trapped, the snare holds it there until the hunter returns to collect the spoils. “Their throats are open graves.” That is the ultimate danger of our paying any attention to any of what a fallen world has to say, let alone so much of what a fallen man insists we listen to or goo along with.

The Bible warns that our fear of man would prove a snare because it will inspire us to live our lives making choices dependent solely upon what we know another person wants us to do or say or assume or become. In short, it’s allowing another mind to make our choices, and in this case, just taking the present odds as they so clearly are, that other person is in all likelihood one of the many comfortably plodding atop the wide open path into eternal oblivion.

Kind of easy to see why we should be careful as to who we listen to, what we go along with, what we agree to agree with and just how much like this world we resolve to dissolve in order to become.

Which is the precise problem the Father has long been trying to warn us against!

You see, He’s always tried to help us understand that He is all we need, and that the world around us, one so vastly convinced that He isn’t even there at all, would only inspire us to let other things take His place. He’s always asked us to resist this suggestion that the world around us had something we needed, an idea that would make us wiser, a possession that would prove our existence more valuable and thus more meaningful, because He knows that should we open our hearts to the longing for things of this world, well then those things of this world would then eventually become the things upon which we could come to rely.

All the way to perhaps even, like that tree I mentioned up top, to the very opening of our eyes to being more than He created us to be. Indeed, avoid that tree. Don’t bow down to their gods. Don’t intermingle with that people. Don’t intermarry with that nation. Do not be unequally yoked. Not because this world can give us something we need but they can, and will, inspire us to lose what we can’t afford to let go.

And yet therein lies the problem proven at present. We’ve become so ensnared by the world around us that you can’t tell us apart. And perhaps there were at one time, maybe even still, some genuine and legitimate reasons for that. Maybe it started as an idea along the same line as what Paul mentioned in the latter half of 1 Corinthians 9:22, “I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.”

Indeed, in that passage Paul talks about how he became like a Jew in order to appeal to the Jews. He lived as if one still under the Law to preach the freedom of Christ amongst those living under the Law. The first part of 9:22 says that he became weak in order to better reach the weak. But while that worked for Paul within his personal ministry and calling, I fear what we fail to comprehend is that our path isn’t like Paul’s. We’ve not seen the things Paul saw. We haven’t talked with the Lord as Paul did. We haven’t been given this massive mission into all corners of the Middle East as that in which Paul served.

Paul had a stance from which to work that remained His foundation. If we have that same solidity in Christ, great! If we don’t, well then becoming like the world to try and reach the world will only pull us into being like the world in order to be liked by the world. Paul wasn’t seeking that same comfort or assurance of personal safety or success. He talks frequently about how he was more than ready to leave this world behind and finally be home.

Can we honestly say the same? We should be able to as the Bible reminds us that for Christians, the ultimate goal in this world is to come upon that mindset which tells us that to live is Christ and to die is gain. But friends, how can we say we’ve arrived at that if we still give any time, attention, intention to anything this world is doing, saying, assuming? Just the fact that we know anything of the goings on going on around us proves that our house is still under construction, and that at least a portion of it remains atop the shifting sands of societal opinion.

And that’s why we need to again be a little more careful as to what we allow to gain any importance in our lives. For the gods of the people around us, these days fashioned from everything from gold to gossip, they’re only there to ensnare us. They trap us. They trip us up and hold us in place, in this place, until the ones who set the traps come to finish the job.

“Their throats are open graves.”

They always have something new to say that they insist we hear. They have some new invention or intention that they demand we enjoy. There is always here some new outrage to share, some new opinion swirling around, some novel doubt to dabble in for a day or two until the next idol has finished being forged of public preference and has finally cooled enough to pass around.

It’s an endless stream of external suggestion, and that’s exactly what we’ve been warned against allowing into our eyes, our ears, our hearts, our minds, our lives. We don’t have enough time, room, attention, effort to give unto anything in and of this world what belongs to God alone. Indeed, give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. Are we Caesar’s? Do we belong to Rome? Are we just currency passed around that exists only change hands between those with the next best ideas that we can’t come up with any excuse to ignore?

No, we are God’s people. God’s creation. God’s treasured possession so highly valued that Christ chose the cross! Yes, chose the cross. Why would He do that? To redeem us from the snares into which we’ve all but become so entrapped, entwined, entangled, enraptured that we can’t live without knowing the breaking news regarding the latest hollyweird scandal taking the headlines by storm.

Friends, the point is our time is thin as it is and each day we’ve less left to live than we had the day before. What we do with this life will be weighed in eternity. Love that quote from Gladiator! “What we do in life echoes in eternity.” Every choice we make sends a message that God hears from Heaven. Every path we followed leads us either closer to that hope or further from it. And that’s the danger in allowing in any voice or any vice that might not be as worried as we are about being welcomed into that eternal joy!

This world is laden with people and their objects of objectionable affection that are clearly not interested at all in living a life the likes of which Christ calls us to live. That is the calling of the cross, to take up our own and thereupon crucify every shred of worldliness that we’ve allowed to live inside of us. Because worldliness is sin and sin is death and so if we don’t turn and repent, then all we’re saying is that our redemption means so little that we’re not willing to leave behind the world in exchange for that better promise.

And that can only happen if we agree with the world that tells us that there’s plenty here for us in which to find hope, happiness, joy, peace, purpose, meaning. Because that’s how this world lives, placing their hope and trust and faith inside things made either by human hands or in human minds. And friends, this world has lost so much of its mind that most here think our faith in Christ is foolish!

Again, not the company we should be in such a hurry to keep!

Which is again what God here warns us against. Do not associate with these nations. Do not make a treaty of friendship with them. Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you no longer think like the world thinks but instead can understand the perfect will of God and the priceless promise toward which it leads.

Friends, this world has no such promise. This world can’t offer us salvation. This world can’t even offer us a decent suggestion in regard to our faith because this world is faithless! They know nothing of our faith as they live as if they know nothing of our Father, and simply put, if they don’t want to know God, then I don’t see why we should want to care about what they chose to focus on instead. And that’s why we have to stop listening to the nations around us and their incessant insistence that we buy some new false god that they themselves have made and come now to serve.

We serve God alone, and that opportunity is of such eternal worth that it instantly renders everything within this world so temporary entirely worthless. Or at least it should. This world should have no more of our attention as God deserves all that we can give being given unto Him alone. The time has come to come apart from the world and live as if we don’t belong here.

Because if Heaven is our hope, then we shouldn’t want to belong here!

And if we can’t see that it’s just that simple, well then we should probably stop listening to all those making it hard.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold