“You must not make a covenant with them or their gods. They must not remain in your land, or else they will make you sin against me. If you serve their gods, it will be a snare for you.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the best and most memorable ideas about friendship I’ve ever heard is that our friends determine the direction and quality of our lives. If we spend all our time with people who discourage us and point us in the wrong direction, our lives will soon show the evidence of this and it won’t be good. Thankfully, the opposite is true as well. As God was preparing the people for the journey that lay ahead of them, He wanted them to know that this same basic idea applied to them too. Let’s talk about what’s going on here and what we should make of it.

Cultural trends have a way of migrating. For instance the culture of rock and roll coming out of the United States migrated to Russia and played a more significant role in the fall of the Soviet Empire than for which it is often given appropriate credit. In a similar way, but from the other direction, many European cultural and especially intellectual trends have made their way across the pond and have had a profound impact on our culture here over the years.

This isn’t just true of national cultures. It’s true on a much smaller scale as well. There’s a reason “keeping up with the Jonses” is a thing. What the people around us do tends to affect what we do as well. We see and evaluate ourselves through the lens of what they do and think and have. When we see our neighbors get something new, suddenly our old things aren’t nearly so satisfying and fulfilling as they were before the new thing arrived next door. Sometimes this can be a fairly neutral or even good thing, but more often it just creates headaches. And debt. Envy always does.

Occasionally, though, the influence our neighbors have on us doesn’t come by way of envy. It simply comes by way of proximity. One of the great but secret truths about humanity is that we aren’t all that different from one another. I mean, sure, we look different and talk different and believe different things. But we also have the same basic needs and we seek to see those fulfilled in ways that while different on their face are generally just variations on the same theme. We struggle with many of the same issues and seek relief and comfort in the same basic places as well. From a distance all we can see are the differences. Those are big. But when we get up close, all of a sudden we find that we have more in common than we once believed.

Now, on the one hand, this isn’t a bad thing at all. It is a very good thing to find points of commonality that allow us to build bridges to and relationships with people with whom we once believed ourselves to hopelessly separated so that we no longer look at each other as enemies, but as friends. Where this can become potentially problematic, though, is when we are not properly grounded in a particular worldview and find ourselves building a kind of syncretistic worldview that is a mixture of several different pieces and parts. Often these pieces and parts are from different worldviews making different, mutually exclusive truth claims. But because we don’t properly understand any of them (including, perhaps, our previously professed worldview), we fail to see or understand this and wind up building a third worldview in a fashion that would leave Hegel beaming with pride.

The problem here is that a worldview is either true or it’s not. The idea that there are a whole bunch of different truths and that we are free to pick the one (or ones) that works best for us is nonsense promulgated by the likes of Disney to make people feel good and sell products. Creating a mishmash worldview like this doesn’t help anybody. If the worldview isn’t true to start with, mixing one part that isn’t true with another part that isn’t true doesn’t suddenly make it true. Mixing one part that is true but loosely understood and held with one part that isn’t true doesn’t make what’s true somehow more tolerant. It just makes it false.

God was inviting the Israelites into what was true. He knew that if they moved into their new place and left themselves surrounded by a whole bunch of lies, this syncretistic blending was going to happen. It almost couldn’t be helped. This wasn’t because they were going to try to be unfaithful, but rather because living peacefully in close proximity with folks who believe different things nearly always results in this kind of blending. At least it does when we aren’t firmly rooted in our own worldview. When we don’t really understand what we believe or why, when we don’t really understand or care whether what we believe is true, we’ll be willing to mix in all kinds of other ideas if they seem in a given moment to work. We are often inherently utilitarian like that. And the trouble is, a whole lot of things that aren’t even remotely true seem to work every now and then thanks to the law of averages. If you knock on wood enough times to prevent something bad from happening after you’ve mentioned it, eventually the bad thing isn’t actually going to happen, and when it doesn’t, it’s pretty easy to fool yourself into thinking that the knocking on wood actually did something.

Because of all of this, God gave Israel the instructions He did to clear out the land of every scrap of pagan influence. If they left any of it in place, the odds were far too high for comfort that they were going to be drawn away by it into some syncretistic nonsense that pointed them away from Him and the life He was inviting them into. He was working to build a people through whom He would reveal Himself to the whole world. If they didn’t reveal Him properly because they kept mixing what was true about Him with what was false, all His efforts were going to be in vain. Thus the need for rigorous purity.

So then, does God’s demanding this kind of purity of Israel mean that Jesus followers today need to cut ourselves off from the world? After all, we see guys like Paul and John telling us to not love the world. John in particular said that if we love the world the love of the Father is not in us. I don’t think things are quite that simple.

For starters, Jesus prayed not that God would take us out of the world, but that He would protect us while we were in the world. We are to be in the world, but not of the world. We regularly see Jesus in the Gospels spending time with people who were nothing like Him in order to invite them into God’s kingdom. Paul talked about the importance of being all things to all people so that by all means we might save some of them. We can do all of this and more because we have something Israel did not have: the Holy Spirit. This is a huge part of the ministry of the Holy Spirit in us. He takes us residence in our hearts and minds to help us deepen our grasp of the truth in order that we are empowered to stand firm in the face of things that aren’t true even when they are presented really convincingly.

Now, is there a time in a young believer’s (and I don’t just mean that in terms of age) growth and development when a more limited engagement with the world is probably wise so they can strengthen their recognition and understanding of what is true without losing sight of it in an ocean of things that are false? Sure, but the goal is to move beyond that stage to the point we can begin engaging more fully and regularly with the world around us being salt and light like Jesus called us to be. A believer who doesn’t move beyond that stage isn’t growing like she should. A group of believers who become convinced that cutting themselves off from the world is the best way to keep themselves unspoiled by it are creating a whole generation of believers who aren’t likely to develop the kind of robust faith that will be able to withstand clever counterarguments when they inevitably encounter them.

Rather than cutting ourselves off from the world like God was calling Israel to do here for reason that made sense given where they were in their journey with Him and what He was trying to do through them for us, we need to invest time and attention into studying carefully what is true and what is not. We need to learn the reasons why the Christian worldview is not just good but true and right. We need to spend time each and every day in the Scriptures, letting them form and shape our view of the world. Then, we need to seek to engage with ideas that aren’t true in order to help the people who hold to them see and understand that they are false. We need to demonstrate by our dedicated display of Jesus’ love why the truth is so good. We need to grow the kingdom. That’s what God made us for. Let’s get to work.