114. Drive Out and Destroy Enemies
Deuteronomy 9:3, 5 Understand therefore this day, that the Lord thy God is he which goeth over before thee; as a consuming fire he shall destroy them, and he shall bring them down before thy face: so shalt thou drive them out, and destroy them quickly, as the Lord hath said unto thee….Not for thy righteousness or for the uprightness of thine heart, dost thou go to possess their land: but for wickedness of these nations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee, and that he may perform the word which the Lord sware unto thy fathers, Abraham, Isaac, an Jacob.
Our God is a consuming fire. Everyone should hold a healthy fear of God, for it is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. God’s wrath is real. In these words from Moses the Lord uses words like destroy, bring down, and drive out. How is that a promise for us? It is a promise for us because it tells us what the Lord thinks of evil and what He will do to the evil. The evil enemies, sin, death, and the devil, are God’s enemies and our enemies. They mean nothing good or beneficial for us but everything bad and terrible.
This promise of bad things happening to bad things is good news for us. And the Good News of the Kingdom says to us that we may dislodge bad things from our souls where the Kingdom (the Land) rules. Joshua did that for the people of God coming in to possess the land that the Lord gave them. The new Joshua (Jesus, in Greek) does that for us people of God while we enter the Kingdom to possess it. This kingdom is in our hearts, and we really don’t want evil-minded gods and demons building strongholds in our minds. They are intent on destroying us, but, thank God, in Jesus’ name we destroy them. The holiness of God makes Him intent on destroying evil and ruthless in the pursuit of evil’s destruction. We, too, must have no toleration of sin or compromise with evil within us. It is not easy to root out all remnants of sin in the soul. For this reason we need such a promise, to drive out and destroy our spiritual enemies in our soul.