136. Utterly Destroy Enemies
Deuteronomy 20:17 But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee.
The command for the Israelites is to utterly destroy the enemies in the Land. The promise is that the Israelites will utterly destroy the enemies in the Land. The seven heathen nations mentioned as living in the Land are enemies because they are pagan idolaters who have rejected the true God in favor of false gods and have taken demons for their gods. They must be utterly destroyed or they will remain in the Land and become thorns in the side that will tempt the true believers into sin, shame, idolatry, and demon worship.
The truth for us NT believers applies spiritually like this. God has put the Land (Kingdom of God) in our hearts. God lives and rules there, but sin and evil and demons still reside there as well. They must be utterly destroyed with no pity, tolerance or compromise. For it is syncretism (holding two or more beliefs or holding to two or more gods at the same time) that exiled God’s people from the Land. Allowing false religion to abide in the same heart as the true God, sometimes serving one and sometimes the other, draws us away from a pure faith in the One Loving God and Lord Jesus Christ. “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” We may or may not lose the Kingdom, but we will not be able to enjoy the full and free benefits of God’s Life and Reign.
Therefore, we are commanded to root out every root of bitterness and weed out all the thorny cares of the world in order to enjoy life in the Kingdom of God. And with the command He gives us the promise that we will be able to actually do so by the power of the Holy Spirit, who uses the Gospel to utterly destroy the enemies of the soul. We will not utterly accomplish that in this life, but the promise of the possibility of complete victory must be held before our eyes so that we are willing to let the Spirit do His work in us. The devil, the world, and the flesh is always around us tempting us to misbelief and other great shame and vice, but so also is the Spirit of God with His promises of victory and life with peace and joy. The encouragement for us is not to be afraid to seriously confront sin and evil and be willing to utterly destroy it in the Land that lives in us.