Beware of the Family

I want to use a passage from Deuteronomy 13, verse 6. Deuteronomy 13, verse 6. This passage starts out with a discussion about the dangers or temptations that come to someone who's trying to live in obedience to God. And in this story, he's telling them, when you enter the promised land, he's already warned them that they're to be able to worship God exactly as he tells them, where he tells them to be obedient to him in every way. And then he starts in 13th chapter telling them that the obstacles that come to them as they're trying to be faithful to God, they have to look out for. The first one he talks about is saying you have to be careful because there'll be religious people who'll come to you, and on every surface they'll look like they're reliable people, but they're not. And they might even tell you wonderful things God's done and give you prophecies of what he's going to do, and you should watch them because if they ever tell you to do anything contrary to the scriptures or what God has already said, you're to leave, you're to not listen to them anymore. And they're, in fact, to be killed. Now he starts with the second area in which temptation comes to us, and this is by people that are very close to us. A religious leader is a dangerous person because he talks the religious language. It sounds like he's a godly person, but in the end, if he leads you to do things contrary to what God says a person should do, he's really destroying you and your faith. The next group of people that he talks to are people that are very difficult for us to avoid because they're a family. Now, I want to reflect just a moment on why this is a powerful thing. It's not as strong for us today as it was in biblical days. You may notice that in cultures that are not very developed so that they have a centralized government, the family units are always more powerful and strong than they are in communities where there is a strong centralized government. And there's reasons for that because if you have a family in a territory where there's not a good army or police help, you need people around you to help protect you. Also, in a land that's not very developed like this, the laws are not very clear. So each family unit has to make sure that it takes care of the people that are around it and protects them. Also, in biblical times when the people of Israel went into the land of promise, they were promised a piece of ground given to the father of this whole group so that the family all owned this piece of ground and it was the source of income for them. So a family member was very critical to the success, the financial success of a person. There's a guy telling me about in Mexico, he was talking about people build a house and they always have rebar sticking up out of all the walls. He thought that was really strange because they never finished them. They always have rebar sticking up. If they had one level, it was rebar up. If they had two levels, rebar was out of the top. And someone who had been a missionary there said, well, there's two reasons for that. One is because if you have your house under construction, there's no taxes. So leave the rebar sticking up out of the top and you don't have to pay taxes until you finish it. Then when you, he said, the other reason is that whenever you have children, if you have a son and he goes and marries or a daughter that goes and marries, then you build a second level up. And then if you have another family member who gets married, you build a third level up. Well, this is exactly the way the people of Israel and the culture in their world did. You had a family and when someone married, they simply added a room onto the family compound. So there was protection here. There was safety there. There was provision there. There was a rule and order. The man, the oldest of the family, was always in charge and he made sure everybody knew what they were supposed to do and brought order to what was taking place. Many of the things that families used to do, we depend on our own culture to do, like the law enforcement agencies or the government to provide income or social security or benefits for us. But in this ancient world, everything was dependent on your family. When you got older, family took you in and cared for you until the time of death. So a disruption in the family was a really terrible thing to do. And family had great pressure. In fact, you'll notice in the Bible, both in the Old Testament and the New Testament, that whenever someone in the family became a follower of Yahweh God or of Jesus in the New Testament, everybody in the family became a follower of Jesus or Yahweh God because the head of the family determined the entire direction that that family would take. There was no room for everybody to go their own way. So he's using a culture that they understand as a very powerful force to warn them about. Now, when you go into this land of promise, they'd never been farmers, they were going to go in and settle down, they'd never lived among people of other religions or other groups except the Egyptians in which they were isolated as slaves. Now they were going into a world that they'd never been in before, where people were farming and they'd never done that. Their next door neighbors or people in the community would come and say, well, here's how we get our crops. And one of the big forces that they'd counted on was the God of Baal to give them rain. It was the God of rain. And so they would say to these new farmers, come in and settle, you know, we're all successful because of Baal. He makes sure that we have plenty of rain to grow our crops with. And someone in your family might hear that and believe it. Now, as you come to settle, be careful because you're subject to the influence of family members who might believe the things that they're told by their neighbors. Chapter 13, verse 6. If your own brother or your son or daughter or wife you love or your closest friend secretly entices you saying, let's go and worship other gods, the gods that neither you nor your fathers have known. Gods of the people around you, whether near or far, from one end of the land to the other, do not yield to him or listen to him. Show him no pity. Do not spare him or shield him. You must certainly put him to death. Your hand must be the first in putting him to death and the hand of all the people, then the hands of all the people. Stone him to death because he tried to turn you away from Yahweh, your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. Then all Israel will hear and be afraid and no one among you will do such an evil thing again. He starts with this discussion reminding them of the closeness that all the family is going to have and the influence it's going to be. This is not overtly like the prophet who stands up and says, here's what I say to you, you should follow another god. It's your brother or your sister or your brother-in-law or your wife who suddenly begins to talk to about the importance of the God of Baal and how much the people in the community have gotten from this and how productive their land was and how successful they'd become. And it comes in in the silent conversation, just a hint there and a hint there, until suddenly they're talking about it quite openly. You know, we'd have better crops if we listened to the people here who are used to farming in this area. We'd see our neighbors and they're doing a lot better than we are and sure would be nice if we had the money to do the things that they have or the animals or the cattle. Just hints and suggestions. Why don't we go and just look to see what they're doing? And maybe it would be right for us to worship their God. We don't have to abandon Yahweh God. We can still worship Him, but we can go and also worship the God of Baal. What's wrong with that? I know God said we should never forsake Him, but we're not going to forsake Him. We're simply going to include this new God that's in this territory where we have never been before and Yahweh's never been before, and then we'll be successful like all the other people around us. So whenever you hear people coming up to you, He says, your first defense, your first defense is to not listen to them. Your closest friends saying, let us go to worship. Your own brother, whether near or far, do not yield to him or listen to him. Now what He tells them is, you're to remember what the God Yahweh, what I have said to you. You're to remember the commands I've given to you, the commands given on Mount Sinai to have no other gods aside beside Him. You're to hold fast to every single thing that I've told you. So when someone tells you anything that's contrary to what I've told you, you're automatically to dismiss that person as someone trying to lead you away from God. You see how critical it is for someone who's trying to learn to walk with God to know what the Bible says. And oftentimes people make a promise to God to live in obedience to Him, but they don't learn enough about the Scriptures to know if the things they hear are really true to God or they're false. So they're left unable to make good decisions about what's right and wrong. The assumption is here that you, because you're my people, have heard what I have to say and you've learned what I have to say, so you can make a judgment on whether that's consistent with the words of God or it's contrary to them. It sounds like a wonderful thing to say we're not going to stop anything we're doing with Yahweh, we'll just go over here and worship some at that place. And we'll have both of them. In human reasoning, that doesn't sound like you've failed one or the other, except that Yahweh said you're to have no other gods. And when that command is clearly understood, then it's plain that you shouldn't do that. So knowing what God expects from us is critical in being able to resist the temptation to be unfaithful to Him. Knowing what He asks of us is critical to be able to know how to live. And if we don't know what He asks of us, we're easily deceived and we start living in a way contrary to what He wants and He cannot fulfill all the promises He's made to us. I will guide you. Well, if I'm listening to Yahweh and someone else, then the guidance becomes difficult to follow. I will provide for you. Well, if I'm depending on Yahweh and some other God, then Yahweh draws His hand back and the other God doesn't exist and the promise of God will not be fulfilled in your life. If you're depending on Yahweh God to protect you and you're worshiping some other way or doing something contrary to what He wants, He backs off from His promise to protect you. And all the while you think that you're doing something that is good and end up with your life being in worse condition than it was before. Now, when he's talking about how the importance of ignoring anyone who would do anything that would distract you from obedience to God, he makes it even more critical because of the language that he uses about this rejection. Show no pity. Do not spare him or shield him. You must certainly put him to death. The demand that God makes on the people of Israel is really harsh. It is difficult sometimes for us to read this language and grasp the seriousness of what God was trying to do with the people of Israel. I think maybe one of the best ways I could describe what God is trying to do here is to talk about families. How many children do you have? Six. Six when they're growing up. If you have six kids and they're all sitting down together and you had told them what they were supposed to do and you left the house and one of them said, well, you guys can go ahead and do those things if you want to, but I'm not going to do them. How much influence do you think one rebellious child would have had over your kids? You see, whenever you're in a position of authority, it could be at work or it could be in your home and there's somebody in charge and they've been told what to do, that is God's in charge. He tells the people of Israel what to do. If one person in all the community of faith says, I'm not going to do what we've been taught to do because I believe worshiping Baal is the secret to success in this land, and you go off and start doing that and then, however it turns out, Satan always makes it look like that guy who's in rebellion against God is doing better than you are. Haven't you heard people say that? I know wicked people and they seem to have everything. Everything goes their way. They get everything they want to have done for them. It always appears to us that people who are rebellious against God are having a good life and those of us that are trying to obey him, life is harder. I think it's the way Satan does. He makes a cover over the people whose lives are miserable and it makes it look like it's attractive and appealing. So he says, I want you to be sure that you eliminate the person from your whole community who participates in rebelling against the authority of God because sin is contagious. Always contagious. You let one person begin to do something contrary to what God wants and everybody around them gets influenced to do it. Sometimes it's so subtle you don't see it. I bet you've heard people say, well, I can remember whenever you could never see on television the things that are on there today. Have you ever heard that? There's kind of an illustration that I've heard used for many years and it's about putting a frog in a kettle of water, turning the fire on, and the water gets warm so slowly that it cooks before you can even know it and doesn't jump out, and we're all like that. You hear some of that language over and over and over and over and over again until suddenly it becomes a part of your life and you're not shocked by it anymore. You're not distressed by it anymore. Nobody pays any attention to it. It's just the way things are. And when you go to cities where the lifestyles are quite different, we went to visit one of our sons in San Francisco, and the things that people do there, if they did them in Great Bend, would be absolutely shocking, but no one even seems to notice. Now those people are the same as we are, but their lives have been acclimated to the presence of rebellion against God until it doesn't even matter to them. They don't even care. There's not even any interest. And if you're in a place like that and you're trying to raise your family or yourself, trying to live a life of obedience to God, it becomes really difficult because you're always now going against the grain. You're always pushing against all the forces that are around you, and how does it get started? One person, somewhere, begins to say, I'm going to do exactly what I want to do. And they attract other people who want to do exactly what they want to do, until suddenly you live in a world where the instructions of God are of no concern whatsoever. What God is telling us is something critical. Sin is infectious. Being unclean is infectious. And when you're around people who do things that are unclean and contrary to what God wants, it is easy for you to pick those things up and for it to spread into your own life. And you must make sure without any doubt or any question that you never allow this kind of person to be in your community. Now for these families, he's talking about families, when you have this kind of thing happen in your family, it has a powerful influence. Because in your small group, no one wants to do anything to offend a family member, because you have to get along. You all work together, you live together, you're in the same complex together. So your tendency is, when your friend or your family member does that, is to listen to the person. And the other is to have pity on this person. And the other is to protect that person, to shield that person. But all you do is you give them an opportunity to spread this infectious lifestyle that is deadly to your whole family and to your whole community. So what I order you to do is, if some member of your family starts trying to lead you away from Yahweh, to recognize that this is the most dangerous and deadly thing that can happen to you in the land. Because I brought you into this land because the people who used to live here paid no attention to me, and their lifestyle became so wicked that I had to purge this land of them. And I will do that with you. And the only way you're going to be free of it is to make sure that no one starts this among you. So when someone comes talking this kind of language of rebellion against God, and that's what it is, rebellion against God, the first commandment, you're not to listen to them at all. And if they persist in doing this, you're not to shield them or to protect them, but you're to turn them in. I was thinking about this the other day. The language we use, you know, about, I read this in football, there's a team that did something wrong and someone told on them, and their coach had to be suspended for a year. And one of the football players said on the news that he knew who ratted the team out. There is a kind of a, growing up in our culture, an idea that you don't tell anything that's wrong about somebody. You don't rat them out. You don't tell the truth. Now telling the truth is ratting people out. See how that changes everything for us? We're told that we're supposed to tell what's true and right. And if you see something that's wrong, you tell about it. You report it to the officials. But now the whole culture of our country is, don't rat someone out. So the police have corruption, no policeman will rat out his buddies. So you have corruption in the army, no person in the army is going to rat out their friends. So you have generals, nobody's going to rat out the generals. We don't tell the truth. We don't listen to the command that God gives to us to say, you must always be willing to tell the truth no matter what, because you are to be righteous and holy as I'm holy. These things subtly sweep over us until we're a whole different culture. If it's the family, the same thing happens in that family. And the only way you can be safe of that is to make sure that it never occurs. Now what God is telling us is just how horrible and terrible people who deviate from the instructions of God are to Him and to the culture and to the people of God. You must at every cost make sure that no infection comes into your community of faith. Then He said to them, you must be certain to put him to death. But you know, this could be a dangerous thing. Because if I got mad at my brother-in-law and I wanted to see him cooked, all I had to do is say, hey, you know what I heard him say the other day? He said he was going to go worship Baal and everybody would go kill him. But your hand must be the first to put him to death. In other words, if you're going to report somebody, you have to believe it's the truth. And you're the first one that does it. And if you do it and you've lied, then you're guilty of murder. See the burden it puts on the reporter? You better know that this is the truth. Now once you've thrown the first stone, then everybody else has to join you so you're not the only person doing it. But if you've told a lie, then your guilt is even greater because you've murdered someone. So God has built into the punishment scene here a way to keep people from using it as a means of controlling or destroying other people. You must be sure that you are the one who takes the first step. Stone him to death because he's tried to turn you away from Yahweh your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. Then all Egypt will hear and be afraid and no man among you will do such an evil thing again. And the New Testament is quite different in how this was to be handled. In the New Testament, somebody in the church is doing something that's not right. You simply say to them, you can no longer be a part of this fellowship of believers. And they were asked to be separated from the fellowship of believers because their life and lifestyle was set was foreign to what God wanted so that the community of faith would be singular and pure and focused. No longer is he asking, I want you now to find if anybody's in the church, you go attack them and kill them. But he's saying, if you see a brother who's failed, you go to them and try to straighten this matter out so that you now eliminate this false behavior or beliefs. And if that person is not willing to do that, then you say it'd be better for you not to be a part of this fellowship if you're going to continue to live, act and talk like you are. The Bible thinks that the family of God ought to be pure, but no longer is the responsibility of killing someone given to us. For the Holy Spirit reveals to us when people's lifestyle or their beliefs or their doctrines are different. And he has a medium whereby we go to them and make an appeal. And then in that appeal, they are to have the choice to be able to reform their behavior or to keep or to stay outside the fellowship of the church. I wouldn't say that this is a foolproof method. We're not in a culture in our country where correcting people is well accepted. It never happens that I know about that it doesn't cause disruption. You know why? Because we have pity on the person and we're more concerned about that person and their feelings than we are about obedience to God. And whenever that happens, then the church becomes divided and split about any corrective method we might use. The second thing is, many people in our church are not really taught to live in obedience to what Scripture teaches. So the pattern, even among leadership in the church, sometimes is not clear about the things that are critical and important. But all this aside, what God is saying to us is, my people can never be effective so long as there is anything that causes them to have divided loyalties. And when a church is not effective in what it's trying to do, oftentimes this very issue is what's at the root of it. Now what God asks for us is that each of us would make sure that our commitment to Christ is complete and total. He says that we're not to be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. He's talking about that in business relationships in 1 Corinthians primarily. Because if you have a business and you work with someone who's not honest and they want to charge the wrong price or they want to short that person and you're working with them in business, then whatever they do, it happens to you. The Bible describes it in terms of our relationships with each other in marriage, as business, and in the community. We're to try to make sure that we never are caught with divided loyalties to God and to another person. It's very difficult when you're married to someone who doesn't have the same commitment to Christ you have, or if you're in business with someone that doesn't have the same commitment to Christ that you have, or if you're in church where the people there don't have the same commitment to Christ you have. For you always have two different directions at work in the same body. The remedy, only remedy, is to make sure that each of us has said, Jesus Christ is the Lord of my life, and my life and lifestyle will show it. I'd like you to bow your head for just a moment. In the passage, he's talking about if your family member, brother, sister, whoever it is, comes with another suggestion about what you should do. And I'd like to change it a little bit. If people around you see your life, do they see a person whose life is controlled by Christ? I'm not just talking about immoral behavior, I'm talking about relationships. Do they see you as kind and loving? Do they see you as positive or negative? They see you as a complainer? They see you as a person who affirms? Do they see you as a person who loves? Just ask God, what is there in my life, if anything, that would distract or cause people to see something less than what you want? However little that is, God wants it eliminated. The Holy Spirit is the primary purifier of the church. It is he who convicts us of our sin. He is the one who tells us when our lives and our hearts are not proper. Listen to that voice. You've told us here that the most important thing in the world is to be singularly committed to follow you. Father, if there is anything in my life that distracts the church from that mission, please make it clear. I ask that of every one of us, that we might be a people with one single focus, submission to you, your authority, and your plan. That we might be that group of people pure and holy. I ask in Jesus' name that you make that come to pass here in this group of believers. Amen.