That They May Not Teach You

⁶ But in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, ¹⁷ but you shall devote them to complete destruction, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded, ¹⁸ that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices that they have done for their gods, and so you sin against the Lord your God.

Passage

Deuteronomy 20 - That They May Not Teach You

Conditions

A freezing but joyful morning. I was winning the sleep-in and there was a loud squark. We don’t have any birds. 

Time

A leisurely Christmas eve morning.

Teaching

Here we found another distinction, this time between two ways of waging war in Israel. I hadn’t thought before about teaching the children to distinguish and bring clarity between ideas and realities. But the laws of Deuteronomy provide opportunities to introduce them to careful thinking like that. 

A good point to notice in the conquest context: Israel was not to go out and destroy everyone, everywhere. Nations far off were to be offered peace. It is only the nations the Lord was giving to Israel that were to be devoted completely to destruction. These were abominable, and the Lord was visiting judgement upon them. 

Verse 8 is a good verse to camp on. Here we get the big “why” on Israel’s side of the conquest instructions:

¹⁸ that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices that they have done for their gods, and so you sin against the Lord your God.

As it happens one of the children chose SC 84. which tied in nicely. God intends to keep Israel separate from the nations, ultimately to bring salvation to the world through Israel. 

This leads us nicely into a discussion about continuity and discontinuity. Has the church been commanded by God to destroy wicked nations? No. We’ve been commanded to proclaim Christ, who offers forgiveness now, and will Himself destroy wicked nations on judgement day. 

However, this does not mean the passage has nothing more than history to teach us. We ought to be just as concerned that the nations do not draw us away from true worship into idolatry. Death and judgement are still the wages of sin and idolatry, despite the fact that neither Israel nor the church is the vehicle of that judgement. The Lord is still jealous of His people, and He still calls us to undivided devotion. 

We wondered a bit about the gods of the nations - the priorities they elevate to god-like status. Lewis was asked once, “Which of the religions of the world gives to its followers the greatest happiness?” He answers, “While it lasts, the religion of worshipping oneself is the best.” This appears to be the highest god in Canada, as is the case in the other once great western nations. People elevate the individual and his or her freedom above all else, as the highest priority. There are temptations to learn this religion at every turn, opportunities everyday not to be drawn away from the true God to false worship.