Judgment without mercy.
This decree is to be viewed—
I. AS A JUST JUDGMENT ON PEOPLES WHOSE INIQUITIES CRIED FOR VENGEANCE. The doomed nations had been long borne with (Genesis 15:16). Their iniquities were of a kind and degree of enormity which imperatively called for a Divine interposition (Le 18:27, 28; Deuteronomy 9:4). This was the true ground of God's dealings with them, and furnishes a sufficient answer to all cavils. The destruction of the comparatively innocent with the guilty may be explained in part by the existence in the offspring of the hereditary evil of their race. How often, under the Divine government, do we see illustrations of the same principle—the temporal consequences of transgression overflowing on those related to the transgressor! The lesson taught is God's inflexible determination to punish evil. There can be no ultimate toleration of sin in God's universe. It must be judged, rooted out, and the sinner who identifies himself with it destroyed.
II. AS A CLEARING FROM IDOLATRY OF THE LAND OF GOD'S ABODE. Not only could the practice of idolatry not be endured, but even its unhallowed monuments must not be permitted to remain, polluting with their presence the land of God's habitation—the peculiar seat of his majesty, the place of his holiness. Every trace of these impure worships must be swept away (Deuteronomy 7:5). The lesson taught is God's hatred of idolatry. It is a secondary matter that the gods are of wood and stone, and the worship one of altars, groves, and pillars. There is the formal idolatry of heathenism, and there is the less-avowed, but not less real, idolatry of hearts which have set up rival objects to God in their secret places-which have substituted the creature, in some form of it, for the Creator. The forms are as numerous as ever were the idols of heathen temples. A man may be an idolater of reason; he may worship art; he may bow at the shrine of mammon (Matthew 6:24; Ephesians 5:5); his god may be the praise of men; he may fling himself to be crushed before the worse than Juggernaut car of fashion; he may be a votary of lewdness. The worship may be avowed, or hidden away in secret desires and imaginings. It may be rendered in the most diverse places—in the laboratory, at the desk, in the art studio, in home circles, on the broad stage of public affairs, in the saloons of gay society. The real point of importance is that it is of the nature of idolatry, and that God abhors it and declares it to be incompatible with his residence in the heart. "The idols he shall utterly abolish" (Isaiah 2:18).
III. AS A PROTECTION TO THE ISRAELITES THEMSELVES. The tolerated presence of idolatry in Canaan would have been to the Israelites an irresistible temptation (Deuteronomy 7:4). We are taught:
1. To seek our friendships and alliances elsewhere than among the ungodly.
2. That it is our duty, not only to avoid occasions of sin, and to keep as far out of harm's way as possible, but to labor for the entire removal from our midst of what experience shows to be a deadly snare (Isaiah 57:14).
Finally, severe as these commands are, we see reflected in them the three principles which, under widely different forms of manifestation, are to this hour to regulate the relation of God's servants to the evil of the world.
1. No toleration of it (Matthew 5:29, Matthew 5:30).
2. No communion with it (2 Corinthians 6:14-18).
3. Unceasing war against it (2 Corinthians 10:4; Colossians 3:5).—J.O.
Marriage in the Lord.
This law, forbidding marriages with the ungodly, is one for all time. The apostle revives it in 1 Corinthians 7:39. That marriage should be only in the Lord is evident—
I. FROM THE TRUE IDEA OF MARRIAGE. Two individuals unite their lives, and enter into a fellowship the most intimate possible—to what end? Surely that their natures may be raised to greater perfection, and that they may be better enabled to attain the ends of their existence. This implies a certain harmony of disposition, an essential accordance in the views taken of life and its duties. It is a union, as One has said, not merely between two creatures, but also between two spirits. But what communion, it may be asked, can exist in spiritual respects between two persons severed from each other in the deepest principles of their lives?
II. FROM A REGARD TO THE DIVINE BLESSING. Where one partner is irreligious, the blessing cannot rest upon the home in the same degree as where both are "heirs together of the grace of life" (1 Peter 3:7). Believers are to "agree" as touching what things they shall ask (Matthew 18:19). Variances even in godly households result in prayers being "hindered" (1 Peter 3:7). How much sadder the case of a home, so-called, where husband and wife stand so far apart that they cannot unite in prayer at all! And who that values God's blessing would willingly enter into a relation which inevitably stints and limits it?
III. FROM THE DANGER ACCRUING TO SPIRITUAL LIFE. The danger is not imaginary (1 Kings 11:3). Where spiritual life is not destroyed, as we may hope that often it is not, yet nothing but harm can come from an association in every respect adverse to it. How intolerable to a spiritual mind to endure "the blight of all sympathy, to be dragged down to earth, and forced to become frivolous and commonplace; to lose all zest and earnestness in life; to have heart and life degraded by mean and perpetually recurring sources of disagreement" (F. W. Robertson)! This is the species of living death to which unequal yoking not infrequently leads. The effects on offspring are also to be considered. Yet such marriages are rushed into, and, in the prevalent anxiety to make marriage the stepping-stone to wealth and social position, seem likely to become increasingly numerous. Would that men were wise, that they understood these things l—J.O.