Example or apostle?
Deuteronomy 18:9 – Chapter 20 Read it here
There’s a common theme running through today’s reading that I believe is a significant division within Christianity, but one so basic in our assumptions that we don’t usually see it.
In both the Old and New Testaments it is clear that God intends his people to be a light to the world, showing what it is to follow him as all humans were intended to do. But how that light and example are shared seems to be different between the books of the law and the gospels.
The common thread through today’s reading is purity of example through separation.
God’s people are to be rigidly set apart from the evil people outside their group.
Divination is evil, so kill those who practice it. Purge the one who is guilty of shedding innocent blood. Offer peace for surrender to your enemies, but not to those of the gifted cities, as their presence may contaminate God’s people. Even in the fighting, the potential soldier who might be less than wholehearted, either through distraction or through cowardice, is to be excluded.
Good people to the right. Bad people to the left.
One thinks of the example of yeast that Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 5:6-8:
“Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? Get rid of the old yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”
Jesus, as well as Paul and other New Testament writers say some things that support the idea of separation, but more frequently seem to teach that purity applies to the individual and within the close-knit community of the church, but assume that people will have ongoing interaction with impure or sinful people who are outside the church.
The parable of the wheat and the weeds (or wheat and tares) in Matthew 13, directly says the danger of separation is too great—the wheat and weeds should grow alongside each other until the time of the harvest. Likewise, the separation of the sheep from the goats takes place at the end.
Right after the 1 Corinthians passage quoted above, Paul writes, “I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral….In that case you would have to leave this world.”
The prevailing Old Testament view of strict separation seems to be a matter of witnessing by example, but not by interaction.
By the time of the New Testament, Jesus and his followers encourage more active engagement with the sinful people of the world. In other words, working as apostles within the mission field, rather than standing outside the mission field, hoping to be seen as an example of a better path to follow.