HEALING: Getting Rid Of The Old Stuff

I lived in the second-story apartment of an old brick house in Ohio during my first teaching job. There I would occasionally enjoy a hamburger prepared on a cheap rickety grill I owned.
 

One day after another turn at the grill, I noticed that the well-used charcoal briquettes had been reduced to ashes. So I spread them and let them cool overnight, then the next day I poured them into the metal garbage can I had placed on the street. It wasn't long before I noticed smoke outside my apartment window. I looked down to the street and saw my trash can engulfed in flames.

The embers I had thought were extinguished, in fact, were not. And with the first stiff wind, they ignited all over again.

      
I remembered this event as I talked to a friend the other day who had grown up in an unusually dysfunctional home. Her parents had divorced, and her mother had subsequently married multiple times and become an alcoholic. Though this mother claimed to love God, little in her life reflected His ways. As a result, her children, including my friend, had witnessed a most unstable upbringing, and she longed to break free. I've tried to help her do that and have made myself available to encourage her. At our latest meeting, she seemed to be at least glancing down a similar road as the one her mother had taken. I had thought she was doing better, but when things got a little tough, she reverted back to some former ways. The embers I thought were extinguished, in fact, were not. And with the first stiff wind, they ignited all over again. 

For many years, I have focused on an Old Testament part of Scripture where I see so much relevance today. It starts with God telling the Israelites about the wonderful Promised Land that He was going to give them. He described its physical parameters (Gen. 15:18; Js. 1:4) and said much about what they'd find there. It would be land flowing with milk and honey (Ex. 3:8) and would feature a secure people who live in a large land where there is no want:

" 'Arise, that we may go up against them: for we have seen the land and, behold, it is very good . . . Be not slothful to go, and to enter to possess the land. When ye go, ye shall come unto a people secure, and to a large land: for God hath given it into your hands; a place where there is no want of anything that is in the earth' " (Jud. 18:9-10).

Who wouldn't want to go there? And yet we know that the Israelites postponed their own entrance and made what should have been an 11-day journey toward the Promised Land into 40 years.

God gave another instruction to the Israelites. In order to possess the new land, they had to dispossess the old inhabitants. Fifty times in Scripture, God told them to "utterly destroy" (not partially) the Canaanite cities that existed on their land. This was called the "law of herem." God told them that each old inhabitant that they didn't utterly destroy would dog them, plague them all their days: 

"But if you will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you; then it shall come to pass, that those which you let remain of them shall be
pricks in your eyes and
thorns in your sides and
shall vex you in the land wherein you dwell" (Num. 34:55).

All of us have old inhabitants in our lives—habits, curses, idols, hangups, distractions, undealt-with emotions, etc. Mine are probably different from yours. What is the same for all of us, however, is that if we don't get rid of them completely, they'll continue to be pricks, thorns, and vexes our whole life through. If we don't identify them and conquer them completely, we will never be able to live victoriously in our own promised lands during our lifetimes here on earth. And Psalm 106:34-38 tells us that we'll pass these same bad influences on to our children, sacrificing them in the process.

If my friend and you and I make sure the charcoals of our old inhabitants are completely dead—utterly  destroyed—then we'll be able to become a secure people who live in a large land where there is no want for generations to come. "Arise . . . for we have seen the land, and behold it is very good. . . . Be not slothful to go, to enter to possess the land" (Jud. 18:9).

That sounds worth the effort, don't you think?