But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then those of them whom you let remain shall be as barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall trouble you in the land where you dwell. Numbers 33:55
At our jail Bible study/recovery meeting last week, we were discussed those obviously self-destructive behaviors that we observe in others. Someone brought up the patient with a tracheostomy from throat cancer who still smokes cigarettes through his tracheostomy. We’ve all seen it, and it astounds us. That guy clearly knows that smoking is killing him, yet he keeps putting that poison in his body. Why would anyone do something so stupid?
The point of course, is that most of us can think of something similar that we do, even if it hasn’t yet caused something as dramatic as throat cancer. We all have those behaviors that we know to be self-destructive that we continue to do anyway. We eat a whole bag of chips while trying to lose weight. We say nasty things to those whom we’re supposed to love the most. We look at pornography, even though we want a healthy marriage. We’ve all got ways of coping that make us feel better in the moment, but which destroy us in the end. We’ve all got our poison that we voluntarily ingest. That is the nature of addiction – to repeatedly engage in a behavior, despite knowing the painful consequences.
Get rid of the poison or suffer the consequences. That’s the lesson of today’s passage. In it, as. the Israelites prepared to enter the Promise Land, God commanded them to drive out the current inhabitants, ridding the land of idols. If they failed to do get rid of these false gods, God predicted that this would be a continual source of misery for them. You must do the difficult thing now, removing the poison, or it will forever make you sick (my paraphrase).
This is an ongoing life lesson for me. Yes, I’m sober. I’ve removed opioids from my life. What poison am I now tolerating though? What misery have I caused myself because of my refusal to deal with a self-destructive behavior? Because I’m not ever going to be perfect in this life, I must daily go to God, asking what it is that I should be working on. The Christian life is meant to be one of continual growth, abandoning our poisons to find true life in Christ. So, daily, I must be honest enough to ask what poison I’m now tolerating. Then, I must do the hard work of cutting it out of my life – or prepare to suffer the consequences.