Exodus 34:12-16

They were speaking of the adjacent lands around Israel and even the far-flung lands as well. Turn with me to Exodus 34:12. Wisely, Judah began with the family in their commitments to changing. They promised not to intermarry with the people of the adjacent Gentile lands. This was not racial snobbery or prejudice, since the Israelites have always contained some individuals of other races. This was an issue of religion and culture primarily; a different way of thinking.

This nation does the very opposite of what God said here by allowing Muslim’s to put up their mosques. Other religions to do the same thing. The Buddhists, the Shinto’s, and anyone else that wants to come to our country. Play the harlot with their gods means spiritual adultery. Moses recorded in Exodus what God told him to record and Israel was warned not to get involved with other nations in that way.

It was the danger of having the people led astray to the worship of pagan gods of the surrounding nations as a result of inter-marriages that made this commitment necessary. Israel was deluded, much like the United States and the Israelite countries around the world today are. In the church, we are not interested in race or anything like that because Paul said that there are Jews and Gentiles in the church. We do not see the difference because we are all spiritual Israelites. They have been baptized and received God’s Holy Spirit.

Exodus 34:12-16

Here God is having a passionate reaction against a rival. That rival is idolatry. And God will not permit idolatry without reacting because idolatry promotes divided loyalties. We are His, and He does not choose to share us with anybody or anything else.

Do you see what is happening? Do you see the way God describes idolatry? He described it as being harlotry, playing around with somebody else's wife. It is a case of divided loyalties. God gets hot. He gets angry. He is jealous. In fact, as we saw there in Deuteronomy 4, He gets so hot that He describes Himself as being a consuming fire. Fire symbolizes God's radiant glory as an aspect of His holiness.

Exodus 34:11-15

Why did God want these places destroyed? Because He wanted there to be no temptation to idolatry; no joining together of the way the people of the land worshipped their god with the way God wanted His people to worship Him. He did not want His way to be diluted by anything that was foreign to His purpose, to His plan. So He specifically designates that there is to be only one place.