“Be Different”

Sunday, December 17, 2023

“When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than you, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them. You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly. But thus shall you deal with them: you shall break down their altars and dash in pieces their pillars and chop down their Asherim and burn their carved images with fire.

“For you are a people holy to the Lord your God.”

(Deuteronomy 7.1-6)

Is God’s point here that interracial marriage is wrong?  This passage has been used to support that position, but it’s not what God said!  To begin with, this was an instruction for the nation of Israel, and we are not today under that law.  But that’s no excuse to ignore the point God was making!  Even when that law does not bind us, it still tells us about God’s character—which is to say, about righteousness.  Jesus tells us that the Law of Moses boiled down to just two commandments:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

(Matthew 22.37-40)

Considering that both of these are repeated for Christians—numerous times!—we shouldn’t carelessly toss out whatever we don’t like about the Old Testament, since it’s all God’s commentary on his two most basic expectations for us to fulfill.  No, we still have to reckon with what God said to the ancient Israelites.  Why did he prohibit them from marrying members of any other races?

Well, in the first place, he didn’t!  The prohibition was narrowly tailored, covering

“the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations…”

(Deuteronomy 7.1)

So does that mean members of other nations were fair game?  Not exactly.  When Ezra and Nehemiah held authority among the Israelites returned from Babylonian exile, they both discovered that Jews had been intermarrying with Gentiles, including Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians, and Philistines—nations not mentioned by name in God’s prohibition (Ezr 9-10, Ne 13.23ff).  Yet both of these leaders concluded this was wrong, and needed to be rectified!

However, there are also examples of godly Israelites who married foreigners, with no hint from God that it was even ill-advised, let alone immoral!  Examples of these situations involve names like Moses, Rahab, Ruth, and Uriah.  Why do these seem to have received some kind of special exemption?  In part, it’s because God’s prohibition concerned systematic intermarriage, not the occasional, individual choices these righteous individuals represent.  And in part it’s because what they were doing was categorically different from what God warned against, which was the erasure of the distinction between Jew and Gentile.  God even built a related provision into the very same law:

“When you go out to war against your enemies, and the Lord your God gives them into your hand and you take them captive, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire to take her to be your wife, and you bring her home to your house, she shall shave her head and pare her nails. And she shall take off the clothes in which she was captured and shall remain in your house and lament her father and her mother a full month. After that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife.”

(Deuteronomy 21.10-13)

Well, doesn’t that contradict what he’d said back in chapter 7?  No!  There, his concern was to keep his chosen people from becoming like the nations around them.  In contrast, the practice he endorses would have Gentile women becoming Israelites, and leaving their past lives, associations, and bonds.  The problem, as Nehemiah observed in his circumstance, was that

half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod, and they could not speak the language of Judah, but only the language of each people.

(Nehemiah 13.24)

These were not Gentiles drawn into God’s kingdom; rather, they were Jews drawn away from it!

So, does this matter to us, today?  Of course it does!

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?

(2 Corinthians 6.14)

This is broader than marriage; it reaches to the core of who we are and how we see ourselves.  The Christian lives in the world, but is not of the world.  Jesus wants “a people holy to the Lord” (De 7.6), just as he told Israel.  He wants his followers to be different—to be righteous.

“If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.”

(John 15.19)

Does this describe you?

Jeremy Nettles

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