Mingling With the World

“…but they mingled with the nations and adopted their customs.”
Psalm 106:33

Psalm 106 is one of those Psalms that recounts the story of what God did for the people and how the people of Israel were quick to forget the mighty deeds of God. As I was reading this Psalm, verse 33 jumped out at me and got me to thinking.

One of the great sins the nation Israel committed was their failure to utterly destroy the peoples that inhabited the Promised Land to which God led them. Instead of destroying them, they “mingled” with them. One definition of the word is “to get involved or mixed up with.” That’s just what the Israelites did. They began to worship the idols of the people around them. They sacrificed their sons and daughters to demons. The Promised Land was desecrated by the innocent blood shed to these false Gods. It was not a pretty sight, the things done by these followers of God.

I know that we are not under the Law of the Old Testament. We are a people of Grace. I wonder though, is the statement of the Old Testament still not true for us today—“Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.” Are we still not supposed to worship God and God alone? I sometimes wonder, if the church has “…mingled with the nations and adopted their customs.”

For example:

• We sit back and allow thousands of unborn children to be killed each year through abortion.


• We continue to let our rights be eroded in the public sector through legislation and rulings that say that our voice, our views, our ideas are not acceptable in our pluralistic society—and yet any other idea seems to have free reign.


• We bow down to the Gods of consumerism and we seek to keep up with the Jones’ and we enslave ourselves to our job and neglect our families.

What would you add to my list? What would you disagree with on my list?