daily java

Daily Java: When all this had ended, the Israelites who were there went out to the towns of Judah, smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles. They destroyed the high places and the altars throughout Judah and Benjamin and in Ephraim and Manasseh. After they had destroyed all of them, the Israelites returned to their own towns and to their own property. (2 Chronicles 31:1)

The Israelites had just gotten through with a mega-Passover and a lot of celebration. They decided that since they were celebrating, they would go ahead and do a little purging. And they did so with the fervor that the people of God have always shown when they feel they are doing the will of God.

They recognized that the presence of idols in their midst would do nothing but damage them.

And they knew that God would not be pleased with the presence of those idols.

Is God pleased with the diversity that is America today? Is he pleased with our live and let live policy with other religions?

It is a truth that only in a Christian country can other religions flourish. That is because Christians recognize the need for freedom, and with that knowledge comes the tolerance of other points of view.

You do not get that in a Muslim country, or in a Buddhist country or any other country with any other faith than that of Christianity.

America was founded on that principle of allowing people to pursue their own ideas of what was right. Of course, liberals to the negative, it was founded on Christian principles and on God.

But there is a difference between the Israelites and America. The Israelites were a people of God. America was founded on Godly principles. There is a difference.

The apostle Paul said in 2 Corinthians 10:4 that The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. In other words, it is not within our power to demolish idolatrous trash. It is within the power of the transformation of the grace of God that will do the demolishing.

To put it differently, God will do the transforming when we teach others about his grace, and when they accept his grace.

We do not have permission to go tear stuff up.

Jesus said, My Kingdom is not of this world. If it were, then would my servants fight (John 18:36). Our fighting is spiritual, not physical.

Now that is not to say that we do not do all the purging in our own lives that we can. We get rid of idols every day, or at least we should.

We tear down all those Asherah poles, sacred stones, high places, altars that are throughout our own lives.

Then we can go home knowing that our lives are pure before God.

As much as we would like to tear other stuff down, we really cannot. We can teach against it, speak against it, show people how it is wrong. That is our right as Americans and Christians.

But physical violence is out of the question.

The best thing about it, of course, is that real Christians are not prone to physical violence. Of course, you have the rare extremists. But they are uncommon.

Again, the only place real diversity would ever occur would be in a Christian nation. After all, Christians don’t bomb schools or fly planes into buildings.

They teach of the love and grace of God.