If you don’t think that God is concerned about the minutiae of your life. Think again. God is very much concerned with your details. Satan is too.
There are several instances in the Bible where God gave Israel victory in war, and gave them particular instructions for what they were to do after they’d won. It’s pretty consistent: scorch the earth. Destroy all that’s in the land that God gave them victory over. Leave nothing alive.
But why? One word: snares.
Also you shall destroy all the peoples whom the Lord your God delivers over to you; your eye shall have no pity on them; nor shall you serve their gods, for that will be a snare to you
The Collins Dictionary describes a snare as a trap from which it is difficult to escape. God was warning His children that the thing they considered small, insignificant, trivial, inconsequential, unimportant, that thing. It mattered. That little gold bracelet they took in the raid, the goat along the road, the phone number that you still haven’t deleted from your phone…all of these “harmless” things may seem harmless, but what you choose to hold on to from the battlefield can entrap you.
You shall utterly destroy all the places where the nations which you shall dispossess served their gods, on the high mountains and on the hills and under every green tree. And you shall destroy their altars, break their sacred pillars, and burn their wooden images with fire; you shall cut down the carved images of their gods and destroy their names from that place.
We serve a God who is omniscient, an all-knowing God who can look ahead and see what has the power to ruin you, cripple you, or impede your progress. He knows what you can handle and so He says… save yourself the tears that you’ll cry five years from now and close this door today.
but you shall utterly destroy them: the Hittite and the Amorite and the Canaanite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite, just as the Lord your God has commanded you, lest they teach you to do according to all their abominations which they have done for their gods, and you sin against the Lord your God.
Addictions don’t start off as an incessant need for a particular thing. They start off as seeds. Someone offers you a smoke…invites you to a casino…offers you an extra scratch card…a free trial to an illicit streaming video site. Small things. But even satan knows that there is power in the small things. He knows that it’s difficult to take down a Moses but a little newborn baby? Oh that’s easy.
In Exodus 1:22 we find the story of Pharaoh on a warpath to destroy all male Hebrew children. On the surface the Egyptians had seen that the children of Israel were a small but mighty group and feared the day when Israel would be a large group and even mightier. Mighty enough to overthrow them in their own land and drive them out.
Below the surface, there was something else stirring. Something spiritual. A little babe named Moses was going to make his entrance into the world. And this babe would grow up in Pharoah’s own house and in fact, overthrow it, and tear it down. From his diviners he learned that this baby would be Hebrew and that it would be male.
So Pharaoh commanded all his people, saying, “Every son who is born you shall cast into the river, and every daughter you shall save alive.”
Killing tiny, defenseless babies is part of satan’s playbook. Just look at the story of Herod when the three wisemen visited him and said we’ve seen a star in the east. Herod started triangulating where he could find this babe.
Then Herod, when he saw that he was deceived by the wise men, was exceedingly angry; and he sent forth and put to death all the male children who were in Bethlehem and in all its districts, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had determined from the wise men.
Satan was and always is concerned with the details. The minutiae. So much so that he would kill newborns. Tiny seeds that can grow up to become too mighty to control. And get this, it took Moses and Jesus 30-ish years to fully step into ministry and fulfill the assignment that God had for them. Did satan wait for them to get to 15, or 25 in order to destroy them? Nope. He targets them at the seed stage. Ruthlessly.
So ponder this: if God is concerned about the seed stage, and if satan is concerned about the seed stage, why aren’t you?
God’s wish is that you would succeed on this side of heaven! And His strategy has always been to keep you as far as possible from sin. And if you do sin, clean yourself up through repentance. And to get rid of things that have the power to ensnare you and lead you back into sin. That’s it.
Reflection
What have you allowed to grow in your life that you know God wants you to get rid of? What seed have you allowed to be watered in your life that has ensnared you? Uproot it today. Without delay. And mark this day on a calendar and see if you don’t start to see a particular thing shift in your life for the better.
