REDUCING YOUR ENEMIES

There are times when something that has loomed large and intimidating in your life suddenly gets reduced to manageable size. Israel was facing some giants that terrified them the first time they saw them and they backed down from following God's orders to take the land. Forty years later, the next generation was faced with the same enemies. God told them He was sending an angel before them.  About this angel God said, “If you will truly obey his voice and do all that I say, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries.  For My Angel will go before you and bring you in to the land of the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hivites and the Jebusites.  And I will completely destroy them.  You shall not worship their gods, nor serve them, nor do according to their deeds: but you shall utterly overthrow them, and break their sacred pillars in pieces” (Exodus 23: 21-24). 

From our perspective as believers, His words about obeying the angel give every indication that this Angel was really Yeshua - a fact that remains in our favor if we are going to take God's words to Israel as directions that we should do likewise and get the scarey critters out of our territory. 

If you do some digging in the Strong’s Concordance and look up these nation's titles in Hebrew as I did below, you can see that these names were types and shadows of what God would want us to get out of our own lives, just as He wanted them out of the land He had give to Israel. God hates mixtures and surely He didn’t want evil pagan practices in the land which He set apart for Israel.  He didn’t tell Israel to clear the land just to provide a home for them, but because the Canaanites et al kept evil and detestable religious practices include sacrificing live children to their gods, and many other horrific things. 

Our enemies may or may not be sacricing their own children (say, by placing them in harms way as human shields), but I'm not talking here about Israel and her enemies, I'm talking about our own personal enemies.  They need to go because they are His enemies as well as our own enemies if we have allowed any enemies to dwell in our personal land, which is to say, in our minds and hearts.  It may be, as you read through these names below that you are so accustomed to having these issues in your life that you hadn’t realized until now that these are not personality defects, they are unclean enemies of your soul and they can be done away with by God’s power and grace. We can renounce them in Yeshua’s name as we make a firm decision (read, repent!) to not allow them to continue to remain in our lives as we fully trust in the Lord and His grace to help us be free of them. 

It may require that we make some significant changes in our lives, but these are choices with great benefits - well worth whatever the costs. It’s a choice we each must make if we want to move out of sharing our lives with limitations. Names of people, places and some things, in the Hebrew in the Bible most often have names that reflect their character.   Here are the meanings and some of the linguistic roots behind the names of the people God commanded Israel to destroy, according to Strong’s Concordance: 

Amorites:   Root: Say, report, speak, publish to boast of self, say in the sense of (self) publicity. (Sounds pretty much like pride, doesn't it?)

Hittites:  Terror. Root: To prostrate, hence to break down by violence, confusion or fear; to scare, terrify or discourage. Cause to dismay (Dismay means paralyzed by real or imagined fear.) 

Perizzites:  Root: An unwalled village, open country.  (It would seem to imply anything goes, no righteous boundaries. Also, being unprotected, vulnerable to enemy attack.) 

Canaanites: Root:  Humiliated (Canaan was a son of Ham); to bend the knee in state of humiliation. 

Jebusites:  Trodden, threshing place. Root: To trample (fig or lit), to loathe, tread down underfoot, or to be polluted.  (I've also heard thatJebusites means restless though I didn't find it in Strongs. This would be interesting since they were the former inhabitants of Salem [Jerusalem] which means peace.) 

Hivites, on the other hand,means: living space, encampment or village; to live, to declare or show.  (This doesn’t seem negative because these were the people who, though they lied to Israel, they did so in order to “declare” friendship with them and to make a covenant with them so they were not among Israel’s enemies.  Rather they dwelt within their ‘living space’ and “showed” their loyalty but serving as Israel’s water carriers and wood cutters.) 

God promised Israel, just as He promises us in the same way, that if we will not serve these negative and ungodly ways, nor do according to their dictates, but let the good of God’s ways utterly overpower these thoughts and behaviors, then God will give us the power to get them out of our lives. 

We cannot produce a vacuum by eliminating them from our lives; we must replace them with the word of God just as Israel was to move into and occupy the quarters left by those whom they ran out of the land. We must fill the place where the enemies of our wellbeing dwelt with God's word and the fruit of the Spirit. Where Israel compromised and allowed them to remain, we can track time and again how the same kind of trouble occurred over and over, just as we sometimes find ourselves going round and round over the same issues.   

I'm writing this on New Year's Day 2014 - a good time to sanctify the year and make a few resolutions to better your life. Make the commitment to take each of these to God and ask for His help. Confess where you have been an accomplice to your own detriment by allowing these behaviors to remain in your life. God will do all He can – which is everything you need – if you will be determined that this is the year that you will clear your land of the ‘ites” that don’t belong so that God can have all of you and all that God has for you has free reign in your life.