9 “When you come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations.10 There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer 11 or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead, 12 for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord. And because of these abominations the Lord your God is driving them out before you. 13 You shall be blameless before the Lord your God, 14 for these nations, which you are about to dispossess, listen to fortune-tellers and to diviners. But as for you, the Lord your God has not allowed you to do this. (Deuteronomy 18)
As God gave final instructions to the People of Israel as they prepared to enter the promised land, He constantly reminded them that this is not the end of the story. They were not to plop themselves down into a cesspool of sin and become comfortable with it. They were to live differently. The sense of an "abomination" - something so horrendous and disgusting that you cannot coexist with it, was to be a real measure of behavior. Allowing ourselves to be lulled into accepting them as acceptable behavior before God only lends to our falling into the same things that has doomed people before us. Same old sin. Same old story. Sad, but true. May we examine ourselves for any ways we have "settled" for less than God's holiness in our own lives.
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