Mongrel Religion

So they feared the Lord, yet appointed from among themselves, whether high or low, priests of the high places, who sacrificed for them in the shrines of the high places. They feared the Lord, yet served their own gods, as did the nations from among whom they had been carried away.
2Ki 17:32-33 AMP (Amplified Bible)

This is very disturbing to me! Though I have read this portion of God's many times before, today it has a fresh impact on me.

From these verses I extract several things but one stands out very clear: It is possible to have the fear of the Lord yet serve other gods. By this I mean to say one can have just enough reverence for God that we pay some kind of tribute to Him but not enough fear to make Him the exclusive Lord of our lives.

My dear friend and mentor, C. K. Barnes, often referred to a principle he called "the law of the excluded middle." One can only serve one master at a time. There is no middle ground much as some of us would like there to be.

Jesus said, "You are either for me or against me."

These transplants from other lands were trying to honor God just enough so He would stop sending lions to attack them (see vs. 24, 25) but they wanted to maintain their worship of the other gods they had brought with them.

What they ended up with is what Matthew Henry called "a mongrel religion." A mongrol, according to Webster, is any animal that is of a mixed breed, but especially in reference to dogs. You don't really know what it's ancestry is. Quite often this leaves the animal confused about what it is because it has some of one kind of breed, some of another, and quite a mix of several breeds and it doesn't know what it really is.

My wife just reminded me of a time we were at an animal shelter and they had a dog that was half wolf, half German Shepherd. The German Shepherd side was domesticated but the wolf side carried the call of the wild and this poor beast was constantly in turmoil over which strain would be the dominate strain.

On this point we must understand that our accusers are right: "We are narrow minded. There is only one God and He alone is the one we serve and worship." If not, then all we have is a mutt! We will never truly know who were are unless we seperate from the pack and decide we are of one variety only.

I fear the church has allowed people to bring their gods with them. We so want to fill our pews and be able to report conversions to headquarters, we give people an injection of the fear of the Lord but it isn't strong enough to really cure their idolatry. How many preachers have I heard declare, "It's our responsibility to catch them but it's God's responsibility to clean them up."

The priest the King of Assyria sent to teach these heathens about Jehovah didn't do them any favors. He taught them about the festivals of Israel, about the sacrifices, and the god of the land but he didn't go far enough. Again quoting from Matthew Henry, they "worshipped the God of Israel for fear and their own idols for love." The priest never taught them to embrace the God of Israel as their god. They simply added him to the list along with the others.

Seperation is a part of our call to be one of God's children. He doesn't father mongrels. His children are of a pure strain, washed in the blood of Christ, and written in the registry of heaven. The Bible refers to us as "a royal priesthood, a holy nation (1 Peter 2:9)."

As I was thinking on all this I reread Peter's instruction to the saints:

So brace up your minds; be sober (circumspect, morally alert); set your hope wholly and unchangeably on the grace (divine favor) that is coming to you when Jesus Christ (the Messiah) is revealed. [Live] as children of obedience [to God]; do not conform yourselves to the evil desires [that governed you] in your former ignorance [when you did not know the requirements of the Gospel]. But as the One Who called you is holy, you yourselves also be holy in all your conduct and manner of living.
1Pe 1:13-15 AMP (Amplified Bible)

By the Holy Spirit God has sought to make us a pure spiritual race. Let us not defile ourselves and give the world mutt religion; a mix of fear and idolatry.