Unholy Links Arrest Spiritual Growth

Whom the devil could not curse, he tricked.   

To frustrate the realization of God's purpose for His people, sinners are put in the way and these sinners are in the nature of links and associations with unholy things. 

Spiritual advance is always arrested by an association, a contact, a link with an unholy thing. 

The apostle, writing to the Corinthians who had been arrested in their spiritual growth, said: "Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers... for what fellowship has light with darkness; and what concord has Christ with Belial?" 

It was those unholy links that arrested the Corinthians and their spiritual growth. 

And these daughters of Moab represent unholy things with which Israel became associated; and all with a view to arresting their progress. 

We must always be very watchful and very careful about a link with an unholy thing, for that is one of the things that the enemy is constantly trying to bring about.

It is the spiritual people whom he is out to ensnare in this way, and it is a remarkable thing that very often the people who are spiritual are tripped up in this way.

When you come into this kind of a relationship with the Lord, you come also into relationship with other spiritual things and they are out to trip up, to ensnare, to get a contact with something unholy in order to cut right in and break spiritual progress.

So the daughters of Moab were the subterfuge used by the enemy when an open curse had been rendered impossible.

If the enemy cannot work openly to bring us immediately under judgement, he works secretly to get some kind of relationship with unholy things.

Let us remember that this is in the path to God's end. These are the things that we meet on the way, and it is the true children of God who meet these things.

The way of the Lord's highest purpose is the way most beset by perils and it is the way in which most watchfulness is necessary. 

When you get to an Ephesian position (chapter 6) of conflict in the heavenlies, the final word is: "praying at all seasons in the Spirit, and watching thereunto..."

~T. Austin Sparks~