The Biblical Doctrine of Separation

I have started a new book project which I hope I will be able to complete about the Biblical Doctrine of Separation. It has been very clear today that this is no longer taught, this is not something the common Christian care about. With sadness I must state this fact.

This is a non-finished preface to the book which I just started to write. 

When in church as a young man separation was not a big thing. That you should not date and marry an unbeliever was more like a suggestion than a commandment. Of course, we should not frequent places like discos, bars and night clubs, and still was the church very much a place outside of the world, safe and without worldly distractions. But if you took away these things you were free to live and experience the world outside as you wanted. Sanctification was taught, even if the concept of it were a very abstract thing, at least in my life. And since I was brought up in the Pentecostal movement were most of what God prescribed his children something legalistic to pursue, because you now lived through the spirit and was completely free. What it meant to be led by the Spirit of God was more unclear, only one thing was clear: “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Cor. 3:6), this was the most cited Scripture in the Pentecostal movement. You could throw that in the face on anyone, and he was at once completely silenced. They were so afraid that the spirit would be quenched that they much rather endured the sins of a spiritual misunderstanding than clear and biblical rules. And they had no love for confessions because that would also quench the spirit-led Pentecostal member. They preferred the spiritual freedom of the inner small voice or inner dialogue than God’s very clear Word. Only the spirit-led Pentecostal could anyway interpret and understand Scripture, because it was only the one baptized by the Spirit who truly was a Christian anyway. Therefore could my parents teach us that all the other so-called Christians in our little town in fact were not true Christians at all since they not were Pentecostals. They very much looked down on these as horrible sinners. We were to separate ourselves from them. They were worse than the world. My upbringing was very strict but not as a call to distinction or separation or as rules taught by Scripture but because of my parents moral understanding and how they themselves had been brought up. Or course was it forbidden to lie, and to steal, and so on but not as God’s perfect law and commandment but as moral understanding of how the society must function.

Today on the other hand nothing is forbidden in many churches, and no separation at all are commanded. The world has come into the church fully. There exists no separation between the world and the church.

So why am I talking about rules and separation? All of it belong together, holiness and separation are very clearly two things that cannot be separated. We know that holiness has to do with separation. The Old Testament are filled with rules that separates thing, and it was the priests that should teach the people the difference between holiness and the common, between the clean and unclean. But not only do God’s perfect law and separation belong together, but also God’s holiness and separation. Separation is something so clear taught in Scripture it is hard to understand how the church has allowed and welcomed the world and its ideas into its midst. They say that we are put into the world but shall not be of the world, and that is exactly what they have don, it has been of the world. So few today takes the warnings from Scripture with any seriousness. Even Solomon was caused to sin because he did not heed God’s commandment. We should take warning.

We seem to forget that idolatry can be many things, one side of idolatry is wrong worship, another exchanging the worship of the true God for another idol which can be a true idol like the Israelites did, or philosophies, or ideas, or political views. There are countless examples of idolatry in Scripture, in our lives, in our surroundings.