Deuteronomy 23:9 – 14 “When you are encamped against your enemies, then you shall keep yourself from every wicked thing. If any man among you becomes unclean because of a nocturnal emission, he must leave the camp and stay outside. When evening approaches, he must wash with water, and when the sun sets, he may return to the camp.
You must have a place outside the camp to go and relieve yourself. And you must have a digging tool in your equipment so that when you relieve yourself you can dig a hole and cover up your excrement.
For the LORD your God walks throughout your camp to protect you and deliver your enemies to you. Your camp must be holy, lest He see anything unclean among you and turn away from you.“
The Israelites were about to enter a land filled with idols and the demons receiving worship from idolaters. The worship rituals for these pagan religions involved every form of sexual vice imaginable. The Israelites were literally called to wage holy war. For the Israelites to be able to conquer their enemies, they had to avoid anything that remotely resembled those vices. Ritually, any man who had a nocturnal emission of semen was considered unclean; hence, the command to continue to practice the standard cleansing procedures even during wartime. Part of the idea behind this might also have been to enforce the need to maintain all the practices leading to holiness. Sometimes in stressful situations such as war, people feel that they should be able to do anything they choose since they might die at any time. Here God was warning the Israelites that they couldn’t take shortcuts or make excuses, no matter the provocation. God knew human nature and he knew that overlooking one ritual meant to ensure holiness would lead to a domino effect.
What about the injunction against defecating inside the camp? Here the idea was maintenance of good sanitation. How could anybody consider a place holy if it was stinking of feces? Far more was at stake here than merely the maintenance of good sanitation.
“For the LORD your God walks throughout your camp to protect you and deliver your enemies to you. Your camp must be holy, lest He see anything unclean among you and turn away from you.” God wanted the Israelites to remember that He was with them at all times and that He saw everything that they were doing and thinking. God wanted the Israelites to be aware of His presence with them at all times as well.
APPLICATION: The sign read “Open Defecation Free Community;” however, someone forgot to inform the children and the mothers of toddlers. As we visited a community in northern Ghana, we saw the sign at the edge of town, but then we saw mothers sending their children “to bush” to defecate, despite the fact that there were KVIP toilets in several locations. Part of this practice was for the sake of convenience, but part of it was because the mothers actually believed that their children’s feces were sterile and harmless!
When we first came to the town of Saboba in January 1993, typhoid was unknown. For the first three and a half years we worked in Saboba, I never saw a patient with typhoid. We left Saboba in 1996 so that I could earn my Master’s Degree in Public Health. When we returned to Ghana in 1998, we worked in another community before returning to Saboba in early 2004. As soon as we reached Saboba, I was horrified to realize that the typhoid situation had changed drastically. The first year I was back in Saboba, there were times when I was operating six patients with intestinal perforations a week, plus treating a host of other patients who had lesser forms of the illness.
What changed between June 1996 and February 2004? During the dry season, many young people began migrating to cities in the south to do manual labor; the places where these urban migrants lived were the most polluted parts of those cities. As soon as these migrants contracted typhoid, they would return to their home areas where they would defecate freely. With soap and water at a premium, many people in the rural areas were only rinsing their hands with water, failing to realize that this practice was totally ineffective. This problem has persisted. As I write this devotional, we have two young men in our male ward recovering from being operated for holes in their intestines due to typhoid. At the same time, we have many children who require typhoid treatment before they can return home. Despite the fact that we have squat toilets that should be acceptable to villagers, as well as outdoor toilets, many of our people continue to sneak out to “go to bush,” even at the hospital!
Our situation with plastic/rubber bags is no better. Twenty – five years ago, many people sold things wrapped in cement papers or in teak leaves. Paper can be burned and goats will eat teak leaves. Then polythene rubber bags came along, including sachet water bags. Now we have piles of rubber bags everywhere, creating messes and encouraging people to dump rubbish freely.
While we might shake our heads at the situations I have just described, we must ask ourselves this question: Am I practicing anything in my life that does not promote holiness? We might be very careful about our external environment, but what about our spiritual environment? What videos or video games enthrall us? What websites do we visit regularly? What music forms the themes for our lives? Nothing happens in a vacuum, and the messages we hear repeatedly are those that will influence us the most. Yesterday I quoted Proverbs 4:23, but it is worth repeating. The NIV version reads “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”
If we fail to guard our hearts, we are as foolish as the mothers who send their children out to defecate indiscriminately while telling themselves that those feces must be sterile. God repeatedly warned the Israelites against the leaven of Egypt, using leaven as a symbol for the spiritual taint left by the Egyptian religions. We too must be careful to avoid the leaven of suggestive movies, violent video games, and pornographic web sites. May God help us to remember that He also moves in our camp, and that He wants us to be holy.
PRAYER: Father God, thank You for loving us and for caring for us. Help us to guard our hearts and to allow Your Holy Spirit light to shine in every dark corner so that there will be nothing hidden to grieve You. In the mighty and precious Name of King Jesus. Amen.
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