No servant can serve two masters; for he will either hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. (Luke 16:13)
None except Caleb and Joshua...for they have wholly followed Yahweh. (Number 32:11)
But whenever the judge died, they turned back and behaved worse than their fathers, going after other gods, serving them, and bowing down to them; they did not drop any of their practices or their stubborn ways. (Judges 2:19)
Of the half-tribe of Manasseh... who were expressly named to come and make David king...to help David with singleness of purpose. (1 Chron. 12:31-33)
It takes no great exercise of the imagination to project what it would be like to live astride a picket fence...! Certainly painful and impossible to move without feeling the prick of the pickets in a most tender place. The obvious solution: move to one side of the fence or the other. But as our legs shrink or shorten---perhaps the fence is growing higher and higher as well?---"the move" becomes more difficult and painful. But of course, there are always those who work hard at maintaining their delusion of being "able to straddle the fence" and live in two kingdoms simultaneously: their "kingdom" Monday to Friday, God's "kingdom" on the sabbath... your "kingdom" in the world most times, and "Israel" in the leftover times: The Borderlands!!
At the border crossings between Israel and Palestinian/Jordanian/Syrian... areas, there is, more or less, "a no man's land or zone", a strip of land in which you are neither in Israel nor Jordan. A person can't live there at all, and likely if they dawdle or delay in crossing that "Borderland" they will be shot at from one side or the other. You have to be in one or the other of the "kingdoms". You not allowed to have one foot in Israel and one foot in Jordan.
The solution: Purify your hearts, ye double-minded men! (James 4:8) Other translations render the verse: "wavering individuals with divided interests".
And make your yes simply "yes", and your no a decisive "no".
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