From the beginning of the Scriptures, God commanded His people to separate themselves from the other people of the world.  They were to look different, act different, hold different opinions and to behave differently.  They were to treat people differently, they were to have a different diet, they were to not intermarry with the others in their area.  The Jews are still being persecuted for the ways that they live that are different from others.  Their command was to “be holy, for the Lord your God is holy.”  Those differences from other peoples were interpreted by the Gentiles that the Jews thought themselves better than others.  And frankly, many of them may have thought that.  But the scriptures make it clear that the Jewish people were no better than anyone else.  They sinned with as much vigor as anyone else.  They betrayed their own standards just like everyone else.  They abandoned God repeatedly and what history records is that they gave God the opportunity to prove to the world that His love does not depend on us, but rather He loves us in spite of ourselves.

But to the question.  What is wrong with something being acceptable to the world?  The Church has taught for centuries that there are three sources of evil in this world; The world, the flesh and the devil.  Let me define those.  The devil is the very personification of evil.  He is the person who stands in direct opposition to the Kingdom of God to tempt God’s people and to deceive them into calling things that are bad as good and to call things that are good as bad.  The flesh is the internal impulses of all humans that draw us away from the proper use of the gifts of God and toward the selfish and destructive distortion of God’s creation.  The world is the influence that is outside of ourselves that tries to convince us to follow another way other than God’s way.  So the devil is a person of evil, the flesh is the evil part of each of us, and the world is our society which leads us to evil.

But does that mean that the devil always leads us to evil?  And does it mean that the impulses of the flesh are always wrong?  And does that mean that everything that the world teaches us is just plain wrong?  The short answer is yes, but that requires more explanation.  The devil is a subtle and devious tempter.  He will try to convince us that he really doesn’t mean us any harm.  He will present his twisted ideas to us in a way that makes it easy for us to question what is wrong and what is right.  We all know that.  And I think that all mature Christian people would be able to see through his deceptions and reject his temptations.  The devil is a real danger to the young, the immature, and the naïve.  The biggest problem here is that so many of us believe that the devil doesn’t even exist that many of us have become immature and naïve even though we have substantial years under our belts.

Modern society has rendered the temptations of the flesh to be the most dangerous to our souls.  We all have been taught to trust our feelings above all else.  We have been overwhelmed with the notion that feelings are more important than reality.  In fact, for many people, feelings ARE reality.  And that is a deadly idea.  Human beings were given emotions to give us power and conviction, on the condition that our emotions would be subject to God through our wills and our reason.  Undirected emotions are like having a cannon rolling around loose on a ship.  It is more likely to blow a hole in its own hull than to do any damage to an enemy.

So, at last, we come to the world.  It sounds harsh to say that the world is always evil.  But the truth is that even the apparent good that the world does is infused with the venom of evil.  Human beings have created various systems of organization throughout history.  When God gave Israel the Ten Commandments and then sent them into the Promised Land He sent them among various peoples whose religions and social structures were entirely contrary to His design for creation.  Ever since the Fall human societies have organized themselves in ungodly ways.  God called for His people to live differently than that.  That is one of the reasons that God called upon Israel to be different.  They were to be Holy because the Lord their God was holy.  This was part of the grand scheme to return us to life in relationship to Him after the disaster of the Fall which cast us out of Eden.

If you are caught in a position where you must choose whether to follow God or whether to follow the crowd, rest assured that your wise choice is, as the saying goes “beware of that which isacceptable to the world.”