15 Lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they go a whoring after their gods, and do sacrifice unto their gods, and one call thee, and thou eat of his sacrifice;

16 And thou take of their daughters unto thy sons, and their daughters go a whoring after their gods, and make thy sons go a whoring after their gods.

17 Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.

What God says here about the tendency to make a covenant with idolatry has been an eternal challenge of God’s people. When Paul wrote to the church in Corinth thousands of years later, he still had to continually remind the people to not mix their faith with false gods. For convenience or politeness, the people would partake of the culture around them, even when doing so violated their exclusive commitment to the Lord.

Howbeit there is not in every man that knowledge: for some with conscience of the idol unto this hour eat it as a thing offered unto an idol; and their conscience being weak is defiled (1 Corinthians 8:7).

We must not make the mistake of dismissing these verses decrying idolatry as irrelevant to us today because we do not carve our false gods out of wood anymore. There are still many false gods and vain obsessions all around us, and many the disciple is deceived to think that they can both be a Christian and partake in the world’s folly. We commit idolatry when we show fealty to the prevailing societal trends, even though they contradict God’s laws. Many that would follow the Lord stumble to the ideals of sexual and identity perversion.

God is also very right to identify the trojan horse of family members and spouses that we become devoted to, who then seduce us into unworthy concessions. I know many the brother and sister who watched the world celebrating that which God has called sin, and they stood boldly against the perversion, but then their spouse convinced them of the need to be “tolerant” of the evil, and by-and-by they lost their way.