“I am going to cut off the righteous and the wicked.”

God is speaking about the land of Israel when He says this. What do you make of God saying He’ll cut off both the righteous and the wicked?

Ezekiel is in the exile. He’s in Babylon. This is a future cutting off he is referring to, but the point is, we know God does cut off the righteous with the wicked, at least at times.

We can all agree Daniel was a righteous man. He gets cut off from Israel and Jerusalem. He’s taken captive to Babylon. God certainly prospers him there, but there’s no easy time of it.

Why would the righteous be cut off? God sees the individual and the whole. Daniel’s story we’ll get to right after Ezekiel, but it’s a good example of the individual and the whole. Daniel is taken captive, but he is exalted to the highest level in the land. He suffers as part of the whole, but God rewards his righteousness as an individual.

But why do the righteous have to be cut off? I would say because they were living with the wicked. They hadn’t separated themselves. They hadn’t put an end to it.

Not that we can control the behavior of those around us, but you must be able to see in this day and age how we put up with the wicked around us.

The church has let the world’s influence creep in from accepting the changing culture in contradiction to the Bible to applying modern psychology instead of Biblical counsel.

If you watch the same things the world watches, play the same games the world plays, hold grudges, engage in gossip, tell an exaggerating lie, or any number of other things like those who don’t bear Christ’s name, then you are not separating yourself from the world. You are tolerating the wickedness around you.

This doesn’t mean join a commune and separate yourself from people. We love people. But we should be “other.” We should be different and set apart. We don’t imitate the world. We imitate Christ. Do you look more like your unsaved neighbors or like Jesus?