Come Out From Among Them

A Call Away From Idols, Turned Into a Reason to Cut People Off

How It Gets Used

It comes up when somebody wants you to walk away from people. A friend who is not saved. A family member living wrong. A whole side of your life that somebody has decided is too worldly. And the verse arrives to seal the deal. Come out from among them and be separate. Touch no unclean thing. So you cut the cord, you stop calling, you start treating people you love like a contamination to flee from.

Whole families have been split by that verse. People have been talked into walking away from a mother, a brother, an old friend, because someone taught them that holiness means separation, and separation means distance, and distance means you are gone. Come out from among them, they were told, and they did, and a relationship died over it.

So we pick it up and do the thing this series keeps coming back to. We read the context. Not just the verse, but the verses around it, and the situation Paul was actually addressing. Because when you find out what he was telling them to come out from, the verse stops being a tool for cutting people off and turns into something much narrower, and much wiser.

And there is a real thing in here worth keeping, because the Bible does call us to be different from the world in important ways. This is not about pretending holiness does not matter. It is about what Paul actually meant by separate, and what he very much did not mean.

What the Text Actually Says

The line is in 2 Corinthians 6. Therefore, come out from them and be separate, says the Lord, touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you (2 Corinthians 6:17). Read it all by itself and it sounds like a command to pull away from people. Read the verses right around it and you find out what them and unclean thing are actually pointing at.

Just before it, Paul writes, do not be yoked together with unbelievers, and then he stacks up a row of questions. What does righteousness have in common with wickedness? What fellowship can light have with darkness? What does Christ have in common with Belial? And then the one that gives the whole thing away. What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols (2 Corinthians 6:14-16)? Idols.

Paul is writing to people in a city packed with pagan temples, where the social life and the business deals and even the dinners ran straight through idol worship. Come out from them is a call away from idolatry, away from binding your life to false gods and the practices wrapped around them. It is not a command to disown your unsaved cousin.

And we do not have to guess about that, because Paul already cleared it up in his earlier letter to the same church. In 1 Corinthians 5 he had told them not to associate with immoral people, and he could tell they took it too far, so he stops and explains himself. I did not at all mean the people of this world who are immoral, he says, in that case you would have to leave this world (1 Corinthians 5:9-10). Hear that. Paul flatly says he never meant pull away from everybody out there living wrong. You would have to leave the planet. He was talking about something specific inside the church, not a wall between believers and every lost person they know.

And lay it next to how Jesus actually lived, because that settles the spirit of it. The religious crowd of his day was scandalized that he ate with tax collectors and sinners, that he let the wrong kind of people get close to him. He answered that it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. Jesus did not come out from among sinners and hide. He went to them, sat at their tables, and loved them right where they were. A reading of come out from among them that has you fleeing the very people Jesus ran toward has lost the plot somewhere.

Paul is even more direct when it comes to family. In these same letters he tells a believer married to an unbeliever to stay, not to leave, because the believing spouse carries a holy influence into that home (1 Corinthians 7:12-14). The man who wrote come out from among them also wrote stay with your unbelieving husband or wife. He clearly did not see the verse as a hammer for breaking up homes. He saw it as a fence around idolatry, not a wall between you and the people you are supposed to love and reach.

So watch the misuse take its shape. A verse about not binding your life to false gods gets stretched into a command to cut off any person somebody has labeled worldly. The narrow thing, do not yoke yourself to idolatry, becomes the broad and brutal thing, abandon the people you love. And here is where it gets dangerous, because that broad reading is a favorite tool of controlling churches and controlling leaders. Get a person to cut off everyone on the outside, and you have a person with nowhere else to go and no one left to check what they are being told. Follow that one, and notice who benefits.

Hold the balance, though, because there is a true thing buried in here. The Bible does call you to a different kind of life, and there are relationships and settings that will pull you straight back into what is destroying you, and stepping back from those can be real wisdom. If a crowd is dragging you into the very things that are tearing you apart, distance can be an act of survival and faith. That is true. But that is a long way from being told to disown your family or flee every unbeliever you know. One is wisdom about influences. The other is a verse twisted into isolation. They are not the same thing.

So how do you keep from getting played by a verse like this? Read around it. Three or four verses on either side will almost always tell you what a word like them or separate is really pointing at, and here it points at idols, not relatives. And when a reading would have you cutting off everyone except the people telling you to cut them off, slow all the way down and follow the benefit. The Word called you out of idolatry. It never called you out of love.

What This Means for Where You Are

Paul said come out from idols. Someone turned it into come out from people. The first is wisdom. The second is a door that only locks from the outside.

If somebody used this verse to talk you into walking away from people you loved, that is a heavy thing to carry, and I am sorry. And many who taught it that way were not cruel. They were scared, scared of the world's pull, trying to protect you the only way they knew how, with a wall. The desire to keep you from harm was real. The reading was just far too big, a narrow warning about idols stretched into a blanket order to isolate.

And reading it right gives you back something the misuse took. People. The real verse never asked you to abandon your mother or flee your friends. It asked you not to bow your life down to false gods, which is a wise and loving thing to ask of anybody. Once you see that, the Bible stops looking like a reason to be alone and starts looking like what it is, the book of a God who chased after sinners and sat at their tables. Holiness was never isolation. It was love that stays close without bowing down. The Word did not build that wall. A hand did.

So the next time come out from among them gets aimed at a relationship, slow down and read the verses around it. Find out what them really points to. If it is idolatry, the pull of something that would own you, then yes, step back, and step back wisely. But if it is just people, people you love, people who are lost, people Jesus would have eaten dinner with, then the verse is not asking you to leave at all. It is the same Jesus, still moving toward them. Go read the whole passage and see who you are really being called away from.

Reflect & Respond

• Has this verse ever been used to push you away from someone you loved? What was the real situation, and what was the verse actually about?

  
  

• Paul said he did not mean to separate from everyone in the world living wrong, or you would have to leave the world. How does that change the verse for you?

  
  

• What is the difference between stepping back from an influence that is destroying you and cutting off a person you are called to love?

  
  

• When a teaching tells you to cut off everyone except the people doing the teaching, what does following the benefit reveal?

Sources

[1] David Guzik, Enduring Word Commentary on 2 Corinthians 6. https://enduringword.com/bible-commentary/2-corinthians-6/

[2] "What Does It Mean to Be Unequally Yoked?" GotQuestions.org. https://www.gotquestions.org/unequally-yoked.html

[3] David Guzik, Enduring Word Commentary on 1 Corinthians 5. https://enduringword.com/bible-commentary/1-corinthians-5/

[4] David Guzik, Enduring Word Commentary on 1 Corinthians 7. https://enduringword.com/bible-commentary/1-corinthians-7/

[5] Ralph P. Martin, 2 Corinthians, Word Biblical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014).

[6] The Holy Bible, NIV. 2 Corinthians 6:14-17; 1 Corinthians 5:9-10; 1 Corinthians 7:12-14; Mark 2:15-17. https://www.biblegateway.com

Do not stop trusting the Bible. Trust it enough to move the hand. Somebody is almost always reaching in. A translator. A custom you never learned. A person with something to gain. Sometimes the hand means well. Sometimes it does not. Either way, it is not the text.

Read the Word in the time and the people it was written to. Notice where a hand, and not God, changed what you read. Then pray for the meaning the Lord put there, not the one you were handed. That is faithful wrestling with the Word.

Leaning on the Rock • Wrestling with the Word