At the onset of World War II, many countries became one. Their concessions of freedom weren’t voluntary.
In 1938 a portion of Czechoslovakia was annexed into Germany. In 1939, Hitler seized the rest. That same year, more confident, Hitler made a grab for Poland and took it for his own.
At first it seemed Hitler would rule much of the world. At the height of his power, one hand reached toward the British Isles and the other squeezed Russia’s throat.
Truth caught up with Hitler, though. Conquest by force is infused with corruption, and it can never become a true marriage between people, races, or countries. It just doesn’t work.
We see this principle in the Bible. Deuteronomy 22:28-29 tells us that if a man makes a grab for a woman and takes her before marriage, the relationship is corrupted. He has violated her and must marry her, paying a substantial bride price.
It becomes a forced marriage, and who wants to be a part of that?
Genesis 34:1-31 tells the story of Jacob’s daughter, Dinah. Shechem, a prince of the land, loved Dinah and took her without the sanctity of marriage. Afterward he begged for her hand in marriage.
It seemed that true love had blossomed. Even so, the union was corrupted, and all the males in the city—including Shechem—were killed by Dinah’s brothers.
The story of Absalom and Tamar in 2 Samuel 13:1-39 is the classic biblical example of a corrupted conquest gone as wrong as it possibly can. Absalom and Tamar were siblings, and Tamar was very beautiful. Another sibling, Amnon, took his sister through guile and lies. The eventual outcome? Absalom killed his brother and afterward spent years on the run. The corruption of Amnon’s deed planted a seed of contention in Absalom against his father, David the king, and in a grab for the kingship, he was killed by Joab, David’s top man.
The corrupted conquest didn’t stop there, though. Years later, in 1 Kings 2, on David’s deathbed, the king instructed Solomon, the upcoming king, to deal with Joab in the harshest way possible. Joab was David’s most trusted warrior, a supporter of the king for all his days, but corruption had taken its toll, for that is what corruption does.
Hitler’s Third Reich was to last a thousand years. It barely made it through the first ten before the corrupted leader of the German people died by suicide, with his body burned beyond recognition in the final rubble of the worldly palace he’d tried to build.
If our conquests are not sanctified by God, they will not stand; rather, they will come tumbling down, no more than piles of rubble crumpled beneath clouds of rising dust soon carried away by the wind.
When we step out without God’s approval, we step into a minefield of unimaginable proportions.
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