I had the amazing opportunity to read Scripture at the America Reads the Bible national event in April, which was broadcast from the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC.

This was a distinct honor, as I consider it a blessing to have had the privilege of reading God’s Word publicly, especially to such a large audience on a national stage for America’s 250^th anniversary.

As one of the readers, naturally I had been assigned a passage of the Bible to read out loud, and my excerpt was from the Old Testament book of Numbers chapters 33-34.

Hearing that my passage would be from the book of Numbers gave me pause, but I really had to take a deep breath when I learned it was the 33^rd and 34^th chapters.

Why? You can see for yourself. If you look them up, you’ll find that these two passages may be the most notoriously difficult chapters of the Bible to read in silence, let alone out loud.

They are filled with long, boring lists of foreign places and people, most of which are obscure and obsolete in history, with names that are not only unfamiliar but downright alien.

One can easily make a fool of himself trying to read and pronounce these ancient Hebrew words, and I was honestly hoping to avoid doing that in public.

Nonetheless, I was committed to fulfilling my responsibility and prepared accordingly, even if it resulted in my own public embarrassment and humiliation!

And yet, to my surprise, even in such an obscure passage, I unwittingly found some profound insight—something timely and relevant, even if it was buried deep within the pages of a tedious Old Testament chronicle.

What I encountered between the laundry list descriptions of their encampments and adventures was an explanation to God’s people as to WHY they must drive out the inhabitants when they arrive in the Promised Land.

The reason? If they don’t drive out the Canaanites in the land, then those remaining enemies will continually make trouble for the Israelites. In fact, they will be like “barbs in their eyes” and “thorns in their sides.”

These metaphors are meant to capture us as it did the original readers—to grab our attention and tug our emotion. After all, nobody wants painful spikes in their eyes and spears in their sides. They are instruments of torture designed to punish and torment.

So, here we have God’s instruction to Israel about WHY God intended for them to clear Canaan of troublemakers—to ensure His people could not only survive but also thrive within the Promised Land without the looming threat of violence within the camp.

And here we also have God’s wisdom to us about WHY as a nation we, as well, here in America must not naïvely tolerate hosting our enemies and entertaining their hostilities in our own country today.

As welcoming a country as we are, we must also be vigilant about those we let in and those we permit to stay. Indeed, our enemies are foreign, but they are also domestic, and turning a blind eye to latent terrorism here at home is foolish.

America, and Tennessee in particular, is our own Promised Land, and we too cannot allow the enemies of God and the plunderers of His people to bring their barbs and their thorns into our home to blind our eyes and to spear our sides right where we live.

Friends, a prescient warning for Israel is also a timely warning for us—violent extremism and domestic terrorism is a real threat to our people and to our way of life here in America, and we would be wise to heed it by also driving these enemies out of our land.