Joshua 23:12-13 "For if you turn back, and join the remnant of these nations left here among you, and make marriages with them, so that you marry their women and they yours, know assuredly that the Lord your God will not continue to drive these nations before you; but they shall be a snare and a trap for you, a scourge on your sides, and thorns in your eyes, till you perish from off this good land which the Lord your God has given you."

God is warning the Israelites not to get too close to the people left behind from the defeated nations of what is now the Promised Land. These people have no knowledge of God, they are pagan. They pose a unique threat to the Jews, who are still in the early learning stages of getting to know God. To intermarry or otherwise become tied to these people would lead the Jews to adopt their ways and eventually turn from the true God who has led them to the Promised Land. God knows this, which is why He says if they are not avoided, this pagan remnant will be a trap for the Jews.

We can apply this advice from God to our own time, too. Although he has been defeated ultimately by Christ's death, for now Satan is very much at work in this world. He and his minions remain here as a remnant of evil. In these verses, we can hear God telling us to stay away from this remnant and anyone under their control.

The devil's influence is everywhere, and is pretty easy to see if we look with clear eyes and a discerning heart. Unlike the Jews in Joshua's time, we have all of Scripture and Biblical history; we have the Son of God's life, death, Resurrection, and teachings; and we have 2,000 years of His Church's leadership. We have everything we need to know God as well as we possibly can, and to know and understand His laws. We can, therefore, see when the devil is leading humanity astray. Any proclaimed "good" that we know to be against God's law is, in fact, evil. The devil loves to take what God has proclaimed as good and twist it into something wicked, while getting us to accept it. For example, marriage is a very good thing, the way God defines it, but here God is warning against marriage, and He warns us in the same way. To be good, a thing must be what God says it is, not what we convince ourselves it includes or can be.

Unfortunately, many Christians seem to have become too close to the enemy through, it seems to me, an overemphasis on empathy at the cost of Truth. Many are now being led astray, falling into this trap of the remnant. This is exactly what God warned the Jews about in this reading. We are, of course, to love all, but there are people and influences we must avoid, especially in this time of great confusion and wickedness, lest we fall into a trap.

Since Jesus' death on the Cross, God, through His angels and saints, has been engaged in the process of driving out the remnant of evil here among us. This is the ongoing spiritual battle. If we turn from God and get too comfortable with the remnant, which many have done, He will eventually turn from us. He will let us have the world of evil that the devil wants to trap us in, and we will perish from "the good land" God has intended for us.