Peer pressure has long been a source of worry for many parents. They worry about their kids being influenced by the wrong elements in their social group — the bad kids — and led on into doing dangerous or unhealthy things.
Have you ever stopped to think about how easy it is for you to be influenced in similar ways? You don’t want to be a stick-in-the-mud after all, and everybody who’s anybody thinks that other way, so you go along to get along. It might be politics (and what isn’t politics these days!). It might be social issues. Shucks, it could even be matters of Christian faith and your church involvement — better not highlight those aspects of your life among some of your acquaintances or they might look down on you! You want to fit in, after all.
The question then becomes, are we really who we profess to be?
Moses was afraid that once God’s people settled down in the land God was giving them, that they might succumb to the adult version of peer pressure — adapting, even adopting the ways of those others who still lived there, going along to get along, soft-pedaling that whole “God-thing” in order to fit in. Sound familiar? We’d do well to listen carefully to these warnings from Moses.
