God's Line of Separation

Text: 2 Corinthians 6:17

Series: Restoration Sermons

Date:

Speaker: Ed Rangel

Location: Waupaca Church of Christ

Bible Version: NASB 1995

Sermon Type: Expository

Learning Objectives

By the close of this lesson the hearer should be able to:

1. Explain why separation is not a harsh or sectarian concept but a consistent pattern woven through all of Scripture from Eden to the final judgment.
2. Identify six biblical examples of God's principle of separation — Adam and Eve, Cain, Noah, Abraham, Israel from Egypt, Israel in Canaan — and state what each illustrates.
3. Articulate what it means for a Christian to be a "new creature in Christ" (2 Cor. 5:17) and an "elect race" (1 Pet. 2:9) in terms of practical separation from the world.
4. Apply the call of 2 Corinthians 6:17 — "come out from their midst and be separate" — to the question of denominationalism: what God requires of those who are Christians but remain in human religious bodies.
5. Explain the final separation at the judgment and why present choices have ultimate consequences.

Thesis

God has always drawn a line between his people and the world — and that line is not man's to erase, soften, or ignore. The call to come out and be separate is not an old covenant peculiarity; it is a permanent feature of the God who is holy.

Burden

The introduction is exactly right: this is an old message for a new age. Every generation inherits the same pressure to blur the line between the people of God and the culture that surrounds them. Every generation produces reasons why the boundary should be moved — tolerance, relevance, inclusion, progress. And every generation that moves the boundary discovers what Israel discovered: you cannot live right on the wrong side of the line. The call of 2 Corinthians 6:17 is not a relic; it is a command addressed to a church in a cosmopolitan city that faced exactly the same pressures the contemporary church faces.

Introduction

"Therefore, come out from their midst and be separate, says the Lord" (2 Cor. 6:17). Paul is quoting Isaiah 52:11, which was originally addressed to the priests carrying the sacred vessels out of Babylon. He applies it to Christians in Corinth who were being asked to live in partnership with the unbelieving world (2 Cor. 6:14-16). The command is not new — it is the same word God has spoken at every point in redemptive history when his people were in danger of assimilation.

Nothing is new in this; the outline says so at the start. The principle of separation is woven through every act of God toward his people from the beginning. What changes is the audience and the occasion. The principle does not change.

I. The Importance of God's Line of Separation

The importance of the line of separation is established by its source: God teaches it. This is not a principle that church leaders devised for organizational convenience. It is a divine requirement that runs from Genesis to Revelation. When God teaches a thing, the appropriate response is to learn it.

We need to discriminate — to distinguish — between good and evil, right and wrong, God's way and man's way, truth and error. The capacity to make these distinctions is not optional for those who claim to follow the one who said "I am the truth" (John 14:6). A community that cannot distinguish between God's order and human imitation of it has lost its essential function. Salt that has lost its saltiness is worthless (Matt. 5:13).

God has always insisted on a line of demarcation between his people and the world. The constancy of this insistence across the entire sweep of Scripture is itself an argument against dismissing it as cultural. It was not culture in the wilderness; it is not culture in Corinth; it is not culture now. It is the requirement of the one who is holy: "You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy" (Lev. 19:2).

Man has always had the privilege of choosing on which side of the line he stands (Deut. 30:15-19). "I have set before you today life and good, and death and evil… So choose life in order that you may live." The line is real; the choice is real; the consequences are real. The mercy in this is that the offer is made before the judgment, not at it.

You cannot live right on the wrong side of the line. This is the summary statement and it is empirically verifiable. A life organized around the values of the world — its definitions of success, its moral framework, its relationship to truth — cannot simultaneously be organized around the kingdom of God. "No one can serve two masters" (Matt. 6:24).

II. Examples of God's Principles of Separation

The biblical examples run from the earliest pages to the latest, and the pattern is consistent: when God acts in redemption, separation is part of the structure.

Adam and Eve. The first moral requirement God laid on human beings was a boundary — the forbidden fruit. The line between what was permitted and what was prohibited was God's to draw, not man's to redraw. When the boundary was crossed, exile followed. The separation from Eden was not arbitrary punishment; it was the consequence of choosing to live on the wrong side of the line God had set.

Cain. The first murder separated Cain from the community of those who worshiped God. He went out "from the presence of the LORD" (Gen. 4:16). The separation was not merely geographic — it was the outward expression of an inner alignment that had already placed him outside God's covenant community.

Noah. The flood separated the one righteous family from a world that had become entirely corrupt. "Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his time" (Gen. 6:9) — the separation was moral before it was physical. The ark was the visible expression of what God's grace had already accomplished in Noah: a man who had not been assimilated by the surrounding corruption.

Abraham. "Go forth from your country, and from your relatives and from your father's house, to the land which I will show you" (Gen. 12:1). The call of Abraham was the call to a physical and social separation that would establish a distinct people. He left kinspeople. He left the religious environment of Mesopotamia. He went — which is why he is the father of the faithful (Rom. 4:11-12).

Israel from Egypt. The Exodus was God's most dramatic act of separation in the Old Testament. Pharaoh's Egypt represented the world system at its most powerful — organized religion, centralized coercion, economic exploitation. God separated his people from it by power and by blood. "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery" (Ex. 20:2) is the preamble to every subsequent commandment. Who they were was defined by what they had been separated from.

Israel in Canaan. Once in the land, the command was to remain distinct from the nations surrounding them. The dietary laws, the calendar, the Sabbath, the prohibitions against intermarriage — these were not arbitrary cultural markers. They were the mechanisms of separation that kept Israel from assimilating into the religious culture of Canaan. When Israel ignored them, the result was syncretism: Baal alongside Yahweh, the high places alongside the temple, the practices of the nations alongside the law of Moses. The prophets preached separation because assimilation had already happened.

III. Christian Life as a Life of Separation

The Christian has not outgrown the principle of separation; he has entered a deeper form of it.

Christ himself is the model: "holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners" (Heb. 7:26). The world had no legitimate claim on him — not its values, not its priorities, not its definitions of greatness. He was in the world without being organized around the world. The Christian is called to the same posture: in the world as a witness, not assimilated into the world as a participant in its values.

The transformation that makes this possible is described in 2 Corinthians 5:17: "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come." The "old things" are the former alignment — the loyalties, values, and habits organized around self and the world. They have passed away. Not gradually improved; passed away. A new creature is not an improved version of the old one. It is a different kind of thing.

First Peter 2:9 names what Christians are: "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light." Every term in that sentence describes a people who are distinct from the world around them — chosen (not self-selected), royal (belonging to the King), holy (set apart), a people (not isolated individuals but a community). The identity is separation.

The call of 2 Corinthians 6:17 has a specific application the outline names directly: there may be genuine Christians in human denominations, but God calls for them to come out. This is not a sectarian judgment about the sincerity of those in denominations — it is a statement about what God requires. The command to "come out from their midst" was addressed to people who were already in a compromised position, and the address itself is evidence that God regarded the position as changeable. The call is an invitation, not a condemnation. But it is a call.

God has always required his people to be different from others. Not culturally superior, not socially isolated, not contemptuous of those outside — but genuinely different in the values that organize life, the authority to which they submit, and the community in which they worship.

IV. The Final Separation

The present line of separation is a foreshadowing of the ultimate one.

"His winnowing fork is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clear His threshing floor; and He will gather His wheat into the barn, but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire" (Matt. 3:12). The image of wheat and chaff is the image of separation — the genuine from the counterfeit, the real from the appearance. The final act of judgment is a sorting, not a blending.

Matthew 25:31-32, 46 describes the same event: "But when the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before Him; and He will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats." The verb is aphorizō — to mark off by boundaries, to separate. The Judge does at the end what God has been requiring throughout history: the drawing of a line.

The difference is finality. Every previous separation in Scripture — from Eden, from the nations, from Egypt — had the character of a mercy, a preparation, an opportunity for the separated people to become what God called them to be. The final separation has no further opportunity attached to it. It is the settlement of every prior choice about which side of the line to inhabit.

Application

Three questions this sermon presses:

Have you crossed the line? The call of 2 Corinthians 6:17 is addressed to those who are in a compromised position. Is there a partnership with unbelieving values, priorities, or institutions that the gospel requires you to exit? The call is specific: "come out from their midst." This is an action, not an aspiration.

Are you living as a new creature? The old things are described as "passed away" — but the experiential reality of that passing-away requires ongoing attention. The world's pull is constant. The discipline of Christian life is the consistent redirection of loyalty away from what used to organize life and toward the one who now has the right to organize it.

Are you prepared for the final separation? The sorting at the judgment will be based on how life was actually lived, not on what category it was placed in. "Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven" (Matt. 7:21).

Conclusion

God's line of separation is not a cultural artifact from a less tolerant era. It is the consistent expression of the holiness of God across the full sweep of Scripture and history. It began in a garden with a forbidden tree. It continued through the call of a patriarch, the deliverance of a nation, and the formation of a covenant people. It was embodied in Christ himself and extended to his followers. It will be completed at the final judgment.

The call is the same in every generation: come out, be separate, be holy. Not because God is harsh, but because he is holy and has made you his. "Come out from their midst and be separate, says the Lord. And do not touch what is unclean; and I will welcome you. And I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to Me, says the Lord Almighty" (2 Cor. 6:17-18).

Invitation

The separation God requires is not isolation — it is re-alignment. It is the movement of a life from one set of organizing values and loyalties to another. That movement begins with obedience to the gospel.

Believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God — the one who was himself "holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners" and who became sin on your behalf. Repent of the alignment with the world that has organized your life. Confess his name before these witnesses. Be baptized for the remission of your sins (Acts 2:38), and rise from that water as a new creature — one for whom the old things have passed away and new things have come.

Word Study

Scripture Interlock Table

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Converted from H. Leo Boles, Outline 91. Primary text: 2 Corinthians 6:17 (stated by Boles). OCR corrections: "d1aff" corrected to "chaff"; "demarkation" corrected to "demarcation"; "Ill." corrected to "III." Doctrinal audit: the call for Christians in denominations to "come out" retained as Boles's application without hedging; the final separation at the judgment stated as a single event (not premillennial); 2 Cor. 6:17-18 developed as an invitation structure (the call ends in welcome, not condemnation); invitation retains full obedient response (Acts 2:38).