Wild Animals and Empty Space
Why God Does Not Remove Sin All at Once
In Exodus 23:29, God tells Israel why He will not drive the Canaanite nations out in a single year:
“I will not drive them out from before you in one year, lest the land become desolate and the wild animals multiply against you.”
That explanation feels strange at first.
If God can break Egypt, part the sea and bring down fortified cities, wild animals hardly seem like the problem. Surely the God who sends plagues can handle predators wandering through an empty field.
But the verse is pressing on a different question: what happens when something is removed faster than it can be rightly inhabited?
The land was not meant to sit vacant. It was meant to be inhabited, cultivated, governed and cared for. If the nations were removed before Israel was ready to occupy the land, peace would not follow. Disorder would.
So God says:
“Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased and possess the land.”
Notice the condition: until you have increased and possess the land.
The clearing of the land is tied to Israel’s growth. God is removing enemies while preparing His people to live faithfully in what He gives them.
We usually think of holiness as removal.
If something is sinful, we want it gone. Completely. Immediately. And sometimes God does remove things quickly. Some sins drop away almost at once. Old habits lose their hold. Patterns that shaped years of life begin to break.
That is real grace.
But removal by itself does not make a person mature. If God stripped everything away before new loves were formed, before trust deepened, before new patterns of obedience were built, the result would not be holiness. It would be instability.
A cleared life can still be an empty life.
And empty places do not stay empty for long.
Jesus gives the same warning in Matthew 12:43-45. He describes an unclean spirit leaving a person. The house is swept and put in order, but it is left empty. Then the spirit returns with others worse than itself.
The house had been cleaned. It had not been filled.
Into that empty space, other things rush in.
Pride. Legalism. Self-reliance. Shame. Control.
These are the wild animals of the spiritual life. They are not always as obvious as the sins they replace, but they are often more dangerous. A person may stop doing the wrong thing and become harsh, fearful or self-justifying in the process.
Maybe more dangerous, since those sins know how to behave in public.
This is why God’s slowness can be protective.
Exodus 23 shows us that God removes what is wrong while He grows what is right. Love must be cultivated. Trust and obedience need time to deepen. God removes sin at the pace that faith, humility and dependence can actually take root.
Otherwise, we might confuse emptiness for maturity. We might mistake restraint for righteousness.
A cleared land that is not yet inhabited is more vulnerable than a land still being reclaimed.
That gives us a different way to read delay.
When God does not remove every struggle at once, we often assume He is holding back. Or worse, that He is not really working. But Exodus 23 gives us another possibility: He may be guarding us from the chaos that would rush into places we are not yet ready to occupy.
The promise was never that the enemies would stay forever. God was clear. They would be driven out.
But they would be driven out as Israel grew.
There is mercy in that pace.
God is not trying to leave us half-free. He is making us whole. And sometimes the wild animals we never see are the reason He moves slower than we expected.