Bad company refers to the bad friends we hang around with. Bad friends are the kind of friends who contribute negatively to our lives or who impact our lives negatively. For some of us, experience has taught us to know at first hand the dangers of keeping bad company. Apart from experience, you can easily make out some of these negative influences of bad friends in historical events recorded in the Bible. These are some of the dangers of keeping bad company:
First of all, a bad friend or bad company will get you into trouble. A friend of mine shared with me that he once had a bad friend when he was a teenager. This bad friend came to him one day and entrusted some game cartridges to his keep, lying that the cartridges were his. Later, it came to light that the cartridges were stolen and the bad friend was arrested for theft. However, he got my friend into serious trouble, because the stolen cartridges were in his possession. Bad friends or bad company is an easy source of unexpected trouble.
When a Christian finds himself amid bad friends or bad company, he turns to be ashamed of his religious faith and the virtues thereof. This is because, in order to fit in the bad company, he has to either abandon or compromise on his Christian virtues. By so doing, he would find the ease to indulge in the bad things they do. Now to be ashamed or to abandon your Christian faith and virtues could permanently ruin your relationship with God.
Bad friends are a source of bad advice. Bad friends have little or nothing good to contribute to your life. A bad friend would mislead you with bad advice to do bad things against your fellow human being and God. In one historical event, a young prince called Amnon followed the bad advice of his bad friend, Jonadab, to rape his half-sister Tamar – incest. This outrageous act he committed led to a homicide in the family of David for Absalom, Tamar’s brother, later, killed Amnon in the quest for vengeance.
Bad friends or bad company will betray you if it is profitable enough to do so. Remember what happened to Jesus. When Jesus was choosing disciples for full-time ministry, he included one man called Judas Iscariot. Jesus respected and counted all these disciples as His friends. Judas Iscariot, in the beginning, was a good friend who did not appear to have any evil intent for Jesus. But along the line, his weakness of love for money corrupted him to become a bad friend so much that he began stealing from Jesus and, later, when he saw that it would be profitable, he betrayed Jesus Christ to receive 30 silver pieces. All bad friends are like Judas Iscariot, they would give you up if only they can cash in on it.
Bad friends corrupt good morals. If you are the playmate of pigs, you would never look clean. One characteristic of bad friends is that aside from having bad intentions about you, they do not set good examples for you to emulate. Their life is tainted with lots of gross sins. And you are not far from following in their footsteps. The world is such that we influence one another, especially, those who stick together. You would likely conform to either some or all of the bad habits of your bad friends.
A bad friend will not be there for you in times of need. Sometimes in life, we face a lot of unforeseen circumstances and we become desperate for help. A bad friend would not be there for you; only the good friends would still hang around. A good example is the story of Job. When calamity overtook him and he was languishing in poverty and disease, his three good friends, Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar, came to visit him. We can be sure that Job did not have only three friends in his life, for he used to be rich and hence had many friends. But in the height of his troubles, only three remained; the bad friends who hung around because of his money disappeared when Job lost everything.
Conclusion
A bad company is called as such because it will impact your life negatively. For the reasons above, it pays to stay away from bad company or bad friends.