BC-Jeremiah 32:30-35
FC-Jeremiah 32:35
Motif-“Baal and Molech have long arms”
Title-“American Idols: Baal and Molech in our Culture”
Enhancer: Today’s we talk about two bad guys from the Old Testament; Baal and Molech. These guys were like old luggage—they never went away and were always a source of problems and temptations for the ancient Hebrews
(Prayer)
Introduction
This weekend Kim and I rented and watched Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World and loved it. I think Russell Crowe might be one of the best actors around. He’s still no Mel Gibson, but he is certainly better than Ben Afleck, especially now that Bennifer is gone!
There is a scene in the film when the captain played by Russell Crowe proposes a toast. He holds his glass in the air and says with all appropriate seriousness, “To our wives and our sweethearts”. All the men at the table, the officers say dutifully, “here here”. Then Crowe says with a giggle, “may they never meet!”
We who are Christians have committed ourselves in covenantal marriage to Jesus. Yet we all live in secret desperation that he might find out about our other sweethearts. You know, the ones we lavish such attention on, the ones we can’t wait to see again, the ones we spend so much money on. What a terrible thing if God found out about them!
The weeping prophet from the Old Testament, Jeremiah, announced to Israel that God had indeed found out about their other sweethearts named Baal and Molech!
READ TEXT HERE!—Jeremiah 32:30-35
Jeremiah, as the mouthpiece of the one true God, Yahweh, implores the people to tear down their false idols for he will not bless them until they do.
Today we are equally guilty of harboring false idols and secretly devoting our best energy to pagan deities. We cannot be the wife of the King until we give up our other lovers.
We must tear down our idols.
Baal and Molech: Background Check
Through the words of the prophet Jeremiah, Yahweh, our one true God, is telling the people why he is about to send them out and why he is so mad at them. They have turned to Baal and to Molech. These were the two favorite false gods of the Old Testament. Time and time again the people would turn to these false demon deities.
Baal is one you’ve probably heard of. He has roots that go deep into the Hebrew history. Baal is semitic in origin which means geographically he is identified with Palestine. He is the local god. Archaeological evidence puts Baal worship predating Abraham. Literary evidence both in the Bible and in epigraphic sources outside the Bible indicate that Baal worship has been around indefinitely.
One way we can identify this is with names. Oftentimes Baal would appear as a prefix on a name like Jerubabaal in the book of Judges or Baal Peor as place in the book of Exodus. Perhaps the most famous is Jezebel, whose father’s name was Ethbaal which means “Baal is alive”. It is important to note that the modern word Belezebub, a synonym for Satan or the Devil, is actually a form of Baal zebub!
Whenever a good king would come into power, like David, Josiah, and Hezekiah one of the first things the Bible says he would do is pull down and destroy the high places and the Asherah. When you read the Old Testament, especially the history books, you’ll see the word Asherah a lot. Asherah and High Places are directly related to Baal worship. Asherah is the name of the wife of Baal. In fact, Asherah is a generic term that was applied to the female consort of all of the Near Eastern gods, even Molech. There are even some curious places where the archaeological record reflects a belief in an Asherah of Yahweh.
Baal was worshipped in a rhythmic, cyclical way. The Asherah poles which were high, hence high places is where the worship took place. Baal is associated with weather patterns, seasons, and fertility. It was, for example, believed that Baal died every winter and then was born every spring. With his birth comes the spring harvest and blossoms. Then he thrives through summer and ages in fall only to die in winter.
It was believed that public, cultic sex would bring his rebirth every spring. Baal worship included female and male prostitutes along with homosexual acts.
Baal worship emphasized the environment.
Baal was worshiped through by practicing sexual perversion.
Baal was tangible. One could taste the crops yielded. People could feel the pleasure of sex. It felt like the right thing to do.
Molech is a little more mysterious than Baal. Admittedly we do not know as much about him. He comes from the region of Tyre in Palestine, but most certainly was imported to Tyre by the ancient Phoenicians. You’ll remember the Phoenicians from your world history because they are the empire that fought three wars with Rome and lost. The great military strategists Hannibal was from Phoenicia. Their great city was named Carthage.
Even the Romans hated the worship of Molech! Most of our information comes from them.
The name of Molech appears early in the Bible. He is in the book of Leviticus as worship to him is strictly forbidden. This means that he was in Canaan before the Exodus. Molech was a fire god who demanded human sacrifice. Moloch had a human shape with a bull’s head. His arms were outstretched and a fire was built within the idol to a great heat. Then the parents would come with their baby and place the baby on the outstretched arms of Moloch and watch: they had to watch without emotion or tear to convince this angry demon god that sacrificing their baby was voluntary. Drums and flutes would be played loudly at the site, to drowned out the tortured cries of the babies.
It makes sense that these two gods, Baal and Molech would coexist. When our having all that sex trying to get Baal to be reborn with Spring, your going to have to have somewhere to put all those extra babies.
The shrine to Molech, there in the valley of Hinnom is the first Planned Parenthood.
The arms of Molech and the wiles of Baal are long indeed and somehow they had seduced, as hard as it is to believe, even the Hebrews who had tasted God’s goodness.
Or maybe its not so hard to believe at all!
This is last weeks People Magazine. There is an interesting article in here that is nearly as heartbreaking as Molech worship.
It talks about the effects of pornography on the internet. Of specific interest was a fake userid that the magazine set up as CR8ZYSUE13. They set it up on AOL and YAHOO! Here are their results (Read directly from the mag p. 72)
“We clicked a box saying we were 18. Then we went surfing. On web browsers and in chat rooms CR8ZYSUE13 was barraged with sexuality in every form. In a “romance” chat room she was propositioned, many with links to sites where anything goes—bestiality, orgies and S&M. ‘Kids are going t osee things they’ve never seen in their lives’ says cyberporn expert Patty Aftab. ‘It’s unbelievable stuff you wouldn’t be able to buy in most porn stores. We need to prepare kids for this.”
I really respect People magazine for at least admitting the problem. But with all due respect to Mrs. Aftab, the expert we do not need to prepare kids for this. We must protect them from this.
Somehow in our world we have managed to combine the worship of Baal and Molech satisfying our sexual appetities at the same time we sacrifice our children.
It’s sick, twisted, and these idols must be torn down.
We worship Baal and call it Playboy or we worship Molech and call it choice.
It’s all the same.
The furtherance of the effect is child molesters moving into neighborhoods with playgrounds and parks. Monsters like this should not be allowed to roam our society freely.
But we worship at the altar of personal choice and watch our children burn in Molech’s outstretched arms.
Old heresies never die, they just come back with new names.
Today in modern English we spell Baal MTV as hip hop artists and their record labels make millions with lyrics that exploit women and glorify violence.
Molech is recognized as corporation after corporation dehumanizes workers and cuts health care benefits to make a profit leaving untold numbers with financial heartache while executives build bigger and bigger mansions with California, Florida, and Redmonds zip codes.
A Timeless Problem
Evidence of these idolatries are found throughout the Old Testament. Earlier in the worship service we read from 1 Kings about Solomon’s failure. Solomon, who had a personal encounter with Yahweh in his Temple still failed.
The book of Hosea talks about how some had mislabeled Yahweh as calling him Baal. Can you imagine that, some got so confused the mixed up Yahweh with Baal.
This problem of idolatry carries throughout the ages. The last book of the Bible, Revelations, records the letters from Jesus to seven specific churches in Asia Minor. Two of those churches he writes and lists specific problems of idolatry. One group he even calls Jezebel.
Church history also bears out an incredible tolerance for idolatry. During the middle ages it was common for missionaries to stumble across a group of pagans worshipping at the sacred tree at the center of the village. They would cut the tree down, make into an altar and drag it into the church. The people would come into the church to worship, but who were they worshipping? The tree in the altar or Jesus?
It’s a good question.
In reality the archaeological and literary evidence of Palestine indicates there was never a time of true monotheism in ancient Israel. Even under the good Kings. There were always high places where idols were worshipped. God was always pleading with the people to get rid of the idols.
They never did.
The problem is idolatry but is technically called syncretism. This is the practice of blending, or melding religious practices into something new. So the family who sacrificed to Molech and partied with Baal would also observe Passover. It’s convenient in covering all its bases.
The same thing happens in the church today.
One of my first impressions of Port Orchard, when we moved here, is from downtown. It was a Saturday and we went down and folks from the church here were showing me around. Immediately I noticed the big Native American totem pole by the waterfront. It shocked me. It piqued my interest. It made me think.
The reason it made me think is because I know what that is. It is a part of Native American religion. It shares a common sociological ancestry with the Asherah pole of Baal. I am not attacking Native Americans—what white anglo Saxons like myself did to the indigenous population of North America is a travesty written in blood on the pages of history. But religiously they are not Christian. They are pagan.
But the longer I pastor and the more I minister, the less and less totems bother me. The less and less little golden buddha’s with worn bellies bother me. The less Yin and Yang bother me.
What really bothers me is the way in which Christians, people who profess Christ, build altars to false gods in their lives and in their hearts. The real problem of idolatry is not the Native American totems or Wiccan covens. The problem is the hearts of Christians who worship at the altars around us.
We can tell what we worship by our time and money.
We obviously worship television. Born again Christians will spend twenty or more hours a week watching television but say they don’t have time to read their Bible or serve on a ministry team. I often wonder how many innovative ministries and community involvement could be done by a people who would just watch television half as much!
We clearly worship the sex god. I wish I could say that sexual deviance was a practice only of the secular world but its not. We in the church are just as guilty of enjoying pornography, lusting in our hearts, and of extra-marital relations. You can tell by the way we dress and the way we act that we worship our own sexual pleasure.
We worship entertainment. The same people who will say they cannot afford to tithe, to financially contribute to the Kingdom work will spend twenty dollars without thinking for a DVD of a movie they’ve already seen.
We worship youth as we are going to botox ourselves to beauty.
We worship celebrity as everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame.
We worship success.
We worship money as we think it will solve all of our problems.
These idols must be torn down.
I think, now I may be out on a limb here, but I think the greatest idol today is none of these. These are all expressions of the one true idol of today. The idol of today is self. As a culture we are preoccupied with self indulgences. Cosmetics is a multi-billion dollar industry. These are the incenses burned to the altar of self. Personal opinion is the holy literature of our time. The creed “I believe” has been transformed into the new statement of faith, “I want. . .” The high priest of this neurotic self absorbed sacrament is found only in one place: the mirror. Our high priestess is the female navel. The theologians of this sect write for Vogue, Cosmo, and GQ, and Maxim.
Consumerism has arisen to feed and fuel our new religion.
Adultery (Conclusion)
The metaphor throughout Scripture for idolatry is adultery. It is so powerful that one man, Hosea, was commanded by God to take a wife who was a prostitute and when she prostituted herself, he commanded Hosea to go buy her back. The image is that of Israel the faithless with to God.
One can almost hear the broken heart of God crying over his wayward wife. Yahweh weeps from heaven over these words—the people have rejected him.
He has loved them and cared for them, yet they build altars to others.
God is jilted, as a jilted lover---no one loves us as much as Jesus!
It is sad when lovers go bad; especially when a husband or a wife throw away a strong relationship by chasing skirts and hunks.
The language of theology is the language of lovers. It’s always been that way. Recently I’ve been reading the lovers poetry of Christina Rosetti and writings of Jim Kavanaugh. He writes about the strength of real, true, genuine love. One piece is called “There are Days”
(Read from the book)
"There are days when I could run for president,
direct General Motors in the morning and Chrysler in the afternoon,
When I could thrill an audience of ten thsuand, and walk hand in hand with the most prestigious leaders on earth, when my conversation sparkles and my imagination is in overdrive. When I could be loved by starlets and international beauties, Create elaborate st ories for the stage and screen, wander from coutnry to country at home in every land,solving political conflicts that have endured for centuries, and healing the wounds of starving children and despairing adults.
And therea re days when emerging from bed seems impossible, when a barking dog or cooing dove can drivem e quite mad, when taking a shower and fixing cornflakes is a major undertaking, and taking m ycar into repair a wiper balde a complex enterprise, when i could not shine shoes or run a hot-dog stand,
and I tremble at the thought of saying, "Hello" to the postman, when the cleaning lady is bored by my dialogue, and no woman in her right mind would give me time for lunch, when to leave the living room frightens me beyond endurance, and I could not createa sotry for a high school paper.
The miracle is that on either kind of day, your eyes still gaze at me as if no one else walks the earth, And your smile forever says, "I love you no matter what."
Then General motors means not nearly as muc has the tears we shed on the living room floor, or the sunset we share in serenity and silence."
(Read There are Days from the book!)
Those other lovers, those sweethearts will all walk away. THey will not be there to share life’s joys and pains. Molech doesn’t love us. His political and social mind games only want to consume us and our children.
Baal doesn’t love us—Baal just wants gratification. When he’s through he leaves us to rot diseased and spent.
Only Jesus loves us. He proved it by dying for us and by being there in the living room when we cry and on contemplative sunsets.
Men and women; friends; we know we have an idol problem. We know we have other lovers we flirt with. We rendezvous in the darkness around the soft glow of the T. V. screen or in the pagan Temple of Tacoma Mall.
But we also know Jesus waiting to receive us back. He aches the same way we do. There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ, never has been, and he’s not going to start now. There is only forgiveness for those who repentant. Let us repent by tearing down those idols and coming home to Christ Jesus our one true LORD!
