40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Episode 167 (Deuteronomy 12:1-32)

Episode Date: May 30, 2019

God tells the people to destroy all the worship places in the land He has given to Israel. What exactly is He doing in this command? What is He preserving by destroying these other things? How does Go...d placing His name in the Tabernacle point to Jesus and the Trinity? The people are reminded not to consume blood and God condemns the sacrifice of children. Chad and Daniel discuss all of this. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network HWSS Conference Become A Supporter

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast. check out all the other podcasts that we got going on over there. The For You Radio podcast. It's a podcast pulled from an actual radio show that 1517 underwrites. It's got Craig D'Onofrio on it, who is a friend of mine, a friend of Chad's. He does good work, and he thinks that maybe Christ for You
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Starting point is 00:01:10 They're all over there at 1517.org slash podcast. Also, if you're interested in hanging out with me and Chad, and Jared C. Wilson, and Scott Keith, and Stephen Paulson, and Loso, and Delwyn Campbell, and Eric Sorensen, and Lee Fitzpatrick, and their list goes on and on and on and on and on. You can come out to Here We Still Stand in October out there in San Diego. Come hang out, hear all the talks,
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Starting point is 00:02:10 So you can get that discount by entering the promo code PNET19. PNET19, like Podcast Network 19. Enter that in the promo box, and you get $25 off each and every ticket you buy. So, get that done. Chad, what's going on, man? Here we are in Deuteronomy 12. Here we are. Yes, sir.
Starting point is 00:02:36 I think we actually, I meant anyway to get us into 12 last time, but we were slightly delayed, so. Well, I'm the one running this show, Chad. You have your goals, but, you know. You got yours. if we cover a chapter i'm pretty impressed with us i am too yeah yeah that's where we're at uh we we pretty much wrapped up 11 last time so we're uh i did mention last time that beginning with chapter 12 we're really in the the heart of deuteronomy as far as like content wise 12 through 26 is is the the legal core if you will of deuteronomy so it's it was a good place to
Starting point is 00:03:18 stop and then a good place to start so that we're at a good good jumping off point to get into this main section so 12 is uh 12 is really all about worship in one way or another and uh connected with worship with the first commandment and then we're gonna so we'll we'll talk about various aspects of that in chapter 12 and then chapter 13 which actually came up in uh the uh the q a that we had the other night in the facebook live for uh for the 1517 academy class christ in the old testament one of the one of the guys my buddy down in australia i believe it was asked me about chapter 13 so uh we had a little uh foray into that in the facebook live but we'll get to that either today or next time. But anyway, 12 is about worship. 13 is about who you listen to
Starting point is 00:04:12 with regard to speaking the words of God. And so we'll hear about false prophets and temptations to idolatry when we get into chapter 13. So we start out here with 12. And I'll read these first three or four verses. These are the statutes and the judgments which you shall carefully observe in the land which the Lord, the God of your fathers, has given you to possess as long as you'll live on the earth. You shall utterly destroy all the places where the nations whom you shall dispossess serve their gods, on the high mountains and on the hills and under every green tree. And you shall tear down their altars and smash their sacred pillars and burn their asherim with fire. And you shall cut down the engraved images of their gods, and you shall
Starting point is 00:04:55 obliterate their name from that place. You shall not act like this toward the Lord your God. it seemed to be pretty black and white there not on the gray area when the Israelites go into the promised land one of their chief tasks is to make sure that every single
Starting point is 00:05:17 place of worship which was used by the Canaanites for their detestable worship and we'll hear more about that later in the chapter is to be like bulldozed down There is to be no, in other words, it's not going to be like the Israelites who can go in and be like, hey, this is a pretty nice place.
Starting point is 00:05:39 You know, Canaanites used it to worship Baal, and they sacrificed their children here, and they practiced all their other abominations. But we can just take it over rather than building something of our own. God says, nope, it's not the way it's going to be. If there's a wooden pole there, one of these Asherah poles, who was the popular goddess of the day, well, I want you to burn it. If there's an altar there that was used to sacrifice the veil, I want you to tear it down. If there's a temple there, I want you to bulldoze it. So he wants them to utterly destroy all these places of false worship when they enter the land. Yeah, this is really interesting, actually.
Starting point is 00:06:21 I mean, obviously God is not interested in them. God is very much opposed to them worshiping false gods, of course. I mean, this is the first and great commandment not to do that. But here, he's not talking about that so much as he's talking about them not adopting worship in the forms that these people are worshiping. So what he also doesn't want, as much as he doesn't want them worshiping these gods, he's taking that as a given here.
Starting point is 00:06:55 We've been through this a number of times. So, yeah, I don't want you worshiping these gods, but I don't want you worshiping me like these people worship these gods. I don't even want you worshiping me in the places that these people worship those gods. And so this tells you that God is not only concerned that you only worship him, the one true God, but that the way that you worship him is is important uh which tells us that this idea that i mean you just worship god any way you want it's fine god doesn't really think that's fine some other religion way worship their god a certain way so we could go baptize that and
Starting point is 00:07:35 you know and we'll just do that uh he's not he's not interested in that and i and i honestly think that, and we'll get into some of this explanation, but I think that part of this is that the way that God prescribes that he be worshipped has so much foreshadowing and is pointing towards Christ and the cross that he is sort of protecting that imagery and that symbolism. He doesn't want these outside things getting in there because, I mean, we've gone over this a bunch of times, especially leviticus but the way that god prescribed worship to be done and we've showed over and over again how this points to christ and how christ fulfills all this stuff right so he didn't want these outside things coming in and disrupting the the foreshadow and the symbolism that he's that he's
Starting point is 00:08:26 setting up yeah absolutely if you ever wonder exactly why god goes into such incredible detail in Leviticus and in Exodus with regard to exactly how he wants things to be built and placed and what he wants there, what he wants done with all the various objects in worship. I mean, if it seems as if God is just being just a little bit OCD about all this, well, keep in mind the real reason behind that, and that every single aspect of Old Testament worship was a foreshadowing of Christ. And so it's really in order to protect the gospel, in order to make sure that there's going to be a clear confession about who christ is and his work for us that god is so careful about spelling out all of these it's all of these details it's not like god is just like he's not
Starting point is 00:09:12 just like a stickler for details just to be that way he's he's that way for uh uh for a greater purpose because he wants all of this to make all he wants all of this to clearly and gracefully point forward to what he actually has designed all of it to do, to be, yes, for the Israelites then and there, but also to extend beyond itself to point to the work of Christ who is to come. You see some of this go down, you know, when he talks to the Canaanite woman, and she's like, you know, hey, we're worshiping over on this mountain, and then, you know, Jesus said he'll worship on that mountain, and this kind of thing.
Starting point is 00:09:55 And first, Jesus acknowledges that she's wrong in the way that she's understanding how worship should be. But then he says, and the day is coming when neither of these things are going to matter. And the day is coming that a lot of the stuff that God says, like, hey, worship me this way, isn't going to matter. But it's not until Christ that that doesn't matter. Until Christ, it matters a lot because it's pointing towards him. Yeah, it's always amazed me that the Samaritan woman in John 4, she actually believes in the Messiah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's one of the things that we just sort of skim over sometimes, unless we really know exactly, well, what is Samaria and who are the Samaritans?
Starting point is 00:10:37 Well, the Samaritans were kind of religious half-breeds, if you will. I mean, they were a mixture of non-Jewish peoples who settled on Israelite soil and decided to want to make their own temple on Mount Gerizim instead of Jerusalem. In fact, they are still Samaritans. I mean, the Samaritan religion still exists. They have their own scriptures, which is only the Pentateuch, and there are several discrepancies between their Samaritan Pentateuch and the Pentateuch that we have. but I mean they still continue on to this day there's not very many of them
Starting point is 00:11:12 but what they represent is what the Samaritan woman believed in but the amazing thing is that actually she confessed faith in the Messiah even though she wasn't a Jew she still believed that the anointed one was to come and of course little did she know at the beginning that she was actually standing face
Starting point is 00:11:29 to face with him but yeah that's the point of at the end of that conversation that jesus has with her is that well okay yes jerusalem is the true place of worship now but a time is coming when that true place of worship is going to be in spirit and in truth and that really the place of worship is going to change from a place to a person so it's in the messiah in me in other words christ says that a true worship is to take place yeah yeah i mean this is where you move from the from the the tabernacle and the temple to
Starting point is 00:12:02 the god who tabernacled in flesh right yeah this is where everything moves to yeah but until then you really need that tabernacle and such things to point forward yeah that's uh that's a good segue into into the next section because that ends up being the key if there is like a key theme in deuteronomy 12 it's that that when the israelites worship they can't simply like when they have their official worship, when they have sacrifices, when they have their sacred meals, that this isn't going to take place just willy-nilly, wherever they want it to, like, oh, there's a cool place, let's do it there. No, God says, I'm going to choose a place, and I'm going to put my name there, we'll get back to that in just a minute, the name theology,
Starting point is 00:12:54 and it's only there precisely there that i want you to to worship so this this fits in with that introductory section we saw so first of all god says i want you to obliterate every worship site of the peoples that you are going to dispossess completely do away with those and you're not going to worship at those places because the reasons we've already discussed so where are you going to worship well you're not going to worship just any old place you want to just choose a high hill and worship there no you're going to worship at that place which i shall choose to put my name there but this has a couple of different meanings right now the uh and and and for the foreseeable future up until really the time of king solomon that
Starting point is 00:13:41 place is going to be wherever the tabernacle is located and the tabernacle being a portable dwelling being a tent uh it was moved around to various places it wasn't like moved all the time in the land of Israel, but it did occupy several different places in the land of Israel before it was moved close to Jerusalem. So wherever it happened to be, wherever it was set up, that was the place where God had put his name, because that's the place where the tabernacle was located. Well, eventually, of course, the tabernacle was replaced by a permanent dwelling when Solomon built the temple, and then that became the place where God put his name. And so it was to Jerusalem that the Israelites would go to worship. But the point was that that name
Starting point is 00:14:19 place was wherever God's dwelling was, whether it was a tabernacle or whether it was later the temple. That was the only place where one could offer sacrifices. That was the only place where the tithes were to be brought, the only place where sacred meals were to be offered. So again, we see the specificity that God has with regard to where his people dwell. And this, again, gets right back to Christology. It's the same with us. We can't just worship anyone that we want to. we worship one person christ because he is the tabernacle in flesh he is the temple his body is the temple of god so all of our worship therefore is directed through him to the father and not through any through anyone else now back to the name i want to talk about that for just a minute
Starting point is 00:15:09 because i think this is significant this this isn't always the language that we hear because sometimes God will talk about like he puts himself in the tabernacle or he himself dwells there or sometimes you'll hear that like his glory dwells there but a major theme that we have not just in this chapter in Deuteronomy but actually throughout Deuteronomy as well as in some of the passages in Kings is this idea that God puts his name there so look at verse 5 verse 5 says you shall seek the Lord at the place which the Lord your God shall choose from all your tribes to establish literally in the hebrew to set or to place his name there for his dwelling and there you shall come now the reason i point this out is because this becomes very significant later on there's this idea what
Starting point is 00:15:57 let me back up so when you hear the name of god there's a couple of different ways that you can view that sometimes it just basically it's just synonymous with talking about god does this or the name of the god does this but there are also cases where there seems to be almost the name almost has not an independent but some sort of distinct identity from god himself like god is in heaven and he puts his name in the tabernacle so there's this idea of the name almost being what uh what theologians would call a hypostasis like almost almost has this distinct personhood and i think this gets right back to what we've been talking about before this this idea that that god has that there is this distinction within god clearly in the old
Starting point is 00:16:45 testament where for instance god will send his angel his messenger or he will he will appear in his glory or he will send or establish or put his name there so there is this there is this complex monotheism that you see in the old testament which becomes clearer and clearer which we confess to be the Trinity, where there is this distinction in God between three persons. That's not the way the Old Testament talks about it. But what the Old Testament talks about it are in these ways in which God is distinguished within himself, where you have, for instance, in Psalm 110, verse 1, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand. Well, in Trinitarian language, we would say the Father said to his Son, sit at my right hand. But in the Old Testament,
Starting point is 00:17:32 but it's phrased differently. Similarly here, we would say, for instance, that the father placed his son in the tabernacle. But the way the Old Testament says it is that the Lord put his name in the tabernacle. Or we would say the father sent his son as the messenger to the patriarchs. But the way the Old Testament says it is Yahweh sent his angel, his malach, his messenger, to speak to the patriarchs. The reason I point this out, I think this is a good way that we as christians who confess the trinity can think about the trinity in old in its specific old testament terminology that yes god it's not like god evolved into a trinity this god didn't change this is who he's always been but the way that god has revealed himself from old testament to new
Starting point is 00:18:19 testament has changed according to the terminology and the clarity with which he reveals himself as the trinity i don't know does that that make sense oh yeah yeah no i think i think that the it's not exactly like this but once you sort of have the the old testament decoder ring like you you start to see the trinity everywhere i mean so you have i mean all the way back obviously you have the let us make man in our image you have that sort of thing right which you know i mean that's plural obviously so you have right god speaking to himself uh but even in creation you You know, you have the, it just goes down to, you know, the first article of the creed, I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.
Starting point is 00:19:02 So we're like, okay, so God creates things. He creates things through the word, which is Christ. So the word, his word goes forth. And you have the spirit, you know, hovering over the water. Like, and so, I mean, you have all of it, right? I mean, very, the very beginning of the Bible, you have these hints of the Trinity. and then throughout the rest of scripture you see god and you see the angel of the lord which you know we've said over and over again you have is is a you have christ there and then we haven't
Starting point is 00:19:34 got into some of these passages but once we get into some other narratives you're going to see the spirit of god in certain stories in the old testament the spirit of god does stuff and you know and this it doesn't even like use coded language it'll say the spirit of god like came upon so and so and they did this thing uh i mean even david say you know in psalm 51 saying crying out to god to not take his spirit from him you know this kind of thing so yeah you have the trinity everywhere yeah i think once you once you understand who god is and most people most christians do so from the new testament once they begin to read back through the old testament all of a sudden all of this becomes clear it's really it's really it's really no different than what we
Starting point is 00:20:16 have made explicit in the Gospel of John several times, I say several, at least two or three different times, John says explicitly that, like, when such and such happened, the disciples didn't get it, but then later, when they remembered, then they got it. It's kind of like, you know, so the disciples have been with Jesus this whole time, and they still really, you know, they're still kind of dense, you know, things just aren't really clicking with them, but then after after his resurrection and ascension and Pentecost, they start going back over everything that he did and that he said. And they're like, oh, yeah, it's kind of like it's an Emmaus Road kind of epiphany. Well, I think it's, well, that happened with the disciples when they went back
Starting point is 00:21:02 over the life of Jesus. And that really happens with us as we go over the Old Testament. We have these Emmaus Road epiphanies in which, you know, we've read this story, but until we see it in light of christ and who god is then we really don't understand it but once we once we have that decoder ring as you put it then yeah all of a sudden the scriptures really open up and we're able to see we're not reading into them what isn't there we're not engaging in what is sometimes called isotesis like reading something into that that's not already present rather we're reading out the fullness that god has put in these scriptures because even when god was was inspiring these earlier scriptures he was he was doing so in such a way that the the fullness that
Starting point is 00:21:45 is there would not be made clear would not be manifest until the end of all things when the messiah comes and and we have that clarity that we need now to understand the scriptures yeah this is a little bit of an aside but i think that the disciples are i think the disciples are hilarious because i think that they say yes that they understand stuff to not appear stupid uh when they totally don't understand stuff because there are times where jesus will actually ask them do you understand everything i've said and they're like yep and it becomes very clear like in the next chapter that they don't understand anything that he said yeah my favorite my favorite story is when they're in the boat and uh jesus warns them about the the leaven the scribes and the
Starting point is 00:22:27 pharisees and they're like talking to each other like oh man it's because we didn't bring any bread yeah and you could just you can almost see jesus in the back of the boat just doing a whole a face palm like uh i'm not talking about bread guys yeah there's a there's a great meme out there where it says uh this is where christianity went sideways it has uh the disciples being like what did he say and then it says peter has peter and he says he said that we are to be salty to the whole world that's great i haven't seen that one that is worth everything it's sideways yeah a little misunderstanding yeah i think i i agree with you i mean they're i want because the disciples are human just like we are and how many times have we you know we don't want to we don't
Starting point is 00:23:17 want to appear stupid we don't feel like you know especially if it seems like everybody else gets it so we're like yeah yeah we understand sure yeah are you able to drink from the cup that i have to drink totally oh yeah totally i'll drink i could totally drink that little do they know Yeah, so there is this distinction within God. I think we see a hint of it here where God puts his name in certain places. So God is there, and yet he puts his name, the God of heaven puts his name in the tabernacle. This is sort of a winking sort of way to suggest that God puts his son in the tabernacle. And I was thinking about the significance of the name, too, that we have discussed this before,
Starting point is 00:24:01 But I don't think that we really get how significant it is that we know the name of God, because names are easy for us. Right. We all we we know each other's names. We know the names of famous people. And so to know somebody's name really doesn't strike us as that significant. But biblically speaking, when you have access to someone's name, especially to the name of God, you have access to them in a very intimate, personal sort of way. So in biblical thinking, the name is intimately connected with the nature of a thing. Thus, to have access to the name is to have this link to the nature of something. So to have the name of God, to have access to the name of God is to have that access to his very nature. So it's a very intimate kind of kind of knowledge.
Starting point is 00:24:56 Now, this is by far a weak analogy, but it sort of gets to this idea of what it means to have access. So just imagine, you know, whoever you really look up to, maybe you're a fan of some star and you can't, I mean, of course, you know their name, but you don't have any access to them. Well, just imagine if you had their cell phone number and you could contact them. I mean, you have sort of a more intimate, direct connection to them. Well, I say it's a weak analogy, but that kind of gets to this idea that we have this connection to God by means of his name so that we can access him in a way that wouldn't be possible otherwise. So that's what it means when we talk about the significance of the name. When we have the name, we can call upon him. He claims us as his own.
Starting point is 00:25:50 he puts his name upon us. So there's this very close relationship that the Sabbath is putting God and his people by him giving them access to his name. Going through the rest of the chapter here, we have the significance of only going to that certain place that God chooses. And we also have this emphasis that we've seen, especially Leviticus 17, about making sure that the blood is dealt with in the proper sort of way so verse 16 echoes leviticus 17 where it talks about the life is in the blood because leviticus 16 i mean sorry deuteronomy 12 16 says that if you're in your city and you want to have meat well you can do that you can slaughter like a deer or a gazelle or something like that verse 16 says only you shall not eat the blood you are to pour it out
Starting point is 00:26:40 on the ground like water. So this is echoing what we have heard many other times, but especially in Leviticus, that the life is in the blood. And so because of that, the Israelites are forbidden to eat meat that has not been drained of its blood, because that is the equivalent of them consuming the life. And God has said that because the life is in the blood, he's given it to them on the altar. So the blood, which is suffused with life, which is connected with life itself, is to be poured out either on the ground or in the case of non-sacred kinds of meals with meat. But in the case of sacrificial meals in which the meat is consumed, it is to be poured out on the altar. But either way, the blood is not to be consumed because the blood has the very life
Starting point is 00:27:32 essence of the animal within it you're not to consume the blood of course until jesus says take and drink this is my blood i love the great reversal of uh you're not allowed to drink the blood because life is in the blood and then jesus comes along and says here's my blood drink it the life is in the blood yeah yeah if there's like if i could have a snapshot of any moment in the ministry of jesus i think i would like to have that one because i love to see the looks on the disciples face i really don't think anything anything in the old testament prepared them for that for that kind of reversal i mean that that's uh oh you see this explicitly in john 6 that this is just this is just a bridge way too far i mean i think if i i would agree that i would either see
Starting point is 00:28:16 that or i'd love to see the john 6 thing go down and just see how just confused everyone was like no no chance this is happening yeah i mean that is one of those uh very explicit reversals that you have because we have multiple times in the old testament that i mean if there's one thing regarding blood that's absolutely clear you never drink it absolutely never and then jesus not only he doesn't like permit he it's it's an it's an imperative he says here drink my blood uh so this is the this is the reversal of the old testament this is what is radically new about the new covenant the old at the at the institution of the old covenant blood was sprinkled on the people but that was i mean that happened multiple times at the ordination of priests blood was placed in
Starting point is 00:29:05 their bodies their ear and their thumb and their and their and their toe so that the the placing of blood on the outside of the body was an old testament thing but the placing of blood inside the body was never to happen until christ comes and changes all that because he wants to put his life within us and to do that he bids us drink from his cup yeah i mean so you have this this whole don't drink the blood uh as a prohibition because god's intention is for you actually to drink the blood of life um it just hasn't arrived yet that's not the blood that's for you uh that blood is coming it's i guess the closest analogy we come come up with is the the prohibition in the commandments against making an image of god right you know not to make any image
Starting point is 00:29:55 of god whatsoever in the old testament that's another thing which is crystal clear no image of god period and then you get to the new testament and at the incarnation jesus is the image of god so god has given us his own image and uh in in human flesh and blood so likewise in the old testament it's crystal clear no drinking of blood and yet when christ comes he says drink drink my blood so there are clear reversals that happen within the old testament in which you have prohibitions which are themselves almost prophecies because what is prohibited is at the same time for uh looking forward to that which will be given when the messiah And this is how it comes and changes things.
Starting point is 00:30:37 I think the other thing I want to point out, we really covered the rest of the chapter. Everything that's discussed there has to do with offerings and where you offer them and what you do with the blood. Just to kind of sum this up, we'll begin with verse 29 of this chapter. It says, when the Lord your God cuts off before you the nations which you are going in to dispossess, and you dispossess them and dwell in their land, beware that you are not ensnared to follow them after they are destroyed before you. and that you do not inquire after their gods saying how these nations serve their gods that i also may do likewise you shall not behave thus toward the lord your god for every abominable abominable act which the lord hates they have done for their gods for they even burn their sons
Starting point is 00:31:22 and daughters in the fire to their gods whatever i command you you shall be careful to do you shall add to nor take away from it so this is a good way to wrap up the chapter because just like it began by saying when you enter the land to dispossess you are to destroy all the worship sites of the peoples who live there so likewise when you invade the land never ask yourself hey how did the canaanites worship their gods because maybe we can do the same thing no absolutely not because verse 31 says everything that they did every every abominable act which god hates well that's what they did that's what their worship consisted of in fact they even went so far as to offer their own children their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods so i mean if like if
Starting point is 00:32:14 there's an argument against in any way uh trying to reproduce canaanite worship in an israelite context. It's that. Everything that God hates, even to the extent of sacrificing one's own sons and daughters, that's what the Canaanites did. So avoid everything and every place in which they engaged in their worship. Yeah, there's one thing that's pretty clear that God is not into as far as worship goes. It's child sacrifice. Over and over again, he has a pretty big issue with this. It's a weird thing because, you know, you have, we've covered this story, but you have the story of abraham and isaac and and so people sometimes think like what kind of god is this well what there's a lot of things going on you can go back and listen to that episode but one of the things
Starting point is 00:33:02 that's definitely going on is god is saying this isn't how we because it was so common to do that sort of thing this is one of the reasons why abraham didn't think it was such an insane request is because this is like because you think like well god told you to do that wouldn't you like He'd be like, that's not right. No, that's not. This is common practice in the other religions. And one of the things that God is doing is showing him that that's not how he is going to be worshipped. And takes him all the way up to the brink of it and then says, no, no, I have deliverance coming in a different way.
Starting point is 00:33:37 I have forgiveness coming in a different way. Yeah, I think the real shocking thing in Genesis 22 is not that God asked Abraham to offer his son as a sacrifice, that the god asked him to offer the son he's waited so long to have as a sacrifice you know what i mean yeah so child sacrifice was common in the ancient world uh but because abraham had waited so long because this son was the promised one of god for god to ask him to sacrifice that son would that was that's real that's the most shocking aspect of that and of course even more shocking is the fact that Abraham doesn't even question. He simply gets up early in the morning, saddles his donkey, and they take off to the place of sacrifice. And I mean, in case you're
Starting point is 00:34:20 wondering, there is plenty of evidence, archaeological as well as textual, that child sacrifice was practiced in this particular time period. And we have instances besides those we've already talked about in the scriptures themselves. In 2 Kings chapter 3, I believe verse 27, we have an instance where the israelites were attacking moab and the king of moab mesha was surrounded and outnumbered and was about to lose the battle and so what does he do he offers his firstborn son as a sacrifice as a burnt offering on top of the wall of the city and so shocking to the israelites that they abandoned the battle if i remember the story correctly but i know the king Mesha offered his son as a sacrifice on top of the city walls. We also have evidence from
Starting point is 00:35:08 some archaeological, not text, but archaeological paintings from Egypt that in the Canaanite cities, when they were besieged, that they would engage in religious ceremonies on top of the walls and cast their sons and daughters, which presumably had been sacrificed, over the walls of the city. so to us it sounds horrific and indeed it does and indeed it is but it wasn't as if it was unheard of in in the ancient world we have we have evidence also archaeological evidence from from carthage of the phoenicians where they would offer children the sacrifices and put them in urns their bones and urns beneath uh these inscriptions which were thanking gods the gods for answering their prayers so this idea that you offer the ultimate sacrifice of your child
Starting point is 00:35:58 if you're in dire straits was a widespread practice in the ancient world, and that's why God is so explicitly against it in these texts, because he wants to make it clear to the Israelites that, no, absolutely not, shall you do this. Yeah, I mean, if you want an additional reason besides preserving all of the stuff pointing to Christ, The other reason is he doesn't want them to say, hey, let's explore how worship went down in this area and see if there's anything worth appropriating. Well, child sacrifice went down in this region, and that's one thing that God is completely opposed to them adopting. So for very good reason, God is like, tear all this stuff down, burn it all down.
Starting point is 00:36:47 We're not adopting any of this stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's here. It's elsewhere. Children are a gift of the Lord. And so they are not to be offered up as as the sacrifice, no matter what, no matter what the situation may be. We'll actually get to when we get to the judges, we'll get to a story which which which involves which involves the Israelite offering, offering a sacrifice when we get to the story of Jephthah. But by and large, the the Israelites avoided this, except when they were in their darkest of periods, when things were just kind of in mayhem and they were practicing.
Starting point is 00:37:24 They were actually imitating various forms of idolatry in the ancient world. We do have evidence of the Israelites offering children then, but at least when they were following what God would have them do, they did not do that. Yeah, and ultimately, I mean, one of the reasons that God is against this sort of thing, besides the fact that it's sin and it's horrible and it's murder, is also that God's plan to redeem his people does involve the death of a son, but not your son or my son or anyone else's son.
Starting point is 00:38:01 It's the death of his son. So this is the way that God is setting this up. He doesn't need the death of a bunch of sons to foreshadow the death of his sons. He's not interested in that foreshadow. yeah and this this son will be god himself offering himself willingly as a sacrifice to to atone for for the sins of the world yeah and we'll defeat death in doing so yeah i mean when people object to the death of christ i was also like well you do know that
Starting point is 00:38:33 he knows he's gonna he's going there to defeat death and rise again right yeah yeah this is this is why he came this was the explicit reason that he doesn't stay dead i mean easier to die if you know you're not going to stay there yeah absolutely well that's it chad that is 40 minutes i think we got to 12 so you know some success one chapter down we'll be at 13 next week guys if you'd like to support all the things that we're doing over here uh at the podcast at christ so fast everything else at 15 17 you can do so you can go to any of the sites go to the donate page and become a contributor and we would very much appreciate it if you're one of the people that do that thank you very much. Chad, we will see you next week for Deuteronomy 13. All right. Have a good week.

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