Exposed: The Great Cover-Up, Part 7

I did not place a diagram in the Bible for you
today. I trust you can use your own
copy of the Word. We’ll have some kind of an insert
next week in the new passage, but if you have last week, that
will do just fine. That’s where we left off. We
are in the midst of this great opening chapter of Romans, where
Paul is essentially providing his alibi to the Roman church
in that they were a little disappointed with him
and perhaps even doubting his integrity. And he affirms that
he indeed desired to be in Rome and to preach in Rome. Paul was
not ashamed of the gospel. He was eager to preach the gospel.
Chapter one, verse 15, because it was God’s gospel. It was God’s
word. It was the gospel of God, as
he said in the very opening words of this great epistle. It was
the gospel of God that bore the power of God and declared the
righteousness of God. We began several weeks ago, though,
in a subsection of this great opening chapter, that of where
Paul opens up to discuss the wrath of God, another of the
great motivators to preach the gospel. In verse 18, We see the
wrath of God declared as revealed and then the reasons for it flow
down all the way through verse 20. The reasons the wrath of
God that the wrath of God is revealed is that men had this
idea to try and suppress God. We called it the great cover
up. And this is essentially the expose
on the great cover up. The nature of it was that even
though they knew God, they did not honor him as God, but they
constantly went about trying to suppress and do away with
the idea of God. The verdict is declared all the
way down at the end of verse 20 in saying that they are without
excuse, no excuse not to believe in a higher power, in a being
that regardless of the fact you may not know his name, You know
that such a being exists simply by what has been made, by what
has been seen. Paul says his invisible attributes,
that being his eternal power and divine nature, have been
clearly seen. And to not have a basic belief
in God is inexcusable. Now, the verdict is pronounced
as guilty that the consequences or the sentence, if you will,
is everything from verse twenty one all the way down through
verse thirty two. As we have begun, I suggested to you and
I maintain that the further I study this, the verse twenty one merely
sets the pattern of judgment. There is a pattern to this judgment.
God doesn’t just capriciously go off the handle one day and
punish all of those who just happen to be in his line of sight. That probably happens in our
homes, but that’s not the way God operates. First, there is
rejection in verse 21. Even though they knew God, they
did not honor him as God. They rejected him. They didn’t
even give basic thanks to God. The second cycle or second step
in that cycle of judgment is replacement. Not only did they
reject God, but they replaced that God shaped vacuum with something
else, anything else. They became futile, Paul says,
in their speculations. They began with some internal
musings that ultimately spilled out into outright idolatry, as
we’ll see. Even though they knew God, they
did not honor him as God or give thanks, but they became futile
in their speculations. And then comes the third step
in the cycle of judgment, reprobation, where Paul says their foolish
heart was darkened. They didn’t darken it themselves.
God darkened it. Now, I told you that the remainder
of the chapter presents to us really three cycles of judgment.
And it’s not like they come to one judgment comes to one people
and another to another. This is all judgment that is
propagated upon the heathen for their idolatry, for their rejection
of God, for the fact that they replaced God with something else. And you might even picture it
as waves, if that works better for you rather than cycles. The
first cycle of judgment we began last Lord’s Day, and that’s where
I’d like to pick up again this morning. In verse 22, Paul records
professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory
of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible
man and of birds and four footed animals and crawling creatures.
Therefore, God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts
to impurity that their bodies might be dishonored among them. Idolatry, as I said last week,
has been a perpetual plague on mankind. The sinful man that
God created always tried to put a face and assign a shape to
God so that he could better his attempt at worship. In a sense,
it’s a mark that even in heathen societies, there is almost always
some kind of an attempt to mimic true worship, to try to appease
some God. God had repeatedly warned Israel,
as we saw last week, not just in the Ten Commandments, but
most succinctly there, you shall have no other gods before me,
which told them that there were other supposed gods that were
being placed in the middle of a land that was surrounded by
these other so-called gods. And God said, you shall have
no other gods before me and you shall not make for yourself an
idol of me. or of any likeness of what is
in heaven or on the earth or beneath or in the water. Idolatry
was a plague and God wanted his children to avoid it at all costs. In looking back, just by way
of a quick review, in the first step of this first cycle of judgment,
we see rejection. We noted this last week that
professing to be wise, a verb that was used of unfounded assertion. They didn’t even know what they
were talking about. They made a bold assertion, but it was
totally unproven. They weren’t wise. They presented
themselves as such. They thought of themselves as
such. And they thought that being wise, they could conceive and
craft a God that was worthy of their worship. Instead of objectively
looking and considering the revelation that God had clearly given, they
began instead to speculate and muse and ponder of the God they
might be able to worship. And they began from the very
start to redefine and re-explain and ultimately re-create this
God. They didn’t like the God that
was presented in nature. And so professing to be wise
there in verse 22, they became fools. Their ideas were foolish. As one said, what is polytheism
except some sort of permanent hallucination? Because it isn’t
presented in worship. It isn’t presented rather in
creation, this polytheistic idea. Nor is this limited, as I stumbled
about last week, nor is this limited to our university professors,
our secular university professors that think themselves to be so
wise, nor is it limited to philosophers, those ungodly thinkers that have
reasoned God completely out of the equation. It’s not limited
to them. It is a much broader group. that
Paul is speaking about. It is a much broader group that
was in offense of God. It was all of the heathen. It was their heathen ways that
tended towards, ultimately, idolatry. Professing to be wise, they made
themselves fools. And as such, they exchanged the
glory of the incorruptible God. Psalm 116, pardon me, Psalm 106
summarizes it very succinctly this way. They exchanged their
glory for the image of an ox that eats grass. Now, that’s
essentially a paraphrase of what Paul says. Four footed animals. They cashed in God’s glory. And we reminded you last Lord’s
Day that to glorify someone is to esteem their true value and
then respond to them accordingly. Well, they saw God and they didn’t
esteem him properly. They didn’t glorify him as God. So they cashed it in. They cashed
in the glory of God. And went for something else. I remind you of J. I. Packer’s description of the
idol and what it does in essence to God himself. J. I. Packer said images dishonor
God because they obscure his glory. The likeness of things
is precisely not like the likeness of the Creator. The problem with
them is, as he goes on, Is that they inevitably conceal most,
if not all of the truth about the personal nature and character
of the divine being. You can’t see God in a statue. You can’t see God in a painting.
You can’t see, in fact, all of those things obscure the very
nature of God. We saw last. Lastly, in closing,
by way of review, we saw that All of this they did to what
Paul refers to as the incorruptible God. Now, when we speak of corruption,
either of politicians or people in the society, we tend to think
of moral failure, that they are corrupt, that they’re either
on the take, they’ve taken a bribe or some moral indiscretion of
some kind. That’s not at all what’s in focus
here. When he speaks of the incorruptible God, he’s speaking of God as
unchanging. Physically and morally and in
every way, he’s unchanging, he is immutable, to use the big
theological word. In his essence, in his attributes,
in his counsel, Malachi 3, 6, I am the Lord, I change not. But the ungrateful heart of the
heathen, It wasn’t enough that they didn’t
evaluate the data properly. It wasn’t enough that they didn’t
yield before Him and give Him the glory that was due His name.
It wasn’t enough that they didn’t thank Him. No, they went on. They went on to idolatry and
they went on to begin to dishonor and degrade God by creating idols
in order to represent God. And it is here where we come
to the second point of this first cycle of judgment, that of replacement. Rejection and now replacement. Professing to be wise, they became
fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for
an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed
animals and crawling creatures. How ridiculous. And yet, as I
said, idolatry has been the perpetual plague of humanity. The consequences
of their false religion, when they sought to fill that void,
that God-shaped vacuum, the consequence was idolatry. One commentator said it is impossible
to conceive anything more deplorable, absurd, further removed from
every semblance of wisdom, or more degrading itself and dishonoring
to God than the idolatrous worship of the heathens.” Did you catch
that? It’s really bad, he says. Here’s how he said it. More deplorably
absurd, further removed from every semblance of wisdom, or
more degrading itself and dishonoring to God than the idolatrous worship
of the heathens. Yet among them, it was nearly
universal. The debasing images to which
the apostle here refers were worshipped and feared by the
whole body of the people. In other words, he says, you
step outside of the Hebrew nation that was placed on the earth
in a theocracy in order to worship and testify of this God. You
step outside of that into any direction, into any society. And you have idolatry, whether
it takes the form of Buddhism or Hinduism or any other ism. Any time you step away from the
true God, you step immediately into idolatry of some sort. And it’s an image. Look at this,
they. It’s put forth here, quite simply,
an image in the form of. That’s what an image is. I mean,
it takes the shape, it takes the form. It’s a statue of some
form, a form of a man, a form of a bird. But it’s an image.
It’s a touch, a touchable, malleable image before them. And Israel
had been warned repeatedly about this. Deuteronomy 415, a little
later than the passage in which we considered last week. Listen
carefully, watch yourselves carefully. Deuteronomy 415, since you did
not see any form on the day the Lord spoke to you at Horeb in
the midst of the fire, you didn’t see God that day. Then why make
a statue now is essentially what’s being communicated to them so
that you do not act corruptly and make a graven image for yourselves
in the form of any figure. And look at what he starts with.
In the likeness of male or female. It’s exactly what Paul started
with. Corruptible man. We’ll come back to that in a
moment. In the likeness of an animal that is on the earth.
And here the order is a little bit different, but he’ll get
there. He’ll cover all of the points that Paul does. The order
isn’t important. It’s to show us the manifold
way that mankind has gone about making idols, the likeness of
any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird
that flies in the sky. All of it was forbidden, and
yet all of it has been used by the heathen nations, and ultimately
even imbibed by Israel herself. Any winged bird that flies in
the sky, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground. You
know, at least you can even, I suppose, understand how a heathen
nation might make an idol of a massive bull. How a heathen
nation might take a young, robust young man and make a statue of
him and think, yes, this clearly is the epitome. But a bug? An eel? A fish that’s in the
water below the earth? He goes on to say, Beware not
to lift up your eyes to heaven, to see the sun, the moon, the
stars, the host of heaven, to be drawn away and worship them
and serve them, those which the Lord your God has allotted to
all the peoples. But the Lord has taken you and
brought you out of the iron furnace from Egypt to be a people for
His own possession, as today. It’s interesting, the threefold
classification of animals there does seem to mirror that of Genesis
from the days of creation. And to take glory and image and
likeness also taken right from that chapter. What Paul says is this account
of man’s wickedness was stated intentionally. To show that in
terms of the fall of Adam and Eve, what had been placed before
them, they saw they saw what the heathen nations saw. And
yet they took that glory, they crafted an image and tried to
make a likeness of God. First of all, let’s look first
at the corruptible man. Now, this mirrors what was said
of God, God is incorruptible, man is corruptible. It doesn’t
mean he’s on the take ready to take a bribe. It doesn’t mean
that he’s ready to fall morally. It means that his body is slowly
going downhill, undergoing decay. And it says that they actually
have the audacity to make a statue of all things a man. And you think of immediately
Roman gods, Romans were Notorious for this and making
idols of mankind. You remember the passages and
acts that we read where Paul was strolling along and they
were everywhere. Apollo. Cupid, Diana, Hercules, Jupiter,
Mars, Mercury, Neptune, Venus. Now, in the Greek culture, the
names might change a little bit, but they had their common gods. Apollo, Eris, Artemis, Zeus,
Ares, Hermes, Poseidon, Aphrodite, all of them. An image in the
form of corruptible man. That’s exactly what’s being spoken
of. As I said, corrupt here is not
used in a moral sense at all. I mean, there certainly are corrupt
idols, as we will see. There were idols that promoted
immorality. Which is really the point of
this entire section, but what he’s talking about here doesn’t
have anything to do with their morals. But with regard to their
ever weakening constitution, it’s the human frame. From what
I hear and read and from what others have told me, our bodies,
as we age. Don’t hold up so well. From very careful research. I
have determined that age 24 is the apex. You’re never going
to feel any better than you do at 24. Everything from that point
is downhill. You wake up one morning at 25
and you have an ache that somehow won’t go away until well afternoon. And then it returns again the
next morning. Sometime fairly shortly after that you discover
your first gray hair. You think it’s an anomaly. You
think that it’s sun bleaching and it isn’t. Your metabolism begins to change
just after 24. You blow out the candles on the
birthday cake, you have a piece of birthday cake and it’s with
you for the next 50 years. And so interestingly enough,
When you look at images, and particularly what I’m talking
about here is statues of the Greek and Roman gods, the human
form, regardless of how old the guy’s face looks, he has a body
of a 24 year old. They knew the principle well
also. And I’ll tell you who it was.
It was one of the, you know, you pick one of them and they
use the same body for all of them. They put different faces
on them, but it’s always this robust guy. And it isn’t even
a six pack, it’s an eight pack. Big guns, huge thighs, muscular
in every way. And that is, that is to most
people, the image of God. Stephen Charnock saw it a little
differently. Stephen Sharnock said, God inhabits
inaccessible light. As it is impossible for the eye
of man to see him, it is impossible for the art of man to paint him
upon walls and carve him out of wood. No earthly thing can
represent a spiritual substance. God is simple, infinite, immense,
eternal, invisible, incorruptible being, a statue, It’s compounded,
finite, limited, temporal, visible, and a corruptible body. But they
didn’t stop there. Other societies said, well, man,
it’s a pretty inefficient machine. Look what happens over time.
We’re not going to take that as the image of God. We’re going
to go much further. We’re going to set our eyes on
birds and four-footed animals. And here, the society particularly
that comes to mind, especially since God himself mentioned it,
the society that comes to mind is Egypt. Egypt seized upon these
images. If it wasn’t idolatry, and if
it didn’t lead so many people astray, it’s almost laughable. There is one God, Osiris, one
always pictured with a crook, a shepherd’s hook and a flail
for whipping. It was the Egyptian god of the
underworld. Both at the same time, the husband
and the brother of Isis, which in and of itself we would find
horrendous. One recounted of Osiris that
He played a double role. He was both a god of fertility
and the embodiment of the dead and resurrected king. There was one god named Anubis. A jackal headed god in Egyptian
mythology who leads the dead to judgment. That’s who you want
waiting for you at the other side, isn’t it? It is also known
as the god of D.I.A. Because some genius got the idea,
why don’t we post this statue outside of the airport? I mean,
that’s what you want before you go through TSA, right? The god
of the dead. There was Horace, not H-O-R-A-C-E,
H-O-R-U-S. I don’t want you to disavow Uncle
Horace. Horus was a falcon headed, and
this is an interesting image for all to see, a man’s body
with the head of a bird, a falcon headed Egyptian god. He was the
god of light. There was the god of Ra, the
god of the sun, also had the head of a falcon. The myth was
or the story was that he sailed across the heavens in a boat. And at the end of each day, Ra
was understood to die. And then the next morning, born
again, born anew. There was Hathor, the god of
music, with horns of a cow, and everyone knows that cows are
musical. Hathor was the goddess of joy,
motherhood, love. She looked after all the women.
She was the caring one. Goddess of music and dancing. There was Sekhmet, the god of
destruction, who had the head of a lion. There was Seth, the
god of the desert, who had an animal’s head with a long, curved
snout. And no one even knows what the animal is. It’s like
a cross between a dog and an anteater. It’s a strange looking
creature, but you put this head on the head of a man and it’s
God. God of the desert. No one, as
I said, seems to know what it was, but Seth was the God of
the desert, the storm, the violence, all of which are enemies of.
fertile and prosperous lands. And so this was a very popular
God. This was a God that must be appeased because of the sun
got too hot and turned their fields into desert. It was judgment. One of my favorites, at least
image wise, was Thoth or T-H-O-T-H, however you pronounce it in your
house. The God of Wisdom, he had the head of an ibis. Now,
if you don’t know what an ibis is, if you think a bird looks
strange, an ibis has a huge, long beak. And they said that
this was the God of Wisdom because he would supposedly like the
head of the ibis who would probe the sand for bugs and whatnot. This God dipped his beak in ink
and wrote words of wisdom. Creative. There was Mayotte,
the goddess of justice, who had a feather in her hair and wings
of a bird, just in case you began to think that birds didn’t get
their fair share of gods. And then my favorite of all.
Was Bastet, who had the head of a cat. God of the litter box,
not really, but She was the, I’m not kidding you now, she
was the protectress of cats, because in the ancient world,
cats kept vermin away from the grain and they would keep the
palace clean. And so they were almost venerated,
these cats. And so they needed a god to protect
them. And just in case you think that
the crawling creatures didn’t get any play, there were many
cults that worship snakes and alligators, who turned even these belly crawling
creatures into gods. John Calvin, in noting the proclivity
of humanity towards idolatry, said this. He said, Man’s nature is a perpetual
factory of idols. We’re constantly looking about
ways to create a so-called idol. Man’s mind, he said, full as
it is of pride and boldness, dares to imagine a God according
to its own capacity. As it sluggishly plods, indeed
is overwhelmed with the crassest ignorance, it conceives an unreality
and an empty appearance as God. To these evils, a new wickedness
joins itself. That a man tries to express his
work, the sort of God he has inwardly conceived. And like
I said, remember what it started with. It started with musings.
It started with speculation. And then ultimately it leaks
out on paper and then onto the stone or the wood. Therefore,
the mind begets an idol, the hand gives it birth, daily experience
teaches that flesh is always uneasy until it has obtained
some figment like itself, in which it may fondly find solace
in an image of God. Man is a perpetual factory of
idols. And that’s what leads to step
three in this first cycle of judgment. Not only rejection
and replacement, but thirdly, reprobation. Verse 24, therefore,
God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity that
their bodies might be dishonored among them. The consequences ultimately include
a moral condition. God handed them over to a moral
condition that humanity, since they ignored the truth that was
communicated clearly to them, led ultimately to a neglect of
the worship of the true God and ultimately a degeneration into
a vile form of worship. Offensive even to call it worship. This idolatry that these heathen
nations fell into ultimately led to moral corruption. And it took all kinds of different
forms, we’ll see, and I’m not even going to touch on the details
of hardly any of them. Improper dimension, things that
are too vile to even get into. But that was the tendency. The
tendency was to create an idol and then build a so-called worship
around this idol that was utterly degrading. One pastor said it
this way, to lose God is to lose everything, to lose connection
with him involved in constant glorifying and giving him thanks
is to sink into an abyss of darkness, both intellectual and moral.
The sensual impurity of religions in which the incorruptible God
has been resigned for the image of an animal that could not but
creep into the imagination of worshippers and debase it was
a divine judgment. That’s what we focus on at the
moment. that this giving over and giving
in by man is the consequence of his own choice, the act of
idolatry itself. It still is an act of judgment
on God, but it’s God giving them over to what they had already
chosen. Ephesians 419 echoes this same sentiment. They, having
become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice
of every kind of impurity with greediness. I mean, they relish
in their sin. In this section, verses 21 through
32, three times it’s repeated, God gave them over. God gave
them over. God gave them over. It’s an emphatic
device that Paul uses here to suggest and point out that this
was a deliberate act of God. God assessed. And God made a
judgment. And God did something, a positive
act of God. It’s not just that they fell
into idolatry. It’s not just that they fell
into sinful practices. God at some point gave them over. And I think there warrants clarification
even there. It’s not that God made them idolaters. It’s not that God impelled them
to sinful desires and sinful forms of so-called worship. They were already heading on
the right or the wrong path, rather, and God merely stepped
out of the way. As one said, the word gave over
does not signify that God impelled them to evil. The holiness of
God is opposed to such a sense. We must rather think in terms
of God’s permitting of his withholding his help, which alone could prevent. It was not merely passive, though
God permitted men to have their way, nor through deprivation
through his withdrawing his gracious aid, but it was judicial. the appropriate punishment of
their defection, one that was evil and leading to another with
natural consequence. And so does that mean that any
heathen that has been given over to this worship is is unsavable? Not necessarily. They might still
catch a glimpse of light. They might still catch a glimpse
of God and his glory. They might still hear a word
of truth. They might still be led to repentance. So we don’t have the right to
write any of them off. Regardless of what idolatrous
practice they’re involved in, we continue to appeal. We continue
to proclaim the grace of God. We continue to name the name
of Christ and to pray for them. Remember, it’s God that gives
them over, not us. And this state to which they’ve
been handed over. We’ll get more details in the
weeks to come. But it is largely, parents, a
state that we can allude to and we have to allude to so carefully
here that otherwise you would have to go home and spend the
entire day debriefing the children. And so we speak of these things
in very Plain and bland terms, but the state that they’ve been
given over to and given up to is a prison, a sense. Impurity,
sexual immorality. Practiced by these so-called
religions. Of such a kind that is almost
unspeakable. Paul uses the word repeatedly
in writing the epistles, just listen to how Paul used it. And
use your discretion and how that is explained to the little ones.
In 2nd Corinthians 12, 21, I am afraid that when I come again,
my God may humiliate me before you and I may mourn over many
of those who have sinned in the past and not repented of the
impurity, immorality and sensuality which they practice. That’s a
great testimony of the church is when Paul says to the Corinthians,
such were some of you. But that little word that’s so
important is the word. And he’s writing to the Corinthians
to say that there’s some of you that even still are dabbling
in this stuff. To the Galatians, he wrote, now
the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are immorality, impurity,
sensuality. Just fleshliness. To the Ephesians,
he wrote, but immorality or impurity or greed must not even be named
among you. as is proper among Saints, Colossians
3.5. And I want you to listen to the
very end. Therefore, consider the members of your earthly body
as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire and greed,
which amounts to idolatry. You may not have a statue. You
may not have this as part of your so-called cult worship like
so many of the heathen nations did, but to live like that is
to live the life of an idolater. You’ve put self on the throne,
not God. Now, you say, well, we know how
Egypt worshipped. They worshipped cats and people
with bird wings and bird faces. What about the rest of these
nations? What were their so-called gods? Let me take you to Canaan,
just in your mind’s eye for a moment. In Canaan, one describes that
nation as orgiastic nature worship. In other words, not unlike what
we have in Boulder. Orgiastic nature worship, fertility
cults, unbounded license, moral abandon, prostitution was glorified. I’ll tell you about some of their
so-called gods. Baal. Baal was known as God of
the storm. Baal and Astarte worship. We’ll meet up with him in a moment,
his wife. was closely associated of all things with fornication
and drunkenness. That was part of the worship
service. His wife, Astarte, or Ashtoreth,
as she’s sometimes seen in scripture, a statue to her was called an
Asherah. She was the supreme goddess of
Canaan. She was the female counterpart
of Baal. She was the goddess of sensual
love and licentious worship was conducted in honor of her. So
if you really wanted to appease the God, you would be as vile
and corrupt as you could be. We’ll come back to her in a moment.
There was a God and of all names, El. We we pause and think, well,
is it wasn’t the Hebrew God known by El? Yes, he was. It was a
general word for God, and other words were appended to it to
talk about what kind of God this was. Elohim, Elyon, El Shaddai,
and others. But the God of Canaan, the chief
God of Canaan, the head of the so-called pantheon, was named
El. He was a heartless, brutal tyrant. His wives were the patrons of
sex and war. for the Canaanites, his three
wives were also his sisters, which is vile enough to think. One person said of that little
fact, the fluidity of relationship. In other words, the fact that
you can marry sister and the fluidity of relationship is in
accordance with the moral grossness of Canaanite cults. In other
words, it was fitting. It was only appropriate. And
if it started there, it only went downhill in the rest of
society. There was Ammon, the nation of
Ammon, whose god was Molech. You don’t want to go to a worship
service for Molech. One said of it, this detestable
Semitic deity was honored by the sacrifice of children. in
which they were caused to pass through or into the fire, no
form of idolatry was more abhorrent than that of Molech. Let me tell
you what God thought of Molech. Leviticus 18.1 warned Israel
severely. You shall not give any of your
offspring to offer them to Molech, nor
shall you profane the name of the Lord your God. I am the Lord. And then later in that same section,
in chapter 20 and verse two through five, you shall say to the sons
of Israel, this is how severe this warning was. You shall say
to the sons of Israel, any man from the sons of Israel Or from
the alien sojourning in Israel, if any of these people wander
into your camp and they want to bring their idolatry with
them. Here’s the fix. Any sojourning who gives any
of his offspring to Molech shall surely be put to death and they
met on the spot. The people shall land stone is
people of the land shall stone him with stones. I will also
set my face against that man and will cut him off from among
his people because he has given some of his offspring to Molech
so as to defile my sanctuary and profane my holy name. If
the people of the land, whoever should ever disregard that man.
And how common is that for humans to look down our nose and say,
well, I can’t judge him. If you ever disregard that man
when he gives birth to any of his offspring to Molech so as
not to put him to death, then I myself will set my face against
that man and against his family. I will cut him off from among
their people, both him and all those who play the harlot after
him by playing the harlot after Molech. I don’t think God liked
Molech. Babylon, the nation of Babylon,
had its false gods. Nebo was the god of wisdom and
literature. Bell was kind of the patron,
the head god of Babylon. The Hebrews, though, called him
Merodach, a sun god. There was Ishtar and Dagon. Dagon’s a particularly fascinating
one because he’s one of the few gods that has the body of a man,
but the tail of a fish. And there was no girl who will
see we’ll meet up with momentarily. Assyria had its gods, Ashur,
Ishtar, Nabu. Moab had its gods. Chemosh was
one of them. He was honored with rights that
were very similar to that of Molech, the worship of Molech
involving children in the worship service. The Assyria, as I told
you, was a A pole that was it was an idle pole that was dedicated
to a start or ashtorette. Often pictured without clothing,
riding the lion. And they called her the holy
one. And then last of all, there was
Temus, who was called the most seductive of all. The rites of
Tammuz, the rites, r-i-t-e-s, the worship, the celebrations
in her name, included a divine marriage where the king would
annually, mind you, they would annually marry the fertility
goddess. who is represented as a temple
priestess. And so year after year, this
went on and that whole scene was attended with idolatrous
and sensual worship as well. Let me tell you how bad it got
in Israel. In First Kings, it’s recorded
King Solomon loved many foreign women. That sounds so nice on
the face of it. He was such a nice guy and had
so much cultural diversity. King Solomon loved many foreign
women along with the daughter of Pharaoh, Moabite, Ammonite,
Edomite, Sidonian, Hittite women, from the nations concerning which
the Lord had said to the sons of Israel, you shall not associate
with them, nor shall they associate with you. For they will surely
turn your heart away after their gods. Parents, you know what
the discussion topic is at lunch today? Solomon held fast to these
in love. He had 700 wives, princesses,
300 concubines, and his wives, understandably, turned his heart
away. To what? When Solomon was old,
his wives turned his heart away after other gods. His heart was
not wholly devoted to the Lord. His God is the heart of David.
His father had been for Solomon went after Ashtoreth, the God
of the Sidonians and after Milcom, the detestable idol of the Ammonites. Solomon did what was evil in
the sight of the Lord. He did not follow his Lord fully
as David, his father, had done. Then Solomon built a high place
for Kimosh, the detestable idol of Moab. and for Molech, the
detestable idol of the sons of Anon. Thus also he did for all
his foreign wives, who burned incense and sacrificed to other
gods. Now the Lord was angry with Solomon,
because his heart was turned away from the Lord, the God of
Israel, who had appeared to him twice and commanded him concerning
this thing, that he should not go after other gods, for he did
not observe what the Lord had commanded. So the Lord said to
Solomon. Because you have done this and
have not kept my covenant, my statutes, which I commanded you,
I will surely tear the kingdom from you and will give it to
your servant. Nevertheless, I will not do it in your days for the
sake of your father, David, but I will tear it out of the hand
of your own your son. However, I will not tear away
all the kingdom that will give you one tribe to your son. For the sake of my servant David
and for the sake of Jerusalem, which I have chosen, even in
this God had mercy. So the penalty. Of deliberating
about the character and. Nature of God and the speculation
that went with it and the musing. degenerated ultimately into idolatry
and that idolatry degenerated into this moral abject failure. As one said, the penalty inflicted
belongs to the moral sphere As distinguished from the spiritual,
spiritual degeneracy is penalized by abandonment to idolatry. Sin
in the spiritual realm is punished by sin in the moral sphere. They
were given over to this unclean and ungodly life. They were given over in the lusts
of their hearts. We’ve already identified it.
It started in here. They lost sight of God. They
replaced their affection with God for an affection for something
else. It started in the lust of their
hearts. Their desires just ran amok and God gave them over.
Why? That their bodies might be dishonored
among them. God wanted them to reap the consequence
of what they had done in abandoning him. And we’ll see that in great
detail. in the second cycle of judgment,
next Lord’s Day. Sin has consequences. False ideas
about God has consequences. And God will be glorified in
all things. Let’s humble ourselves before
Him. For Heavenly Father, We do humble
ourselves in the midst of this solemn passage when we see how
prevalent idolatry was and is. That mankind, having this huge
void in their hearts, as they cannot look to you and glorify
you as God, must replace it with something else. And as soon as
they do, that downward and degrading spiral begins. Oh, God, keep
any of us from that. Help us to see who you are. Help us to be faithful to seek
you out. Help us to acknowledge all that
you have shown yourself to be in creation and be led to a pure
worship of you through what your son has accomplished on the cross.
Father God, help us to recognize also the detestable ideas of
the world. Those ideas that lead astray,
those ideas and practices and habits that become idols, just
like these little statues. God, grant us the grace to be
drawn closer to you, that we could be what Israel was not.
A shining light. in the midst of a dark land.
It’s in Jesus’ name that we pray, Amen.