God versus Moloch God versus Moloch

3. God versus Moloch

Calvin, in his excellent classification of the law in his Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses Arranged in the Form of a Harmony, cites Deuteronomy 18:9-22; 13:1-4; Leviticus 18:21;

19:26, 31; and Deuteronomy 12:29-32, as basic to the first commandment. These passages relate to man’s attempt to know and control the future. Since God is the LORD,, the Maker of heaven and earth, and the determiner of all things, any attempt to know and control the future outside of God is to set up another god in contempt of the LORD.

Every form of illicit probing of the future is cited by Moses:

When thou art come into the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee. Thou shalt be perfect (or, upright) with the LORD thy God. For these nations, which thou shalt possess, hearkened unto observers of times, and unto diviners;

but as for thee, the LORD thy God hath not suffered thee so to do. (Deut. 18:9- 14)

And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the LORD. (Lev. 18:21)

Ye shall not eat any thing with the blood: neither shall ye use enchantment, nor observe times. (Lev. 19:26)

Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them: I am the LORD your God. (Lev. 19:31)

When the LORD thy God shall cut off the nations from before thee, whither thou goest to possess them, and thou succeedest them, and dwellest in their land; Take heed to thyself that thou be not snared by following them, after that they be destroyed from before thee; and that thou enquire not after their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods? even so will I do likewise. Thou shalt not do so unto the LORD thy God: for every abomination to the LORD, which he hateth, have they done unto their gods; for even their sons and their daughters they have burnt in the fire to their gods. What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it. (Deut. 12:29-32)

Calvin’s comment on Deuteronomy 18:9-14 gets to the heart of the matter:

Moses explains clearly in this passage what it is to have other gods, viz., to mix up the worship of God with things profane, since its purity is only thus maintained by banishing from it all uncongenial superstitions. The sum, therefore, is, that the people of God should abstain from all the inventions of men, whereby pure and simple religion is adulterated.53

Equally to the point is the observation of another commentator:

Moses groups together all the words which the language contained for the different modes of exploring the future and discovering the will of God, for the

purpose of forbidding every description of soothsaying, and places the prohibition of Moloch-worship at the head, to show the inward connection between soothsaying and idolatry, possibly because februation, or passing children through the fire in the worship of Moloch, was more intimately connected with soothsaying and magic than any other description of idolatry.54

A wide variety of practices is cited. An “enchanter” is a whisperer or snake charmer; a witch, one who uses charms or spells; a wizard, one who claimed to know the secrets of the other world; a necromancer, one who enquires of the dead, and so on.55 But the key evil is Moloch-worship. The word Moloch (or Melech, Melek, Malik), meaning king , is a misvocalization of the name of a pagan, the consonants ofking being retained and the vowels of shame used. Human sacrifice was made to this god, who is identified as the god of Ammon in 1 Kings 11:7, 33. There are references to Moloch in Jeremiah 49:1, 3; Amos 1:15; Zephaniah 1:5; Leviticus 18:21; 20:2-5; 2 Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 32:35, etc., and the location of Moloch worship in Israel was the Valley of Hinnom (Jer. 32:35; 2 Kings 23:10). Moloch worship was not limited to Ammon.56

Moloch is “the king” or “kingship.” The name of Moloch is also given as Milcom (1 Kings 6:5, 33) and Malcam (Jer. 49:1, 3, RV; Zeph. 1:5). Moloch was an aspect of Baal (Jer. 32:35), Baal meaning lord. Under the name of Melcarth, king of Tyre, Baal was worshiped with human sacrifices at Tyre.57

While relatively little is known of Moloch, much more is known of the concept of divine kingship, the king as god, and the god as king, as the divine-human link between heaven and earth. The god-king represented man on a higher scale, man ascended, and the worship of such a god, i.e., of such a Baal, was the assertion of the continuity of heaven and earth. It was the belief that all being was one being, and the god therefore was an ascended man on that scale of being. The power manifested in the political order was thus a manifestation or apprehension and seizure of divine power. It represented the triumph of a man and of his people. Moloch worship was thus a political religion.

Since Moloch represented kingship and power, sacrifices to Moloch represented the purchase, at the very least, of immunity or insurance and protection, and, at its highest claim, of power. The “higher” sacrifices in paganism, and especially Baal worship, were sacrifices of humanity, i.e., self-mutilations, notably castration, the sacrifice of children or of posterity, and the like. The

priest became identified with the god to the degree that he “departed” from humanity by his castration, his separation from normal human relationships, and his abnormalities. The king became identified with the god to the degree that he manifested absolute power. The sacrifice of children was the supreme sacrifice to Moloch. Moloch worship entered Israel when Solomon built an altar for Moloch for his foreign wives, the Ammonites in particular. Apparently, Solomon

limited the sacrificial scope of that altar, because many generations passed before the first human sacrifice, but Solomon’s act (1 Kings 11:7- 8) had introduced the cult into Israel. Moloch worship was thus state worship. The state was the true and ultimate order, and religion was a department of state. The state claimedtotal jurisdiction over man; it was therefore entitled to total sacrifice. T. Robert Ingram, in his excellent study of law, virtually the only work of merit on the law in generations, rightly links the first commandment to the proscription of statism and totalitarianism. Speaking of “the government which would arrogate to itself all power and bow before no other,” Ingram comments:

The modern word for such a government is totalitarian: a government that arrogates to itself total power. The crowning goal of Satan is to have a totalitarian world government. We who have known something of God the Creator know that total power can resideonly in Him. Clearly the maker of anything is greater than anything he might make. The very possibility of a Frankenstein monster, the creation of human hands that can destroy humans and not be destroyed by them, is a false image of distorted reason. It presupposes a supernatural evil genius which deceives men into thinking they have made something while really they have been but passive agents of an unknown power. The potter can do what he will with his clay.

It is certain that the ultimate in supremacy, the greatest power there is, is the power to give existence to everything that is. God alone owes His own being to no other and has eternal existence in Himself. The mere possibility of total power residing anywhere forces us to recognize it in the Creator. Total power can be seated nowhere else. Any person who refuses to acknowledge that all things were made (and hence there is a Maker) simply rules out any consideration of the fact that total power exists anywhere. Thus we may say that for both Christians and non-Christians there is no reasonable way to establish total power anywhere but

in the Creator of all things. Apart from Him, all power is divided and thereby limited.58

For a state to claim total jurisdiction, as the modern state does, is to claim to be as god, to be the total governor of man and the world. Instead of limited law and limited jurisdiction, the modern anti-Christian state claims jurisdiction from cradle to grave, from womb to tomb, over welfare, education, worship, the family, business and farming, capital and labor, and all things else. The modern state is a Moloch, demanding Moloch worship: it claims total jurisdiction over man and hence requires total sacrifice.

But, as Ingram observes, with respect to worship, “Only the power who is to be worshipped can ordain the manner in which he is to be worshipped.”59 _{Similarly, only the power who is ultimate}

has the right to be the source of law. God is the only true source of law; the state is an agency of law, one agency among many (church, school, family, etc.), and has a specified and limited area of law to administer under God. The Moloch state denies any such boundaries: it insists on taxing at will, expropriating at its pleasure by “eminent domain,” and it claims the right to force the youth into warfare and death at the pleasure of the state.

The Moloch state is the product of apostasy. When a people reject God as their King, and make a man or the state their king (1 Sam. 8:7-9), God declares the consequences:

This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: he will take your sons, and appoint them unto him, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and they shall run before his chariots. And he will appoint them unto him for captains of thousands, and captains of fifties; and to plow his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and the instruments of his chariots. And he will take your daughters to be perfumers, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even to the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. And he will take your men-servants, and your maid-servants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your flocks; and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that day because

of your king whom ye shall have chosen you; and the LORD will not answer you in that day. (1 Sam. 8:11-18 MTV)

Several aspects of the state which rejects God are here cited: First , an antibiblical military conscription will be instituted and enforced. Second , there will be compulsory labor battalions conscripted for state service. Third , the conscription will be of young men and young women, and of animals as well. Fourth, the state will expropriate property, both landed property and livestock. Fifth, because the state is now playing god-king, it will demand like God a tithe, a tenth of man’s

increase as its tax.Sixth, God will not hear a people who are complaining at paying the price for their sins.

All these conditions are met and surpassed by the modern Moloch state, which refuses to be content with a tithe but demands a tax equal to several tithes. In some countries, the local tax required is an incredible seizure. Thus, “The late Luigi Einaudi, Italy’s foremost economist and ex-President of the Republic, calculated that, if every tax on the statute books was fully collected, the State would absorb 110% of the national income.”60

The Moloch state simply represents the supreme effort of man to command the future, to predestine the world, and to be as God. Lesser efforts, divination, spirit-questing, magic, and

witchcraft, are equally anathema to God. All represent efforts to have the future on other than God’s terms, to have a future apart from and in defiance of God. They are assertions that the world is not of God but of brute factuality, and that man can somehow master the world and the future by going directly to the raw materials thereof. Thus King Saul outwardly conformed to God’s law by abolishing all black arts, but, when faced with a crisis, he turned to the witch of Endor (1 Sam. 28). Saul knew where he stood with God: in rebellion and unrepentant. Saul knew, moreover, the judgment of the law and of the prophet Samuel concerning him (1 Sam. 15:10-35). Samuel alive had declared God’s future to Saul. In going to the witch of Endor, Saul attempted to reach Samuel dead, in the faith and hope that Samuel dead was now in touch with and informed concerning a world of brute factuality outside of God which could offer Saul a God-free, law-free future. But the word from the grave only underscored God’s law-word (1 Sam. 28:15-19): it was the word of judgment.

Astrology is to be included in the ungodly probings which cannot put off or charm away judgment (Isa. 47:10-14).

In Leviticus 19:26, divination and soothsaying are forbidden in the same sentence as the eating of blood. Davis’s definition of the meaning of blood in the Bible deserves quotation in full as a

succinct statement of the matter:

BLOOD. The vital fluid circulating through the body, and conveyed by a system of deep-seated arteries from the heart to the extremities, and by a system of superficial veins back again to the heart. . . . The life is in the blood (Lev. xvii. 11, 14): or the blood is the life (Deut. xii. 23), though not exclusively (Ps. civ. 30). The blood represented the life, and so sacred is life before God that the blood of murdered Abel could be described as crying to God from the ground for vengeance (Gen. iv. 10); and immediately after the flood the eating of the blood of the lower animals was forbidden, although their slaughter for food was authorized (ix. 3, 4; Acts xv. 20, 29), and the law was laid down, “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed” (Gen. ix. 6). The loss of life is the penalty for sin, and its typical vicarious surrender was necessary for remission (Heb. ix. 22), and so, under the Mosaic law the blood of animals was used in all offerings for sin, and the blood of beasts killed on the hunt or slaughtered for food was poured out and covered with earth, because withheld by God f rom man’s consumption and reserved for purposes of atonement (Lev. xvii. 10-14; Deut. xii. 15, 16). The “blood of Jesus,” the “blood of Christ,” the “blood of Jesus Christ,” or “the blood of the Lamb,” are figurative expressions for his atoning death (I Cor. x. 16; Eph. ii. 13; Heb. ix. 14; x. 19; I Pet. i. 2, 19; I John i:7; Rev. vii. 14; xii. 11).61

Since life is given by God and is to be lived on His terms alone, no life of man or beast can be taken except on God’s terms, whether by the state, by man to eat, or by man in his self-defense. To attempt to govern or to take life apart from God’s permission, and apart from His service, is like attempting to govern the world and the future apart from God. For this reason, Leviticus 19:26 puts the eating of blood, divination, and soothsaying all on the same level as the same sin in essence.

Deuteronomy 18:13 commands, “Thou shalt be perfect (or, upright; ‘whole-hearted,’ MTV; ‘ blameless,’ Berkeley Version) with the LORD thy God.” This is part of the often repeated

commandment, “Ye shall be holy: for I the LORD your God am holy” (Ex. 19:6; Lev. 11:44; 19:2; 20:7, 26; 1 Thess. 4:7; I Peter 1:15-16, etc.). To beholy means literally to be separated, i.e., set apart from a common to a sacred use. The utensils and vessels of the sanctuary, the ministers, and certain days, were separated unto God’s special service and hence holy (Ex. 20:8; 30:31; 31:10-11; Num. 5:17; Zech. 14:21). The defilement from lack of separation could be ceremonial and physical (Ex. 22:31; Lev. 20:26), or it could be spiritual and moral (Lev. 20:6-7; 21:6; 2 Cor. 7:1; 1 Thess. 4:7;). The holiness of God is His separation from all created being as the uncreated and creating Being, infinite in wisdom, power, justice, goodness, truth, and glory. The true holiness of man is man’s separation unto God in faith and in obedience to God’s law. The law is thus the specified way of holiness.

Moloch worship seeks a nontheistic, a nonbiblical way to holiness. It seeks to set itself apart as the power and the glory by means of sacrifices designed to transcend humanity. St. Paul specified some of these ways of false holiness as “forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving… for it is sanctified (made holy) by the word of God and prayer” (1 Tim. 4:3-5).

Very often, societies have sacrificed men in order to dedicate and sanctify a building, to give it power. Writing in 1909, Lawson reported, in his study of lingering paganism in Greece: “…it was

reported from Zacynthos only a generation ago that a strong feeling still existed there in favour of sacrificing a Mohammedan or a Jew at the foundation of important bridges and other buildings; and there is a legend of a black man having been actually immured in the bridge of an aqueduct near Lebadea in Boeotia.”62 _{Strack, in the course of disproving any special racial blood ritual}

among the Jews, did call attention to extensive evidences of superstitious human sacrifices and animal sacrifices in modern Europe.

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Man’s attempts to control the world and to be the source of predestination lead also to false prophets. The law governing this declares:

If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, And the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou has not known, and let us serve them; Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the LORD your God proveth you, to know whether ye

love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul. Ye shall walk after the LORD your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and