Episode Transcript
Let's take our Bibles and turn to 2 Kings 17.
2 Kings 17.
And let's remember to turn our cell phones on silent.
We're going to finish verse 16 and go into 17 today.
And in our study last week, we were looking at the specific ways the children of Israel left God's commandments.
2 Kings 17.
And I encourage you to listen to the recording of last week's lesson on Facebook if you were not here or you were not able to listen on the internet last week.
But today we're going to continue with what separates the followers of the Lord from the followers of Baal.
And our concluding observation last week was that nowhere in the Bible do we read about the word of Baal.
We don't read, thus saith the Lord Baal, anything like that.
And if Baal had no word, then Baal's prophets and priests were just shooting from the hip, making up their own rules and laws.
And if you notice, and that's a cult by the way, that's exactly what cult leaders do, is turn the religious practices and doctrines of their group, of their followers, to benefit themselves.
It always works out that way.
1 Peter 1, verse 25, if you're taking notes, write that down, says this,
But the word of the Lord endureth forever.
And this is the word by which the gospel is preached unto you.
Now that's a very important passage for you to know, because if the word of the Lord endures forever, that means it's good for all time, past, present, future.
It doesn't have a beginning and it doesn't have an expiration. It's always been.
And that verse said, and this is the word, that enduring word, this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you.
So the gospel preachers have a source for what they're preaching to you, for what we're preaching to you, and it's the enduring word of the Lord.
So when I give you the enduring word of the Lord from the scriptures, I'm not shooting from the hip.
I'm not making up my own rules. I wouldn't have come up with the gospel anyway.
I never would have thought of something like that. Neither would anybody else for that matter.
And as we noted last week, there are many similarities between the followers of Baal and the followers of the Lord,
but the differences between them are even greater than the similarities.
Because the word of the Lord is settled, is endures forever, nobody can alter it.
In fact, Psalm 119 verse 89, Psalm 119 verse 89 says,
forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven.
So I've given you two passages and there are many more like them, two passages that tell you God's word endures and God's word is settled.
There's not anything to be done to it or with it, except to obey it, to believe it.
And of course, there will be those who pervert God's word, who teach heresy, they deny certain doctrines of the Bible and so on.
There are and will continue to be those who claim that everything you see came from some kind of explosion billions of years ago
and that the said explosion somehow produced order, which in turn produced changes through this heresy called evolution.
Now, I'll tell you something, if I bought a stick of dynamite and I went out to blow something up and it put it back into order, I'd go get my money back.
That's the silliest notion I've ever heard.
But there are people with all kinds of letters after their name who say they believe that.
But those people who denied or changed or added to God's word can never in fact change God's word.
So get that. Why is it? Because the word of the Lord endures forever and forever his word is settled in heaven.
So somebody may say, I've heard people say, well, they've they've changed the word of God.
Well, they actually haven't changed it because you can't change it. They've changed what they've said about it.
They've lied about it. They've added to it and taken away from it in their preaching and their teaching.
But in fact, they haven't changed it. And it's been said about prayer the same way.
You've heard people say, and maybe you said it. They've taken prayer out of schools.
Nobody can take prayer out of schools or the workplace or the home or anywhere else.
Now, prayer may not be allowed over the loudspeaker.
There may be rules and laws that prohibit the classroom from praying together out loud or a teacher led prayer
or perhaps organized prayer is not allowed on the athletic field, but nobody can stop anybody from praying.
And nobody can change God's word. Just what they say about it.
I can promise you there was no organized prison led prayer when the apostle Paul was in the dungeon.
That wasn't a place of prayer. But he made it so he prayed nonetheless.
So even being in prison, shackled in a dungeon, could not stop the apostle Paul from praying.
And it's the same with God's word, which is settled forever in heaven.
And because God's word is settled, now we're contrasting this word with the word of Baal, which doesn't exist.
Because God's word has settled, then his people will never be misled if we stick to his word.
And I know that sounds kind of simple and cliche, but it's true.
And until everybody obeys it, we're going to keep saying it.
And not everybody's going to obey it. So we're going to say it until it's time for us to go be with the Lord.
God's word never uses tricks or gimmicks or manipulation. Only truth. Saving truth.
And by following God's word, we follow God.
So if someone says, well, I just want to do God's will. I just don't know what that is right now.
Well, then you didn't look in your Bible. It's all over the place.
God's will is in the Bible. Now, if you're saying, well, God didn't tell me yet exactly which job I should apply for.
He's not going to do that. Not going to tell you his word doesn't say in the four and 20th day of the month of November.
Andy Shepherd will apply for such and said, doesn't say that.
He gives me guiding principles and truths about what my work should be and who it should honor and what is honorable and so forth.
But he doesn't lead me astray.
And by demanding and in fact accepting only truth from the teachers of God's word,
nobody will be led astray by the sinful flesh of the charlatans who desire to lord over us and use us and throw us away.
And that's what the prophets of Baal did. That's what the priests of Baal did to the people.
Well, how could the followers of Baal here in verse 16, it says, and they served Baal.
How could the followers of Baal be sure that they were being told right or wrong by the prophets of Baal?
How could they be sure? Well, now let's just stop right there and let's say I make a statement in here.
I make a bold statement and brother Doug wants to be sure that what I said was right or that it was wrong.
Where do you think he's going to go?
Buddy, he's going to shuffle through the pages of that Bible and say, I know where that is.
And if he doesn't, he's going to look it up and he's going to open it up and say, that's right. Amen.
That's what that that man said is true because I have the enduring settled word of God that says the same thing he just did.
Or he's going to say, oh, no, no, what he said is the exact opposite of what the Bible says. And here it is.
So he has somewhere to go check. And so do you, by the way.
In fact, we expect you to do that.
To verify what's being preached.
But the followers of Baal couldn't do that.
How did they know whether the prophets of Baal and the priests of Baal were telling them the truth about their religion?
There were no Berean Baal worshippers who searched the scriptures daily to see if the things those apostles or those preachers of Baal were telling them were so.
You know, Paul commended the Berean Christians. He said they searched the scriptures daily to see if those things were so.
In other words, those Berean Christians didn't just say, oh, that's the apostle Paul. Well, that's Peter. That's the apostle.
So and so they must be telling the truth. Surely they wouldn't lie to me.
That's how you get led astray right there is by believing that because a man you admire said something, that it's got to be true.
And you base that upon your admiration of that man rather than whether he is telling the truth or not.
Those priests and prophets of Baal were the classic manipulators, just like false preachers are today.
And they wrote their own laws and rules and they did it in a very sinister way, the same way Satan does.
He's the author of this. They paralleled God's word.
They walked right alongside of it and said, all right, we'll make our we'll be sure we have a prophet because the Christian religion has prophets.
So we'll have a prophet and we'll be sure that we have sacrifices because they have sacrifices.
So we better make it look an awful lot like that. That's what Satan does. He's the great counterfeiter, isn't he?
They mimicked the ordinances and commands of the Lord, but they stopped short of obeying those commands.
And today's prophets of Baal are the same counterfeiters. They may be called something different rather than prophets of Baal.
But they're the same counterfeiters because they appeal to the desire that religious desire people have inside them.
You know, man has in his heart a concept of a creator.
You can go anywhere in the world and speak to any people group and they're going to have some concept of a creator, even if they are not Christians.
They will acknowledge there's some force bigger and better than I am.
There's something that we don't know whether they acknowledge the one true God or not.
Did you know even atheist and agnostics have that sense?
They may tell you, oh, no, no, no, everything's done when you die.
You don't really believe that. It takes more faith to believe that probably than it does to be a Christian.
Because we have God's word telling us what happened when what's going to happen.
And atheists just have their own thoughts about what's going to happen.
They may agree with what has happened minus the supernatural.
They may agree with historical accounts of certain things in the world, but they have no idea what's going to happen after they die.
They don't have anything to base it on.
So they just say, well, there's no God. That's what atheism is. No God, atheist.
I know of a dear lady who is an unbeliever.
She believes in evolution and does not believe in God.
And by her own statement of faith, which atheism does require a great deal of, the dead are simply received into the earth.
And they decompose and that's it. That's what she has to believe.
And to believe in an afterlife would require her to believe in some type of being greater than herself,
perhaps even believing in some kind of a judgment.
And that cannot coexist with atheism. It cannot.
Because atheism is a secular, selfish religion. It is self-centered.
It means when I'm done, everything's done.
There's nothing for me after I die. That's what atheism would have to agree with.
And this dear lady's parents are both dead. They passed away at different times.
But both of them were cremated.
And the lady of whom I speak had a special urn, a wooden urn, made for their ashes.
It's a wooden box.
And I saw it before she had her parents' ashes put in it.
And I saw it after it was built.
And on one side will go her father's ashes and on the other side will be her mother's ashes.
And in the middle there's a partition to keep them separate.
Do you know what she did? Do you know what she built between the two sides of that urn?
She carved a little tunnel out at the bottom, a little hole.
And she said that the reason she did that was so her parents' ashes could mingle.
Now, what did that just tell you about her atheism?
She's got doubts, doesn't she? She has some doubts.
Because to the true atheist, there is no co-mingling. It's just a bunch of carbon.
You've just been reduced to ashes. There is no you anymore.
There is no father and mother. Those are just ashes. They're gone.
And it tells me that she has some notion that her parents are going to be together after death or in death, somehow,
with the mixing of these ashes. And I and others have prayed for this dear lady for decades,
that she would repent of her unbelief and put her trust in Jesus for salvation.
For the worshippers of Baal in our study, their religion becomes one that pleases the flesh.
But it appears to be quite spiritual as well.
In fact, it is spiritual. It's just the wrong kind of spirit, isn't it?
You know, Baal worship in some form or another has been there since the Garden of Eden and will be there.
In fact, you could even argue that it was in heaven when Lucifer and his host disobeyed the Lord and rebelled.
That would be the beginning of it. But on earth, it's been here since the Garden of Eden.
And it's going to continue to be here until Jesus redeems his creation completely from all evil.
Look in verse 17. Verse 16 told us what the children of Israel themselves did.
And this next verse is even more horrifying because it's about what they did to their children.
It says in verse 17, and they caused their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire
and used divination and enchantments and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the Lord to provoke him to anger.
And they caused their sons and daughters to pass through the fire.
It wasn't enough for the Israelites themselves to go astray from the truth they knew.
Now they've led their children astray from a truth they never knew by passing them through the fire.
When we have children, nobody has to tell us to love and protect our children unless there is something seriously wrong with the parents' mental health.
In fact, it would take quite a brainwashing to cause a parent to knowingly deliver their children unto certain death.
And not only did this happen in the time about which we are reading, but it will happen again.
We have Jesus' word on that.
In Matthew chapter 10, Jesus was telling the apostles about how hard this road was going to be for them after he sent them into the world with the gospel message.
He said, here's what you signed up for. Here's what you've been called to.
And in verse 21 of that chapter, it's Matthew 10, 21, Jesus said,
And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child, and the children shall rise up against their parents and cause them to be put to death.
That word, deliver, in the verse I just read you, is translated as the word betray 40 times in the New Testament.
And yes, for a father to deliver up a child, or a child to deliver up a father to death is betrayal. That's what it is.
And betrayal is exactly what it is for the worshipers of Baal.
They have betrayed their children, but you know who they betrayed first? They betrayed God.
And once you betray God, it's much easier to walk down that road, because when you betray God, you deny what his word says.
You deny that all of the things he's told us about how to care for our children.
So what does it mean to pass through the fire? You have that in your text, and they cause their sons and daughters to pass through the fire.
To pass through the fire, you have to go into the fire first, don't you? You're not in the fire.
Now you go into the fire, and then you pass through the fire. And of course, this fire was not one that would be survived.
And when we think about it, it's the opposite of what a parent would do naturally to protect a child.
We teach our children not to touch the stove.
Now I'll tell you, it's a cruel thing to grow up in a house with an electric stove, because you really don't know when it's hot until you've already put your hand on it.
With a gas stove, you see the flame, and you say, hey, the stove is on.
But as I did my children, and you probably did yours, we teach them not to touch the stove because we don't want them to learn that lesson the hard way.
We don't say, well, I'm going to turn it on, and I'm going to see what happens.
And when he goes up there and touches it, and it burns his little finger, that'll teach him, and then maybe he'll never do it again.
We would never do that, not in our right minds.
We don't want our children to hurt. When they hurt, we hurt.
But it still happens, doesn't it? They'll still touch the stove.
Now I want you to imagine as we think about the children of Israel causing their children to pass through the fire,
what if a parent said, I'm going to cause my children to pass through the traffic on the interstate and hope they can make it across the highway?
Well, that'd be a foolish notion, wouldn't it?
So there had to be a purpose for this passing through the fire, and we're going to look at that purpose.
It's shown to us in Leviticus chapter 18 and verse 21, if you'll write that down.
Leviticus chapter 18 verse 21.
And this is where God forbids the children of Israel from causing their children to pass through the fire.
Here's what it says.
And thou shalt not let any of thy seed, that means your children, your offspring, pass through the fire to Molech, with a capital N.
Neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God, I am the Lord.
So in that Leviticus verse, it tells us to whom the children of Israel were forbidden to pass their children through the fire to Molech.
They passed them through the fire, and Leviticus teaches us that it wasn't just to see if they could handle the heat, it was to Molech.
God said, don't do it.
And what I want to emphasize in that verse in Leviticus is the very small, huge word of preposition, to, to Molech.
Passing to Molech is the problem here.
It's bad enough to put the children through the fire, but they were doing it to pass them to Molech.
And Molech means king.
And history tells us this was the name of one of the false gods of the heathen at that time.
So the wicked Israelite parents were causing their children not only to pass through the fire,
but we may infer in our text based on what God said in Leviticus, that they were sending them through the fire to Molech.
In other words, they were trying to please the God Molech, which is no God, is a false God.
By passing their children to the fire, by submitting their children to the requirement that was placed upon them by the makers of the religion of Molech.
Whether it be the religion of Molech or Baal or Astoroth or any of the other false gods, it's all got one author, and that's Satan.
Now let's contrast that for a moment with what God commands parents when it comes to pleasing Him with their children.
I could turn to many places, but I'll give you 2 Chronicles chapter 30 and verse 9.
2 Chronicles chapter 30 and verse 9, where God says to the children of Israel, listen for the prepositions here,
For if you turn again unto the Lord, or you could just say to the Lord, your brethren and your children shall find compassion before them that lead them captive,
So that they shall come again into this land, for the Lord your God is gracious and merciful, and will not turn away his face from you if you return unto him.
So yes, there were many prepositions, and if you circled them all, I'm so proud of you, girls, boys, if you did that.
But the ones unto and unto, those are the ones I want you to really look at.
God said, if you return to Me, that means they were away from Him for a while.
You return to Me. You're not going to find what you find when you go to Molech.
You're not going to pass through a fire and be burned to death to try to please a false God.
You return to Me, even though you've been far away from Me, you return to Me.
You'll find compassion even among your captors.
You'll find grace and mercy from the Lord.
And I said, the Lord will not turn my face away from you.
Well, that's a whole different set of circumstances than passing the children through the fire to Molech.
And the result of turning to Molech rather than God is, and passing your children through the fire to Him, is death.
That's the result. It's death.
The child dies, and guess what? Molech is still not pleased.
Because another parent passes his child through the fire, and that child dies, and it goes on and on,
because some priest, some prophet of that false religion said so.
You notice these radical Muslim leaders, well, you don't see them volunteering to wear the suicide vest, do you?
They want other people to do vest jihad or whatever they call it.
But you don't see them signing up for it.
You don't see them sending their sons for that. They don't really believe in it like that.
The children of Israel knew the truths about God that we read in that 2 Chronicles passage.
They knew them, but they rejected them.
The devil's real. He's powerful.
And by submitting to the Lord, you have the power to resist Him, but without the Lord, you're no match for Him.
You'll pass your children through the fire to Molech just like these others did, except maybe not in that actual, literal way.
Just like there was no word of Baal, there was no word of Molech either.
So the word of Molech was nothing more than the word of sinful man.
And when we read about a child being passed through the fire, the most obvious image in our mind is of that child screaming, terrified,
being tortured by that flame and being burned to death in a fire to which their parents delivered them.
Can you imagine that image of that child reaching for mom and dad and mom and dad going,
oh, we're trying to please Molech? What a terrible scene.
The child's cries for help were ignored by the very people who were supposed to be their protectors.
But even more egregious than that was the fact that Molech had no compassion whatsoever on those poor children.
There was no grace and mercy that would come from Molech like the grace and mercy and compassion that would come from the Lord God,
because Molech was nothing more than the outworking of Satan.
And what's one thing we know Satan desires?
He desires for every person to be condemned and to go into the lake of fire.
For the atheist, Satan has to do nothing. They already don't believe in him.
They already don't believe in God, or so they say.
He doesn't have to convince the atheist, God is real, just leave them alone.
But for the ones who believe in some type of God, Satan wants to devour them by fire.
He wants them to go down the same trail that these followers of Baal, these followers of Molech did.
Anything, any religious exercise other than trusting in the salvation that was accomplished by Jesus is fine with Satan.
Well, you want to talk about a religious show.
Do you remember when we studied about the prophets of Baal in Elisha's day?
And all of the religious exercises those prophets did trying to call fire down from heaven upon the sacrifice they made?
Boy, that was a hootenanny, wasn't it? They put a show on.
Satan loves all that because none of it worked.
It was very religious. It was very devoted.
Those priests and prophets of Baal even cut themselves and hollered out to their gods to no avail.
That was fine with Satan.
And you know Satan didn't try to convince Eve that God wasn't real, just that he wasn't right.
He didn't say, hey, that wasn't even God talking to you.
He said, oh yeah, I know what God said to you, but he's not right.
You won't die if you touch or if you eat of the fruit of that tree.
In the spiritual ears of the children of Israel, Satan is whispered to them,
Molech will be happy with you if you will send your children to him through the fire.
Now contrast that with the invitation that Jesus gave.
Matthew 11 verses 28 through 29.
Matthew 11, 28 through 29.
He said, come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart,
and you shall find rest unto your souls.
Coming to Molech is death, not life.
Coming to Christ is life and not death.
It's that simple.
In John chapter 5 verses 39 through 40.
John 5, 39 through 40.
Just to show you that coming to Jesus is not death but life.
He said, Jesus said, search the Scriptures for in them you think you have eternal life.
And they are they which testify of me, and ye will not come to me that you might have life.
Come to Molech, you have death.
Come to me, you have life.
And deceived by Satan, the children of Israel thought they could come to Molech and have life.
1 John 5 verse 11.
And this is the record that God has given to us eternal life and this life is in His Son.
It's not in Molech, it's not in the baptistery, it's not in religion.
A so-called sinners prayer, having the name Baptist on your church, it's in His Son.
And we can't help but wonder how in the world did Israelites, God's chosen people whom He called out of bondage and led them into through the wilderness and into the Promised Land.
How did those people go from worshipping God in spirit and in truth, even as recently as the days of King Solomon in our studies,
to serving Baal in Molech and completely rejecting God?
It didn't happen overnight.
You don't just wake up one morning and say, I think I'll be evil today.
In fact, I think I'll just be evil the rest of my life. You don't do that.
It happens over the course of a generation, even several generations.
As we read the sorry testimony and they did after the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, they continued in the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, over and over the generations did.
The religious leaders tickled the people's itching ears with the words that they wanted to hear.
And they listened, those religious leaders listened to the people, just like Aaron did at the foot of Mount Sinai when the children of Israel, those wicked Israelites, said,
what's become of this Moses? We want not. We don't know where He is.
Up make us gods to go before us.
It didn't happen overnight.
I read yesterday about a Baptist pastor of a church in Alabama.
He was also the mayor of the town where he was a pastor.
And he was found to have been advertising himself as a woman online.
He had his own little nickname and all his own account.
I don't know what he what account he used. And he was dressing up in women's clothing and posting extremely vulgar content.
And police were called after this was discovered and it got out.
The police were called to do a welfare check on him.
And somehow they tried to stop him in a car and he pulled a handgun out and he committed suicide in front of them.
But before he killed himself that week, that Wednesday night, he spoke before his church.
But he made a statement that was captured in the press.
Now, this is a Baptist pastor.
He said, what I do in my private life has nothing to do with what I do in my holy life.
That's what he said. Now, that's a wicked thing to say.
So whatever he did that others couldn't see was not connected to his holy life, as he called it.
That pastor didn't wake up one morning and decide he wanted to be a cross dresser, a pervert,
and to make such a statement about holy life and all of that.
That wasn't an overnight thing.
It wasn't an impulsive decision, just like it wasn't for the children of Israel.
It creeps in.
Have you heard that phrase, the camel's got his nose under the tent?
You know what that means.
What's the next thing the camel does?
Lifts his head up and just destroys the tent.
Just another saying maybe to help you realize that that's what happens when God's Word is set aside.
It starts off very gradually.
And I'll tell you how so many people are doing it today, educators, so-called,
is they're destroying the foundations of the Bible by destroying the foundations in Genesis.
And you start off telling people, billions of years ago there was a tremendous explosion
and it caused all of these things to happen.
And you can get somebody to look at you and say, man, that's good stuff right there.
You got them hooked.
When we teach our children, and yourselves for that matter, if you don't know,
the foundations in Genesis that they do not agree with this concept of the spontaneous generation
and the evolution of species and all, it doesn't agree with it.
The Bible says God created man, not that he came from a monkey.
That's why we have to start in that first book, in that first verse, in that first chapter.
In the beginning, God.
Everything else proceeds from that.
In the beginning, God.
Not an explosion, not something else.
In the beginning, God.
Now let's look back in our text and see what else they use.
In the middle of verse 17, and they cause their sons and daughters to pass through the fire
and used divination.
Divination.
Where the word divination is translated as the word witchcraft in one place in the Old Testament.
But let's look at the root word, the English word divination.
The root word of it is the word divine.
Now that makes sense, doesn't it?
The divine.
You've heard God referred to as the divine, and he is.
And in the Bible, he is.
And this may not, or this may be a shock to you, but it's not always a bad thing to divine
or use divination.
Proverbs 16 verse 10.
Proverbs 16 verse 10.
It says, a divine sentence, or judgment, is in the lips of the king,
and his mouth transgresseth not in judgment.
Oh.
Now the children of Israel used divination, and they were wicked in doing so,
but this king, his mouth did not transgress.
In other words, what he said, the judgment he gave with his mouth, was a divine sentence.
And it was not wrong.
It was good stuff.
So in our text, we have Israelites who use divination and were there by sinning against God.
In Proverbs, we have a king using divination, giving a divine sentence.
It's the same Hebrew word for divine sentence and divination.
Same Hebrew word.
But his mouth is not transgressing in judgment.
In other words, this king is not sinning when he divines.
What's the difference?
If you go to the New Testament, you'll also see the English word divine used.
Now remember, the New Testament is translated from the Greek language
and the Old Testament from the Hebrew language.
However, I think the New Testament passage where the word divine is used
will help us with our question.
Write down 2 Peter chapter 1 verse 3.
2 Peter 1 verse 3.
According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness,
through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue,
whereby are given unto us exceeding in great and precious promises,
that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature,
having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.
So Peter wrote about the divine power.
He wrote about the divine nature.
And then in Acts 17 verse 29, we have a couple of minutes,
maybe I can get through this thought.
In Acts 17 verse 29, you will see the Greek word theos,
or theos, translated as the word godhead with a capital G.
That's the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Where he writes, where Luke writes in Acts 17, 29,
for as much then as we are the offspring of God,
we ought not to think that the godhead, or the divine,
is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art, and man's device.
What we learn from these New Testament verses about the English word divine,
and also the word godhead,
is that the divine, that is God, produces in man a divine nature by his divine power,
and that in turn produces a divine sentence,
like the one the king gave in Proverbs 16.
The divine nature and the divine sentence are pleasing to God,
because he produces them in us.
I hope it's beginning to click.
Why was it wicked for the Israelites to use divination?
Because that divination sprang from a sinful nature,
which produced a sinful sentence, not a divine one.
Speaking something as though it is the oracle,
or the divine sentence of God is sin,
unless that oracle or sentence is actually what God said in his word.
You remember the great altar that was brought to the temple,
to sit near the brazen altar?
And that great altar would be used to offer up sacrifices to God,
and those who used it would say we're being obedient,
because God commanded animal sacrifices to be made,
and he commanded them to be burnt upon an altar, and yes he did,
but he commanded those animal sacrifices to be burnt on his altar.
Not a replacement.
And just as it was wrong to use a filthy replacement altar
to offer up sacrifices to God,
it was wrong to use divination to pronounce unjust sentences
and claim they were pleasing to God.
And with that we'll close in prayer.
Father, we're so grateful for those who came
and gave their attention to the preaching of your word
and those who tuned in online, setting aside this time
to give themselves to the study of the Word of God.
And Lord, we pray that your spirit would teach us
all of the truth that we've covered today
and remove any confusion that we may have.
Just turn the light on for us so when we read your word,
we understand what you're saying.
And Father, I just pray you'd help us during this next hour,
our singing, our preaching, our praying,
our fellowship with one another,
that it would be pleasing in your sight.
In Jesus' name, amen.
