Deuteronomy 16:18 – 22 “You are to appoint judges and officials for your tribes in every town that the LORD your God is giving you. They are to judge the people with righteous judgment. Do not deny justice or show partiality. Do not accept any bribes, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and twists the words of the righteous.
Pursue justice, and justice alone, so that you may live, and you may possess the land that the LORD your God is giving you.
Do not set up any wooden Asherah pole next to the altar you will build for the LORD your God, and do not set up for yourselves a sacred pillar, which the LORD your God hates.”
At first reading these verses, you might wonder if Moses was just lumping the issues of unjust judges together with the proscription of Asherah worship. Wrong! Corruption breeds more corruption, and the corruption from wicked fertility cults would certainly twist the minds of those who were to judge. Nothing happens in a vacuum, and the One True Living God who created men knows this better than does anyone else.
What would cause judges to turn away from truth? Generally, nobody wakes up one morning and just decides that he/she is going to be corrupt. Corruption takes place gradually. The Apostle James described this process: “When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when by his own evil desires he is lured away and enticed. Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.” (James 1:13-15)
What was so terrible about Asherah worship? This form of worship promoted ritual prostitution, perverting God’s gift of sex and undermining the God – given family structure. Asherah worship was supposed to ensure the fertility of the land and bountiful crops; however, the One True Living God had already promised the Israelites that if they would obey His Will and follow His commands, they would enjoy these blessings. The fertility cults preyed on people’s fears that if they didn’t go through elaborate rituals, their crops would fail and they would starve. To turn away from God to engage in fertility rites was to deny everything that God had already done for the Israelites and everything that He promised to do.
In Canaan the Asherah poles and Asherah trees were everywhere. Gregory Elder, blogging for Redlands Daily Facts, January 11, 2007, writes, “It must have been a terrifying and tempting thing to the peoples of antiquity when they saw the impressive temples of the pagan gods, the loud music, the professional priesthoods and their claims that such blood sacrifices and exotic fertility rites could make people’s lives better. The Hebrew God by comparison spent a lot of his career with a solitary ark drawn around in a cart. Later, He had but few holy places for sacrifice and in the days of Solomon these were concentrated into only one temple in Jerusalem. But the humble worship of the Hebrew God, who had no images, ritual tattoos and who rejected child sacrifice, survived.” (redlands@comredlands@dfmdev.com)
APPLICATION: When we read about some of these cults, we might think that they died out in antiquity; however, we would be wrong. As long as people exist, there will always be those who feel that they can sway the future by carrying out magic rituals. The lure of magic consists in the idea that a person can control his/her own fate by engaging in some ritual and that reliance on the God who has created that person is unnecessary.
Cults do not merely appeal to the poorly educated but also to those intellectuals who trust more in themselves than in God. St. Paul wrote describing this problem, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness. For what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship, so that men are without excuse.
“For although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking and darkened in their foolish hearts. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images of mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.” (Romans 1:18-22)
The question before us is this: Whom will you trust? If you trust yourself, remember that at any moment you can be stricken with a stroke, a heart attack, a cerebral hemorrhage, or even a fatal accident. The day you die, your hope dies with you. Only trust in the One True Living God is sufficient to deliver any of us from our sins and failures.
PRAYER: Father God, thank You for loving us and for caring for us. Help us to trust You, our Creator, our Deliverer, and the One who knows us better than we know ourselves. Thank You for sending Your Son Jesus Christ as the ultimate blood sacrifice for our sins so that we are free from the need to engage in magic of any kind. Lord, let each person who reads this realize Your Truth for himself/herself. In the matchless Name of King Jesus. Amen.
Burunche's Blog 
Leave a comment