According to Wikipedia, "Child sacrifice is the ritualistic killing of children in order to please or appease a deity, supernatural beings, or sacred social order, tribal, group or national loyalties in order to achieve a desired result. As such, it is a form of human sacrifice. Child sacrifice is thought to be an extreme extension of the idea that, the more important the object of sacrifice, the more devout the person giving it up is."
In the Old Testament, Israel was constantly tempted to bring in physical idols to their temple (the physical house of God expressing His truth) that represented a doctrinal thinking process that was corrupt, evil.
"All the physical starts with the spiritual; out of the heart are the issues of life," explains Preacher Richard Jordan. "The piano is a physical instrument with a physical piece of sheet music in front of it that the pianist plays off of, but you know really the music is a spiritual thing. It's not a physical entity. It has a spiritual origin. You can take a sledgehammer to the piano and burn up the sheet music, but you didn't destroy the music; just the physical representation.
"The physical is the expression of the life and idols were an expression of a doctrine of error, of the gods who were not the God of the Bible.
"In II Chronicles 33, Manasseh had a great daddy, Hezekiah, but he wasn't much of a son. He was 12 years old when he began to reign and he reigned 55 years in Jerusalem.
The passage says 'he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD, like unto the abominations of the heathen, whom the LORD had cast out before the children of Israel.
[3] For he built again the high places which Hezekiah his father had broken down, and he reared up altars for Baalim, and made groves, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served them."He goes out and reestablishes all of the false religion that his daddy had run out of Israel by taking the Word of God. Manasseh lets the darkness come back in.
"Notice verse 4: [4] Also he built altars in the house of the LORD, whereof the LORD had said, In Jerusalem shall my name be for ever.
"He literally brings in this Baal worship, with all these idols and idolatry, and puts an altar in the temple of the Lord for worship of all that false religion.
"Verse 5: [5] And he built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the house of the LORD.
"All the angelic intervention, all the angelic host, all the stuff that goes all the way back to Genesis 11 when they built the Tower of Babel, where on the top they were going to reach to heaven.
"Manasseh, by the way, was to the southern kingdom of Judah what Ahab was to the northern kingdom of Israel. Ahab made Baal worship the official religion of the northern kingdom. Manasseh did for 55 years the same in the southern kingdom.
"His focus was so corrupt he brought it all the way into both the temple's outer and inner courts, and there he's sacrificing children to the false god, putting them through the fire. He's got all these abominations. He completely pollutes the whole thing with idolatry.
"Verse 6: [6] And he caused his children to pass through the fire in the valley of the son of Hinnom: also he observed times, and used enchantments, and used witchcraft, and dealt with a familiar spirit, and with wizards: he wrought much evil in the sight of the LORD, to provoke him to anger.
"You read that and you say, 'Oh, it was so terrible back then,' but you know people do the same thing today.
"Believers say, 'I would never sacrifice my child to a heathen god,' but you'll sacrifice them to the world system out there and you'll let that world pollute their minds, whether it's through the TV, or the music they listen to, or the books they read, or the movies they watch, or the friends they associate with."
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