Degenerations

Will have more about last weekend's conference tomorrow. In meantime, here's an outtake from last night's Bible study at my church:

Isaiah 2: [12] For the day of the LORD of hosts shall be upon every one that is proud and lofty, and upon every one that is lifted up; and he shall be brought low:

[13] And upon all the cedars of Lebanon, that are high and lifted up, and upon all the oaks of Bashan,
[14] And upon all the high mountains, and upon all the hills that are lifted up,

The high mountains, the hills--that’s the government. His wrath is going to come in on all of that, explains Richard Jordan.

[15] And upon every high tower, and upon every fenced wall,

That’s Genesis 11; the religious system of Babylon. The fenced cities. They think they’ve got fortresses to protect them, but it won’t do them any good.

[16] And upon all the ships of Tarshish, and upon all pleasant pictures.

Ships of Tarsus; that’s international trade where you go out among the Gentile nations and you bring it to you.

One of the things they bring is what he calls the “pleasant pictures.” What he’s talking about is pornography.

Idol worship has always been associated with pornography. A missionary said one time, “There are things the heathen do. One is they take off their clothes. Two is they paint their bodies; tattoos."

Leviticus 19 says not to take off your clothes and don’t put tats on your body. Why? Because that’s what the heathen do.

Numbers 33: [51] Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye are passed over Jordan into the land of Canaan;

[52] Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their molten images, and quite pluck down all their high places:
[53] And ye shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land, and dwell therein: for I have given you the land to possess it.

The erotic pictures associated with Baal worship, paganism. Trying to make man God by creating. All of that pornography, all the so-called pleasant pictures, God says, “Destroy all that stuff,” because it’s where the Satanic policy of evil takes you. Degeneration, degeneration, degeneration.

The vile affections in Romans 1 is the homosexual activity. The pictures that they use to portray that.

Today, the largest single thing the internet is used for among teenagers and people in their 20s is pornography. Sixty percent of everyone who uses a cell phone watches pornography on a regular basis, according to statistics.

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Psalm 106 says, [28] They joined themselves also unto Baal-peor, and ate the sacrifices of the dead.
[29] Thus they provoked him to anger with their inventions: and the plague brake in upon them.
[30] Then stood up Phinehas, and executed judgment: and so the plague was stayed.

Phinehas was God’s man in Israel, but what happened is the Midianites were taught how to get God to curse Israel. It was to have them be corrupted by Baal worship.

The Israelites were deceived through enchantments to get involved in Baal worship and when they did, God sent a plague.

From verse 29 we see they developed some wise ideas about how to worship, but not God’s way. They became religious; part of the religion they were involved in was one that fostered sexual impurity. It was a terrible wicked thing.

They sacrificed to the dead; they sacrificed their children. When you get a culture willing to sacrifice its children—why would you do that? Well, you’ve got these things, these inventions, you’ve developed.

The psalm continues: [39] Thus were they defiled with their own works, and went a whoring with their own inventions.
[40] Therefore was the wrath of the LORD kindled against his people, insomuch that he abhorred his own inheritance.
[41] And he gave them into the hand of the heathen; and they that hated them ruled over them.

They’re inventors of evil things and the evil things they were developing had to do with corrupting their families and their religion. They were religious but it wasn’t God’s religion.

As a teenager I went to hear a missionary speak who had been on the mission field in Bolivia for about 40 years. He lived in the bush with some heathen for over 20 years without ever coming back out and seeing any people in the quote “civilized world”.

He went there and learned the natives’ language, then wrote down a written language and translated the Bible into their language. Many missionaries back in the late 1800s and early 1900s did that in South America.

He said there are four things that the heathen always do and I wrote them down and kept them in my Bible to remind me.

No. 1: They take off their clothes. No. 2: They paint and pierce their bodies. No. 3: They dance to drug-induced hypnotic music. No. 4: They’re religious.

He said, “I want you to see these things in Exodus 32; that’s exactly the things Israel does at the golden calf.” This was in the 1960s when it was exactly what my age group was doing in the culture and has done since.

Inventors of evil. "We’re going to take an idea and we’re going to take our imagination and invent new ways to be evil."