Rise and shrine

(I hate to give another excuse but I’m coming down with something today and right now I’m struggling to "stay in the game" every way you can think of. I will have to postpone new article now until tomorrow. In meantime, here’s the subsequent article to go along with yesterday’s post.)

“We looked in Isaiah 44 where he says they talk to the stalks of trees. In other words, they’ve made idols out of the trees and these idols give them counsel. ‘Their staff declareth unto them.’ They are literally getting extra-biblical revelation out of a supernatural phenomenon through these idols,” says Richard Jordan.

“Habakkuk 2:18 says, ‘What profiteth the graven image that the maker thereof hath graven it; the molten image, and a teacher of lies, that the maker of his work trusteth therein, to make dumb idols?’

“Those idols were literally teaching these people the lie program. When Hosea says ‘dumb idols,’ that’s dumb in the sense of ‘deaf and dumb.’ They don’t speak. You don’t have to tell somebody that pulpit doesn’t speak unless you thought it did.

*****

“They’re thinking these idols are talking to them; tongue talking, the peeping and muttering of Isaiah 8:19, the ecstatic utterances and all that business. There’s nothing new about that. That’s as ancient as the Tower of Babel. That’s was going on here in these religious systems; the practices that had corrupted and apostatized the nation Israel.

“Zechariah 10:2 says, ‘For the idols have spoken vanity, and the diviners have seen a lie, and have told false dreams; they comfort in vain: therefore they went their way as a flock, they were troubled, because there was no shepherd.’

“Notice the idols have spoken. Now you know good and well they didn’t, but the people worshipping them thought they did. In other words, there is a demonic, evil spirit associated with these idols that is using them to deceive people into thinking they’re giving them a supernatural communication of divine revelation outside of God’s Word. Extra to God’s Word. You know, ‘God is speaking to me.’

“When you hear people do that kind of thing, you need to remember there’s nothing new about that. Deuteronomy 13 says if anybody comes along and says he’s a prophet, or has a message from God, and says he’s got a sign from God and tells you God spoke to him, and it doesn’t match what God told them through Moses in Deuteronomy, and it doesn’t conform to the Scripture he gave them, they’re lying to you!

“So what’s the standard? The standard’s going to be the Word of God. It was for Israel; they had His Word that they could check what was being said by.

“What’s happened is all of this divination stuff, this false teaching, this lie program, has led Israel astray into false gods ‘for the spirit of whoredoms hath caused them to err, and they have gone a whoring from under their God.’

*****

“Verse 13 is going to talk about the specifics of the system: ‘They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains, and burn incense upon the hills, under oaks and poplars and elms, because the shadow thereof is good: therefore your daughters shall commit whoredom, and your spouses shall commit adultery.’

“Verse 14: ‘I will not punish your daughters when they commit whoredom, nor your spouses when they commit adultery: for themselves are separated with whores, and they sacrifice with harlots: therefore the people that doth not understand shall fall.’

“There’s a bunch of stuff in there when you just read it, you might not grasp just from the verse all the things that are going on, but the people he wrote that to have all kinds of information that they know about.

“When he talks about how ‘they sacrificed unto the tops of the mountains,’ there is a thing associated with Baal worship that’s called ‘high places.’

“Deuteronomy 12 says, ‘These are the statutes and judgments, which ye shall observe to do in the land, which the LORD God of thy fathers giveth thee to possess it, all the days that ye live upon the earth. [2] Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree:
[3] And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.
[4] Ye shall not do so unto the LORD your God.’

“Notice in verse 3 he talks about altars, pillars. A pillar is not like the pillars holding that wall up back there. We’re talking about what you think of as a steeple. If you ever wondered where steeples came from, it’s part of the Baal worship.

“When it talks about groves, if you look at Deuteronomy 16, it says, ‘Thou shalt not plant thee a grove of any trees near unto the altar of the LORD thy God, which thou shalt make thee.’

*****

“My old next-door neighbor used to have one in his front yard. He had a little fat red guy that looked like Buddha in it. Usually you see a Madonna or something like that in it. It’s a shrine and there’s a grove of trees, and in that grove you put an altar and they go there to worship.

“You read there in Hosea 13 that they sacrificed upon the tops of the mountains and burned incense upon the hills . . . what he’s talking about with ‘the oaks, the poplars and the elms’ is those groves. They set up groves of trees where they then set up their idols and go and sacrifice to devils. They have all these shrines.

“Around here you’ll see every now and then, if somebody gets killed on the side of the road, where there will be a couple of crosses and all kind of flowers and pretty soon there’ll be a memorial there.

“We think of it just as a memorial, like you go to a war memorial or you go to the cemetery, but the people who put that there come out of Catholicism. The reason you see so much of it now that you didn’t used to see is there’s so many folks from Central and South America here that practice just a raw, fundamental form of Roman Catholicism.

“American Catholicism has been liberalized. It’s a liberal form. They don’t care what the pope says very much. If he says you can’t have an abortion, well, they’ll have one if they want one. That’s America, but you go where Catholicism holds sway—Mexico, Guatemala, Central and South America--where in their constitution, Catholicism is the state religion. When you do that, you find a much more virulent type of Catholicism—much more like it really is in its dogmas.

“The control that they have . . . those shrines are everywhere. The first time I was in the Philippines, I was walking along the street and I noticed them. The rule of thumb in that is every time you go by one, you’re supposed to stop and worship.

*****

“I remember missionary Sam Vinton talking about when he first went to Africa in the Belgian-Congo region. He said when he first got there in the 1930s you couldn’t get anybody to go anywhere with any dispatch because every time they’d go down the road, every one of these shrines they’d have to stop and offer some kind of prayer. He said if they had to go five miles and there were 30 of these things, it would take them forever.

“He said one of the things that began to happen after people got converted and saved is that it sped up their economy of time going places because they didn’t have to stop at these idols all of the time. That’s exactly what this is here—these little shrines, little groves, these little places to worship their false gods.

“Now, that had permeated the nation of Israel. It’s all over and there were shrines everywhere.

“Deuteronomy 12: 5 says, ‘But unto the place which the LORD your God shall choose out of all your tribes to put his name there, even unto his habitation shall ye seek, and thither thou shalt come.'

“Israel was not to sacrifice and worship Jehovah except in one place. When they went into the land he chose a place—Jerusalem. He said, ‘I’m going to put my name there and that’s where you’re going to come and worship.’

“When David bought the threshing floor from Onan, he said, ‘This is the place; this is the house of God. This is where God wants it done.’

“When Solomon dedicated the temple In II Chronicles 6 and 7, he said, ‘This is the place God has chosen to put his name.’ Deuteronomy 16:1 says, ‘Observe the month of Abib, and keep the passover unto the LORD thy God: for in the month of Abib the LORD thy God brought thee forth out of Egypt by night.’

“Verse 6 says, ‘But at the place which the LORD thy God shall choose to place his name in, there thou shalt sacrifice the passover at even, at the going down of the sun, at the season that thou camest forth out of Egypt.’

“There was a piece of real estate where they were to go and worship. They weren’t just to do this willy-nilly everywhere. They were to go to the temple after they were in the land and worship there. These high places, now they’re everywhere.

*****

“You remember how over in Deuteronomy 12 they destroy the altar, the tower, the name? All that stuff comes out of the passage in Genesis 11 about the Tower of Babel.

“I remember as a kid watching cartoons where they’re building this tower, trying to make it go all the way to heaven, but this is not talking about something that goes up like Jack in the Bean Stalk into the sky up there and gets the giant down.

“When it says ‘whose tower may reach to heaven,’ that’s talking about, ‘We want to build this tower and on the top of that tower were going to do some things that allows us to connect to heaven. That’s how we’re going to get to heaven is by this tower. It’s going to be the means whereby we come in contact with God. Through this building we’re going to reach to God.’

“Now all of that stuff involved in that translates itself over into, ‘When we go to worship where are we going to go? We’re going to go up into this hill, this mountain, this high place so that we can get nearer to our goal and we can replicate what’s going on in Genesis 11.’

“You go down into Central America and see these Aztec temples. Always you go up these steep steps and on the top they’ve got this altar. That’s what this is. Maybe not quite that elaborate every time because every Tom, Dick and Harry that had one couldn’t necessarily build one that big, but they were centers of worship; false worship, devil worship.”