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by Charlie Wolcott

“You shall not murder.” -Exodus 20:13

Life is precious. Man is made in the image of God and as a result, all human life is God’s “image-bearer.” There is a reason why most societies have laws about taking a human life, but with any other animal, the laws are about doing it humanely. This commandment is also specific about the pre-meditated taking of life. It is not about lawful execution carried out by the government, not about war, and not about self-defense. Most governments know the difference. There was a recent case of a father who caught a man molesting his daughter. He beat up the man, who ended up dying. He wasn’t even charged of murder because he was protecting his home and his family. However, had he known this man had molested his daughter, and later went to this man’s house and killed him there, then it would have been murder, taking the law into his own hands.

This is one of the most basic commands that is nearly universal across cultures, except when it comes to certain rituals. Idolatry is perhaps the world’s #1 cause of murder in this world. More so than theft, gangs, drugs, rape, greed, jealousy, you name it; idolatry is the #1 reason why people commit murder. And here is the disturbing part: it’s a COMMAND in a number of idolatrous practices. Not all, but a number of them.

To be clear, all idolatry is a result of a Satanic lie to corrupt and violate anything God has established as being “good.” Man is made in the image of God, so our very existence reminds Satan of God every moment of every day. He hates us with pure raging hatred for no other reason than we remind him of God. So what does he do? He takes whatever he can use and every aspect of man to twist it and corrupt it and malign it so he can say, “That is what I think of God.” The taking of life, especially precious innocent life, gives the enemy an adrenaline power rush.

So how does idolatry play a role here? Many people murder for a variety of reasons, and not all idolatrous practices lead to murder. But all murder is a result of rejecting the true God and despising the life of an image-bearer of God. I can easily go the Jesus route and reference him saying: “If you hate your brother, you may as well be murdering him, because if you would be able to get away with it, you would do it” (my paraphrase). So on a generic level like this, we’ve all committed the plotting of murder or the thought of it. But I want to get more specific on this issue.

Islam is a religion of utter violence. It is known as a religion of the sword. It spreads by conquest and war, not by passing on its teachings to another. It is written in the Koran that if a foreigner were not to embrace and confess Islam, such a person is an infidel and is to be killed. The stories of Christians who live in Muslim-dominated countries being slaughtered for refusing to renounce Christ are harrowing and numerous. Why do they kill? Because their false religion tells them to.

Don Richardson wrote of the Sawi Tribe of Ira Jira and Papua New Guinea in his book Peace Child. One of their cultural norms was to see who could best befriend someone and then betray them, kill them, and cannibalize them. It was part of their religious practices, as is the case with many other animistic and jungle warrior tribes. Jim Eliot, Nate Saint, and three other friends were slain by the Acua Tribe of Ecuador and as depicted in the movie The End of the Spear. The murder of another tribe was common practice as well.

The Aztecs in particular were infamous for their practice of taking a “human sacrifice,” cutting out the heart of the person, and then throwing the still living body down the long stairs from the top of their temples. In these religious rites, murder - the intentional taking of a life - was commanded by the gods.

Ancient Israel shed a lot of innocent blood too. This wasn’t just a pagan practice of the jungle tribes. There was one god in particular whom God despised even more than Baal and Asherah, and that was Molech. The worship of Molech was singled out as being a great wickedness. Why? Because in the worship of Molech, the parents would take a newborn baby and place it on the metal plate of the idol. Then the idol’s belly was a furnace and when it heated up, the idol turned red from the heat and the baby was burned alive to the point of its blood and water boiling. I was talking with someone who mocked God by saying that God committed genocide (likely thinking of the Conquest of Canaan). So I asked how he would vote on a jury of a man who burned his baby to death like this and he said he’d give that man the death penalty. I told him this was part of the religious practices of that area. This was a brutal, sadistic murder and it was commanded by the idols.

The U.S. is guilty of a great amount of bloodshed, too. Molech is alive and well here in our country today, only instead of living newborns being sacrificed onto a metal plate, we have done EVEN WORSE. We instead rip apart babies piece by piece before they even get out of the womb. I’m not sorry about the graphic image; that is what happens in abortion. It’s even worse than burning the baby alive, not to mention the emotional and physical harm it does to the mother. But what is the ‘idol’ that commands abortion? I’ll tell you what it is: convenience. I understand that 97% of abortion cases are ultimately a matter of convenience: financial, will, comfort, desire to be a parent, whatever. Less than 3% of cases actually deal with rape, let alone a pregnancy with such complications that only mother or baby would survive. King Manasseh was the only king of Judah to commit this crime of putting his son through the fire of Molech and Judah’s doom and captivity was sealed. How much more so for us here in the U.S. when we’ve committed 63+ million murders on abortion alone? It gets worse.

If Israel would turn so far in the worship of these foreign gods to enjoy sexual promiscuity and to murder their own babies, seeking comfort, productivity, prosperity, and or power, how much more so do our own “elite” of this world do the same? I know enough about satanic rituals to know how in these rites, a “human sacrifice” (age is no limit) would be tortured physically and sexually to maximize the adrenaline and strength of the will to survive in the blood. Then the sacrifice would be cut or killed, and the blood dripped into chalices. The practitioners would then drink that blood in honor of the spirits and for the power of their victim. It’s happening today and not just by the “weird people.” Reports are coming out about this being regularly practiced by the elite in politics, music, Hollywood, etc. If you look at what is being produced by these industries, it should not surprise you if some of this is going on.

The only solution to all this is the Gospel. God has given us hope in all this, and He came to rescue us from all this mess. But in order for the Gospel message to do its work in our lives, we must get rid of our idols and put God back where he belongs. This is a difficult topic, but if we want to understand why God takes idolatry so seriously, this is part of it. Next week will be another difficult one because adultery is no laughing matter either.

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