Baal & Asherah

Thank you for listening to this message from the ministry of Morse Corner Church in Leverett, Massachusetts. Morse Corner is a non-denominational church that is committed to the preaching and teaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Our church was founded in 1896 by two students of the famous evangelist D .L. Moody. We seek to encourage and edify the body of Christ through the proclamation of God's word through the ministries of the local church.

Baal, Asherah, and the Worship of False Gods

If you'd like more information, visit our website, morsecornerchurch .com. We hope you enjoy the message. So, Israel was joined to who? What's the deity? Baal of Peor. So, Baal was the false god of the Canaanites.

Baal, the name Baal, or the word Baal, it can either be translated as lord, because they looked to him as their lord. But another name for Baal, it basically means possessor or owner. So, when you yoked yourself to Baal, he controlled you.

And there's probably stories that we could look at where people were demonically possessed because they joined themselves to a false god. But that's what Baal means, either lord or possessor or owner.

So, they joined themselves to Baal. Each region back then had their own deity. The term for this is henotheism. So, this is your vocab word for the day, henotheism. It's not the worship of chickens, okay?

What is henotheism? This is probably a new term for some of you. I think we've all heard of polytheism. Polytheism is the worship of many gods. Henotheism is when they worship one god, but they recognize that many, many gods exist.

So, they recognize other gods, but they really only worshiped one. So, there's polytheism, there's henotheism. But what were the Israelites supposed to be? They were supposed to be monotheists. So, they only worshiped one god, Jehovah, and they only recognized that one god existed.

So, the Lord, or Jehovah, was the one true god. There are no other gods. This is what the Israelites believed, or it's what they were supposed to believe. But, like I said, in this case, each tribe or each nation had their own deity.

This was very common in pagan religions, that each had their own deity, and then there would sometimes be a female deity. In studying this, maybe you've come across this before, Baal was the male deity.

Who was the female deity? Well, there was a female deity the pagans would worship, and her name was Asherah. So, there's Baal, the possessor, the owner, and then his consort, or his wife, was named Asherah.

And, of course, there was sexual immorality involved in the worship of Asherah. So, you have Baal and Asherah, and this is common within pagan religions, that there is both a male deity to worship and a female deity to worship.

We see this even within Roman Catholicism, which, if you understand Roman Catholicism, you will know it is a mixture of Christianity. They have a lot of truth, but it's a mixture of Christianity with pagan religion.

That's why you can worship Jesus, but you can also venerate who? Mary. So, they have their male deity and their female figure that you can bow and venerate her as well. This is not what God wants. All the way from the beginning, God, the scripture says, is a jealous God.

God wants to be worshipped, Him and Him alone. So, when God sees His own covenant people bowing down to this Baal of Peor, this makes the Lord very angry. And, by the way, God has not changed on this.

If we serve Mary, or the saints, or any other deity, any other idol, this makes God angry. And I think we see this here with the plague in Numbers chapter 25. So, this was the plan of the Lord, giving these instructions to Moses to completely eradicate the worship of false gods from the land of Canaan.

This is what God wanted, to drive out all the idolaters from Israel. Because God knew if that didn't happen, if you allow these people to stay, and if you allow their false worship, and if you allow their idols, God knew that His own people would continually fall back into the worship of these idols.

And that's exactly what happened throughout their history. And God knows that you can't have a blessed and stable society when there's all these other false practices going on. Because with the worship of Baal, and the worship of Asherah, these false systems of idolatrous religion included fornication, adultery, and even child sacrifice.

And God knows a nation cannot be blessed when those things are commonplace. So, this is what is at stake. God's name is at stake. His holiness is at stake. The blessing, and God wants to bless His people.

God loves the children of Israel. He wants to see them blessed. But it's a very serious thing when they join themselves to this idol, Baal of Peor. So, hopefully that helps you to understand the reaction of Phinehas.

As far as Phinehas is concerned, there is a zero tolerance policy for the worship of false gods in Israel. Especially when the worship and the fornication is happening right in front of the tabernacle.

You have to understand what this was like. This would be like, and it would be worse than this, but it would be like somebody going to a church building and committing the act right in the church parking lot.

Or something like that. Like this is a high-handed act. It's a way of kind of rubbing their nose in it. So, this is a very serious thing and that explains why Phinehas reacted the way he did. Look at verse 4.

Then the Lord said to Moses, take all the leaders of the people, because many people got involved in this, take all the leaders of the people and hang the offenders before the Lord out in the sun, that the fierce anger of the Lord may be turned away from Israel.

So, this is the solution. Deal with the people and then the wrath of God would be quenched. So, verse 5. Moses said to the judges of Israel, every one of you kill his men who are joined to Baal of Peor.

So, this is swift action. All of this done openly and publicly out in the sun. It's meant to be a deterrent. So, it's meant to send a message. It's meant to be a deterrent. People would see it. They'd realize, okay, I don't want to get involved in this because this is what's going to happen.

So, a strong message needed to be sent because look at what happens next. So, they start off by feasting, eating meat sacrificed to idols, bowing down in front of a statue. This is what it led to. Verse 6.

A man walks through the camp with a Midianite woman. Basically, this is like prostitution. Right in front of everybody, walking right by Moses. Moses was not a man you wanted to mess with, by the way.

So, for him to do this tells you something. They walk right by the tabernacle and they go off into this tent in plain view of everybody to commit this brazen act. So, this is not, understand, this is not some private sinner who did something wrong and then he was kind of ashamed of it after the fact.

No, they're flaunting it. They're spitting in Moses' face. More importantly, it's like they're spitting in whose face? Yeah, they're spitting in God's face. It's almost as if to say, okay, Moses, okay, Aaron, okay, Phineas, okay, God, here's what we're going to do.

What are you going to do about it? Well, verse 7. When Phineas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose from among the congregation and took the javelin in his hand. And he basically just, and the fact that he threw it and it went through both of them tells you that one was probably on top of the other.

And because he did that, the plague was stopped among the children of Israel. This is probably why it's not in the Sunday school curriculum. I'm guessing. I don't know. Maybe it is. Correct me if I'm wrong.

You say, wow, this is pretty gruesome. Taking a javelin and just thrusting it through two people. So instead of me falling all over myself to try to excuse Phineas' action, let me just say this. What Phineas did, he was right.

What Phineas did was holy. God is well pleased with him. You have to understand, Phineas is not a vigilante. He didn't just lose his temper, although I'm sure he was very angry. But Phineas was a high-ranking official in Israel.

Aaron was like number two man, basically. So he's kind of viewed Phineas as second in line or third in line for the vice presidency, if that helps you to understand. He is an official in the nation of Israel.

And what he did was right. And we know that because God makes a covenant with him, his covenant of peace. So as the result of this, Phineas is blessed. He is honored. He is blessed. His children will be blessed.

His great-grandchildren. Through generations, his family is blessed. And just keep in mind, there's probably a couple million Israelites at this point. They're people just like anyone else. I'm sure there were sinful things going on in Israel all the time.

Moses and Aaron and Phineas, they're not bloodthirsty tyrants. They're not looking to just crack down on anyone who gets out of line. Again, this was a high-handed brazen act right in front of Moses, right in front of the tabernacle.

And there have been many attempts like this before. This basically, I think, was like a coup attempt. This was a way of saying, we don't recognize your leadership, Moses. We are with Moab. That's basically what it was.

And there's been many coup attempts in the book of Numbers. Those of you who have read through the book, you've heard of the rebellion of Korah. He tried to overthrow Moses' leadership. And I think that's what's starting to happen here.

The man might as well have been holding a sign that says, I stand with Midian. I stand with Baal. We are opposed to Moses. We are opposed to the Lord God. So this could almost be seen as an act of treason against the nation of Israel.

How long has Israel been a nation at this point? Because I want to help you understand what's at stake in the situation. They've only been a nation for 38 years. When a new government is established, that government is unstable.

We live in the year 2000. The United States has been here for what, 250 years? Something like that. So there's treasonous acts that happen all the time. But we view our government as very stable. So it's not treated as serious.

But if you went back to the founding of the nation, treason within the first few years of our nation and during the revolution, it was treated very differently. So you have to understand, 38 years in, this is a newly formed nation.

Treason was handled as a very serious thing. So what's Phineas doing? He's trying to nip this rebellion in the bud. And the Lord, again, is pleased with him. Look at verse 12. Therefore, say, this is God through Moses, Behold, I give to him, to Phineas, my covenant of peace.

And it shall be to him and his descendants after him a covenant of an everlasting priesthood, because he was zealous for his God and made atonement for the children of Israel. You know, in the Old Testament, we're very familiar with the covenants in the Bible.

There's the Noahic covenant, the Abrahamic covenant. There's the covenant of the law. There's the Davidic covenant. There's the new covenant. We kind of know all of these covenants. Somehow this covenant slips through the crack.

Like you never hear about this covenant, but this is the covenant of an everlasting priesthood. So because of the zeal of Phineas, God blesses him that all future legitimate high priests will descend from his line.

This is a major honor. This is a major blessing. Isn't that what every believer wants? Not only do you want to be blessed by God, wouldn't you love to have that assurance that not only are you going to be blessed by God, that your children are going to be blessed by God, and that your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren and on and on it goes, that they will all be blessed by the Lord?

That's what happened with Phineas. So what's the application? You know, what does this mean for us? Well, in order to receive God's blessing, sometimes you have to do the hard thing. Phineas was the only man who rose up and did this.

I'm sure many people wanted to, but he was the only one who did it. To receive the blessings of God, we have to have courage. We have to do the difficult thing. We have to fight the good fight of faith.

In Israel, and I want to say this, I know all of you know this, but just in case a critic is listening later on, we're not calling for violence. Don't say, okay, I'm going to read this and I'm going to go home and get a spear or a javelin and I'm going to go after the...

No, obviously that's not what we're about. In the Old Testament, Israel was a physical nation. So therefore, they fought physical battles. In the New Testament, the church is referred to by the apostle Peter as a spiritual nation.

Therefore, the battles we fight are what? Spiritual battles. Thanks for listening. I'm Pastor Michael Grant from Morris Cornick Church. If you'd like to listen to the complete message or if you'd like more information about the ministry, visit our website, morriscornickchurch .com.

And we'd love to have you join us some Sunday morning here in Leverett. Until next time, with the grace of God be with you.