IBL01: First Commandment

God vs Molech

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Prerequisite/Law

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 2 of 5

Track: 4

Dictation Name: RR130B4

Date: 1960’s-1970’s

[Rushdoony] Deuteronomy eighteen verses nine, following, God versus Molech. Deuteronomy eighteen verses nine following.

“When thou art come into the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations.

10 There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch.

11 Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.

12 For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord: and because of these abominations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee.

13 Thou shalt be perfect with the Lord thy God.

14 For these nations, which thou shalt possess, hearkened unto observers of times, and unto diviners: but as for thee, the Lord thy God hath not suffered thee so to do.

15 The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken;

16 According to all that thou desiredst of the Lord thy God in Horeb in the day of the assembly, saying, Let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God, neither let me see this great fire any more, that I die not.

17 And the Lord said unto me, They have well spoken that which they have spoken.

18 I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him.

19 And it shall come to pass, that whosoever will not hearken unto my words which he shall speak in my name, I will require it of him.

20 But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods, even that prophet shall die.

21 And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken?

22 When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him.”

In Deuteronomy eighteen, verses nine through twenty-two, a variety of practices are cited as forbidden. All of which are with respect to knowing and controlling the future of man and the world. There are a variety of practices; there are necromancers, that is those who speak to the dead, spiritualists, trying to get a message from the dead, there are those who are diviners who through various forms of divination attempt to know the future, witchcraft or magic and so on. Virtually every particular form of attempting to know the future is here cited except one, which did not as yet exist in that part of the world, Astrology. But astrology is later cited by the prophets as being covered by these regulations.

Now at the head of the list is one particular form which sums up in essence all these attempts to have power over the future. “There shall not be found among you any that maketh his son or daughter to pass through the fire.” This of course is dealt with in numerous other regulations and it is defined for us very specifically as Moloch worship. It was Moloch worship M-o-l-o-c-h, sometimes spelled “Molech” that this and other scriptures had reference to.

Now we cannot begin to understand the significance of Molech worship with its demand of children as sacrifice until we begin to analyze the meaning of the word Moloch. The word Moloch is the same as the word which still appears in various of the middle Eastern languages as “Melech, Malik, Malec, and in various Western European countries as Milcom, Melcolm, Malcolm. Its meaning is “king”, it’s a very common word, it very often appears in various legitimate forms, but here it has reference to a Baal, a god. And the name of this god “Melech or Malec or Moloch meant king.

Moloch worship was state worship. The state claimed to be the true and ultimate order and religion was a department of state. The Moloch state claimed to have total jurisdiction over man and was therefore entitled to total sacrifice. It had absolute right over the life of man. Now this of course makes it very telling in terms of our modern culture, because the modern state is a Moloch state, it claims total jurisdiction over the life of man, over his income, over his life, over his property, and feels it can claim his right to live to expropriate his life at will, apart from the law of God.

But, the scripture makes it clear that no man has any right over another man’s life apart from the word of God. One of the related commandments is in Leviticus 19:26. This is a single sentence, and listen to it. “You shall not eat anything with the blood: neither shall ye use enchantment, nor observe times.” Now to the modern American as he hears this sentence it seems as though two completely unrelated ideas are brought together and so this is an illogical sentence. First it forbids eating anything with blood so that whatever animal is eaten has to be bled first. And then it says you shall not indulge in spiritualism or astrology or anything that involves an ungodly probing into the future. What do the two have in common?

Now the ban concerning eating anything with blood in it goes directly back to a number of commandments in the Bible which we will deal with more next week. Now these commandments required that whenever a man killed to eat, he did it only in terms of the law of God and by the permission of God so the animals which were legitimate food were specified. The laws had the help of man, his life in mine. And so certain types of animals were forbidden.

Then because all life comes from God, life can only be taken on God’s terms and therefore as man kills to eat that blood must be spilled upon the ground, and then covered over in order that it might be returned unto God by his permission and then the food eaten with thanksgiving. So that every partaking of meat constitute, according to scripture, an act of thanksgiving, a kind of communion meal with God, and hence the necessity that it be eaten with thanksgiving. This is specified in scripture, Saint Paul makes it emphatic. So that any attempt to take life or to govern life apart from the word of God is therefore Moloch worship. This is the connection. It constitutes an attempt by man to play at being God, to say “life is to be taken on my terms.”

Moloch worship claimed total jurisdiction over the life of man. Over his todays’ and tomorrows’. Just as today the state claims the right to take and conscript young men and send them to Asia or elsewhere at will, a violation of our constitution, the provisions of which were established on Christian grounds. Similarly it claims the right to take your income, in contempt of the law of God. It claims the right to govern you from cradle to grave in contempt of the law of God. In other words it claims total right to your life, and this is Moloch worship. Total jurisdiction means that the state is entitled to total sacrifice. And therefore this had to be set forth symbolically in worship in Moloch worship periodically, in that people would be called upon in a time of great national crisis to bring forth their children and offer them their firstborn son on the altar to Moloch. The Moloch state comes when people reject God as king for man or a statist king. And the first commandment declared “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me’

When Israel rejected the leadership of Samuel, Samuel went in dejection to God and God said “They have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me that I would not be king or “Moloch” over them” and so he told them the consequences of their course of action, their rejection of God. What would happen now that the state was being made king? And in I Samuel 8 verses 11-18 God declares the consequence of this rejection. And He says because they are choosing another king, in effect by implication another god, even though they claimed they are not; first He says there will be conscription. Second there will be compulsory labor battalions. Third there will be conscription of young woman as well as men. Fourth there will be an expropriation of property and livestock. Fifth the state will demand a tithe like God as its tax.

Now this is an interesting point. God declares that when a state demands as much as ten percent of anyone’s income, in support of self, it is challenging God, it is denying God, because God alone has the right as the absolute Lord and Landlord to demand that much of man. But today the state requires far more than ten percent, it is well over forty percent that all state, federal, and local taxes take of one’s income. And sixth God declares He will not hear a people who complain about paying the price of their sin, that the day will come He says, that the consequence of having abandoned Me will bring upon you all this oppression and when you reach the ultimate of this oppression you shall cry out to Me and I will not hear you. You will pay the price. The Moloch state therefore represents man’s supreme effort to command the future and to play God, to have himself as the other god before God.

Now in an related passage in Deuteronomy thirteen Moses goes into greater detail about the false prophets, and he declares that there are three kinds of instigators to idolatry and Deuteronomy thirteen verses one through five he says there is an instigation to idolatry by false prophets. Second in verses 6-11 by private individuals, and third in verses 12-18 by a city, by a community, and he declares there must be in all three cases the death penalty without mercy. Now the death penalty is not required for private belief, in other words a person can privately, in his heart, be an idolater, or an atheist, but it is for attempts to propagate idolatry, to subvert the social order. Similarly this law is not for a missionary situation, but in a Christian society that has established itself upon God’s law order. Then such a society has an obligation to invoke the death penalty against all those who attempt to subvert it because this is then the basic treason.

Every law order has a concept of treason, of betrayal of its fundamental law order. It either punishes such treason by death or it commits suicide. Now criminal offenses always exact a penalty, every time a crime is committed there is a penalty. It makes no difference whether the crime was great or small, every crime has a penalty. If it is a pencil that’s stolen, the person who owned that pencil is penalized to the extent that they have to replace that pencil. If it’s a million stolen the person who had that million, or the institution that had it is then penalized. The only question is “who is penalized”? Is it the criminal? Or is it the victim? According to Biblical law restitution is the requirement. The criminal is penalized. In our society today we are penalized, we are robbed, and then we have to pay to support the criminal in jail by means of taxation, so that we are doubly penalized. We lose that which we were robbed of and then we lose the price of the support in taxation. Every criminal offence always exacts a penalty. And we live today in such an age that the penalty is almost invariably paid by the victim.

Now, crime also exacts a social penalty as well as a personal penalty. The law order is breached; the peace and health of society are broken. If in a classroom a child cheats, and the child gets an undeserved grade, everyone in the classroom is affected because the whole order and the rank and the grading of the classroom is affected in that someone has of an eminence the position that is undeserved, and the law order of that classroom is broken. Or if a child speaks out of turn and gets away with it the peace and quiet of all is disturbed. Basic to any society is the integrity of its foundations, and if a society allows it’s foundations to be attacked then it perishes.

The Marxist make it clear. But if you’re going to attack Marxism you’re going to die. That is not the sin of Marxism. If this were the only thing the Marxist did we would have to say there’s good sense in their procedure. Because they are simply recognizing this is their foundation, Marxist philosophy, and they can never survive if they allow Marxist philosophy to be attacked and to be denied and for people to try to convert anyone away from it. A society either protects its foundations and declares that any departure from it incurs the death penalty and it perishes, and therefore the first commandment being “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me”. Nothing more totally destroys a society then the breaching of this faith in a Godly society. But of course this is no longer the faith of our society, we are a humanistic society and we are in a missionary situation. We have to convert and to re-establish as against these false prophets, false mediators, from the diviners to the necromancers, to the Moloch state, the false prophets, all of whom claim to be gods and man’s true mediators to salvation an the happiness.

The true prophet is cited in Deuteronomy 18 verses 15-19. God says “I will raise up unto the a prophet from the midst of thy brethren, like unto thee, very man of very man. Like unto Me, like unto Moses, a lawgiver who speaks for God, unto him ye shall harken.” All the prophets spoke in the name of the Lord as forerunners of Christ, and Christ was the prophet. And He comes, according to the promise given through Moses in the fullness of time, to speak unto them all that shall command him.

Isaiah in the eight chapter, the nineteenth verse, as he surveys the apostasy of the people, and their readiness to go to spiritualists, to fortune tellers, to seers and seeresses, to probe the future commented “and when they shall say unto you “seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep and that mutter,” should not a people seek unto their God for the living to the dead?” Or as the angels said, to the women at the tomb, why seek ye Him that liveth, among the dead?

In the concluding passage of the eighteenth chapter Moses turns to the false prophets. The false prophet when he speaks a thing in the name of the Lord, claiming to be a faithful servant god, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass that is the thing that the Lord has not spoken, but the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. Thou shalt not be afraid of him. Today we live in a society that has for some years been given over to Molech worship. The state has been man’s king and God, and we are now reaping the consequence. I referred a few weeks ago to the incidence that had just taken place about two weeks ago at the Sorbonne during the student rebellion in Paris. There was in the auditorium that read “No smoking” and someone had written under it in large letters on the wall “it is forbidden to forbid.” Then someone came along and wrote on the outside walls in large letters a sentence that became the motto of the students “I take my desires for the truth, because I believe in the truth of my desires.” this in anarchism and it is Moloch worship. In which everyman makes himself his own Moloch, and says all things must be sacrificed to me, all law and order, all humanity, because I deem it so.

One of the aspects of Moloch worship that is very significant is that as a part of the paganism it represented, all kinds of strange sacrifices of humanity were required of man, not only the sacrifice of the human, of surrendering ones children to be burned on an alter before this image. But also all kinds of mutilation, all kinds of denials of humanity, and it became a part of this kind of Baal worship to have as well priests that were castrated; it was a denial of humanity, and an attempt to be as God, by surpassing humanity. This was a deep impulse in the ancient world a part of its humanism, because when men deny God the essence of humanism is that it makes man to be God. And there is legend concerning Empedocles the Greek philosopher, that in his old age, he decided to be a god and so he climbed up onto mount Etna and threw himself into the crater of the volcano to become a God, it was his form of Moloch worship. And today all over the world whether it is the Totalitarians or the Anarchists self destruction is the method by which man are seeking to be as gods. Against this we must declare God said “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me”. For apart from Him man cannot live, and his course becomes self destruction. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God we thank Thee for Thy word and we thank Thee that Thy word speaks to our condition and gives us strength, to live, to overcome, to triumph. We thank Thee our Father that we can face all our today’s and our tomorrows in the supreme confidence of victory. Bless us to this purpose. Grant us Thy peace, and Thy guiding and provident care, that in all things we may be more than conquers through Him who loved us, even Jesus Christ our Lord. In His name we pray, Amen.

Are there any questions now? Yes?

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] No, but of course the meats are bled, what little is left in we are not to worry about, this is re-emphasized in Acts 15 in the counsel of Jerusalem, so that it does apply to us.

[Same audience member] {?}…How can you know when you are a Christian?

[Rushdoony] You know that you are Christian when…[audience member interrupts]… we’re not a Christian because we do everything that we are told, we do what we are told to do as our gratitude to God for His salvation. We are a Christian when we accept Christ as our Lord and Saviour, when by faith we accept Him as the only one who can save us. When we recognize that it is not what our hands have done, or can do, but what he has done for us, and then our response is to keep His word to the best of our ability. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, this is the declaration over and over in the New Testament.

[Same audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, well not necessarily, some people have emotional experience, others they find imperceptibly they are moving day by day more and more in the direction of faith and of obedience and as they look back they can see that a great change has taken place.

[Same audience member] Both.

[Rushdoony] Both, yes. This is more commonly the situation, it is a growth that begins. Because growth is not a dramatic thing, you see the seed begins its life underground, it’s growing but you don’t see it, but suddenly you notice it’s there. You go and come and then you notice why it’s really popped up, it’s getting to be quite tall, and this is the way most Christian growth is.

[Rushdoony] Yes?

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Is it a sin to use divining rod to locate water? This is a question that is often debated, it is not covered by any of the commandments particularly, we don’t really know what is involved in this. Myself I feel a little inclined to be hostile to it until I fully determined in my mind what all this involves. I have gotten a book on water witching to say it’s a historical survey and one of these days I’ll get around to analyzing it and then I’ll know when I know exactly is meant {?} there, a more of what jurisdiction the law here has in with reference to it.

[Rushdoony] Yes?

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes I know the verse... [audience member interrupts] …Yes, that’s a verse that is very often used “if my people which are called by My name shall humble themselves and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and heal their land” II Chronicles 7:14. That’s very true, but, it cannot be read in an antinomian, anti-law fashion. What do I mean by that? Simply this, God does say in I Samuel 8 verses 11-18 “That if you cry out in that day I will not hear you” What does He mean by it? Well namely that when you are crying out against the penalty of your sins, I will not hear you. But if there is true repentance II Chronicles 8:14 says, I will hear you, but this does not mean I will turn away the consequences. In other words, you’re going to pay for it all the same but I will give you an opportunity thereafter. In other words if you have a hundred dollars, a child let us say has a hundred dollars and they waste it, and they go and sorrow and repent to their parents, the parents can say “I forgive you” but they aren’t going to say, unless they’re fools “I’ll restore the hundred dollars to you that you blew”. So God is saying, you’re going to pay for it, but I’ll give you another opportunity, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to get back what you lost, you pay the price.

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] II Chronicles 7:14. Yes, yes.

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, I haven’t read the book yet, but of course I’ve read the little portions of it, and of course this is what he’s talking about apparently, Moloch worship, in The Hideous Strength.

[Rushdoony] Yes?

[Audience Member] Would it not be lawful to convict {?}

[Rushdoony] No, because we have a great many passages in the law that deal with this, they specifically cite the kinds of meat you can eat. For example beef, and lamb, and kid.

[Audience member] Where does it say that?

[Rushdoony] We’ll come to that later on. But the law has a great deal, we’ll go into the significance of these commandments later on when we get to it. But it cites the kinds of meats that are given by God as foods for man and then it says specifically that the blood is to be spilled on the ground as an offering to God, recognizing that one takes it by His permission and the food is then to be eaten with thanksgiving. So it is definitely a vegetarian kind of commandment.

[Same audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, unless the practice has been changed this has been in Western society except in a few places in Europe, very much the requirement, it used to be, unless it’s been changed recently, that the laws required the method of butchering and the blood had to be let out. Now it is extensively used I believe for making of fertilizers and other things today.

[Rushdoony] Yes?

[Audience Member] {?}

[Rushdoony] We’ll come to this, these are good questions, but we want to deal with that later, we’re going to go into the significance of this. We’ll touch on the blood a little next week but I don’t want to go into the whole of the law at once.

[Rushdoony] Yes?

[Audience Member] {?}

[Rushdoony] There is no evidence in scripture that we are only to eat meat at certain times. None whatsoever, it is simply given to man as food. And it depended on the financial means of people, say in the Old Testament times, how often they ate meat. And that was it.

[Rushdoony] Yes?

[Audience Member] Would you say that there was specific {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh yes, there was an idol, right, a very definitely an idol

[Audience Member] In which of Marx’s works did he present {?}

[Rushdoony] Well first of all, that’s a difficult question because Marx is such a long winded writer. It sometimes took him forever to say something, and when he said it, it wasn’t clear. But I would say in some of his early writings, which you can get in a paperback entitled “Marx’s Early Writings” you find some of his plainest and best statements. Then of course the Communist Manifesto that’s very important, then in the volume On Religion which is a collection of his various things here, and also on German philosophy. I would say one of the best ways right now to understand Karl Marx is to read an excellent introduction which will give you some choice citations from Marx as well as where to go for them is book that just came out this past week by Gary North, entitled Marx’s Religion of Revolution and I would say this you must get and read, you’ll have a superb analysis there.

[Rushdoony] Yes?

[Audience Member] {?}

[Rushdoony] I think it was because he was confused, I really do, I think that some like Lord Keins {?} deliberately tried to be pompous and confuse people, but Marx was a very confused and sick mind, so that there was this tendency to gush, when he wrote it just came pouring out, every kind of badly digested idea.

[Rushdoony] Yes?

[Audience Member] {?}

[Rushdoony] It really has no ground in either, the forty days of lent, and the fasting at Lent have been made into a kind of time for spiritual meditation and so on, but according to the entire Bible, the old and new testaments, there was only one day of fasting required on the day of atonement of the Old Testament believer. Now that disappeared, because Christ’s atonement on the cross made the Day of Atonement fulfilled. And our Lord said with respect to fasting, now that the bridegroom was come, He being the bridegroom of the church, the time for fasting was over. So that any mandatory time of fasting it does not exist as far as the scripture is concerned. It is mandatory only by church regulations. Now fasting is not forbidden, it is stated that it can be a voluntary thing for a season of prayer and meditation but even there when Saint Paul speaks of it, neither a wife nor a husbands can partake of a fast without the permission of the other.

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] How do I explain our blindness to the massacre {?} of young men as against..yes well this is a contrived thing to a great degree. I think of course what happened this last week was wicked, murder is always a fearful sin, it is an offense against God’s commandment. But the aftermath of that was even more wicked, because within a matter of minutes you had various dignitaries saying, substantially the same thing, for example Senator McCarthy, he got on the air and said this was the act of a lone deranged man. How did he know? How does anyone know? And how did he know within 3-4 hours that this was the act of a lone deranged man? They didn’t know the name of the man, they didn’t know anything when he so said. This was very presumptive.

Then he proceeded to say we are all guilty, now that was the essence of wickedness, to put the guilt upon us, when certainly we did not do it, and there is no ground in scripture to put guilt upon us for the act of a single man, especially someone who has no connection with us, who is a foreigner, not even a citizen. Then after he finished speaking what the announcers said was that we must not speak of this man as the murder or the assassin, only as the alleged assassin because it would prejudice the case in the courts. He could never be referred to except as the alleged murder. So he’s only the alleged murderer but we are, according to a Senator of the United States and dignitaries from Washington to California, the guilty ones. Now this is wicked, it indicates a fearful depravity when you’ve come to a situation where the innocent people are the guilty ones.

I’ll take just a minute or two more, our time is really up, but I was in Washington D.C. and mostly outside of it, from Thursday until yesterday afternoon, and I did not go into Washington itself except on the outskirts. I had no interest to go and see insurrection city… the names given back there for it [general laughter] I’m using the polite term I ever heard, the only one fit to use for insurrection city [more laughter] but I did not see any sense going in and seeing things of that sort, and of course I was told by any number of people, almost everyone that I met, told me of some experiences they had had in the area. Look, it isn’t safe. Most people who have anything to do in Washington live in the suburbs and work there, go in and out as quickly as possible, they do not go around at all. But to back up a bit, one of the things they stated was that they believed that the march on Washington and on the Pentagon earlier was a marvelously staged production. That platforms are setup in numerous places where the T.V. cameras could be placed, the action was in front of the camera’s. It was in front of the cameras too that the lines of the troops broke and they were able to get through. And one person who works for the government said “I believe they wanted the lines to break at one point, that the lines could have held if it had been so ordered, that they idea was for you to see this and to be terrified that these things have, as part of their purpose, to throw fear into the hearts of the people.”

Then when Martin Luther King died, as soon as word of the rioting and burning in Washington hit all of the various government offices, the thousands upon thousands of people who are working didn’t wait, nobody ever told them “There will be no work the balance of this day or tomorrow” as the word reached them, people began to shut their desks, and put on their coats and the secretaries picked up their handbags and they started to walk out. So without a word from anybody, from every building of the federal government, the crowd started streaming out. The few who waited around wondering “should I stay or should I leave” when they decided to leave, it was too late, the busses had stopped running, and not because they had been told to stop running. And so some people had to walk ten and fifteen miles to the suburbs to get away.

There had been burnings virtually every night and sometimes seven or eight since then, and yet the mayor of Washington, who is of course colored, together with various other officials who are white, call it “a base slander” that there’s anything wrong or that Washington is not now a very safe city. So that they are regularly making statements assuring everyone that it is a safe and quiet place, in spite of the nightly burnings. It’s not uncommon as people drive in and out to have pop bottles, rocks, and what not, come through the car windows. One man I was talking to, a minister, had as he stopped at an intersection had hoodlums come up and try to get into his car. This is the kind of thing that prevails. This is the most federally controlled area of the United States, and it is the most lawless part of the United States now.

Friday I asked to go to Mount Vernon, I had not seen that on my previous visit, we’d gotten there too late. The man who took me, remarked when we went there, he said “this is really amazing,” he said “I didn’t expect to see such few people here, I knew that business men in Washington were saying business was 25% to 50% off” he said “Mount Vernon being outside of Washington, I still thought there would be crowds here” and he said “this time of the year, on a Friday afternoon there would be 500 people just standing at the front door of the house” . There weren’t 50 people all over the place in the house and around the grounds. So you didn’t have to stand in line, you just walked in. Now this is the situation.

One of the interesting things was I spoke at the commencement of the Fairfax Christian school and there was a crowd of a little better than 1000, approximately 1100 for the commencement, but neither there, nor any graduation in the Washington area, wear their caps and gowns. The two big supply houses in Washington D.C. had been looted of every cap and gown during the rioting. Now what in the world they wanted to do with the caps and gowns these hoodlums, I don’t know. But every last cap and gown was taken. This is the kind of thing that went on.

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] No, no I don’t think he represents any special evil as against anyone else. And the time may come when a great many people will be saying that John and Robert Kennedy were fortunate in that they died and others live to go through what may be coming. Our time is up.