Leviticus; The Law of Holiness and Grace

Molech Worship

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Genre: Lessons with Q & A

Lesson: 45

Track: 45

Dictation Name: RR172Y45

Date: Early 70s

Let us worship God. This is the confidence that we have in Him that if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us. Having these promises, let us draw near to the Throne of Grace with true hearts in full assurance of faith. My voice shalt Thou hear in the morning, oh Lord, in the morning will I direct my prayer unto Thee and will look up.

Let us pray.

Almighty God our Heavenly Father we thank Thee that of Thy grace and mercy, Thou hast made all things and hast made us for Thy purpose, reclaimed us from our ways unto Thy ways and given us such great promises in Christ. Grant that we walk day by day in the confidence that it is not man’s will that shall be done, but Thine. Not our will but Thine, and that Thy kingdom indeed shall come, and Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Prepare us by Thy Holy Spirit and by Thy Word for Thy service and make us strong in Thy truth. In Christ’s name, amen.

Our scripture is Leviticus 20:1-5. Our subject: “Molech Worship.” Leviticus 20:1-5

“1And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,

2 Again, thou shalt say to the children of Israel, Whosoever he be of the children of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn in Israel, that giveth any of his seed unto Molech; he shall surely be put to death: the people of the land shall stone him with stones.

3 And I will set my face against that man, and will cut him off from among his people; because he hath given of his seed unto Molech, to defile my sanctuary, and to profane my holy name.

4 And if the people of the land do any ways hide their eyes from the man, when he giveth of his seed unto Molech, and kill him not:

5 Then I will set my face against that man, and against his family, and will cut him off, and all that go a whoring after him, to commit whoredom with Molech, from among their people.”

This clearly is one of the less popular laws of the Bible. Of course, no law is really popular when it militates against man’s sin.

First of all, to deal with the question of who is Molech. Molech, or Molok, Melek, Milcom, Malkam, Malcom, means “king or counselor;” usually, king. And Molech worship has reference to State worship; giving one’s seed to Molech as we have seen on other occasions had reference normally to a rite of dedication at a state center, where before a battle insignia or an image of the king, there would be a little brazier with a few coals and some incense and the man would pass his child over those coals, over the fire. He would thereby dedicate his child to the State, to the ruler, saying that his life, like that of his child belonged to the State and if need be, would be sacrificed for the life of the State. On rare occasions it could actually mean human sacrifice.

This cult was also associated with the bull or calf cult which we encounter in the episode of the golden calf. It was a symbol of fertility, of divine kingship. The king god in antiquity is sometimes represented on seal by streams of water issuing from his body or from a vessel in his hand. And as Hook has said, “The interchange between the god, the king and the sacred tree seem to point to the fact that the tree which may not be misleading to call the Tree of Life is a symbol of the life-giving functions of the king.” Hook, as an archeologist, was discussing the relationship between the Tree of Life and kings and how the State (the king) was seen as the Tree of Life. He went on to say that a king-god was, “an individual who was regarded by the community as the focus and embodiment of the magical powers which were necessary for its well-being.”

Now, it is easy for modern man to view Molech worship as a primitive superstition. But the State is now seen as the Tree of Life, as the means to solving all problems in all fields, whether politic or economic, educational, medical, cultural, and so on. Modern man is as gullible and as superstitious as ancient man. He is ready to believe the state can deliver all these things. I should say in passing that of late, some scholars have tried to cast doubt on the nature of Molech worship, that it was not necessarily State worship. But in reading their comments, all that comes through is, they do not deny the fact, neither do they affirm it. In other words, they are true modern scholars; they fuzz up everything they touch.

It is interesting that a French Medievalist, Henri Focillon has written a book about the year 1,000, and he begins by calling attention to the fact that it was once believed that the year 1,000 was a year of great significance, that people were afraid that that was going to be the date of the Second Coming, and of the end of the world and the Day of Judgment and so on. And he said subsequently, historians said that’s all nonsense, but without any real investigation. The reason for it of course being that in a modern perspective, time means nothing, history really means nothing, and therefore dates mean nothing. But as he says, the Christian calendar has moved in terms of dates: The Day of Resurrection, the day of Christ’s birth, Saint’s Days, days of pilgrimages, the Day of Worship, and much, much more. So days and years from a Christian perspective have significance, and he says that the year 1,000 had a great deal of significance, that it was looked forward to by people rather than feared (although there were a few who apparently did fear it), but most looked forward to it because it was going to mark the beginning of another millennium in Christ. And so, it charged a great deal of activity and reform within the Church, so he says the year 1,000 was indeed a year of tremendous significance. But time now is meaningless because men have no faith. And, he says, for Frenchmen, time has only meaning now in terms of political dates: 1793, 1830, 1848. But modern man’s calendar has no cosmic meaning. Hence, dates, men and events lack moral meaning, moral content, moral imperatives. Thus, the fuzzing up that a few scholars are now doing with regard to the meaning of Molech worship is nonsense. It is because whatever they touch is stripped of meaning because ultimately there is no meaning for them.

With this in mind, let us turn to the text. The child was given to the State. But in terms of scripture, the child belongs to God. This is the meaning of circumcision and the meaning of baptism. The child is given to God. We declare that the child is not our property, but God’s property, and hence to alienate the child from God is a very serious offense. Our Lord echoes this law in Matthew 18:6 when He says, “… whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” Notice that in this law, with regard to Molech worship, execution by stoning is cited, and our Lord uses that to say it were better that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he were drowned in the depth of the sea. The offense against children, thus—any offense—is not to be taken lightly. A covenant child is God’s child through baptism and it is called committing whoredom with Molech, or in modern version, prostituting themselves to Molech. Thus, all offenses against children are primarily religious. It means anything other than seeing the child’s life as God’s property and as stewardship to us is wrong. All other offenses to children are subsidiaries to this. Hannah’s words about Samuel when she took him to Levi set forth the meaning of this law. “For this lad I prayed, and the Lord granted me what I’d prayed for. I have therefore handed him (her child Samuel) back to the Lord as long as he lives, he is the Lord’s.”

Now, two kinds of penalties are cited here. First, the people of the land, which is a term meaning the people through their legal system, must execute all who are guilty of child abuse, of alienating the child from his place under God. And second that God Himself moves against such a people. A culture which is indifferent to children and to child abuse has no future.

Now verse 5 tells us that the primary offender is the man, the father, because he has the greater authority. The Hebraic practice, by the way, in all such instances of the death penalty, was first to exhort the condemned man to confess his sins, then to give him a stupefying draught to render him more or less insensible.

Verse 4 tells us that the entire community must be involved in its opposition to the separation of the child from God and to all forms of child abuse. The child is not man’s property. The offense was, as Micklem, an English scholar said the dedication of children to the king or to the State, but the child can never be seen as family property, state property or human property, or his own lord. He is God’s. The secularization of the child culminates in his sacrifice to human or statist purposes. It should not surprise us therefore that Molech worship could end at times in human sacrifice, child sacrifice. Ezekiel commented on this saying, in Ezekiel 23:37-39,

“37That they have committed adultery, and blood is in their hands, and with their idols have they committed adultery, and have also caused their sons, whom they bare unto me, to pass for them through the fire, to devour them.

38 Moreover this they have done unto me: they have defiled my sanctuary in the same day, and have profaned my Sabbaths.

39 For when they had slain their children to their idols, then they came the same day into my sanctuary to profane it; and, lo, thus have they done in the midst of mine house.”

God says the children are born unto Him and to reject our duty to rear our children in terms of God’s covenant is to give them over to death. It is the rejection of our inheritance and of our future.

In this text and others like this where we have the death penalty, there is a very great hostility on the part of modern man to the penalty. We live in a time when the death penalty is not popular for anything. But even among those who favor the death penalty, this law is commonly rejected. To understand it first we must see that the penalty applies to a covenant people directly, but indirectly, all godless cultures are under a penalty of death when they do not give themselves and their children to God. Second, many are ready to accept the death penalty for crimes against man, but reject it for crimes against God. Man is more important in their thinking, and crime is reduced to offenses against mankind and its properties. This is Humanism. Then, third, in due time God brings radical judgment on cultures which despise the name and honor of God and who feel the transgressions of his law are nothing at all.

Now, to understand the full reaches of this law, we have to understand that it is a death penalty because an oath has been violated. To understand that, let us look at the word ‘sacrament’. It comes from the Latin “sacramentum.” It’s an old Latin word. It meant in Latin, “a soldier’s oath never to desert the Roman eagle.” It meant that he was going to be under the sentence of death if he turned his back on the enemy, if in any way, he fell short of his duty. And anyone who violated his oath, his sacramentum, died. On some occasions, when a whole legion was guilty, and there might be a mitigating circumstance, what was done was a decimation—every tenth man was marked for death. To break the oath and to run from an enemy, thus, was to violate the sacrament.

Now this is difficult for modern man to understand. Until fairly recent times, to break an oath meant death. The oath of office in the U.S. Constitution when written still had much of its ancient religious and biblical meaning. It invoked on the one hand the wrath of God for violation or man’s charges of impeachment or treason. But we are very much under the influence of Renaissance Humanism and that attitude is best summed up by Shakespeare in Hamlet. Polonius, in speaking to Laertes, declared, “This above all, to thine own self be true and it must follow as the night the day. Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

However, it is precisely when we are true to ourselves that we are false to both God and man. We then give priority to our own changing whims and desires, to our thoughts, with deadly results. Men cannot be true to an oath when they are true to themselves, because an oath means that our vow to God takes priority over ourselves. This is why within the Hebrew and within the Christian tradition, within the Roman and all the various pagan traditions, the oath, if violated, merited death. IT meant that a man had to live in terms of more than in himself.

Now circumcision and baptism are both forms of an oath. In circumcising or baptizing a child, we give that child to God and we swear before God and man to rear the child as God’s possession. The child we thereby commit to rearing, not for ourselves or for his own or her own sake, but for the Lord. In adult baptism, we make that vow for ourselves.

In giving one’s seed to Molech, a man by means of this pagan sacrament or oath, gave his son to the State and vowed that the child was the property of the State. He violated his oath to God. Molech worship, thus, is very much with us, although most people fail to recognize it; takes many forms. One of which is for Christians to send their children to state schools.

Now, it is a sad sign of the time that many Protestant churches refuse to apply the word ‘sacrament’ to baptism or to communion. This means that they refuse to see it as an oath binding themselves irrevocably to God with a penalty of His judgment for desertion if they turn their backs on their baptismal vow. If they do not call God’s ordination of these ceremonies, a sacrament, they are turning it into a human act, thereby guilty of blasphemy. The sacrament of communion is a double oath. God the Son in His incarnation vowed to become the all-sufficient sacrifice for sin to redeem His people. And in Hebrews [10:4-9a] we read,

“4For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins.

5 Wherefore when he [Christ] cometh into the world, he saith, Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared me:

6 In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin thou hast had no pleasure.

7 Then said I, Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written of me,) to do thy will, O God.

8 Above when he said, Sacrifice and offering and burnt offerings and offering for sin thou wouldest not, neither hadst pleasure therein; which are offered by the law;

9 Then said he, Lo, I come to do thy will, O God…”

Jesus Christ came to do away with the insufficient laws of sacrifice with His sufficient sacrifice.

Now the words of institution and communion set forth His vow or sacrament. On our turn in receiving the sacrament, we must examine or test ourselves and the word that is used is the same word that is used in Proverbs 25:4 in the Septuagint for the refining of silver by fire, the testing of its character. The word is also related to an oath because it was used for the investigation or testing that preceded the installation into office of any man. Thus, the oath is closely related to the sacrament and its testing, the examination.

In the New Testament the word is used with reference to church members, those under the oath of baptism. And as a result, they are to be tested by God in their oath. To deny an oath thus, was to die. In Hebrews 6:2 speaks of the doctrine of baptism and then continues where it is impossible [Hebrews 6:4-8 ], “4…for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, 5And have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, 6 If they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame. 7For the earth which drinketh in the rain that cometh oft upon it, and bringeth forth herbs meet for them by whom it is dressed, receiveth blessing from God: 8 But that which beareth thorns and briers is rejected, and is nigh unto cursing; whose end is to be burned.”

Now, the reference here is not to sins which reveal our shortcomings, but to sins of lawlessness and of contempt for God and His Law. Those who partake of the sacrament unworthily eat and drink damnation unto themselves and for this, Paul said, many in Corinth were weak, sickly, or had died.

Now the modern state like the pagan state of antiquity is guilty of Molech worship. And God promises judgment to all false gods and to all who take oaths falsely to Him and in His name. We have lost so much because modern man being without faith has no meaning in his life, and therefore he takes meaning out of everything. Words lose their meaning, and you can read this about Molech worship. You can be told by some commentators it meant the king or the State. But the meaning escapes men because meaning is lost to them since it is lost as far as things ultimate are concerned.

In previous generations, men out of fear for violation of the oath went to extremes that were not altogether wise. Constantine, recognizing that baptism is an oath, delayed his baptism until he was dying. Washington recognizing the sacrament of communion as an oath, and feeling very strongly about oaths, in fact requiring forty lashes of any man in the army who took God’s name in vain for fear of the wrath of God, all his life, hesitated ever to take the sacrament of communion. Now those were not sound practices, but certainly the modern practice of not seeing the significance of an oath is very, very wrong. And this is why Molech worship is again with us. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, Thy Word is truth, and Thy Word declares unto us that Molech worship is with us, and that we must look unto Thee, not to the State, to Thy Law for our hope and a future. Oh Lord our God, make us strong by Thy Word and by Thy Spirit that we may turn this generation back to Thy Word and to Thy kingdom and that we may work to the end that the kingdoms of this world might become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. In His name we pray, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

Yes.

[Audience] So Mussolini and Hitler set up the idea that nothing should stand above the government…

[Rushdoony] Yes

[Audience] …and I think there is a confusion in the mind of many people between the government and the nation. Since the government is only a system of government; the nation is the people.

[Rushdoony] It is interesting too that in speaking to a papal legate, a representative of Hitler’s said, echoing something that went back to Bismarck, ah, the German Reich will never tolerate a state within the State. And the people, the volk were identified with the state, so they had no independent existence from the state. They were absorbed into it. And the Church could not be allowed any independent existence so Church and people were identified with the State which meant no independent voice.

We have the same thing of course, in Marxism, so that any disagreement is treason. It is the slave labor camps.

Any other questions or comments?

Yes.

[Audience] {?} Interesting that the clergy of the West is never identified in modern Molech.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And it’s not for, uh, lack of being told who Molech was. Uh, Nathaniel Micklem, whom I cited, was an English scholar, first half of this century, and he was very clear. Molech is the king, the State. Now neither those who read Micklem nor Micklem himself ever drew the logical conclusion to that, never applied it to the world around us. Somehow the State in which all these biblical scholars lived in was not to be identified with the pagan states of antiquity or the nation next door.

[Audience] You mentioned adult baptism?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] I thought there was a… isn’t there a

[Rushdoony] Is there a what?

[Audience] I thought you had to be, a, baptized at a young age. Isn’t there a time limit on being baptized?

[Rushdoony] No. There is no time limit on baptism. A man can be baptized on his deathbed. And in every instance, it’s a vow. With a child, it is a vow by the parents whereby they give the child to God, and with an adult it is his vow to God. It is a sacramentum. And the word has never lost its original meaning. It is an oath that invokes death if there is faithlessness. And as long as Rome took the sacramentum seriously, it had a, legions that were feared everywhere. It was only as they cheapened the meaning of the Legion and the oath was replaced with pay, and that was the inducement to fight, not the oath. Before that, the Roman Legions marched triumphantly. After that, their work was defensive; a totally different psychology.

Any other questions or comments?

Yes.

[Audience] {?} That influencing our military today? That idea of {?} oaths? {?} our military?

[Rushdoony] I don’t think in the army they even remotely consider the meaning of an oath. And I think that’s one reason why the modern army which fights for nothing it believes in is increasingly a weak army. All over the world the fire power in this century of the various armies has gone down, which means more and more of them just carry the gun and never use it. Because what are they fighting for? With good reason, they don’t know! In Afghanistan, the Soviet troops are not interested in fighting the Afghans. So, why should they put themselves out to be killed? This is the feeling. When you take an oath for anything short of God, and for something that is blessed by Him, both the oath and what you are supposed to do become meaningless.

Yes, Otto, you had a question also?

[Otto] {?} Physicians have dropped the Hippocratic Oath.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The physicians, I think, have dropped the Hippocratic Oath. If not, they’re taking an oath falsely, but they were doing that a long time before the recent years.

There are very few oaths left, uh, with any meaning, if there are any. The oath you take as a witness should result in severe punishment if there is any kind of perjury and yet about the only time now when you can get punished on a stand is if you refuse to testify to Congress; not if you lie to them. I imagine they have punished a few for lying, but primarily you’ve got to get up on the stand and perform as they bid you to.

Any other comments?

Well, if not, let us conclude with prayer.

Bless us, oh Lord in Thy service and make us a strong people of Thy sacrament, people who are bound to Thee, strong in Thy service, and never retreating from the task to which Thou hast ordered us. Bless us mightily as we serve Thee. And now, go in peace. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.