Solomon’s
personal involvement with and public initiation of
idolatry at the end of his reign influenced
the spirituality of Israel and Judah for generations to come. The common
biblical description of Israel playing the harlot with the pagan (i.e.,
earthly) idol-gods of the surrounding nations is, I believe, more than a
metaphor.[29]
As religion, the
feminine goddess
Asherah (or, Ashtoreth) was
fully a part of Baal worship, she being the female consort of Baal.[30]
This male-female divinity (i.e., Baal-Asherah) typifies the pagan idolatry
where, as one study Bible notes, the “deities symbolized generative power,
[and] their worship involved prostitution.”[31]
As ritual, the
intent behind
religious prostitution was perhaps threefold: one, that worshippers
could derive pleasure as they indulged their selfish lusts; two, that by
engaging in the primal act by which the continuum of life is perpetuated,
they could, in acts of imitative magic, somehow stimulate “the womb of
mother earth” to open thereby increasing the fertility of their flocks and
crops; and three, that they could, for reason of ecstasy derived from the
sexual liaison with a body representing a god or goddess, experience their
personality, however fleetingly, become mystically fused with the divine.[32]
Thus, ritual prostitution involving males and females became a common
occurrence at the many high places constructed “before Jerusalem” and
throughout the nation (Jeremiah 3:6).[33]
At this juncture of the discussion, we should note a call from some that, in
advocating
New Age/New Spirituality, “We must allow ourselves whatever time it
takes to reestablish the consciousness of the
Sacred Prostitute.”[34]
In spite of the outward repression of idolatry by reforms like those
initiated by the youthful King Josiah (circa 622 B.C., 2 Chronicles 34:1-7),
it has been noted that the idolatrous cancer “was deep and flourished
quickly again after a shallow revival.”[35] Not even the Babylonian
Captivity would cure the nation of its fascination for and playing harlot
with the imagined gods and goddesses of the surrounding nations. In fact,
the solution to this spiritual pollution awaits the coming of the One who
will cure Israel and the world of spiritual harlotry forever (Zechariah
12:10; 13:2; See Micah 4:1-2.).
Obviously, when the image of God is
changed into gods and goddesses (Romans 1:23), poly-gendering generates
polytheism, when the sacred/sexual on earth is believed to mimic the
sacred-sexual in heaven (as above, so below), when sacred prostitutes
become representative incarnations of the gods and goddesses, and when
sex becomes a sacrament
linking of human to
the divine, the dynamic of “relationship” with God changes.[36]
Sensuality controls the spirituality, and the divine mystery is reduced
vulgar lust (See Leviticus 18:1-19:4; 1 Peter 1:15).
Solomon’s introduction of an idolatry that included the feminine-divine
changed the human perception of the relationship of the gods with each
other, the people with those gods, and the people with people. As the
apostle wrote, God “gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of
their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves”
(Romans 1:24). With the projection of femaleness into god (Asherah,
being Baal’s consort), in theory it became possible for gods to reproduce
gods. Like rats, the gods multiplied (i.e., polytheism).[37]
As the gods proliferated and Israel created their likenesses on earth, idols
flooded the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The prophet described the
apostasy:
"Therefore thou hast forsaken thy
people the house of Jacob, because they be replenished from the east,
and are soothsayers like the Philistines . . . Their land also is full
of idols; they worship the work of their own hands, that which their own
fingers have made: And the mean man boweth down, and the great man
humbleth himself: therefore forgive them not (Isaiah 2:6, 8-9, KJV;
Compare Jeremiah 2:13, 20; 3:1-10, 13.)."
For reason of being influenced by the
spiritualities of the East, in which spiritual adultery was exhibited in the
people’s sacramental liaisons with male and female prostitutes representing
the gods and goddesses, Israel’s relationship with her faithful HUSBAND “hit
the rocks!”
“RELATIONSHIP” ON THE ROCKS
Idolism negatively impacted “relationship”
among Jehovah’s ancient people in two basic ways—first and vertically, their
relationship to the Lord was changed, and second and horizontally, their
relationships to each other were affected. Idolatry impacted both the
religious life and social stability of the nation.
For reason of playing the harlot with foreign gods and goddesses [As
exhibited in the Ten Commandments, they lived in denial of Yahweh’s
hierarchical authority over them, ed.], the Lord divorced Himself from the
Northern Kingdom of Israel (i.e., the Assyrian invasion and captivity in 722
B.C., Jeremiah 3:6-11). He scattered the nation throughout the ancient
world.[38] Like her northern sister, Judah’s pursuit of “relationships” with
other pagan gods and goddesses also necessitated her eviction from the land.
The Babylonians carried her into captivity circa 586 B.C. The primal cause
for evicting both Israel and Judah from the Promised Land was that both
sister-kingdoms played the harlot with foreign gods. Openly and unashamedly,
they committed adultery with sacred prostitutes of both sexes before their
HUSBAND-JEHOVAH. They understood neither the hierarchy of, the authority
within, nor fidelity required in their relationship to the Lord (Exodus
20:3). God is not open to an “open marriage” with His people!
But as the spiritual relationship between Israel, Judah, and the Lord broke
down, relationships within the social structure of the ancient kingdoms were
impacted. Through Isaiah the prophet, the Lord described the state of
affairs:
“As for my people, children are their
oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee
cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths” (Isaiah 3:12, KJV).
Hypothetically, Israel and Judah were two
kingdoms under Jehovah. But in their idolism, the two
sister-nations denied God’s authority by creating their own gods and
goddesses as concurrently, they broke God’s Law. As a result, the stability
of their social structure, as Isaiah communicated, lay in shambles.
The
Shack’s thesis—that the Trinity exists in “a
circle of relationship,” and that “hierarchy . . . is your [humanity’s]
problem, not ours”—is not only biblically errant [Any concordance check of
the word “authority” in the Bible will bear this out, ed.], but also
spiritually and socially utopian. Any breach in the concept of God’s
ultimate authority can lead to spiritual anarchy and social chaos among
God’s people. If God, in the governance of family and church, doesn’t rule,
and consequently and correspondingly neither do the men, then the women and
children will. Thus, to the Corinthians Paul wrote,
“But I want you to understand that
Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of a woman, and
God is the head of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:3, NASB).
There can be no relationship where there is
no responsibility, and there can be no accountability where there is no
economy of authority. In fact, one great evidence of the Holy Spirit’s
filling ministry among believers is SUBMISSION (Ephesians 5:21). Without
faithful self-denial and submission, both relationship and fellowship suffer
as imperfect people live on this imperfect earth.
CONCLUSION
Some years ago, a rock singer asked, “What if
God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us . . . If God had a face what
would it look like?”[39] Thanks to the verbal painting of God in
The Shack, some may think they now know what God is like.
As we pointed out, The Shack is big on “relationship(s).” Apparently,
to enhance the “relationship” idea for his readers, William Young felt it
necessary to inject femininity into the Trinity, a femininity that Scripture
neither literally nor metaphorically endorses.[40] But if the femininity of
the Trinity becomes ingrained in the collective consciousness of a large
number professing Christians, the essential goddess-ism it contains may lead
devout souls into versions of spirituality utterly opposed by God and His
Word. We must remember verbal paintings can become just as iconic as images
carved from wood or smelted from precious metals. Christians should together
remember that because,
“we are absent from the Lord . . .
we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:6b-7).
In our relationship with God, He initiates
and we respond in faith. So the question arises, are books like The Shack
needed to enhance, even initiate, the feeling “relationship” with God? The
answer is, if we have found our spiritual completeness in Christ through
faith, they are not (See Colossians 2:10.). The sovereign God will reveal
His presence in us as we existentially walk day-to-day trusting Him, obeying
Him, praying to Him, witnessing to others, and fellowshipping with
believers.[41] By grace through faith, we receive the blessings God gives to
us as we become enraptured by His presence with and in us.
We find the experience of faith in the Savior, the Spirit, and the
Scriptures. Through Jesus we experience
-
contentment in God. He said,
“I am the bread of life; he who comes
to Me shall not hunger, satisfaction he who believes in Me shall never
thirst” (John 6:35, NASB). In the Spirit we experience
-
companionship with God.
“The Spirit Himself bears witness with
our spirit that we are children of God” (Romans 8:16; Compare 2
Corinthians 13:14.). From the Scriptures we experience
-
confidence before God.
“These things I have written to you who
believe in the name of the Son of God, in order that you may know that
you have eternal life. And this is the confidence which we have before
Him” (1 John 5:13-14). By resting in Christ we experience
-
comfort from God, for He has promised,
“I will never leave thee, nor forsake
thee” (Hebrews 13:5, KJV). Such—and much more—is the experiential
fruit of our relationship with God, fruits that then extend His blessing
to those around us.
Sometime during first part of the 1800s, Catesby
Paget wrote a hymn, “A Mind at Peace with God.” The song contained these
words describing the closeness to God that is ours through faith in Jesus
Christ:
Near, so very
near to God,
I could not nearer be;
For in the Person of God’s Son
I am as near as He.
Dear, so very dear to God,
Dearer I could not be;
The love with which He loves His Son,
That is His love to me.
Now, that’s relationship![42] And it’s the
relationship of a BRIDE promised to Jesus who is “the true God and
eternal life.” And because of the exclusivity of this
relationship, John orders,
“Little children, guard yourselves from idols”
(1 John 5:20-21).
ENDNOTES:
29. I think that the Bible’s picturing of God
as being masculine better represents His asexuality. After all, by
themselves males do not have babies. The masculine gender therefore, affirms
God’s solitariness (i.e., monotheism) and sovereignty (i.e., authority).
Infusing femininity into God deconstructs monotheism by creating a
mythological way for gods and goddesses to reproduce (i.e., polytheism). The
asexuality of God also possesses Christological implications. It safeguards
against the Arian or New Age idea that God’s Son was “birthed” in time (See
John 1:1.). God’s solitary masculinity also dismisses any thought that the
first “christ” resulted from the conjugation of primal “father and mother”
gods, thereby becoming the first-born of all human spirits. Such a myth of
primogeniture is believed by many New Age spiritualists and cults.
At this point, I draw attention to a statement by emergent pastor Bob Bell.
He writes: “Sex carries within it the power of Life itself. . . . Something
given by the creator of the universe. Something divine.” See Rob Bell,
Sex God, Exploring the Endless Connections
Between Sexuality and Spirituality (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007)
197. Personally, I wonder why Bell accentuates “Life” with an upper case “L”
and “creator” with a lower case “c.” It was drawn to my attention that in
his book, Tomorrow’s God, Our Greatest
Spiritual Challenge, Neale Donald Walsh repeatedly spells “Life” with
an idolatrous capital “L” because in one conversation God told him, “The
words ‘Life’ and ‘God’ are interchangeable.” (New York: Atria Books, 2004,
69).
I also question whether being “divine” refers to the
process of sex, as Bell makes it to,
or to the product of sex, males and
females reproduced in God’s image (Genesis 1:26-27). Clearly, in the Genesis
account, the persons God created are distinct from the process by which they
are to propagate (“Be fruitful and
multiply, and fill the earth . . .”). Calling sex divine introduces
eroticism into the nature of God, which becomes an interesting make-over for
God, especially in light of the fact that most theologians believe He is
Spirit and therefore asexual. But eroticism is an essential component of
goddess-ism.
Though disclaiming that men and women are, or possess the potential to
become, gods, Bell states that, “in some distinct, intentional way,
something of God has been placed in them. We reflect what God is like and
who God is. A divine spark resides in every single human being.” (Sex
God, 19) To what does the “divine spark” refer? Does the implanted
“spark” refer to the soul-spirit of a person, or to sex? In that people are
either spiritually dead or alive, the “spark” cannot biblically and
theologically refer to every person’s soul-spirit (John 3:3-8; Ephesians
2:1-5). Bell’s scheme will only allow that sex is the “divine spark” (As he
writes, “Sex carries within it the power of Life . . . Something divine.”).
So God has placed a divine “sex-spark” in His creatures, a spark that
because of His asexuality, even He does not possess?
Thus, one must wonder whether Bell’s sex construct elevates or degrades the
image of God in man, whether it affirms or denies the transcendence and
separateness of God from His creation. I myself look at it like this: If it
degrades God, then it degrades man. I shudder to think of the perversity
that might result from thinking that sex and God belong to the same cosmic
and monistic whole—as below, so above. In pagan belief, sex is the spark
that excites, ignites, perpetuates “Life” with a capital “L,” and taps into
the cosmic Energy with a capital “E.”
In playing to the New Age/New Spirituality now entrenched in our culture, I
wonder again, as with his use of “Life” with a capital “L,’ whether Bell
found “seed” for his thinking in Sex God from Walsch who wrote: “Mix what
you call the sacred with the sacrilegious, for until you see your altars as
the ultimate place for love, and your bedrooms as the ultimate place for
worship, you see nothing as all.” Quoted by Peter Jones,
The God of Sex, How Spirituality Defines
Your Sexuality (Colorado Springs: Cook Communication Ministries,
2006) 48. Such a view of sex makes God out to be a sort of “peeping Tom”! I
make this crude analogy simply to ask, How far are we willing to reduce
God’s holiness to crassness, God’s transcendence to immanence? In this
regard, I note the stunning statement of a radical Anglican priest: “Sex is
the spirituality that reveals the sacramental richness of matter.” Jones,
God of Sex, 47, citing Charles
Pickstone, The Divinity of Sex.
30. In Canaanite religion, the goddess
Anath was the female consort of Baal. In addition to being Baal’s
sister with whom he committed incest, she also served as a prostitute for
other gods. As Unger wrote, Anath was “given the epithet ‘virgin’ and ‘the
Holy One’ (qudshu) in her invariable
role of a sacred prostitute—another illustration of the utter irrationality
and moral indiscrimination of Canaanite religion.” See Merrill F. Unger,
Archaeology and the Old Testament
(Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1954) 173.
31. John F. MacArthur, Jr., The MacArthur
Study Bible, (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1997) 1073.
32. In a chapter titled “Sex and Possession,” Sargant writes: “If man is
thought to rise to the level of the divine in mystical experience, it has
been believed by millions of people that he can attain the same level in the
ecstasy of sex.” See William Sargant, The
Mind Possessed, A Physiology of Possession, Mysticism and Faith Healing
(Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1974) 86.
On this point, I would note that in sex there appears to take place a union
between two persons that is mysterious, metaphysical, and mystical, a
transcendent experience that can be thought to, from a pagan point of view,
enhance “spirituality.” But the apostle Paul warned,
“Know ye not that your bodies are the
members of Christ? shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them
the members of an harlot? God forbid. What? know ye not that he which is
joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh”
(1 Corinthians 6:15-16, KJV).
33. “High places housed chambers where male prostitutes and harlots (qedeshim
and qedeshot, Heb.) practiced cult
prostitution (cf. 1 Kin. 14:23; 2 Kin. 23:7).” See W.A. Criswell,
Believer’s Study Bible (Nashville:
Thomas Nelson, 1997) Online Logos Library System by the Criswell Center for
Biblical Studies.
34. Deena Metzger, “Revamping the World: On the Return of the Sacred
Prostitute,” Anima 12/2 (1986),
quoted by Peter Jones, The God of Sex, How
Spirituality Defines Your Sexuality (Colorado Springs: Cook
Communication Ministries, 2006).35.
35. John F. MacArthur, Jr., The MacArthur
Study Bible, (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1997) 1059.
36. In John’s vision of end-time religion, one can wonder at the system’s
indebtedness to the divine-feminine as the apostle pictures the goddess
holding, “a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of
her fornication,” and having the name, “MYSTERY, BABYLON THE MOTHER OF
HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH” (Revelation 17:4-5). One must also
note the violent side of ancient goddess-ism and how this woman is pictured
as drunk “with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of
Jesus” (Revelation 17:6). Of Anath,
the incestuous goddess-sister of Baal, Unger notes that she and other
ancient goddesses were “patronesses of sex and war—sex mainly in its
sensuous aspect as lust, and war in its evil aspect of violence and murder.”
See Unger, Archaeology, 173. My
point—ancient goddess-ism possessed a mean streak, and if it did then, it
can now, for as the old saying goes, “Hell hath no fury such as that of a
woman scorned.” In this vein, Scripture portrays the idolatrous queen and
false prophet Jezebel as a murderess and seductress (1 Kings 18:4;
Revelation 2:20).
37. It is as if the deities were commanded, “Be fruitful, multiply, and fill
the heavens.” Hindus believe there a millions of gods.
38. This scattering has given rise to the myth of “The Ten Lost Tribes of
Israel.” But the tribes were never totally lost (James 1:1; Luke 22:30).
Nevertheless, by playing the harlot, Israel forfeited her relationship with
Jehovah, a forfeiture Israel’s sister, Judah, did not learn from (Jeremiah
3:10).
39. Joan Osborne, “What if God was One of Us?” Lyrics
HERE. Performance recorded on YouTube
HERE.
40. Obviously, the Father presents a masculine impression to us as does the
Son. Over two decades ago, I read an opinion which, supporting feminism,
stated theoretically that God’s Son could have been born a daughter—this in
spite of the prophet’s contrary prediction (Isaiah 9:6-7). Those who desire
to inject femininity into the Trinity, do so by assigning femaleness to a
genderless noun, Spirit (Greek pneuma,
neuter). But they can only do so by ignoring the fact that Jesus reveals the
gender of the Holy Spirit to be masculine. See John 16:13-14, “But
when He (ekeinos, masculine
gender), the Spirit of truth, comes, He
will guide you into all the truth . . . He (ekeinos,
masculine gender) shall glorify Me . . .”
So The Shack’s feminization of the
Spirit as Sarayu contradicts Jesus’
masculine gendering of Him.
41. I can only imagine how on this point the super-spiritualists will
condescendingly say, “Oh, that’s so quaint and out of date. The fashions of
spirituality are changing. Poor fellow . . . his brand of spirituality
stands out like a polyester leisure suit of the 1960s. Does he really
believe such spirituality is all there is? Give us something new to us,
something novel . . . something more.”
42. As Paul the Apostle wrote, “But now in
Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood
of Christ” (Ephesians 2:13).
Lord willing, this current series on The
Shack will be published in a booklet and available for distribution from
Discernment Ministries. Pastor Larry DeBruyn will be a speaker at the
upcoming Discernment Ministries
conference
Oct. 10-11, 2008 in Niles, Michigan. Pastor DeBruyn is the author of
Church on the Rise: Why I am not a
Purpose-Driven Pastor.
