Dennis Tuuri

Sermon Transcript
Reformation Covenant Church
Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Sermon scripture today is Exodus 22:18-20. Exodus 22:18-20. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Exodus 22:18-20. You shall not permit, you shall not permit a sorceress to live. Whoever lies with an animal shall surely be put to death. He who sacrifices to any god except to the Lord only, he shall be utterly destroyed. Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for your word. We pray, Lord God, that your spirit would do its work, his work now, Father, enliven our hearts to a renewed love and devotion to our Lord Jesus Christ, our bridegroom and our husband. We pray, Lord God, that you would form your church to be a submissive wife to him, who loves him and is devoted to him in all things, who seeks knowledge from him, exercises dominion under his kingship, and who consecrates all things under him, the great priest. Enliven us by your spirit, Lord God, that spirit who comes to teach us things of our savior and to prepare us as a bride for him. We pray this through the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Please be seated. Nursery workers may be dismissed.

We were watching an old movie on AMC, American Movie Classics, a Charlie Chan movie. I believe it was Friday night. And at the beginning of the movie, before they showed it, they showed a commercial that the actor who portrays Charlie Chan had made back in this time period. I guess it was the 40s. I don’t know when the movie was made exactly, but it was an interesting commercial. He was urging a particular vote on some piece of legislation that was being put before the people. And it apparently was a vote dealing with Sabbath laws because he talked about how there were some places where people couldn’t go to see Charlie Chan movies on Sunday. They could go golf, but they couldn’t go see Charlie Chan movies. How terrible that was. So he was urging the people watching this commercial, you know, in the Charlie Chan character to vote for this law or this measure that would apparently remove the Sabbath restrictions on theaters remaining open.

And I thought to myself, my my, what a long distance we’ve come, so to speak, in our movement away from the God of the scriptures and his laws in terms of our civil structure. Within, you know, a generation or two ago, movie theaters were not—at least in some municipalities were not allowed to be open on the Lord’s day. You could talk to Richard about the progression of grocery stores and how they were also not open on Sundays, many of them until the last decade or two.

So I just bring this up by way of illustration of how far we’ve moved away from civil requirements of God’s law. And these are the requirements we’re dealing with as we go through the law of the covenant, Exodus 21-23. These are statutes and judgments that have civil applications to them, and we’ve tried to point out that as we’ve gone through them. Of course, they have moral applications to our lives as well.

Today we’re going to be dealing with three particular laws, and I want to put them in a context by giving you an outline here. Another way of looking at these laws of the covenant found in Exodus 21-23. Properly speaking, a law of the covenant would be the 10 words, the ten commandments in Exodus 20. And then the introductory remarks to the law of the covenant proper in chapter 22. But what I’ve done here is given you an outline where I relate these various sections of laws that we’ve talked about to specific elements of the ten commandments.

So remember that for instance the beginning, the opening section of these statutes and judgments in Exodus 21:2-11 had to do with liberty and moving people away from servitude to liberty, which has an obvious correlation to the fourth commandment and also has reference to the opening sequence of the 10 words. God gives his commandments to those that he has brought out of the house of Egypt and he’s brought them out of sin and domination of sin. He’s brought them out of servitude into liberty and so he gives us laws to continue to move us toward a true liberty, not just an external displacement of a people from a land. They still have servitude and slavery on their hearts, so to speak. They’re not fully self-governing. And so his laws are intended to bring us to liberty.

And know I’ve bolded this because what we’ve seen throughout the first half of the law of the covenant is that liberty pops through over and over again. These laws relative to servitude are moving people to liberty.

The second section in Exodus 21:12-36 deals with the sixth commandment, the prohibition against killing. And so we have laws relating to life and violence. We could also see there a reference to the fifth commandment—remember the parents that were spoken of there. And then the third section has to do with property. So we’ve got liberty, life, and property. Property dealing with the eighth commandment, the commandment to not steal.

And in each of these sections, there’s a transition. So the cities of refuge serve as a transition from laws about liberty, or lack of liberty in terms of the man who’s guilty of manslaughter, as a bridge then to the commandments in terms of not killing in the section on life. The section of animals striving together moves us from the section on life and violence to the section on property, the third section. And then the section on property and community that we looked at moves us to this fourth section dealing with marriage and faithfulness in the context of community.

So just to put what we’re going to talk about today in context, remember we said last week that this section has to do with marriage and faithfulness. And we’ll see that as we go through this. And then I’ve given you a little foretaste of what we’ll be looking at in terms of the next few sermons as we deal with the rest of the law of the covenant.

Now I wanted to mention one thing from last week. I got several questions on this both last Sunday as well as throughout the week. I apparently didn’t make clear the reference in terms of vows and single women. In Numbers 30:16 we read this. These are the regulations the Lord gave Moses concerning relationships between a man and his wife and between a father and his young daughter still living in his house.

So Numbers 30 says that a wife or a daughter entering into a vow, that vow can be countermanded by the husband as he hears of it or by the father of the girl. And we saw that in terms of this marriage thing last week. A young man and a young woman in Israel, lawkeepers, right, presumptively have relations together outside of marriage. And then the insistence is that they bring a—the dowry price be paid one way or the other. Why? Because the idea is that the covenant children of God would not be harlots, would not want to just go around and have sexual relationships with different people, or they wouldn’t be men who’d want to do that either.

What they’ve entered into in terms of the sexual relationship is a commitment and vow of marriage. It’s part of the marriage covenant, the consummation in terms of the physical relationship. Now they put the cart before the horse, but their intention to marry is mandated in the context of the law. Meaning that a dow, and by its assertion that the dowry price must be paid by the young man to the father—in other words, the young man is being forced to, but also enabled to say, “I wanted to marry her,” and the young woman is put in that context as well by the payment of this dowry. The problem is they haven’t sought father’s permission before they moved toward marriage.

And so the father can either say yes or no. So the point is the father can then countermand the vow the girl has made and the man has made to her by way of dowry and her by way of relations with the man. He can say no—although you’ve taken this vow and oath, I’m countermanding it—because Numbers 30 says I can. But Numbers 30:16 says explicitly that it relates to young daughters who live in the home. The implication is that there may be older daughters who don’t live in the home and the father wouldn’t be able to countermand their vow.

So it seems, at least—and I’m not making this an assertion, but I’m saying that it seems—number one, that there’s biblical implications here that young women can legitimately, if the father sees it’s the right thing for them to do and they want to do it, move away from the household. Now it’s not normative, but it does seem like it’s not prohibited here. And in fact it seems like there’s a recognition of a separate covenantal headship of that woman as she’s moved away from the father. And it also seems by way of implication that the father’s oversight of her marriage choice is reduced.

If we see Numbers 30 as one of the reasons why the seduction law insists the father can countermand the marital vow the couple are trying to enter in through physical relationships and dowry, it seems like the father’s role in terms of the daughter moved away from the home and who’s older is different.

Okay, so that’s Numbers 30:16 for all of you who asked, and that’s the explanation of it.

Today we’re going to move on to another topic, which I heard one fell say after last week’s sermon. He had been looking for a stiff drink after the sermon. I don’t know if that was a sense of conviction or maybe just the squeamishness of the topic, which involves sexual relations outside of marriage. But you know, today’s topic is even more squeamish. We’re going to deal here with witchcraft, bestiality, and killing animals to sacrifice to other gods. Those are these three particular laws.

And so it is kind of squeamish territory. But this is the word of God. And this is the result of preaching what the reformers refer to as the lectio continua—to take a particular portion of scripture and preach through it in a continual fashion, a lectionary going through a particular portion of scripture from beginning to end. A particular section forces you to deal with topics which are uncomfortable for us to deal with, but they’re here for today. And this is what we’re going to be dealing with.

And what we’ll see is, I think, what we see here in the scriptures is that these things are perversions of commitment to Christ. They’re being committed to something other than Christ. And so they have to do with marital fidelity. Again, this section, I believe the whole section here deals with marital fidelity.

Next week, we’ll see that the next verse and the next few verses after these verses deal with hospitality. So in the providence of God as we come to Thanksgiving, in a week or so, we’re moved to a sermon dealing on hospitality and the need to take care of members of the bride or the covenant community that are less well off than you are. And of course, Thanksgiving is a great picture of that, of our joint feast together.

Now, one other verse I want to mention here is Malachi 3:5. We read this: “I will come near to you for judgment. I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers, and perjurers, against those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless and deprive aliens of justice.”

So in Malachi, these things are linked together: sorcerers, adulterers, and perjurers, and those who defraud laborers. So you see this connection of witchcraft and sexual perversion and idolatry, then leading up to hospitality shows us from this Malachi text these are not simply a series of laws randomly put together. There’s a connection between witchcraft, sorcery, bestiality, idolatry, and then being bad to members of the bride of the covenant community and the requirement to be hospitable to them. These things are linked together not just in the case law but also in the context of Malachi leading up to this idea of hospitality.

Additionally, these sins—these three we’re going to deal with today—are linked in Revelation 22:15. “Outside of the city of God are the dogs, those who practice magic, and the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.”

So we’ve got murder thrown in there in the middle. But otherwise, we’ve got these same three things. Yes, we’ve got magic arts, sexually immoral, and idolaters. The three things we have listed here in the case laws of these three verses. So they’re a unit and Revelation 22 tells us they’re combined in the practicing of falsehood. And what we’ll see is that these are people who commit these things who, instead of adhering to the bride, the true groom, the Lord Jesus Christ, worship false prophets and they worship false kings and they worship false priests and they become those things as well.

So the common element is falsehood and it’s a lack of fidelity to our groom, the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the true prophet, the true king, and the true priest.

All right, let’s go through these three prohibitions then in some detail and draw some illustrations and analogies to our lives.

First of all, first verse: “Do not allow a sorceress to live.” Now, this word sorceress is a female term. It’s a, you know, it’s not a sorcerer, it’s a sorceress. And some people have wondered why it is that it’s a female term used here, that the gender of this particular noun is feminine. Some people have said, commentators who should know better, that it’s because women are more prone to witchcraft. Well, I don’t think that’s true. I don’t see anywhere in the scriptures where women are more prone to witchcraft.

In other portions of scripture, and I’ve given you a number of parallel passages on the outline, men are referred to as well as women. And specifically in Leviticus 20:27 we read that “a man also or a woman that hath a familiar spirit or that is a wizard shall surely be put to death. They shall stone them with stones. Their blood shall be upon them.”

So there it’s clear that it’s either a male witch or a female witch, or sorceress or wizard, that is the subject of the death penalty. So I think that what we’d want to say is the reason the feminine is used here is because of the overarching context. Again, these are laws dealing with fidelity to the groom. Israel being a godly bride instead of a harlot bride. Israel cleaving to God as their true husband or moving away from their true husband and practicing spiritual fornication and adultery with other gods.

So I think that’s why it’s put in the feminine form here. And what we should see is a category of sins listed, not just the single one. These things are all expositions, I believe, of the commandment against adultery and they’re in very specific forms. I mean very packed forms. And in other places in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, these words such as the sorceress term is fleshed out in much more detail.

In Deuteronomy 18:9-13, we read this: “When you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you, do not learn to imitate the detestable ways of the nations there. Let no one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens and engages in witchcraft, casts spells, who is a medium or a spiritist, or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord. And because of these detestable practices, the Lord your God will drive out those nations before you. You must be blameless before the Lord your God.”

See, so if you expand the list out, it includes a lot of specific practices. That’s what Deuteronomy tells us. So all these specific practices are all combined in this general term of sorceress in Exodus 22:18.

Now there were two prominent examples of sorcery in the Old Testament. Jezebel—we all know because of the scripture in 2 Kings 9:22 that she engaged in witchcraft—and Manasseh as well. And we’ll also make reference of King Saul and his consulting a witch to seek communication with the dead. So the idea here is that all forms of witchcraft are prohibited by the scriptures and in fact become a subject of a capital offense or capital punishment.

I’m going to read here from a man who at one time was on the Supreme Court of Israel, commenting on this particular text and this general prohibition. He says this: “It was to be the characteristic of Judaism that nothing would be achieved by magic but everything by the will and spirit of God. Hence the confrontations of Joseph and the magicians of Egypt, of Moses and Aaron and Egyptian sorcerers, of Daniel and the Babylonian astrologers, etc. And hence also the classification of crimes of sorcery as tantamount to idolatrous crimes of human sacrifices”—we just read that correlation in Deuteronomy 18—”and to idolatrous sacrifices in general in Exodus 22:19, the next verse. And its visitation, just as idolatry itself, with death by stoning. In a god-fearing Israel, there’s no room for augury and sorcery, and the presence of astrologers and fortune tellers is an indication of godlessness.”

So that has a lot of implications for Beyond Warwick, the commercial she makes, for the astrology stuff and the soothsayers and the astrology columns in the paper, all that stuff. The Supreme Court judge said, and I believe he’s correct, can be traced back to the specific list in Deuteronomy and is provided a federal headship picture of in this term sorceress in Exodus 22.

All right, let’s make some comments. And we have the same basic set of comments for each of these three sins.

And the first comment that I make is that we should have tremendous thanksgiving for the grace of God and the spread of the gospel. Now, I know that we’re in days when this stuff is coming back, but for the most part, we don’t have a lot of magic going on in the streets of our cities. Right? I mean, and so we should be thankful for the spread of the gospel.

It’s interesting here. The justice in Israel points out this confrontation of Joseph and the magicians of Pharaoh and Moses and Aaron. If you look at the Old Testament history, they were continually in the context of nations that practice these kinds of abominations that are spoken of here. And in fact, the Deuteronomy text told us that, right? When you go into the land to possess it, don’t be like all these people. Don’t do these magical arts things. They were in the context of cultures, fertility cult cultures that practiced witchcraft as a routine thing and also practiced various degrees of sexual perversion as a routine religious affair as well as of course sacrificing to other gods.

But what happens in the scriptures is that those cultures are conquered by God’s people. And if you look at the great flow of these pagan cultures, we have Egypt and here we see the confrontation of Joseph and the Egyptians and we see Pharaoh converting to the God of Joseph. So this group of men who practice regularly sexual perversion and witchcraft all were conquered by the preaching of the gospel, as it were, through Joseph.

Then we have the great Assyrian empire that arises up. But there what happens? God sends Jonah to Nineveh, which was the capital of Assyria and Nineveh repents. These men who practice bestiality, false sacrifices and witchcraft repent of all those things because of the preaching of the gospel through Jonah.

Well, Assyria is then replaced. Then they go bad and then they’re replaced as a world empire by Babylon. And the Babylonians—what happens? Daniel gets taken into captivity. Daniel has to deal with the magicians in court at the court of Nebuchadnezzar. And Nebuchadnezzar hears the gospel through Daniel and through God’s providential acts and bringing him insanity. Nebuchadnezzar comes to his senses and acknowledges the God of the Hebrews. He converts.

And so throughout Old Testament history, these false gods are subdued, as it were, through the preaching of the gospel in its pre-evangelistic form, so to speak, in its form before the actual coming of the Savior, but what pointed to his coming. So what should we see then? We should see prefigured in these conversions of these nations and the defeat of the sorcerers at the hands of God’s messengers who bring his word.

We see what’s going to happen in the gospel age—that the gospel drives out magic. Well, that’s what we should expect to see. And sure enough, in the books of Acts, in the book of Acts, that’s what we see. Philip goes and evangelizes people and there’s a magician there. And you know, people get turned away from position to the true God. Magician wants the power himself. He’s given an imprecation by God’s men on the scene and indication is he probably repents of his divination and comes to faith.

Explicitly we see in Paul’s missionary journeys, in his first one, the magician who tried to keep people from converting is given an imprecation by Paul and his power and influence over the people is removed and people come to the faith of God. And then later, Paul at Ephesus—you know, people, tons of people who have all these books of sorcery and magic and witchcraft burn them all because they all convert to the faith.

So the picture both in the Old Testament prefigurements and then the gospel account in the book of Acts is: when the gospel permeates a nation, it conquers those who practice magical arts. And so we should be greatly thankful that we live in the context of a world which, while in declension at this particular point in time, was the result of the propagation of the gospel and magic has not been a big part of this country’s history.

I mean how many people do you know today that are going to get together tomorrow night and do some kind of magical ceremony and try to draw demons? You’ll see it a lot in movies, but you won’t see it in the lives of the people of the country for the most part. And that’s the result explicitly of the preaching of the gospel, the conquering of magical arts by the speaking of the word of God by his messengers. It is effectual. It’s effectual. So we should be greatly thankful for that.

On the other hand, B—we should note that the serious nature of this sin calls for public suppression. Now I want to say here, you know I—what these laws have in mind is that in a country that is covenantally in relationship to God these things should be publicly suppressed. Remember that the laws of evidence remain in effect. You have to have two or more witnesses to a particular crime. If somebody practices magic in their basement, we’re not into inquisitions that would go house to house and if they’re practicing magic.

But if they do it publicly and promote it publicly, that should be a crime in a godly nation. It should be suppressed. And so these laws give us kind of the picture of what it should be like as a nation moves covenantally back to the Lord Jesus Christ. But it’s not that we should go about executing everybody who’s ever done these things. How does the word of God execute the sorcerers in Ephesus? It slays them and brings those that are elect back to life in Christ. Okay? In other words, you go into a culture like ours now that is post-Christian or maybe pre-Christian. And that culture—you know, what we do not want to do is try to institute death penalty for all the sorcerers. We want to preach the gospel and the preaching of the gospel brings them to repentance so that they’d burn their books of sorcery.

And then the end result of that is, as the country becomes then again a Christian nation whose laws image God’s laws, these sorts of sins be publicly suppressed, couldn’t advertise them on TV. And that used to be the case in this country.

So the third point is that while we should be thankful and acknowledge the usefulness of this law in terms of public suppression of this particular sin, we should pay attention here to the cautionary tale of the Salem witch trials in our schools.

What do I mean by that? Well, can’t get into a great detail on the Salem witch trials, but the origins are interesting. There was apparently a minister who had a slave that had come from the West Indies and who knew voodoo. And the minister had the slave, and there were various young people—for the most part adolescent girls—who would get together with this slave gal, had a relationship with her, friendship, and she would teach them these magic arts. So you know, in their way of thinking they weren’t probably thinking much of it. They were just getting together as adolescent girls can do and just having a good time by entertaining themselves in some way. And so they began doing this stuff with these black arts of some type. And it’s analogous today to young people using Ouija boards, right? And it’s no big deal when they first start out.

This situation in Salem, but what happens is that over time these girls find themselves being changed in their character because of this exposure and their involvement in this witchcraft, occultic sort of activity. And as a result, well, they then exhibit their problems to others. Those men come in and begin an investigation. And instead of punishing the girls for their sins, instead the girls are allowed to point the finger at the slave girl that taught them this stuff or at other people and begin to divert rather attention from themselves to those round about them.

And as a result, the situation got out of hand for a period of time. And what was happening in Europe at that time is people could bring all kinds of charges against a witch. Two witnesses were not required. Just the word of one person. Slander could force a person to be burned. Thousands of witches were burned in Europe who probably weren’t witches at all. And in the colonial period, the colony period, in the Salem witch trials, there probably were people there as well who were put to death. There was only a handful, 17 or 18, I think. But still, it was because the situation became it moved away from the objective truth of sin or not sin and holding people responsible for their actions to a subjective evaluation of what was going on.

And now the girls who were first affected began to have visions and they began to experience commitment to God in an experiential way that sort of was used by them to point the finger to other people as witches. The point is that subjectivism in the legal process came in through a failure to treat these girls directly for and hold them accountable for their particular actions.

Now the point here is that while we should be thankful to God, we live in a country that is not primarily involved in this stuff. We obviously see the encroachment back now, as we move away from Christ, of witchcraft practices. And while our children or other children in this in the world and Christian churches might think things like Ouija boards and black balls that give answers and all that stuff are kind of cute and fun, honey, it is important that we remember that when you begin to delve into these things, you can, if you’re going about it sinfully, be led into it in an increasing way.

And we can see the resurgence of witchcraft today. I know good Christian theonomic, theocratic guys whose adolescent daughters have been tempted and have to some degree have succumbed to investigation of the occult with a marked result on their temperament and personality. What I’m saying is that this is coming back into our culture as it moves away from Christ. And it comes back in ways that at first seem ways of entertainment, the way those young girls hung out with the slave gal and heard those funny stories about the voodoo practices back in the West Indies.

We want to keep away from all of those sorts of things. Several of the school shootings of the last few years around the country, some of those have been related directly to involvement in the occult and investigation of occultic practices. So this stuff is going on now. It’s going on in terms of our country and it should point out to us that we have a great need to be very careful in this area and to teach our children to stay way away from things that may look like entertainment to them and yet could be the prerunner, the prefigurement of magical practices.

One other point here—that the term for sorceries that’s listed in Galatians as a fruit of the flesh, so to speak, is the word for pharmacopoeia and has to do with drugs or poisonings. So there’s this relationship in the ingestion of drugs for an altered state to what seemed to have been prohibited in the practices of Exodus 22. The Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament, translates this word sorceress as “one who dabbles in drugs or medicines incantations.” So there is some reason for pause as we look at cultures as well that move toward an increasing use of drugs for altered states of reality. This seems to be comprehended under the same biblical term of witchcraft or sorceries in Exodus 22.

Now the big picture here, I think, is—and this is outline point D under number one—that the witch or wizard is a false prophet. I mentioned Saul and his use of witchcraft. In 1 Samuel 28:5-7, Saul sees a Philistine army. He’s afraid. He’s involved in warfare, but God won’t answer him anymore. Terror fills his heart. He inquired of the Lord, but the Lord did not answer him by dreams or urim or prophets. Saul then said to his attendants, “Find me a woman who is a medium so I may go and inquire of her,” and they say, “There’s one at Endor. Let’s go visit her.”

Now, this is a picture of what it is to consult witches. When Saul engages in sorceries, it’s to the end that he might get knowledge of something that’s going on in his life, a knowledge that God has refused to give him for one reason or the other.

Remember, we’ve said that from last week that 2 Corinthians 11, Paul says that he’s jealous for the church because the church has been wedded to the Lord Jesus Christ. But Paul said that he was afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, the church’s mind may also somehow be led astray from true devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Eve listened to the word of the serpent, and in doing that she was attempting, and was led to attempt, to seek knowledge—specifically the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil from that tree—by way of intercourse, so to speak, in dialogue with the serpent. And so I think that when we look at witchcraft what we see in the scriptures is an attempt to get knowledge by summoning up the dead, by using incantations or spells, get knowledge that is not available to us from God.

So I think that the witch is a picture for us, the sorceress, of one who attempts to get knowledge apart from the groom, the Lord Jesus Christ. Instead of God’s word and Eve being formed by that, she sought to be formed by the word of the serpent. And the serpent then beguiled her and led her away from fidelity to God and Adam as well.

So I think that witchcraft is to seek power or knowledge from a source other than a source of fidelity to the Lord God, and as a result represents to us the false prophet.

Now it’s interesting the very English terms witch and wizard have to do with knowledge. Wit—to have wit about something is to know something. If you’re witting, you have knowledge. And there was an English word wittish. It’s like witting or wittable or wittish. And so you had knowledge of something, and the contraction of that became our word witch. So a witch is someone who has knowledge, a special kind of knowledge not given by God but given by way of summoning up satanic or demonic forces.

The word wizard also is a term that means wise. It comes from a contraction of wiseard, wise man. And so a wizard is a wise man. A witch is someone with knowledge of a special type, a witting person. And in fact in interviews I’ve heard over the last few years with supposed white witches on the radio, good witches, they’ll refer to this fact: that the problem with Christianity is they don’t want women to know anything. And so they persecute witches, and all a witch is is a woman who knows how to use various herbs and things to make people better.

So it’s knowledge that’s being suppressed. Now, that can be a pretty daunting argument to a Christian who doesn’t understand that the nature of witchcraft does indeed have to do with knowledge, as demonstrated. But it’s knowledge obtained in an illicit manner, not from God, not from the prophet, the Lord Jesus Christ, the true prophet, but rather from the one who seeks to provide knowledge through demonic sources.

Interestingly also, the knowledge that’s talked about by modern white witches also has a sexual connotation or implication to it. In Deuteronomy, after this long list of sorceries is described in the book of Deuteronomy that we read earlier at the conclusion of that list, God says, “I will send you a prophet. Listen to this prophet.” So God contrasts the true prophet, the coming Lord Jesus Christ, with the knowledge that people sought through witchcraft and divination.

So what this scripture tells us in its basic form is that we’re to seek knowledge not by means of going away from God and seeking it through a demonic lowering of ourselves, but rather by heeding Christ as our true prophet.

Galatians 5:13 says, “You, my brothers, were called to be free, but don’t use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature. Rather, serve one another in love.”

So the beginning formations of seeking knowledge in some way other than knowledge mediated through the prophet, the Lord Jesus Christ—and I’m talking here about Ouija boards, etc., as an example—we may think we have liberty to do certain of the things, but recognize that these things, if they’re rooted in a desire to know things that God has not given us knowledge of by means of normal intellectual activity, the word of God shaping our thoughts, then it is a movement toward witchcraft.

Now, in the answer to this negative is the positive of seeking devotion to the true prophet, the Lord Jesus Christ. The Westminster Larger Catechism in question 43 says, “How does Christ execute the office of a prophet?” Christ executes the office of a prophet in revealing to the church in all ages by his spirit and word in diverse ways of administration the whole will of God in all things concerning their edification and salvation.

So the answer to witchcraft is a fidelity—that it is the word of the Lord Jesus Christ, the spirit and word being his means of bringing us his truth and all things necessary to our edification and salvation. It is a cleaving to that groom and the power of the spirit that prevents us from being led away into the sin of witchcraft.

Now notice here that the confession or the catechism says that Christ communicates this as the prophet by means of spirit and word. It joins together the spirit and the word.

What we saw with the young girls in Salem, as a result of them being given attention in a foolish portion of their lives as young adolescent girls and then being allowed to bring accusations against other people on the basis of hearsay and ecstatic utterances, was what we saw in these young girls—a beginning of a split moving the spirit of God away from the word of God. Their basic problem, a failure to cleave to Christ as the true prophet by means of the spirit speaking through the word, wasn’t really addressed by the courts. The girls were allowed to transform their fascination with witchcraft or the incidental practices of it to a fascination with a form of Christianity that used visions and ecstatic utterances and excitable sort of stuff, subjective elements of the faith as opposed to seeing the spirit speak through the word.

And this seemed to begin then a whole process of a movement of the church of God here in America away from true biblical faith toward an experientialism that maintains its hold upon the church even to this very day.

So witchcraft is seen as seeking the false prophet. The witch is a false prophet, seeking false knowledge, dispensing false knowledge—not false in the sense that it’s been obtained in illicit ways apart from God’s word. And the answer to that is to cleave in the power of the Holy Spirit to fidelity to the Lord Jesus Christ, the true prophet.

Now, the second law here is found in the next verse: “Anyone who has sexual relations with an animal must be put to death.”

Now Calvin commenting on this said, “The madness of lust has however invented several monstrous vices whose names it would be better to bury if God had not chosen that these shameful monuments should exist to inspire us with fear and horror.” I cite that to say that I only deal with this subject because the word of God insists that I do. This is the next verse in the text. So it’s important that we deal with it and deal with it properly.

Now again here I think that we can see elements of the garden at work. Eve sought knowledge falsely, and she sought knowledge explicitly by communication, dialogue with a beast. And so I think that there is behind this prohibition of bestiality a reference to the original infidelity or adultery of Eve, a picture of the false church as it were, who in interaction with the beast enters into a sense of false knowledge by not heeding the word of God. She hearkens to the voice of a beast. She becomes an adulteress and as a result is subject to the death penalty.

Additionally, I think this is confirmed in passages such as Ezekiel 23:20. In this passage, we have a verse that is a strong one speaking of Israel and her spiritual idolatry, her seeking after the religions of the other nations round about her. Ezekiel says this: “There she lusted after her lovers whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.”

Stiff drink time.

Now the importance of that verse is this: that Israel’s seeking after the gentile nations round about her is described in terms of bestiality. And I think this draws us back again to the garden where Eve seeking knowledge and relationship, communion and union with the serpent—or at least allowing yourself to be tempted into that—is essentially guilty of the same sin of bestiality. There’s no physical act that I’m trying to imply in terms of Eve and the serpent.

You know, it’s an interesting thing. If you read commentaries on the fall of Adam and Eve, you will read repeated references to the notion somehow that sexual sin is involved in Eve’s sin with the serpent. Now there’s absolutely no hint of that in the text. It didn’t happen. And yet for 2,000 years, many Christian commentators even have seen behind the scenes in this kind of sexual sin. Why? Because the sexual sin is a representation of the dialogue that Eve has and the union and communion that the serpent draws her into through giving her forbidden fruit. The point is that sexual act is a picture of that kind of union and communion and fellowship.

So while that didn’t occur, the scriptures seem to make these analogies back to Eve—from 1 Corinthians as Eve was seduced, etc. This text in Ezekiel where Israel, when it’s seduced by the nations, is said to be involved in the sin of bestiality.

All right. Our response to this, first of all, is great thanksgiving to God for again the spread of the gospel. When I mentioned Assyria and Babylon and these other nations round about that God’s people converted—at least you know by way of symbol, Nineveh and Nebuchadnezzar—these were fertility cult religions.

You know, we’re going through this in our world history class at my home with some of the young men and women from the church. And what we’ve used as an illustration of fertility cult religions is a fellow with a Friar’s cap on his head. Friar was one of these fertility cult religions. And the Friari believe that you had to go through chaos in order to make order. Their view of the universe is that it’s essentially chaos, and through chaos, we have then salvation. So the idea was you’d want to do perverted weird things and do that for a period of time and then you’d wake up and everything would be okay for a while and the emperor, the empire would be established again.

It’s like planned chaos. That’s the origins of Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras is an attempt to sin in every way possible so that then as preparation for Holy Week you would enter into true salvation. It’s kind of a blend of Christianity and fertility cult worship.

There is this predominant feel in fertility cult worship that through perversions, including sexual perversions, you could tap into the powers of nature and then through that chaos and tapping into these powers achieve preeminence as a people. Dracula is another illustration of the same thing. Dracula rejects God in Christ and as a result turns then to the way of the bat, the way of the wolf. He knows animals can take like forces. He knows them so well. He enters into relationship with them that he can kind of use their forces and abilities in prolonging his life and doing whatever he wants to do. And of course, a big part of that is sexual perversion as well, sexual license.

So Dracula is a picture of these old ancient fertility cult worshippers. And it’s a picture of what’s being condemned in this particular scripture. Fertility cult worship is an attempt to exercise power or authority through sexual practices, tapping into the powers of nature, and bestiality is the worst form of that. But it’s not the only form. It is in a list of offenses given in Leviticus 18 and 20. Leviticus 18 and 20 talk a lot of sexual offenses and perversions, and the culmination of them, so to speak, is the sin of bestiality.

Now here once more we see the rise of this in our particular day and age. Interpreting rock lyrics is always problematic, but there’s a song by Jim Morrison in the Doors, and one of the refrains in it is “Passionate lady, give up your vows,” says it a couple of times, and then he screams out “Save our city.”

See, that is fertility cult worship—that’s the old religions of Assyria, Friar, and these other peoples coming back to life. It’s an idea that through throwing off all restraints on sexuality we can actually produce salvation for our city and culture.

Okay, so that’s the picture of fertility cult worship in the scriptures, and I think that’s what’s really being talked about through this headship crime, as it were, of bestiality.

So once again we can be thankful for the grace of God and the spread of the gospel that was successful in the time of the Assyrians and Babylonians, etc., in driving these things back, and we don’t have this problem in America. And it’s not because people are normally moral and upright. It’s not because people apart from Christ don’t enter into these things. The history of man is that they almost always do in their formal, in their, in the as a society deteriorates or degenerates, it almost always engages in some form of fertility cult worship, a return to the powers or worship of the powers and attempt to use the powers of sexual proclivity and the forces of nature as well. Baal worship is force worship. It wasn’t some god Baal they thought they had. It was the idea of worship worshiping the forces in nature, and one of those strongest forces is sexuality. And so we can be thankful that the gospel wipes these things out and drives them back into the darkness.

Secondly, we can say that the serious nature of this sin calls for public suppression. And this we would acknowledge. We actually have still the remnants of a Christian culture and publicly suppressing bestiality in the context of our laws in our country. That’s great. Praise God.

However, we have here a cautionary tale: the ongoing sexual revolution of the 60s. If you understood what Jim Morrison was singing about, you see its correlation to the free love movements of the 60s and the ongoing sexual revolution. How did it begin? It began with simply the ability to love the one you’re with. But then it moved toward and has now moved toward in our day and age, you know, what 30 years later, a full-grown political movement with a gay agenda and homosexual propagation. You see, it’s not—it wasn’t over. The ongoing sexual revolution is an ongoing one. First it went to you know perversion of sexuality in terms of multiple partners, adultery and fornication. Then it became dominant in the view of in the propagation of homosexuality.