The West has become like Canaan, with its worship of sex, power, and things. The Judge is at the door!
Deuteronomy 7 begins: “When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites…and when the Lord your God delivers them over to you, you shall conquer them and utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them. Nor shall you make marriages with them…For they will turn your sons away from following Me, to serve other gods” (vv 1-4). When the Allies fought against the Hirohito regime in Japan and Hitler’s Reich in Germany, their intention was not to kill every person, but to destroy the underpinnings of two brutal governments that demanded their leaders be worshiped. As long as that existed, there could be no peace. So it was in Canaan or, as we saw earlier, in Egypt. The Canaanites, in spite of knowing the truth about God, had made grotesque distortions of His character to worship instead—the Baals, with the consort Asherah, a fertility cult that deified sex, forcing young women into temple prostitution. They had Dagon, Chemosh, and Moloch, to whom they sacrificed their children in the fire—like our Abortion god. I counted 52 such demon-possessed gods! God explained to Israel, “It is not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart that you go in to possess their land, but because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord your God drives them out from before you” (9:5). The Israelites were not His spoiled children, getting whatever they wished at the expense of others. In fact, they would be judged for their idolatry, too. Whether we understand it fully or not, God is always fair.