“When you make a vow to Adonai your God, you are not to delay in fulfilling it, for Adonai your God will certainly demand it of you, and your failure to do so will be your sin.”-Deuteronomy 23:22
From verse 22, we are introduced to a truly fascinating topic around which many doctrines have been formed: the subject of making vows to God.
Before going any further, let’s quickly define what exactly a vow is.
A vow refers to making a promise to the Lord and invoking His Holy Name as surety.
That’s really it.
According to the Torah, when you make a vow, you are obligated to keep that promise AND perform it in a timely manner.
To hesitate and then eventually end up not keeping that vow would be considered a sin.
It doesn’t matter what the nature of the promise is or even if circumstances have so radically changed that you are no longer able to keep that vow.
God still fully expects you to keep that promise…which is why you should not take vows lightly.
We’re going to be examining this a bit because in practically every chapter in the Bible, we encounter many situations of people making and breaking vows of one kind or another.
Let’s go a bit deep and see if we can’t gain an understanding of this practice of making a vow to a god as it existed in the ancient world.
The first thing we have to remember is that in ancient times, the existence of gods and goddesses and other spiritual beings was a universal belief that wasn’t even questioned.
It was considered as common as eating dinner at night.
So when exactly did the universal belief in gods and goddesses shift to our current modern ideas of atheism and secular humanism?
It all started with the period of the Enlightenment about 300 years ago in the early 1700’s.
It was during this time that philosophers such as Kant, Voltaire and Hume came on the scene and challenged the idea of the existence of an invisible all-powerful god or an unseen spirit world that was manipulating things from behind the scenes.
Why did they affirm that theism (the belief in God) was all a bunch of nonsense?
Simply because such a premise was not scientifically verifiable.
My whole point is before this so-called “Enlightenment”, the idea of making vows to gods in order to get them to supernaturally manifest something in your life was the norm.
The Israelites were not unique in this respect but there was one radical difference.
The pagan religions WANTED their followers to make vows and pledges to the various gods and goddesses.
They enthusiastically endorsed vow making.
Why?
Because making a vow and bringing a gift to the pagan temples went hand-in-hand.
In other words, vow-making was a lucrative source of profit for the pagan priests.
This was actually no different in Israel because when an Israelite made a vow, he also had to give a sacrifice and an offering at BOTH the beginning and the end of the vow-making process.
However, the one key difference is that unlike the pagan temples, the God of Israel did NOT encourage vow-making at all.
He actually discouraged it for many reasons.
We’ll continue this discussion the next time we meet.
Leave a Reply