“Remember this and never forget how you aroused the anger of the Lord your God in the wilderness. From the day you left Egypt until you arrived here, you have been rebellious against the Lord.”-Deuteronomy 9:7
Moses explains to Israel that there is ONLY one thing that separates them from everybody else on the planet.
And that one thing is that God chose them, period.
Moses then adds they weren’t chosen because of any inherent righteousness on their part.
The Israelites hadn’t accomplished any great or special works or had somehow achieved some higher or more enlightened spiritual plane better than the rest of the human race.
Nope, they were only the fortunate recipients of God’s grace and love simply because of the promise God had made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob centuries earlier.
From verse 7, Moses then goes on to provide undeniable historical evidence that the people had merited nothing and as a result deserved nothing.
Moses makes it clear they had received God’s greatest mercies and blessings when what they should have got was God’s fiery wrath.
Moses goes on to recount that Israel had barely left Egypt before they committed gross rebellion against the Lord…
…twice actually.
When Israel arrived at Sinai (also called Horeb), Moses was summoned to come up to the top of the mountain to receive the Law.
However, while he was up there, the people grew impatient and irony of ironies at the precise moment when Moses was receiving the Law the people were down in the valley breaking that very same law!
This was the infamous Golden Calf incident.
The Golden Calf was a god symbol in addition to being an outlawed graven image most likely patterned after the Isis Bull.
The Isis Bull was a prominent Egyptian deity image that was very common in the everyday life of the Egyptians.
Everyone including the ancient Israelites would have been very familiar with the Isis Bull.
This brings to mind something I need to remind you about the ancient world that is quite pertinent to the modern gentile church and is also something horribly misunderstood.
In the ancient world, animals were often used to symbolize deities.
However, it wasn’t that the ancients believed a certain animal was literally a deity.
It was more like they chose certain animals to represent deities because a given animal possessed attributes that were admired and considered God-like.
Take the bull for instance.
A bull was huge and possessed incredible brute strength and power.
Therefore, the bull was chosen to represent the god Isis’s strength and power.
Or I’m sure you’ve heard the expression “to breed like rabbits“?
For those who are not native English speakers, it means to reproduce like crazy.
Well, along the same lines of thinking, rabbits were used to symbolize fertility.
Therefore, many of the fertility idols that were created had rabbit features.
But again, rabbits themselves were NOT considered to be little deities running around.
They were mere representations or symbols.
And by the way, the most famous fertility god is called ISHTAR.
It is more known by the name “EASTER” in our modern English.
Why do you think the gentiles use “Easter eggs” in their Easter celebrations?
It’s because the eggs represent fertility.
Now here’s the connection I wanted to make to the modern gentile church.
Using animals to symbolize deities is no different than what some of the Eastern Orthodox Churches and the Catholic Church does with their idols of “Jesus” and “Mary” and all of the idol statues of the saints they create.
And yes, people actually pray to these statues.
UNBELIEVABLE!!!
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