by True North 14 Replies latest watchtower bible
And if mankind's sins are canceled out by means of Jesus' sacrifice, why in the world do we pray for forgiveness, aren't our sins blotted out?
Good thinking question Agent 1. This is not the kind of thinking appreciated by the Org though. As one recent poster so eloquently put it though "I would rather have questions without answers than answers you cannot question."
I'm not appalled because I think that the concept of God requiring a human sacrifice is ridiculous. I can accept the idea of Jesus needed to demonstrate that the illusion of death could be overcome and you can't do that without going through the process.
I'm on holiday in the UK and so I don't have my books at the moment, but human and child sacrifice was a feature of worship of certain Canaanite deities, especially the agricultural god Dagan and the underworld deity Malik/Milku/Moloch. Dagan only required the sacrifice of human cadavers, people already dead (the so-called "pagram" sacrifice), but the cult of Malik involved the sacrifice of living children and slaves. Malik was the "eternal king" of Sheol, the king of the dead Rephaim kings, and who apparently was identical with Rapiu/Rapha, the eponymous ancestor of the Rephaim. In Judah, the Valley of Hinnom was the locale of Ahab's sacrifice to Moloch, which in Joshua 15:8, 18:16; 2 Samuel 5:18; 1 Chronicles 11:15, 20:4 is associated with the Valley of the Rephaim, and which is paralleled by the "valleys of Sheol" in Proverbs 9:18 where the Rephaim reside. The later Jewish and Christian notion of Gehenna is certainly connected with this earlier notion of valleys of the Rephaim in Sheol. It is easy to say what happened, but your notion is "WHY" and that is much harder to understand from ancient sources. It was believed that Rapiu and the Rephaim bless the current kings in power, and perhaps the sacrifice was meant to satisfy them. There is also the ambiguous relationship between Malik/Rapiu with Resheph and Mot. Are all three the same deity or are they different gods in different cults? Mot however is represented in the OT and in Canaanite literature as insatiable, always hungry, desiring to eat the souls of the living, and perhaps the sacrifice was done in times of stress to halt some pestilence or famine. I know Mark Baker has a detailed discussion of the evidence pertaining to the mlk-sacrifice. Also see my post on Rapiu and the Rephaim:
Spoken like a dyed in the wool witness!God gives us freewill to do as we please.......then kicks your ass if that freewill isn't done HIS way.
That's like a dad giving his son the choice between a truck or a car........then kicking his sons arse for picking the one the dad didn't like. I'd call a dad like that a dumb bastard. Why give a choice to someone when you already know what they will choose? Isn't that a bit idiotic?
Gumby
Come on Gumby.... It's not about choose which one of these girls you want and if you guess wrong you're dead. It's more like: If you want to rape, rob and kill then you get death behind door #1 (clothing optional). If you can manage to be nice at brunch and love your fellowman and not try to hog up all the best land and make other people slaves, then we can work something out for you behind door #2.
JC
Thanks Leolaia, we're getting such good research from you here! I'm sure others have said so!!!
It is easy to say what happened, but your notion is "WHY" and that is much harder to understand from ancient sources. It was believed that Rapiu and the Rephaim bless the current kings in power, and perhaps the sacrifice was meant to satisfy them. There is also the ambiguous relationship between Malik/Rapiu with Resheph and Mot.
Just a research note for you. "Mot" sounds like an Egyptian God. I know (as well as you, I'm sure) that the gods did overlap in identities and sometimes changed identities over time. By the 18th Dynasty in Egypt though, Reshep was clearly associated not with Mot but with Min, the "storm god" and consort of Nut, the sky God. Astrologically he was associated with TAURUS, the "Bull of Heaven". Not sure if you were aware of that. Earlier, he seems to have been associated with Nergal whose counterpart in Egypt I think is more applicable to Seth.
Don't know if that's significant or not. By the time the Jews were in Palestine, though, it was the time of the post 18th Dynasty.
Thanks, again, for your interesting detail.
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Just since you asked "why" though.....
One of my thoughts on this is Satan's resentment of God saving mankind through the ransom sacrifice. An oversimplication is that at some point God's law basically says if you "sin" you die, but who judges that? Adam sinned so had to die but so did Satan. So what god did was required a higher standard. If you wanted to live you had to die for God. So everyone had to be willing to die for God. That was Satan's basic challenge to Job. That if you took all the good stuff God had given him away then he'd curse god and die, not decide to die and still remain faithful. Thus in a sense, what God did was forced everybody (all his sons/children) to die if they wanted to live. This is the "test by fire". ("He who lets go of his soul will live..."). So what Satan did, resentful of this higher standard, was pervert it (or whatever) in pagan worship, the killing of children, particularly in the fire representing "testing, or cleansing by fire". So it's a mockery of God's requiring his servants to "go through the fire and die" for him and Satan having parents kill their children in the fire. The difference is, though, God's servants willingly die for him because they love him. With everybody dead (figuratively or literally), God then has set aside the "law of death" and allows those whom are "righteous" to be resurrected again. So ironically, even though the law requires DEATH to be acquitted, it doesn't much matter if you get the death penalty if you're going to get resurrected the next day, right? It's like putting to death a condemned murderer in the gas chamber as part of his sentence, only having some holy-roller come by the morgue and resurrect him. Thus "death" is only "sleep" unless it's final, in the lake of fire. So basically Satan is upset with God for getting around that death "law" with a de-facto nullification with the resurrection. Thus Satan has no case. That is, if Satan at one point claims he was unjustly condemned to death, God can say, he's not being prejudiced or partial sine EVERYBODY must die, I didn't promise you eternal life (or a rose garden), life is a gift. But when he raises up his own righteous ones, the "death sentence" becomes nearly meaningless. Thus he gladly let Christ die knowing he'd get raised up again. But when Satan is put to death, he won't be coming back. NEAT TRICK, HUH? Satan fell into that trap, but God likes to confound the cunning. Anyway, Satan sees it as a cruel thing for god to do and thus replicates it by having these false gods require the sacrifice of children, their going through the fire "purifying them".
I hope you could follow that.
Thanks, again for your references!!!!! I'll have to read all your posts to see what I've been missing!! Enjoy your trip!
JC
