Transcription of the Video: Innocent Blood

Ray Vander Laan: The ancient land of Israel is a testimony and evidence, if you will, of the greatness of what God did in that country - a testimony to the truth of the words that we find in the pages of the Bible. The people who lived here have left behind a record - an indelible record, if you will, of their lives. An important part of that record is the cities where they lived, ancient piles of debris that contain their culture, architecture, art, their diet, the weapons they used, and even on occasion, their writings. 

These piles of ancient cities, often built one on top of the other, are called tells. People in ancient times tended to build and live in the same places. Maybe because there were occupations there or a main road went nearby or maybe, most likely of all, a source of fresh water. 

As archaeologists began to peel away the layers of this ancient civilization, the culture and even the people of the Bible come to light. I'd like to ask you to join us on this adventure. We're going to try and understand the people, the context of the Bible. It'll mean some extra hiking, some climbing, some travel to out-of-the-way places. But the end result, I think, will be well worth the effort as we discover, again, that God's word, God's message is as relevant for us as it was for them. 

The great roadway that connected the empires of the ancient world is called the Via Maris - the way of the sea. All important countries and civilizations of Bible times traveled back and forth on that road. That road goes through a very crucial mountain pass. That mountain pass is guarded by the greatest of the ancient cities, the city of Megiddo. Some would even say that it becomes the place which symbolizes the battle that will end the world itself.

We're on a tell called Tel Megiddo right at the edge of the plain that was called the Plain of Jezreel. Some Christians refer to it as the Plain of Armageddon. We'll call it by its Hebrew name, the Plain of Jezreel. To the east of us, the great eastern empires of Assyria, Babylon, and Persia with their silks and their cloth and their spices and all the exotic things. To the south and west of us, Egypt, that huge powerful, technologically advanced nation with its food supply and access to salt and other kinds of things. Those two empires really needed each other and so they traded back and forth. 

Due to the desert here to our east, really the only way the trade route could go easily is to go to the north along the rivers until they got north of the desert and go down through this piece of land we call Canaan or Israel, down to Egypt. If there's one place where that road could be controlled, it's right here at Megiddo. And for that reason, before the bronze age, people came here to live not only because of the fertility of the valley, but also because this city stood right here and guarded that pass through which the trade route went and therefore could exert control over the world. 

Some scholars say that more battles have been fought down there in the Jezreel Valley in front of you right here than any other place in the world known to history. So you have to imagine the bloodshed down here in this valley. Most of it done simply to exert control over this spot because this spot controlled the world. Probably the most significant passage about this place in the Bible is in 1 Kings where it describes King Solomon's power and glory. Solomon, you remember, had become king in the south in Jerusalem. He had been put on the throne there that his father, David, had held. And Solomon asked God for wisdom. So God said, "I'll give you wisdom, but I'm going to give you greatness also."

Solomon became the richest king who had ever lived. He had money, he had power, he stretched the kingdom to the north and the south and to the east. He was probably the greatest Israelite king in terms of total power to ever live. 

Well, the Bible says in 1 Kings 9 that Solomon fortified Gezer, Megiddo, and Hazor. Now, that tells you, from a Hebrew way, how Solomon controlled the world. What made Solomon rich? God did. How did God do it? By giving Solomon the strength to control this trade route. 

So world control right here. And Solomon had it. This city controls the world because it controls the trade route. 

In the book of Revelation, the writer is talking about the continuing battle between good and evil. And he writes it this way, "Then they gathered the kingdoms together to the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon." Now, what makes this Armageddon? Well, we're standing on a hill, a mound, a mount. In Hebrew, Har. So we're at Har Megiddo, or as you would say it in Hebrew, Harmageddon. And this becomes the place of Harmageddon. 

So what you're looking at out here is what the writer of Revelation uses when he wants to describe the symbol of the battle for the end of the world. By choosing this location, he gives you some insight about what that battle is all about. Since this place determines the control of the world, by saying the battle will be at Armageddon, the writer is saying the battle is ultimately for control of the world. 

What would represent Megiddo in our culture? Hollywood? I could call Hollywood Megiddo. Hollywood sets the standard of the value system of our culture. We could say New York. What is New York? Well, it's the financial center of the world. If the values that determine New York are oppression and injustice and dishonesty, then the influence we have on the rest of the world is anti-God. 

Maybe you want to say Washington D.C. is the Megiddo. Maybe it's a call for some of you to be Christian politicians. We can't all just be the little people who serve the Lord. Sometime along the line, we've got to say we not only need the little towns of Jezreel and all these other little towns in the valley. We've got to have the Megiddos too. Maybe the most significant Megiddo of today in America is the family. So maybe the first commitment that each of us has to have in this battle of Armageddon, which in my opinion, goes on every day in every town and community you represent. Maybe the first step in that battle, the first skirmish will be to go back and rededicate yourselves to family. 

And so we come here I think not only to say we're standing where history will end. I think we're standing here to say, there's a battle going on. There's going to be an ongoing battle between the people of God and the people of the devil. And that battle is called Armageddon. But I like to think also that ultimately the battle between good and evil is going on all over the world. And that battle is going to determine who and what controls the world. 

Now, the question becomes, for us, where are we in that battle? Where are our loyalties? Where are our allegiances? The Bible describes that the battle at the end of time is not a battle for political real estate, but it's a battle for the hearts and souls and minds of people.

I'd like to have you all look across to the north. That's Nazareth. Just over the crest of that hill, a boy grew up, and I wonder how many times he climbed to the hill behind his house and looked across the valley at Megiddo, knowing what it stood for, knowing what had happened here. But more importantly, knowing that it represented a battle of which he was to become Commander in Chief. He grew up, people, at Armageddon. So in a sense, the work of Jesus Christ starts at Armageddon and ends at Armageddon. It starts with a virgin birth and a little boy, and it ends up with the King of the universe coming back and saying, "It's finished. It's done. It's redeemed. It's right. It's forgiven. It's re-created." 

So I look out there, and I don't simply see a battle that I have to be part of. I also see the fact that that valley, that beautiful plain symbolizes the victory of Jesus Christ. 

The ancient city of Megiddo was strategically important because it guarded the road - the Via Maris. Because of that importance, people went to great lengths to protect their water system. In fact, at Megiddo, archaeologists have discovered one of the earliest examples of an extensive water system - a water tunnel. 

And again, if you notice the chisel marks, just take a look at the chisel marks. You can see where they worked. If it was Ahab's time, it would have been 850 B.C., let's say. 

Only by walking through this tunnel can you see how important it was to these ancient people to protect their water. 

So every day, you would come down here, walk all the way to the spring, get the water on your head, carry it back, climb up the steps, and on out. Just imagine how much of your day and how much effort that would take just to keep the city and the people in water. 

You're seated down in the hole here, in a shaft, an archaeological dig. You look around you, you see the walls of that dig on both sides of us. You can see stones exposed at different levels and different layers. And some places you can see a layer of dirt that represents the separation of one civilization from another. You get a sense of what an archaeological dig is like, but you also get a sense of a tell.

You're down at a level which most archaeologists call the bronze age. We're really not here at an Israelite period. However, what I'd like to share with you here today is, in a sense, representative of what went on in the Israelite period. We come here to get an understanding of that religious background that the Israelites found themselves drawn into that will help us to appreciate better some of the things that God said about the struggles between bad and good.

When the Israelites came here, the Canaanites practiced a fertility religion. Let's just refer to it as Baal worship. Ahab was the king. He began to be drawn into Baal worship as his father had been. And he married a woman from Phoenicia named Jezebel who was a priestess of the Baal cult of her town, which is in Phoenicia. Her father had been a follower of Baal. 

She came here and brought her Baal worship with her. Now, we know from history that her form of Baal worship, the Phoenician form of Baal worship, was particularly a radical form of Baal worship. And as she brought that Baal worship to this part of the country, it very much became a part of the Baal worship in this part of the land of Israel and very soon was being practiced by the Israelites, including Ahab and Jezebel. In fact, on that mountaintop right over there, you can see the place that traditionally locates where Elijah had the contest with the Baal prophets of Ahab and Jezebel. 

There are many names you could give to Baal. He's called Moloch. He's called Dagan. But we'll refer to him as Baal, who had a mistress, a female half called Asherah. 

Now, the Canaanites practiced that fertility cult because they were farmers. And as you look out at the valley down below here, you'll understand why those farmers would find it necessary to worship a fertility god. If you see the fertility out there, you can see that their god must have seemed to them to be very effective. And it was that religion that those shepherd Israelites, when they came into this country, found themselves so attracted to. The attractiveness may have been in part that their god was a desert god, a shepherd god. 

He had been the one who brought water out of the rock and had protected them in that wandering period. Whereas, when they came here, they found themselves exposed to farmers. And would the desert god be appropriate in a new situation and a new setting? Well, when they got to this country, it must have been easy for them to see the attractiveness of this fertility god. After all, look at how he had blessed his worshipers. The fertility here was just tremendous. And so they must have thought that this was definitely the god of choice.

Now, Baal worship was widely practiced in this culture by the Canaanites. Only at later points did the Israelites participate in it at any great depth. Baal worship went like this. They believed that Baal was the god, the god of fertility. He was often portrayed as a god of thunder and lighting, sometimes on the back of a bull or on the back of a calf with a lightning bolt in his hand. And you get that whole sense of the storm and of lightning and of thunder and of rain that would bring fertility. 

He went back to the underworld, a place that was very dreary, very dark, not a particularly attractive place, and the land would begin to lose its fertility. Then in the springtime - or so it was hoped - Baal would come back to life, and he would return. What they believed brought Baal back to life was the offering of blood. And we can say that throughout much of his history, the blood offering was the blood of an animal. But there were also times in history where the Canaanites practiced, and so did the Israelites, the offering of human blood. 

They believed that that offering of human life would somehow be an offering to Baal that would bring Baal back to life. And if Baal returned to life and had sexual relations with his consort, his mistress Asherah, that relationship would produce fertility. The priest of Baal would have sexual relationships with a girl, a woman who had been chosen. She would be brought out onto a place like this and, in front of the worshipers gathering as you would gather in church, I guess you might say, would observe the sexual intercourse right here on this platform, because they believed that by having intercourse between priest and priestess of Baal, you could possibly encourage or seduce Baal and his mistress, Asherah, to have intercourse in some sense. And out of that relationship between Baal and Asherah would come the fertility of the land around.

Then following that, all the adult members of the community who participated in the Baal cult, they would go off to the side, and they, themselves would practice intercourse with a prostitute. So the sexual relationship between the male and the female god produced the fertility of the crops and the olive trees and the vineyards and the sheep and even men and women in their families. So their religious practices were really an attempt to encourage Baal to come back to life and for Baal and Asherah to have sexual relations. 

Now, we have a community that has really perverted two of the most beautiful gifts that God has given. It's perverted the beauty of the gift of a human life, a child. But it's also, in the process, perverted the normal sexual relationship between a male and female within the bonds of marriage. 

And in our society, it seems like almost everything involves, in some way, a perversion or a lack of respect for the beauty of human sexuality, whether that's television or movies or advertisements or whatever. It just seems to me we have perverted similar kinds of things. 

One of the names that the Canaanites gave to Baal was Beelzebul. And Jesus comes along not too far from here, and he takes that word, Beelzebub and he applies that word to the devil himself. He calls him Beelzebub. Now, I would like to suggest that Jesus is, by that, saying that what was practiced here, places like this, in Jezreel here, in Samaria, in Jerusalem even unfortunately, at Dan, maybe at Bethel too was the Old Testament form of satanism. 

They would gather here at this temple complex. And here behind me you see a high place. It's a bronze age high place, but it might very well represent to us what was here in the Israelite period and what was certainly present in other Israelite places - and I might mention, you say, "This isn't really a high place. Look at how much higher that is." Remember, we're down in a dig. We're down in the shaft of an archaeological dig, so actually, in the time that this was here, this would have represented the highest point on the tell, and the rest of this, of course, would have been part of the city.

But in the middle of this high place, this huge mound of stones here which probably had a covering of beaten clay of some kind so the top was flat, in the middle of this high place would be an idol. It would stand in the middle with a roaring fire built inside it. Now, the name the Bible uses on occasion to describe that altar or that idol is Tophet. Then, those mothers who followed the practice of this particular cult would hand the baby to the priest, and the priest would climb the stairs of the high place and approach the altar in some position of worship and would take that baby and would lay the baby on the red hot arms of that idol.

That's almost very difficult to even think about or to describe. Some of you have small children. Some of you are first sons. The people would gather to do that, including, the Bible tells us, King Manasseh, King Ahaz, and other kings in Judah who actually sacrificed their children in the valleys outside of the city of Jerusalem somewhere near the Temple. 

Now, in retrospect, as you look at that, you think about the fact that really what they were doing is saying, "We so much want Baal's blessing of fertility, of personal, physical things that I need - my crops, my animals," that they were willing to offer the life of a child for personal, financial, material success. 

I think the culture we live in is remarkably similar, because it seems to me that what defines, to a large extent, the culture we live in is on the one hand the cheapness of human life. We practice abortion, and we take the life of an unborn child (29 million plus times already) often simply because of the inconvenience of the child for financial reasons. 

That seems to me to be a somewhat similar kind of motivation. It's interesting that one of the archaeological publishings recently had to do with a cemetery that was found in the city of Carthage. Carthage was originally Phoenician, where Jezebel came from, and they practiced a very similar kind of cult of religion. It came from the same source. They recently uncovered a cemetery there which was 60,000 square feet - 60,00 square feet - of burials, all of burnings. At several levels deep-- now, imagine how many babies were represented, how many human lives were represented in those levels of burial. You're talking about an enormous cemetery in several levels over a period of 100 plus years. But in all those burial urns, the remains of the burnings of that particular year. 

What Satan brought to this culture and to this place was of such evil that somehow to believe that the taking, the offering of a human life (a baby, no less) was appropriate because it brought personal gain. 

Questions? Comments? Reactions? I'd like to spend a few minutes reflecting on that.

Participant 1: I guess I'm just struck too about how similar to abortion-- I mean, we could fill so many cemeteries with babies that have been aborted. We wonder how they could stand by and watch it, and we do the same. And I think, as Christians, we really need to get on the bandwagon and not be so apathetic to watching it and let it happen.

Participant 2: Going back to your concept of the relationship of abortion, the child sacrifices, you talked about the graveyard they uncovered. In today's society, we're claiming that that's not even a life. We're totally ignoring that and we're not bearing it. There's no remorse at all. 

Ray Vander Laan: Listen to this. "At the same time, they defiled my sanctuary and desecrated my Sabbaths, on the very day they sacrificed their children to their idols, they entered my sanctuary and desecrated it. That is what they did in my house." So these people had the incredible gall to sacrifice their children on the same day they went to God's house to worship him. I think we have to be a little bit careful as we leave here today. I find myself sometimes leaving, trying to understand how these people of this culture were thinking. And yet, I guess I need to ask myself, "When I go to worship my God, how pure and how clean is my heart?" 

I think sometimes God looks down and says, "Yeah, you're amazed that they could do this and then worship him at the same time. But what about these sinful patterns in your life? How can you continue to do that and still come to church on Sunday and worship me?" 

How can you claim to honor God and then, do that on weekends? How can you claim to honor God and then, do that in your business? How can you claim to honor God and say that about your parents?

That's the question you're really asking. How can somebody have the value system of evil and claim to worship and serve God? And this is an extreme form of that, but it's the same issue. 

What strikes me by way of a faith lesson is that the battle in our culture that we've talked about so often between good and evil is a very real one that has incredible consequences. Because God comes to this culture, and he says, "I'm very patient with my people, and I love you. But what goes on in a place like this, I absolutely will not tolerate. That's the last straw."

In Jeremiah 7, "'The people of Judah have done evil in my eyes,' declares the Lord. 'They have set up their detestable idols in the house that bears my name and have defiled it. They have built the high places of Topheth in the Valley of Hinnom, of Bin Hinnom, to burn their sons and daughters in the fire, something I did not command nor did it enter my mind. So beware. The days are coming,' declares the Lord, 'when people will know longer call it Topheth or the Valley of Bin Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter. For they will bury the dead in the Topheth until there is no more room.'"

In another passage in Jeremiah, God says, "I will actually turn the whole city of Jerusalem into a Topheth. That's how upset I am with that."

Taking the blood of an innocent for the sake of one's own personal gain is beyond what God is patient enough to bear. So when God finally loses his patience, here comes the Assyrian army - probably the most brutal army the world has ever known. It comes marching down the Via Maris to places like this and it ends at places like Lachish. And people there die brutal deaths. Some may be guilty of things like this. Others may be completely innocent. But God finally says, "Enough." 

I think we need to put ourselves into that situation. People, this is a very significant battle. And it's one that we really need to ask, "Have we been involved enough?" Because it's the kind of battle that has long-term consequences. Now, I'm not saying the doom of our society is at hand. But in some ways, I think it's very safe to say that God soon reaches a point where he says, "I will not tolerate the shedding of innocent blood." 

God loves innocence. Remember at the Sea of Galilee where Jesus stood by a millstone and he said, "If you cause one of these little ones [we define that to be more than children - one of these unimportant ones] to stumble, that will throw you into the abyss." I think that's the expression of the same kind of anger that God felt with what went on here. And we could even add to that to say if someone has, through their own personal struggle, arrived at the point where they maybe even had an abortion, there's even forgiveness then. 

That's, I think, an important note to have also. That's not the unforgivable sin. What is unforgivable is when a culture accepts this as acceptable. But yet, if you stand and you look from over there, behind you is this beautiful plain. That's the symbol of the battle between good and evil. Or maybe better yet to say it this way. That's the symbol of who's ultimately going to win the battle between good and evil. 

I think we need to keep that in mind that no matter how evil it is - the thing that you face in your own life, no matter how evil the issue is that we face in our culture, no matter how big and how bad the thing seems that we have to wrestle with as Christians in our western society, we must never put our eyes so much down on the evil that we don't lift them up and look at what's finally going to happen. Because that out there says, "When that battle's finally over, and the Commander in Chief who was brought up 10 miles away is crowned the King, God is going to win."