Rendering Unto Molech

In ancient Palestine, prior to the Conquest by Israel in roughly 1400 BC, there had arisen among the native Canaanites an appalling pagan religion devoted to a god called Molech. The name itself means “king” more or less. The idol for this god was normally a bronze oven, around which this god was formed, and multiple arms rather like the Hindu Kali.

The annual early spring rituals saw this oven fired up and heated until the bronze arms glowed. Then someone from the community of worshipers would place their own first-born infant son in these waiting arms, until all that remained was a smoking corpse. In the quaint terminology of their day, it was called “passing their children through the fire of Molech.” This screaming sacrifice sought to assure a good harvest of crops, and fertile herd animals.

In the standard mystical frame of reference from that part of the world, this scene symbolized the abject slavery of the people to their “king.” He owned them entirely; their lives were subject to his whims. The image was extensible, applying itself to a thousand acts, small and large, throughout the year.

The God of Israel was not like this. You gave your sons to Him symbolically, not in some ghastly ritual. He wanted them alive to serve Him and His covenant in building and maintaining what was truly the best of all possible worlds after the Fall. In the case of Israel, He paid the full price to redeem them from slavery, showing incredible signs and wonders, giving them freedom and their own home land. Then as clear  a revelation as could be offered in human language was handed to them with a full and open explanation as to why this covenant was as good as it gets. As we know from those Scriptures, they spent more of their history in ungrateful violation than in anything resembling even the most feeble compliance. The periods of compliance became increasingly rare. Their ingratitude extended to rekindling the fires of Molech for their children, a deity who had not done a thing for them.

This pagan deity serves as a perfect symbol of the implacable modern nation-state government in the West, and may other places, today. We are expected to render our children to the state, regardless of any expectation of pleasant consequences. Maybe it will turn out well; maybe not. But you and I are offered no real hope beyond bland assurances which are patently false. Nor can the state offer any plausible claims of having taken us from any previous servitude, but demands such servitude a priori from us. There is a fiction we have chosen to go along with this, but from the first day that system was a lie. It has always been the elite ruling us, controlling the entire public discourse and mechanisms for selecting who exercises power.

Molech threatened his worshipers with starvation and disease if they did not fulfill his demands. Sounds like the state, no? You are required to surrender your children as property of the state in a thousand ways. The state will decide if you are permitted to bear that child in the first place, and can change its mind capriciously without any accountability through its many servants. The state will decide where and under what conditions that child will be born, what you are permitted to do with it, feed it, what you must inject into its tissues and when. At the first sign of any irregularities, the state snatches the child from your home, as if you and the child were simply the property of the state, an asset for its comfort and convenience. Such is the logic of the nation-state.

My characterizing is according to the logic of Heaven; this is the way the Bible views things, a parabolic indication of something hard to put into words. This is “thus saith the Lord.” Do not pass your children through the fires of Molech by compromising with the state. You may think you have no options, but if you seek no relief from God by praying for guidance in how to build a better society, you have chosen Molech.