ENTICED BY HIGH PLACES!

 1. Enticed by High Places!

a) Have you ever wondered why the kings in the Old Testament repeatedly didn't want to destroy the shrines on the hills where the people sacrificed and burned incense? These were the shrines built on high places.

b) High places were mentioned 117 times in the Old Testament. It is more than just an archaeological curiosity! They were centers for Canaanite idol worship that the Jews were commanded to tear down. But instead, these places became idols that subtly seduced God’s people year after year — they couldn’t stay away!

c) Even before Israel crossed the Jordan into Canaan, Moses exhorted the Jews to “demolish all their high places … [or they] will become as pricks in your eyes and as thorns in your sides." (Numbers 33:52, 55)

d) The Canaanites “built for themselves high places and sacred pillars and Asherim on every high hill and beneath every luxuriant tree.” (1 Kings 14:23)

e) Why was God so concerned about these mythical Canaanite deities? Just look at some of the gods that people worshiped in these places:

i) El — supreme head of the Canaanite pantheon of gods, supposedly the father of creation.

ii) Baal — lord of earth and rain (prerequisites for successful harvest in a dry land).

iii) Ashtoreth —goddess of fertility. Canaanite farmers visited her shrines to mate with cult prostitutes to guarantee crop fertility.

iv) Dagon — principal god of the Philistines. Dgn means grain in Hebrew and Ugaritic and is associated with wheat harvest. In 1 Chronicles 10: 8-10, when the Philistines found King Saul’s dead body on Mount Gilboa, they “fastened his head in the house of Dagon.”

v) Molech (Moloch, Milcom) — Ammonite god to whom children were sacrificed. At Gezer, archaeologists have found clay jars containing the charred bones of babies.

vi) Chemosh — a Moabite deity, “honored with horribly cruel rites like those of Molech, to whom children were sacrificed in the fire.” 

vii) That’s just six of 26 major Canaanite gods and goddesses! 

f) King Solomon succumbed to wheedling from his Canaanite wives and built a high place for Chemosh and Molech on the mountain east of Jerusalem.

g) What about today? As followers of Jesus Christ, are you enticed by high places in any way?

h) Today we don’t construct idolatrous clay figurines of Baal or attend worship services for Asherah, but our temptations are just as seductive and perhaps even more subtle.

i) Believers today might avoid obvious “high places” such as theft, child abuse or explosive anger. But, we rarely speak of envy, worry, spiritual pride, sexual window-shopping, gossip or strife as sin. These habits are nothing but sinful deeds of the flesh (Galatians 5:19-21).

i) Let’s look at this way: Do believers sometimes succumb to today’s “ism-idols” — rampant materialism, impure sexism or me-ism?