Hey, my friends.

Matt, this is the 10 minute Bible Hour podcast, and I have a question for you.

Where does your head go when I say idolatry and witchcraft? Maybe it goes right to the Bible because it's a Bible podcast, and so your head's already there a little bit. But let's say somebody just walked up to you on the street and yelled those two words right at you. Nope, that doesn't work as an exercise either because

your head would go to what the heck just happened. Just randomly, if you see those words on a page

somewhere, what do you picture? What do you imagine? Do you think of something now? Do you think of

something old? What sector of culture do you imagine? Here's what I'm driving at. I don't know that

I'm teasing this out very well,

but I picture idolatry and witchcraft. My knee-jerk reactions to these are things that happen somewhere far, far away in different kinds of cultures than the one in which I live, or things that

happened a very long time ago. So idolatry. Okay, look, I've read the Bible a whole bunch,

the Old Testament and things like that. So what do I picture? I picture the stuff that the

pagans, or I guess he didn't call them pagans back then, but that the other nations did,

the idolatrous foreign nations that surrounded the Israelites in the Old Testament.

They had all these made-up gods that were local, regional, ethnic deities who were kind of only good for one particular thing most of the time.

Like they weren't good at crops and then also human fertility and also war. Most of them were only good at like one thing. So you need a whole bunch of

gods for these idolatrous nations to worship. And they all demanded a sacrifice. Pele

demands one. Throw something into the fire. You have to. And unfortunately, a lot of these

idolatrous fake gods demanded people for the sacrifice, particularly babies among the Canaanites, the neighbors of the Israelites in the Old Testament. So that's ick.

Idolatory in general, though, it doesn't just stay with the outsiders. One of the main threats, one of the main villains or problems or cycles of failure of the Old Testament is that these people

are supposed to be sanctified, if you will, God's chosen people. They're supposed to be set apart,

holy. They're supposed to be different from the people around them. Well, like, what are the two

things that they're just constantly suckers for? One, weird sex stuff,

and two, they're suckers for idolatry. They marry people and have relations with people who God told

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