This sermon delves into the dark reality of the worship of Moloch, highlighting the extreme sacrifices and atrocities committed in the name of power and supernatural influence. It contrasts the two sides of paganism, from the happy and imaginative to the dark and unnatural, emphasizing the descent into inhuman practices like child sacrifice and cannibalism. The speaker draws parallels between ancient civilizations like Carthage and modern societal issues, pointing out the erosion of childhood innocence and the prioritization of material gain over moral values.

As we look and we want to look from your perspective at this society, help us, we who in some ways have been victims of this loss of childhood, to see through all of the hurt and the perversion the reality that has been so awfully ripped away from the generation that deserves to see what a father really looks like. Help us, we pray, to see things through your eyes and in seeing them to love you. Amen. I want to give you some examples of the overall attack now on children. These are, we've already looked at, these are characteristics of child likeness that are things that Jesus may have had in mind when he used many times the illustrations he did concerning children. In our time we have focused on one. What is the one we've looked at of abuses that children face? First one we looked at, one that you're all familiar with, is abortion. And we, what's the current figure now in the United States? Abortions a year? Has it been over 20 million since 1973? Something like that? What's the, I don't know, I haven't got the current statistics. It's a horrible, larger than all of the American war dead and all wars put together by multiple times. A war on babies, especially awful in that case because babies really can't fight back. But abortion is only one of these things. There is a plain outright murder, but there are other murders in this nation. There is a murder in this country, just a general murder, every 27 minutes. Two will be dead by the time we finish this message, and 54 a day, 20,000 a year minimum. But between the ages of 14 and 24, these are your teenage to early 20s, there are nearly 50 million young people in this country, in that group. But suicide is occurring from younger and younger ages. There's a lot of suicides in this group, but it's moving down. The age in which suicides take place is moving down. I want to give you maybe right near the end of the week when we deal with some of the roots of the war on children, when we look at bitterness, I'll give you some things on why children kill themselves. But between the ages of 5 and 14, 15,000 kill themselves every year, and that's growing, that number. In terms of abortions, the age group between 15 and 19, there are at least 417,000 abortions in that age group. And 15 or under, there are at least 15,000 legal abortions a year, legal ones, that's known ones. I think by the end of this year, it's going to be 20 million people, 20 million babies, in this country since the Supreme Court in 1973, was it 73, that okayed abortion. 20 million people, little people, 20 million babies have been sent out into eternity. Now if that isn't the spirit of Moloch, I don't know what. We'll come back and look at Moloch and see who he was. But these are only some of the things, and these are the ones we're most familiar with. We are now losing the family. If you have no family, then where do you get the picture of child and father and the mother? We have used this statistic before, but have a guess, what percentage of this nation is now the typical family? Typical family is dad out working, mother at home taking care of the two children. What percentage of this country do you think is that typical family? It's 7.3% I think, over 93% of this country, well over 93% of this country no longer fits the typical family. So there isn't any typical family anymore. So many of you here, you know this, you come from homes that are not typical families. This is the generation growing up not being a typical family. The family is disappearing. Then we have child abuse. Child abuse, there are two kinds, main kinds. Most of it of course happening with relatives or family. The two kinds of physical attack. Now the child has survived abortion, has not become one of the 20 million, and now the dad or the mother or relatives or somebody tries to kill the child physically. Here are some examples. This is why so many children run away. About 53% of the 1 million runaways in this country every year, between 700,000 and a million children run away from home every year in this country. Now some are just, I'm going to run away and run down the road. But a huge chunk of them aren't. They are serious runaways, not just, you know, I'll run away and go to grandma's house for the day. These are serious runaways. Of that 700,000 to a million, 53% of them are running away from home because they've been beaten up or smashed around by their parents, whom God put in their hearts to love and worship and look up to and trust and rely on. Here is a couple of examples from, I sat beside him in the grass. His name was Richard. Small boy, blonde, light-eyed, slight, vulnerable in appearance, lost and unhappy. He wore cut-off blue jeans and a torn, plaid cowboy shirt. He wore no shoes. He was 11. Why don't you go home, I asked. It's getting late. He stared at the grass. I'm sure your parents miss you. You should go home. He glanced up, raising his left hand for me to see. Like his entire body, his arms were thin like sticks. Across his left forearm, between wrist and elbow, was a deep red gash. My mom did that, he said without emotion. My mom did that. He repeated as if I didn't believe him. Why? I don't know, Richard said. She just doesn't like me. I asked how it happened. She got mad because my room was messy. She started screaming at me and whipping me like crazy. She's always screaming about something. That's how your arm got hurt? He dropped his arm and he looked down, watching his fingers braid blades of grass like strands of hair. He didn't like talking about his mother. I asked him again to tell me. Mom held my arm against the door frame and slammed the door shut. Richard stood up. He was about four feet tall. Facing me, he carefully removed his shirt, then turned around to show me his back. There were bruises on his body. On his left shoulder was an ugly burn larger than a man's hand, covered with a scab just beginning to heal. Richard pulled his shirt back on, wincing. It don't hurt much, he said. I wanted to know how he got such a wound. He said he had a fight with his mother when she was cooking dinner. He didn't know what started it. It was one of those things that happened all the time for no good reason. She had gone into a rage, grabbed him, lifted him up, and shoved his bare back against the hot oven. She don't want me anymore, he said ruefully. Where will you go if you can't go home anymore, I asked him. He sat down again in the grass, but didn't answer for a while. He was thinking hard. At eleven, that's the kind of question that scares a kid. I'll run away, he finally said. I'll run away for good. And then what I wanted to know, I'll just run away. Fifty-three percent of those 700,000 to a million every year that run away, run away because of physical neglect or abuse. They're either beaten up or just left, just left. When I worked in the streets of Detroit and New York with Teen Challenge, there were children out there, little seven, eight years old, and would be eleven or twelve or one or two in the morning. We'd say, you know, why don't you go home? They'd go, well, you know, some of them didn't know where home really was. And I'd say, you know, where's your father? They'd say, which one? They didn't know who their dad was. And then I'd say, well, won't your mother miss you? And they said, no, she doesn't care whether we're here or not. And the other thirty-five percent, another thirty-five percent, run away because of sexual abuse of some kind, basically incest of some sort. So not only is the physical welfare of the child being attacked, the life, childhood itself is being attacked. Little children shouldn't have to deal with sexual abuse, shouldn't have to deal with the father who rapes a daughter, shouldn't have to have everything inverted and ripped away. Little children shouldn't have to deal with that, but they have to. Another, Daniel, age fifteen, this is in university, first in university in Seattle, about ten and a half thousand runaways in Seattle-Dakota area who are living on the streets. The reason they gravitate to some of those west coast cities is because in other cities they will not survive during the winter. They're living on the streets, so they won't make it during the winter. But some of them don't make it anyway. Huddled in the doorway near Woolworths was a slight hungry girl of twelve who had run from California months ago. Wendy's got no place to live, Daniel said, and she's scared of everybody. She had an abortion two weeks back. He paused and then added quietly and sadly, she's not going to make it when the cold weather comes. Late that night we went to a bus depot where Daniel got a small bag of clothes out of a twenty-five cent locker. I rented him a room at my hotel, he had nowhere else to go. What's going to happen to me, he asked, I can't get a job, there aren't any for runaway kids. How am I going to finish school without money and no place to live? The tricks already want boys younger than me, you tell me what to do. When I didn't reply, Daniel mumbled something angrily under his breath, I asked what he said. I said, nobody gives a damn about us kids. All runaway shelters combined last year only took care of 44,000 children. Every runaway program combined in this country could only take care of that number, and most of them for only a night or two. And every year 150,000 children disappear without a trace, 150,000, gone. If it is not enough just to have to live on the streets, and again, as Daniel and others pointed out, what do you do if you're only a little kid, what kind of job, people are not going to give you a job. So most of them are forced into prostitution, male and female prostitution. But if that isn't bad enough, you can buy children. There is a slave traffic, a white slave trade traffic among children. You can buy a child for sexual use or whatever else you want. In New York City they cost about $5,000. In San Diego you can get a child as cheap as $500. This white slave traffic has existed from the early days. I've got books, and I may show you them tomorrow, going back to the turn of the century. In Catherine Booth's time, that child slave traffic for prostitution, Catherine Booth's son Bramwell Booth and his wife uncovered this huge, hideous network entrapping children from the country who came in hoping to find jobs in the city in this horrible child prostitution and white slave traffic ring where children were drugged sometimes and nailed alive into coffins and shipped overseas to Europe and the continent for sexual use. There is a society in this country called the Rene Guillaume Society that has claims of 5,000 members. To get to be a member of the Rene Guillaume Society, named after one of the original child abusers, you have to have deflowered a child before they reach the age of eight. Their motto is sex before eight or it's too late. And that they are pushing for legislation, and they had their international meeting in 1982 in Wales. You can imagine how many IRAC mothers were outside that meeting. The 5,000 members in the United States alone, you cannot get to be a member unless you've had sexual intercourse with a child younger than eight years old. They're pushing for legislation so that their acts would become legal. They are saying, we want sex allowed between adults and consenting minors. Consenting children. Trouble is minors can't consent by law. There isn't such thing as a consenting minor. Why would people do that? I have a set of reports there from the U.S. government, Congress, do you know how many child pornography, let's add this one, child pornography. Not enough to rape a child, let's destroy his mind too. Let's get him posing and let's make him into real little adults. Let's get him involved in pornography, not just reading pornography, but being pornography. Child pornography in this country is between a half billion dollar and a billion dollar a year business. And what is totally shocking is that the people who make money out of child pornography are only a small fraction, tiny fraction, of the people who are actually involved in child pornography. The vast majority of people involved in child pornography do not do it for economic reasons but for pleasure. We're only looking at a tiny fraction. Do you know how many child pornography magazines were available in this country in 1977 alone? These are monthly magazines, over 263 monthly child pornography magazines, just using children. And the federal government, you understand it's illegal to send pornography through the mails, so what the federal government has done, the FBI working with the post office and others, have actually posed as procurers. You know, they get these ads that say right away to a thing, so they've even set up companies, just as if they were, and it's all, you can't go and buy these on the newsstands of course, but it's all done through the mails. You get the address of somebody who tells you about somebody else, and then they will send you pictures and videos and films and stuff like that. I have statistics on that thing here. It costs only 35 cents to print this average child pornography magazine, but they sell anywhere from $7.50 to $12.50 each. For a few dollars, they can make a home movie or video and sell them for three, all of these child pornography magazines sell at a far higher price than adult pornography. Three or four hundred dollars is not unusual for a child pornography video film, or a movie or something like that. And some of the instances are incredible. I talked to Pat Robertson last week on the club on this, and one of the, I mentioned to him, one of these undercover operations, you know, when finally they send stuff through the mails, they can arrest them. Very few people are able to be arrested because they have to prove at the moment on the pornography laws there was commercial intent. First they have to prove that the thing really was pornography, and there may be some redeeming social value. And one famous conviction in there was overturned involving child pornography, and there's two parts to it. One part they had to prove that there was money involved in it, and the other part they had to prove that there really was child pornography. And they overturned one part, that there wasn't money involved, and then the judge, New York judge, decided that there was some, it was accurately representing a child in those areas so it could, it must have some redeeming social value. So anyway they dropped the pornography charges. So the people got off scot-free. Here's what they found. Somebody attempting sexual intercourse with a six-month-old child, I mentioned that one to Pat, he said, I had one even worse, a brand new baby born that somebody was trying to have sexual intercourse with. These are photos, or movies. We're not talking about some little hand-holding episode here. We're talking about utter, devastating. Now imagine what happens if you're on the end of that, and some of you may have been on the end of things like that, because the next generation that grows up that has been abused like that tends to abuse their own children, either in reaction or so on. So what do you do when you're a little kid? I'll tell you what you do. Child crime has jumped because there aren't any adults anymore. They're little adults. Give you an idea of that. The gap between adult crime and child crime is rapidly narrowing. In 1950, and think just how few years ago that was, that's 30 years ago in the lifetime of a lot of people here, the whole year only 170 people in this country were arrested for some serious crime that were under the age of 14. The FBI calls a serious crime forcible rape, or robbery, or aggravated assault, or something like that, armed robbery, or assault, or something like that. Only 170 children under 14 in 1950. In that year, adult crime, this is adults here, adult crime was 215 times that of children, which is, in other words, adults committed crimes 215 times more than children did. However, by 1960, adult crime was only 8 times as high as child crime, and by 1979, it was only 5.5 times as high. Now does that mean that adult crime was decreasing? No it doesn't. During that time, between 1950 and 1979, adult crime increased 3 times what it was in 1950. That means, simply this, that child serious crime between 1950 and then had increased 11,000%. In other words, children are not children anymore, they're little adults. And because of that, the law is beginning to treat children like adults. The laws are being changed in states so that children can get the same kind of sentences as adults, because they're doing the same things, they're not children anymore. What we're headed for, actually, is what happened in the Middle Ages, where there were no children. In the Middle Ages, the distinction between childhood and adults was completely swept away. So children were given the same jobs as adults, were treated the same by law, were executed like adults, were treated like adults, there was no childhood anymore. I have pictures here, and I've showed this in a previous series on the material we did on revival. Here are some drawings of children working in the coal mines in the 1800s, where they had to push these coal wagons along, and the whole point of this, they said that they had to do it, adults said that the children had to do it, because they're the only ones whose bones were still flexible enough before they set to be able to get through these mines. So you can imagine being put in a mine, the simplest job was a little job called a trapper's job, and what you did is they lowered you down a hole, pitch black, you'd take an adult and lower him down a hole pitch black, 50 feet underground with mud and running water and beetles and rats and other things, sits there in the dark, had to sit behind a door and wait for these coal cars, children pushing, to come up, because if there was a gas explosion, then it only killed the people between those doors, the doors cut the gas off from going further on, so those doors had to be kept closed, and open them, coal car went through and closed them behind, so they sat in the dark, sometimes 18 to 20 hours a day, sitting there in the mud, listening. Now an adult, you imagine, I'll put you in one of those things for an hour and think how you feel, you imagine a little kid of 7 or 8 years old, lowered down into that hole every single day. Some went crazy, some went completely crazy, and that was the mildest job. There was terrible cruelty, it says, in addition to the actual labor, the children, especially the apprentices, suffered terribly from the cruelty of the overlookers who bargained for them, dismissed them and used them as they pleased. Many of the, you can see, many of the people, a large portion of the workers underground were less than 13 years of age, some of them began to toil in the pits when only 4 or 5, many between 6 and 7, and the majority not over 8 or 9, females as well as males, except on Sunday they never saw the sun, there were no hours of relaxation, their meals were mostly eaten in the dark, and their homes were with parents who devoted them to this kind of life. Here's what, hurrying, that is loading small wagons called corbs with coal and pushing along passages was an utterly barbarous labor performed by women as well as by children. They had to crawl on hands and knees, draw enormous weights along shafts as narrow and wet as common sewers, and women remained at this work till the last hour of pregnancy. When the passages were very narrow, not more than 18 to 24 inches in height, boys and girls performed the work by girdle and chain, that is to say a girdle was put around the naked waist to which a chain from the carriage was hooked and passed between the legs, and crawling on hands and knees they drew the carriages after them. It is not necessary to describe how the sides of the hurriers were blistered, their ankles strained, how their backs were chafed by coming in contact with the roofs, or how they stumbled in the darkness and choked in the stifling atmosphere. It is enough to say they were obliged to do the work of horses or other beasts of burden only because human flesh and blood was cheaper in some cases and horse labor was impossible in others. Coal bearing, carrying on their backs on unrailroaded roads, burdens weighing from half a hundred to a hundredweight and a half, was almost always performed by girls and women, and it was a common occurrence for little children at the age of six or seven years to carry burdens of coal of half a hundredweight up steps that in the aggregate equalled an ascent fourteen times a day to the summit of St. Paul's Cathedral, which is like climbing up to, I don't know, halfway up the Empire State and back again. And you can read these other things here. What happened in the middle, in this 1800s then, this is not so long ago, is it? Is that there was no childhood. And you know what gave childhood back? Christian revival. The preaching of the gospel in society gave children back their childhood and established those norms that this society is now busy throwing out again. It was the Christian picture of family that brought childhood back. And I mentioned the Booths, and you'll see that in the little book Revival, how that Bramwell Booth and his wife, who had a little girl themselves, undercovered this hideous initiation entrapment process and labored. In those days in moral Britain, I think the age of consent was like fourteen or fifteen or something, and one minister of Parliament wanted it lowered to twelve, or it was twelve and he wanted it lowered to ten, or some ridiculous thing. And one man boasted that he'd ruined two thousand children. That was in moral Britain, and the Salvation Army went to war against this damnable thing, and what they did is they had a newspaper editor. He was a guy like the editor of the National Enquirer, you know, some well-read paper across there. And he happened to be a Christian. This guy was sort of the local, it was called the Pall Mall Gazette. It was the basic thing everybody read for whatever was going on. And he posed as a child procurer, and they bought this pretty child from the parents for ten pounds or something ridiculous, and it went all the way, they documented each step of the process right up to the actual, to the point where normally the procurer would have sexual intercourse with this child that he'd bought. And then they published the story, and it hit London like no other piece of news has ever hit London in a hundred years. And in less than two months, this bill, which three times had been thrown out of Parliament, was law. They raised the age of consent up to sixteen, the continent was twenty-one, but in Britain it was like twelve or something ridiculous, and pushed it back up again. Salvation Army marched into Parliament with this huge roll that had 160,000 signatures on it. It was, you know, just shocked Parliament. And it was Christian awakening and Christian concern that gave children back their childhood. Now we're losing it. Let me give you a quote. There's so many little things here. Here's Professor Neil Postman of New York University. He has written that the children's rights movement, isn't it funny, whenever the devil wants to take something away from people, he starts a movement for the rights of something. Rather than servant, he calls it a right, and in the end you wind up losing whatever it was that you're supposed to have the rights for. That's what he says. Children's rights, he argues that the social category of children is in itself an oppressive idea, and everything must be done to free the young from its restrictions. Being a child is a repressive idea. We must eliminate that. Well, we're well on our way to doing it. Now, how much time have we got? Cameramen, what have we got in time? Ten, fifteen, twenty-five minutes. Alright. I want to show you now, we've called this thing the Spirit of Moloch. You've written that word down, maybe you wondered what in the world is this thing. What are we talking about? Can you see that? Let's throw in one more. What about, before we leave this, what about television taking away childhood? When you read an adult book, and I didn't mean by adult book, sexually explicit book, when you read an adult book, adult themes have a code on them when you read, and that is language. You can't understand an adult theme as a little kid if you don't understand the words. So things like death and war and incest and robbery, much of that stuff, if you don't understand the words of it, you don't get into the themes of it. That's reading. But what happens on television? On television, everybody takes those, whatever themes, there's hardly a theme that has not been explored in primetime television. I mean, you name it, tell me one, completely the most outlandish thing you could possibly think of, they'll run it sometime, primetime. You name it, incest, yes, we've dealt with that, divorce, yes, homosexuality, we've had a whole series on being gay, I mean, what, we make comedy series out of it. There are no adult themes anymore that are not being reduced to child, because they're aiming at an eight-year-old. That's what television's levels aimed at. They believe that most intelligence can handle that level, so they put on programs where a gorilla is a genius and, you know, other orangutans are genius, you know, Dukes of Hazzard-type programs, Gilligan's Island-type programs, this is your basic eight-year-old level. Now, all television is trying to bring it down. What you do is you cut out the child. Little kids now look at an adult world, all broken down to small people's understanding. Pick up some of the child reading books. They deal with divorce and rape and incest, all part of it. She comes from a home where she was raped, so it's all, this is being real. I don't know what you read when you were a little kid, into, you know, tooth fairies and dragons, but you didn't read about that. So it's the idea of childhood that's going, not just children, but the whole idea of childhood. Now I want to take you back to ancient history. First of all, how many of you, apart from this morning, have ever heard of that name Moloch? You ever heard of that name Moloch? When you read through the Bible, you will sometimes come to some weird verses. These verses say things like this, cause the children to be passed through the fire to Moloch. And when you do research on this, and I have a pretty good library to dig it in, it is almost amazing how little is known today about Moloch. Now this is all I've got. I've looked through the whole library and that's what I got on Moloch. There's nothing much on Moloch at all, because the worship of Moloch is such an alien thing. Some of the national deities, Milcom, Chumash, Bayo, they will mention some of the way these rites were carried out. But I want to take you now to my today's favorite author, G.K. Chesterton. G.K. Chesterton, one of C.S. Lewis' friends, wrote a book called The Everlasting Man. It's an amazing book and it traces from a novelist's point of view, and Chesterton was a very good novelist. He also was a great poet and he tended to make these little paradoxes. He loved tricky little paradoxes. So to read a book by Chesterton on history is to take a poet and a novelist's treatment of history, which is often a lot more fun than reading a history book. Did you know what I'm talking about? He gives you the inside feeling of what it was like. Here's an analysis for two chapters leading up to the birth of Christ of the kind of civilization that Jesus was born in, and he talks about paganism. So I want to give you a summary of this now. There are actually two kinds of paganism in the early days. The first one is a kind that we'd be familiar with today, with Easter. You know, the Easter bunny. Last week I stayed at a hotel in Virginia Beach, and there was a big chocolate Easter bunny in the foyer that was two and a—well, how high was that, Tony? About a story and a half, at least, maybe two stories high, at least. A big, big chocolate Easter bunny towering over the thing, and I—so everything except people going, oh, great Easter bunny, you know. And I think, we're in there, and it's Easter lunch, right? And everybody's—the pianist, poor guy, has got to play Easter songs. So what is he playing? You know, in your Easter bunny, you know, this stuff. And I don't know, bunny disco. You know, what do you play, what do you play on Easter? You've got to have something to do with bunnies and bonnets. That's—the bunny is a type of one kind of paganism, Christmas, it's Santa Claus and Rudolph and, you know. Another example is the tooth fairy. Now, we've got to be very careful of tooth fairies now. You know, San Francisco, they don't have tooth fairies. Very scary. Can you imagine singing some of these old songs? How folks are so merry and gay, you'd never get away with that in today's society. All of these, you've got to watch all of these things. Now, the tooth fairy is an example of what we could call happy paganism, all right? It's kind of, if you wanted to use the magic, you could call it like white magic, sort of nice paganism. At its very best, paganism of this variety is an attempt to describe the supernatural through the imagination. Most paganism is not really concerned about facts. It is only concerned about feelings, the feelings of devotion and worship. So you don't really say, was there really an Easter bunny? You don't ask, who was Santa Claus really? Most kids want to know, is it really a Santa Claus, but they don't care about the historicity so much of Santa Claus, you know? Santa Claus was born in the Encyclopedia Britannica. You don't care. If you explore this too deeply, you lose it. You see that? The tooth fairy is a neat thing. You get rid of the tooth, you put it under your pillow and you wake up in the morning and it used to be ten cents, now it's got to be about five bucks because of inflation. It's just, twenty-five cents? Forget it! Anyway, that's an example of nice paganism, which our culture is filled with. Many civilizations, especially Rome, had an awful lot of their gods, Roman gods, were these nice pagan gods. If you know what I'm talking about. By nice, I mean in contrast to the second kind of paganism we'll talk about in a minute. The Roman gods were household gods. They had gods for everything. They had gods for the floor, gods of the door, they had gods of the roof, and even gods of the drain. I mean, when you look at Roman stuff, there's a lot of sort of, there is Bacchus, you know, the god of wine and grapes and parties and, you know, Mars, the god of war. You know, they had a bunch of sort of basic images that they paid respect to. Now people didn't seriously really think there was a fat guy up there in heaven with grapes and that's the one you invited when you, it was tooth fairy stuff, see that? Most of this paganism, paganism of the imagination's attempt to describe the supernatural, let me give you another example, elves, you see that, have you seen that big book, that beautiful book on elves and fairies and stuff like that, it's that kind of stuff. Another one would be, Chesterton said, you never went into the woods to find an elf, you never actually met one, you just went hoping you would meet one. What do you mean meet if we saw, oh look, a leprechaun, you know, that kind of thing. You never actually expected to meet one, you just, it would be neat if you did meet one sort of thing. You never seriously thought about it, it was just there. The Roman gods were household gods, so when the children sat down, they tended to be big shapeless, homey, you know, the idols were not goggling, garagile type idols, they were just sort of your basic household deity, you know, when you sat down, there's a big household deity there and kids would keep looking and dad would say, sometimes he has a bit of your dinner and you'd go, oh, like that, see that was about as scary as it got, okay. Now we call this whole attempt by imagination, we call it mythology, kind of a happy paganism, good deal of nonsense in it, but nice cut of nonsense. Everybody understands these things, the images in mythology. You know what Jack and the Beanstalk is, remember that? Until somebody explains to you what Jack and the Beanstalk means, you have no idea it meant that. It just, nobody knows the idea of, he cuts down the giant, got his, and you don't philosophically say no, actually the Beanstalk represents, and Jack, you never get into that, see, it's just two fairies and Jack and the Beanstalk and fine. What people got out of this was not so much the thing they were worshipping, but the fact it worshipped. They figured out, hey, it is, it's really good worshipping. When you got to the center of what they were worshipping, they weren't really sure, it was like a flame and it wasn't there, it wasn't very clear at all, but they found they enjoyed the actual doing of it, the looking under the pillow to see if the tooth fairy had come, that whole neat little thing, maybe there's something here that could surprise you and you jump in, you know, who knows? And businessmen would do it, the same ones that throw salt over their shoulders or don't walk under ladders, for the same kind of reasons, based on this. We don't really understand the real laws of the universe and sometimes tiny little things really affect huge things, so who knows? You may as well do it just to be safe, you see that? That's an idea. Civilized people do this, not uncivilized people, not barbarians, but civilized people. As a matter of fact, it's the civilized people that get into the second form even more dangerously than this first nonsense paganism. He says, it's from the Everlasting Man, now quoting from Chesterton, I've dwelled at some little length on this imaginative sort of paganism which crowded the world with temples and is everywhere the parent of popular festivity. Every time there's a holiday, they dragged out all of these myths and the Easter bunny came out and Santa Claus rode across the sky. But the central history of civilization, as I see it, consists of two further stages before the final stage of Christendom. These are what people believed in the world leading up to when Jesus was born. But two stages. The first was the struggle between this first kind of paganism and something much less worthy in itself, and the second, the process by which they attained to that. And when we get to this, we come to the spirit of Moloch. Now, every civilization has its superstitions. See that? We all have them. We have them today, tied in with this kind of thing. Here is a question. Why did people, civilized people, not primitive people, do what these Canaanite people did, and I'll give you the name of the place, Tyre and Sidon were the twin cities that spawned the worship of this particular god, Moloch. They founded a town which the Romans called Carthage. We didn't know what Carthage's religion was until archaeologists dug in the ruins because Carthage was utterly destroyed. But if you look in the Bible, you'll see many times references to these two cities. And what may interest you even more, in the Old Testament there is a person called the King of Tyre, who seems to be more than human, and most Bible scholars believe is a reference to Satan himself. Like demonic princes and kings had seats of government in key places. Now, I'll tell you a little bit about Carthage, which was Tyre and Sidon's new colony. Like New York was a colony, New Zealand was a colony. So Carthage was called Newtown, or the Romans called it Carthage, and it was a new colony of Tyre and Sidon. It was sort of their hustling, go get them. This was a mercantile empire, which means it was an empire basically built on their travel and their money. And the kind of money they earned was because they had this purple, Tyrolean purple, which was unique in all the world and very, very highly prized. And using this money system, they were very, very good at making money, and ships were all over the world, Carthage boasted you couldn't wash your hands in the sea without permission of Newtown. They had so ruled the world in the time leading up to Jesus' birth. This is a century or so before, okay? Now, how did this city come up with the worship of Moloch? Here's what happened in the worship of Moloch. I've got a description here from a man. Have you ever heard of this place? It's called the Valley of Hinnom. In Greek, it comes out to this. I'm going to give you a description of what went on in the Valley of Hinnom. Moloch was an idol that apparently, some think it had the head of a cow. As a matter of fact, the golden calf that the children of Israel were making is probably what Moloch looked like. It's a man's body with the head of an ox. And he had hands like this that stretched out. There are different descriptions of how this idol was built. The main idol was built with hands that extended like this, forwards. And right over the base of the idol was a fire that heated a white-hot plate. The arms of the idol reached out like that, and they would take children, bound, and lay them on the arms of the idol. And then the priests, as they played music and beat drums very, very loudly, and everybody cheered to drown out the screams of the children, the priest would wind the arms of the idol until it was over the white-hot plate or over the fire, and then pull, and the arms would go up like this, and the child would drop on this plate. Now, the equivalent of it today, we think, when I say that to you, what image do you get? You get the image of people with bones through their noses, and sort of with clubs and, you know, animal skins. We're not talking about that. We're talking about a highly advanced civilization, the one that ruled the world at this time. We're talking about the same kind of civilization that the Aztecs had when they did the same thing. We're not talking about primitives. We're talking about highly advanced technological civilizations. The equivalent in our day, if you can imagine, would be a group of high-tech Silicon Valley executives, people who run Apples or IBMs in their basements, you know, meeting every Sunday at 11 o'clock to watch a baby being roasted alive. Now that is the equivalent. If you can, if in your mind you could say this, how in the world could civilized people ever do that? That's a good question. Here's what Geike says. Nighttime seems to have been the special time for these awful immolations. The yells of the children bound to the altars or rolling into the fire from the brazen arms of the idol, shouts and hymns of the frenetic crowd, the wild tumult of drums and shrill instruments for which the cries of the victims were sought to be drowned, rose in awful discordance over the city, forming with a whole scene visible from the walls by the glow of the furnace and flames, such an ideal of transcendent horror that the name of the valley became and still continues in the form of Gehenna, the usual word for hell, a rubbish dump that had become in Jesus' day. But that's where the name came from, the place where they offered the children, all right? Now the second kind of paganism. I'm going to ask you, this is what I asked four weeks ago. Why in the world would civilized people do that? How could they do something like it? How could they take their own children, loved children, not an enemy's children even, their own children, and deliberately give them to a god? Here's how it came about. The second side of paganism, the dark side of the force, okay? This idea came. If you want something done, and it comes to people who are business people, people who get things done, pragmatic people, not theoretical philosophers, pragmatic people, people who want to get the job done, people to whom money means, things mean everything, there came the idea that if you really wanted power to get things done, what you should do is to tap into that supernatural world. Maybe it wasn't just a little thing, maybe you did something big, maybe you did something significant. How do you get the attention of that world? Well, the tooth fairy probably couldn't help because there's a bunch of nonsense in there. But what you did is you went to the other side of the supernatural. Because even though they were really dangerous, they got things done. Like a private detective, the job was dirty but it got done. So instead you went to the demonic. And you asked or you proved to them that you meant business as long as they would do business. And the idea came that to get to the secret of power you went against nature. Here's nature growing alive like this, see? You want to get to the heart of it? You go against nature and against that which is natural. And the more unnatural you go and the more against nature you come, the closer you come to the secret of power in that dark world. And the secret of the demonic world was to go against nature and against natural. So I ask you this question. I talked with a young lady a week ago in Hawaii, and she had been through a sad situation at home, product of an abused childhood. She is now very active in a ministry dealing with abortion, against abortion. She had a little girl there, just a few months old. I said, why wouldn't you kill your child? Why wouldn't you kill it? She said, oh, I couldn't do it. I said, why not? Why couldn't you do it? You know what she said? It's not natural. That's the key. This isn't natural. It is unnatural. It is not even evil. It is alien. It is beyond evil. It is not even indecent. It is beyond indecent. It is inhuman. It is unnatural. It is alien. And that was what Moloch was like, like worshipping something from another world. And to get their attention, you prove, I'm in business. I'll take the most horrible, unnatural, alien thing, and I'll get your attention. I prove, I will do business if you mean business. They didn't do it because they didn't know it was wrong. They did it precisely because they didn't know it was wrong. And these two things, child or human sacrifice, and cannibalism, which if I said to you, what is the most alien, unhuman thing you could think of? You know, if we sat down and said, I'm going to think of some really horrible thing, you'd probably come up with exactly the things those people did in their worship. Not because they didn't know. Precisely because they didn't know. Cannibalism. In the 1960s, when they arrested those two hip guys north of San Francisco, and police searching their pockets pulled out half-chewed human fingers. They went around eating them like potato chips. Why would they do that? You say, that's so alien. That's precisely why. Because if you want the secret of power and the satanic, you go against the natural and against the human. You look for that which is most human, most natural, most normal, and you go directly against it. That is the spirit of Moloch. And that is why childhood is under attack today. And it's coming from people to whom things mean more than life. You see, Carthage believed that things meant more than life. And I'll tell you the story tomorrow, what happened to Carthage. Let's close in prayer. My father, we cannot believe some of the things that are said sometimes, and yet the reality you see is even more horrible than that small tip of the volcano which we ourselves have stumbled across from time to time. I pray you will open our eyes even further to that which goes on in the so-called civilized world, the spirit of Moloch is abroad. We pray you will raise up those who will overturn idols, stamp out that worship from our time. In Jesus' name, amen. Okay.