What happens when you reject God’s Word as your authority and instead base your thinking on fallen man’s fallible word? Well, you might end up standing in a church pulpit and telling your congregation that God had a wife and that King Josiah was wrong for destroying the Asherah poles.
Yes, this “pastor” really claims the Israelites worshipped Yahweh as God along with Asherah as a female god, and that no one had a problem with it for a very long time. He then bemoans how hard it must have been for the Israelite women and girls when King Josiah ordered the Asherah poles to be chopped down—who would they now look up to and pray to without a “queen of heaven”?
I’ll share with you here the relevant four-minute clip from his sermon. Notice what he says at the very beginning: “And, no, before you dismiss it . . . this is actually a widely accepted theory in the world of historical religious scholarship.”
In other words, he’s saying many historians and researchers believe this, so you should too. For him, it doesn’t matter what the Bible says, what matters is what fallible historians say. He’s saying to trust man, not God. He’s succumbing to the Genesis 3 attack when the devil tempted Adam and Eve to doubt and thus not believe what God said. God warns us in 2 Corinthians 11:3 that the devil will use that same attack on us, as we see exhibited in this example.
When you start with Scripture, this man’s view is utter nonsense. No one who has read any of the Old Testament and cared about what the Author (God) intended to communicate would believe such heresy. Consider just this smattering of verses regarding the Bible’s view of God as the one true God and how the Israelites were to treat false gods like Asherah:
In Exodus 34:11–17, God says, “Be sure to keep what I am commanding you this day: behold, I am going to drive out the Amorite before you, and the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite. Beware lest you cut a covenant with the inhabitants of the land into which you are going, lest it become a snare in your midst. But rather, you are to tear down their altars and shatter their sacred pillars and cut down their Asherim [Asherah] —for you shall not worship any other god, for Yahweh, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God—lest you cut a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they play the harlot with their gods and sacrifice to their gods, and one of them invite you to eat of his sacrifice, and you take some of his daughters for your sons, and his daughters play the harlot with their gods and cause your sons also to play the harlot with their gods. You shall make for yourself no molten gods.”
In Exodus 20:3–5, God declares, “You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them.”
Deuteronomy 6:4 states, “Hear, O Israel! Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one!”
In Deuteronomy 12:2–3, God commands, “You shall utterly destroy all the places where the nations whom you shall dispossess serve their gods, on the high mountains and on the hills and under every green tree. And you shall tear down their altars and shatter their sacred pillars and burn their Asherim [Asherah] with fire, and you shall cut the graven images of their gods in pieces and destroy their name from that place.”
God was clear—He alone is God, and the sacred places of the Canaanites’ false gods were to be utterly destroyed.
And if you know your Old Testament history, you’ll know that King Josiah of Judah was praised by God for smashing idols and restoring proper worship of God. He was one of the greatest kings of Israelite history because of this: “And before him there was no king like him who turned to Yahweh with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses; nor did any like him arise after him” (2 Kings 23:25).
Because of this “pastor’s” rejection of God’s Word as the authority, along with the feminist lens through which he clearly interprets everything, he has completely rejected the truth of God’s Word and, unless he repents, will have to someday stand before God and give account for leading others astray. This “pastor” is truly a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Now, most of us understand right away how ridiculous and utterly unbiblical this man’s arguments are. But his nonsense has the same foundation as those Christian pastors and leaders who add evolution or millions of years into the Bible: Man’s word is the authority. Instead of starting with God’s perfect Word and allowing it to shape our thinking, so many Christians (or professing Christians) start with man’s word and then reinterpret God’s clear Word.
Whenever we start with something outside Scripture—whether it’s a historian, researcher, scholar, or scientist—and use that as our authority, we end up compromising on truth. If a Christian chooses to add millions of years into Genesis, it’s not because of the text of Scripture. It’s because they’ve chosen to start with man’s interpretation of the rocks and fossils instead of God’s eyewitness testimony. God’s Word is not their authority—man is!
Compromise kills. When the Israelites mixed worship of the one true God with the worship of false gods like Asherah, they were judged by God for their syncretism. Let us not be like the Israelites, mixing truth with lies because we have started with man’s word rather than God’s perfect Word.
