March 27, 2023
To return to the blog, please click below. If you are enjoying the posts and want to be notified of future posts, please subscribe. Thank you. https://bringingjesusn2focus.com/blog-growing-the-family-tree/
I want to share with you what happened when I commented on a video on Facebook, and the resulting discussion with a woman in response to that comment. She tried to prove what the video was saying was correct by using only a part of a scripture that was taken out of context. When we go to quote scripture as proof of something, we need to exceptionally careful of context and content. Too many people are led astray by pieces and parts of the Bible that have been cobbled together to take on a meaning that it was never intended to have. There are two things that are never easy to discuss, politics and religion. Because someone is bound to misunderstand someone else, or someone is twisting the meaning and missing the point altogether and everybody gets into the argument. My point? If it’s religion, know your Bible and know it very well AND know the Author on a personal basis.
I came across a Facebook video of a man telling viewers that God was married, and her name was “Asherah, Queen of Heaven.” He said that this “fact” had been deliberately deleted from the Bible. I posted the comment, “You are so wrong.” I am not sure if it was a mistake or not but it did create a long thread of remarks. Most agreed with me. Others did not. Some got very angry when they defended him. But because I believe in the absolute integrity of the Bible, I still have to say that he is so very wrong, and he will answer to the one true God for it. He is leading a lot of people, who will believe what he says, straight to hell. He will also answer for every soul that goes to hell because of his teaching as well.
I say this now. God did not then, or ever, have a wife and for that matter, neither did Jesus. No matter which conspiracy theory you hear about the Merovingian Dynasty of France, or any other supposed bloodline of Jesus, those theories are just that, theories. Unproven theories. The ideas of people trying to make Jesus seem less than the Son of God that He is. There is no basis of fact for them to stand on. Satan brings this kind of stuff up over and over again to lead people away from the Truth of God and His Son, Jesus Christ.
I’ve done some research on what he was saying. Sadly, encyclopedia are very biased against God. Their articles seem to agree that God had a wife. A god (little g) may have had a wife but GOD (Big G) did not. Asherah is one of the many goddesses that the people of Israel were plagued with throughout their history. She was called the “queen of heaven”. She goes by many other names as well. Ashtoreth, Astarte, Ishtar, Isis. She was a Canaanite goddess of fertility. She, supposedly, was married to a god (little g) name ‘El’. Some say she was the wife of Baal, or Anu. I’ll have to say she does get around. But regardless of her name or her spouse, she was never the wife of the God of Israel. She has been found in many cultures of the Middle East but never in the true worship of the One God, Creator of the Universe.
“El” is its basic Hebrew form only means might, strength or power. It does not mean God all by itself. Some use it as the name for a god (little ‘g’). But when “El” is used in Hebrew, it is always accompanied with another word. Here is a list of some of them: El Echad – The One God; El Hanne-eman – The Faithful God; El Emet – The God of Truth; El Tzaddik – The Righteous God; El Shaddai – The All Sufficient God, El-Elyon – The Most High God, El Kanna – The Jealous or Zealous God; and Immanuel – God with us. Just to name a few. God is the Living God, not a stone or wooden god that cannot hear or act.
This one woman, in particular, took me to task because “Asherah, Queen of Heaven” was in the Bible and people were sacrificing to her. She went so far as to point out a verse in Jeremiah 44, where the people stated they refused to stop worshipping the “queen of heaven” as “proof” that God had a wife. She told me that, apparently, I hadn’t read my Bible very well. I responded to her that, apparently, SHE hadn’t read the entire chapter of Jeremiah 44 at all, because she was taking that one statement totally out of context, not even recognizing the fact that Jeremiah was chastising the people because of their worship of this so called “queen of heaven,” and their refusal to return to the worship of the God of Israel.
The Hebrew people always seemed to have had a love/hate relationship with idolatry. They would repent and reaffirm their covenant with God, turning from and destroying all the idols in the land. After a while, they would start marrying the Canaanites again and begin to add the Canaanite idols to their worship of God. This brought punishment upon them in the form of wars, conquerors, deportation and exile. Each time, the Hebrews would repent and commit to worship only the God of Israel. For a number of years, when they did, they flourished. But as time passed, they would grow complacent again and return to idol worship. The cycle repeated many times.
Eventually, the Assyrians conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Babylonian conquered the Southern Kingdom of Judah. Both conquerors took captives and scattered them all over their respective kingdoms. Most of the captives never returned to their homeland. Most of the captives of the ten tribes of the Northern Kingdom never returned to their home. Only Judah kept a remnant of its people of two tribes, Judah and Benjamin. Babylon, and subsequently Persia, allowed many of their captives to return to Judah and rebuild the city of Jerusalem. The people that never returned began to migrate all over Europe and Asia.
This chapter tells of the message that Jeremiah had received from God to give to people who had fled from the Babylonians into Egypt after God had told them not to. Jeremiah told them that the Babylonians would have been kind to them but because they had left against God’s advice, Jeremiah prophesied that they would never return to Judah. They argued that because they stopped worshiping Asherah, famine and war come on the land.
Jeremiah pointed out to them that their worship of idols was what had brought the destruction of Judah, not because they worshipped God instead of the idols. The people had taken an oath of obedience to God and then refused to listen to God and turned to idols. Those who repented of their idol worship returned to Judah and escaped the judgement that God imposed. Those who stayed in Egypt slipped deeper and deeper into idol worship to the point that they blamed their troubles on the neglect of their idols, when in fact, the worship of idols was the cause of their problems in the first place.
In Jeremiah 44:15-19, all the men and their wives who had left Judah for Egypt assembled before Jeremiah. The men knew their wives had been worshipping Asherah. The people said they would not listen to him and would keep on worshipping as they chose. Just as their ancestors did. They claimed that when they stopped worshipping her, famine and war descended on their nation. They continued to blame their neglect of those idols for the troubles. Jeremiah reminded that their ancestors worshipped God and burned incense before the God of Israel. Then he told them flat out that their idol worship would be their downfall. Not one of those who fled to Egypt would ever invoke the name of God again. They would all die by sword and famine. God said that He would deliver the Pharoah of Egypt, Hophra, into the hands of his enemies as a sign to prove His words.
I said all that to say this. We must be careful when we quote Scripture or disagree with someone who is trying to twist the Bible into what they want it to say. Know your facts and context. If you are not sure, tell them that you will study on that a bit, and that you will get back with them about it.
