Jezebel

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything else along the way. I’m your host this evening, Bryan Broome, and I’m joined by Greg Uttinger and Emily Maxson.

Tonight we’ll be talking about that wicked woman, Jezebel, or is she a boss babe? We don’t know. We’re going to talk about it. It seems that in recent years Jezebel has been either a name to throw at people who don’t agree with you, or alternatively a name to claim for yourself if you are of a particular ideological persuasion. So we’re going to look at her. Is there anything good in her? I don’t know, but we’re going to talk about the bad for sure.

I heard her eyeshadow game was on point.

There we go. That’s one good thing, I think.

Yeah, I think that’s a point in her favor.

But over the years, fundamentalism has looked at that particular thing and have thereby condemned eyeshadow and other makeup. Your generation may not know the expression, but mine certainly did – “That painted Jezebel.”

Ah yes, I do know this phrase.

I can infer the meaning.

It’s real easy to put that one together.

We’ll have to talk about the whole ‘painted’ thing before we’re done, but that ought to be a minor point, although it hasn’t always been.

So Jezebel. She was a Phoenician princess. Her father was a priest of Astarte or Ashtaroth or one of the A names for the female goddess of the Canaanites, and not content with that role he assassinated his king and took the throne, so Jezebel had a great pattern here in how to run a kingdom. Assassination was right up front. Trusting nobody was probably real close behind that.

She got farmed off to Ahab of Israel in a political marriage, but she seems to have been loyal to her new husband in the sense that she never apparently stabbed him in the back or betrayed him or sold him out, and forwarded his own desires when he was too weak to do anything, and moved to give him what he wanted, even if it was illegal, immoral, and atrocious, so in that sense she was very supportive.

Looking through history, I can’t think of very many times where the queen assassinates the king to whom she is married and then retains any semblance of power, so loyalty is pretty self-interested here.

I think some queen mothers have tried it and almost got away with it, but queens not so much, so there’s probably some self-interest going on, and yet there are some things that she did for her husband that she didn’t directly get much out of. She just made her husband feel good. I’m thinking here particularly of the whole Naboth’s vineyard thing, where she got some blood on her hands and didn’t even really tell her husband what she was doing. Then God came down hard upon Ahab, and incidentally on her, because Ahab was the king and he should have known and should have stopped it.

Side note while we’re here – her father Ethobaal, is known to secular history through the writings of Josephus quoting an earlier Greek or Phoenician historian. It turns out she is the great aunt of Dido of Carthage.

Hey, no way!

Yeah. And in finding that out I finally found out how to pronounce Dido. For those of you who’ve ever read the Aeneid or know the myth of the founding of Rome, there’s a connection there because Carthage, of course, was the Phoenician, that is to say Canaanite, that is to say Tyre and Sidon type colony that worshiped Baal and Moloch, but that’s a story for another time perhaps.

So this is what we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with a political alliance. Now, something else. Political alliances, as we know, were always religious alliances. You swore the name of your common god, which meant somebody had to give ground here. You either admitted that your god was subservient to the god of the other person in this deal, or you somehow tried to identify them, like Zeus and Amun-Ra were the same god, or there was a third possibility.

Territorialize.

Yeah, something like that.

“I’m leaving the mountains to come to the valley and I’ll now worship the god of the valley.”

“I will worship the relevant god over here,” which is to say we’re dealing with polytheism at its best, or worst, which in the ancient world meant pluralism. Jezebel gets a lot of her support from would-be pluralists who see in her an open-minded attitude to accept various sorts of gods, except one. The God of Israelite fundamentalism was right out, but the assumption has been that since all we know about Jezebel is in the Bible, and the Bible is hostile to her and favorable to this fundamentalist prophet Elijah, obviously the Bible isn’t telling us the whole story.

Jezebel just must have stepped on too many toes because she was a strong-willed woman in an age that didn’t appreciate such things, and her pluralism got in the way of fundamentalism, so this nice lady who got stuck in a kingdom that wasn’t hers, trying to be faithful to her husband and trying to make everything work for everybody, got the shaft and eventually was thrown to the dogs. That’s kind of the modern take on Jezebel, as far as I can see.

We all know that strong-willed women are very prone to murder.

Or maybe it wasn’t so much murder. Maybe that’s just exaggeration. Because the thing is, as everybody will admit, aside from that one reference that I brought up, that she’s somehow related to Dido, there’s no other historical record on Jezebel except that in Kings in the Bible.

So you can speculate all you want as to what the writer, and therefore God, is hiding from us or hasn’t revealed to us, but to concoct your own vision of who and what Jezebel must have been, based on the prejudices of God, is a dangerous kind of proposition any way you look at it.

Nobody would try to do anything seriously historical. Even if you approach a controversial character who’s presented by some author whose prejudices you don’t share, you’re not simply going to reinvent the antagonist here out of whole cloth because you want to find someone like you there. That’s the worst sort of trying to not be a historian that historians could ever be.

It would be one thing to say, “Well, we don’t know how much we can trust this because we don’t believe God actually wrote the Bible, and we don’t trust that the original scribe or whoever the final editor was…” You can say all that. That’s nice unbelief, but to go the extra step of stupidity and say, “And therefore I imagine that Jezebel must have been like…” is right out and idiotic, and yet people have done it.

Perhaps we should look a little bit at what exactly she did, so I’m just going to read a few references here and there, and feel free to supply your favorite part of the story if I skip over it. We’re introduced to her I Kings 16.

And Ahab the son of Omri did evil in the sight of the LORD above all that were before him. And it came to pass, as if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, that he took to wife Jezebel the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Zidonians, and went and served Baal, and worshipped him. And he reared up an altar for Baal in the house of Baal, which he had built in Samaria. And Ahab made a grove, and Ahab did more to provoke the LORD God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel that were before him.

That’s quite an accolade.

Yeah, the writer does not waste anything. “So tell us what you really think.” But notice the blame falls primarily upon Ahab. Yes, she’s not a nice lady, but the main condemnation is upon Ahab because he’s the king of God’s people, and he did and should have known better, and yet he marries a pagan. We’ve seen in scripture a number of times what complications that leads to. Think back as short a time ago as Solomon marrying 700 foreign princesses. Ahab only married one and things were really bad.

Then Baal worship. I think we’ve talked about Baal worship before, but this is a good point just to remind everybody of what it is. This is nature worship. It’s the worship of the primal forces of the cosmos, if that’s even a word that pagans can use, or the multiverse.

Baal is the male dimension manifested in lightning, fire, thunder, and rain, the things that descend from heaven and permeate Mother Earth to bring forth life, but also that suggest danger and destruction. Astarte, Asherah, Astaroth – there’s a number of names for the female side. She’s Mother Earth. She’s the fertility of the land, of the woman’s body and cattle and sheep and such, the feminine side of nature.

When the male and the female get together harmoniously, then things are great and society flourishes. There are crops. There are children being born. There’s peace. There’s plenty.

The problem is that nature by nature is chaotic, and the gods such as they are don’t necessarily get along. It’s the job of the king and his priests to try to bring some kind of order, and the way that you tame nature is through that which is anti-natural. You shock nature into conformity, and thus the most vicious horrible kinds of activities were cataloged as acts of religious virtue – child sacrifice, self-castration, cutting yourself until the blood flows. These sorts of things were a way to get nature on your side, to make nature sit up and pay attention.

Baal and Ashtaroth were not necessarily conceived of as personal beings. They could be described in those terms if it were useful, but fundamentally they were the forces of nature that man had to tame by his magic. And since the king and the queen – the king particularly – were the great magicians, the social engineers that made society work, the good king was the one who made nature behave and brought you good harvests and lots of new children and all that. The bad king was the one who let it all get out of control.

To assassinate a king then was to war against the gods, unless you succeeded. Then that must be the gods’ will and the next step in the process. So this is the religion that Ahab adopted and that Jezebel forwarded as being the daughter of a priest of Astarte.

The one thing that this kind of polytheism or pluralism can’t tolerate is any idea of absolutes. That there should be a single God who is sovereign and Lord of all was absolutely outside their range of thinking because that’s the sort of God you would have to obey, who can boss you around and tell you what to do and condemn you for your sins and call judgement upon you.

No, the gods are things to be manipulated and controlled and used, powerful and dangerous like electricity or nuclear power, sure, but if we’re careful we can make this thing work. But absolute gods with absolute authority and absolute morality, no, that wasn’t a thing.

It’s interesting too that you bring up doing anti-natural things to tame nature. That immediately reminded me of something, and I think I brought it up the last time that I was on the podcast. It was another podcast that I listen to that talked about the Aztecs.

One of the gods the Aztecs worshiped was known as the flayed god. The priests, as part of one of the worship services for it, would wear the inside-out flayed skins of human victims for weeks. How gross is that? How anti-natural is that? But it’s all on the same kind of continuum of tribalistic pagan god worship.

We’ve talked about Peace Child a number of times. There’s a later section beyond the offering of the peace child where Don Richardson confronted some of the death rituals of the tribe he was ministering to in Papua New Guinea, and that same kind of thing came up. It’s been too long since I’ve read it to remember the details, but I just remember that the people there were disgusted at what their death rituals required.

When they came to Christ and understood, “This is stupid, pointless, and actually wicked,” they were so relieved. “I don’t have to do that anymore? Cool! This is great. Don’t anybody do that when I die. Just put me in the ground and I’ll go home to be with Jesus. This is wonderful.”

Ever since the ‘60s there’s been this myth that paganism is kinder, gentler, sweeter, tamer, closer to nature, and it’s not true.

No. Pagans don’t like being pagans, if they have any sensibilities.

No. In that they’re used to it and they’re terrified to do anything else, yeah sure, but it’s a horrific way to live, and the ancient world was terrified of demons and of magic. So this is what Ahab was inflicting upon Israel.

Sometimes the reward for sin is more sin. You want to sin? God says, “Fine, here, I’ll show you some. You want to worship foreign gods? Let me show you foreign culture and have you be under their thumb for a while and see what happens.”

Although God with one hand opened this door and let Baal worship enter Israel, with the other he raised up one of the most colorful figures in all scripture, Elijah the Tishbite, and I think the next couple episodes center on Elijah, so I won’t spoil all that right now. But while surrendering Israel to Baal worship – “You want golden calves? Let me show you real paganism. Here, have a pagan queen and a king under her thumb and you can go the way of nature worship and anti-nature” – God’s people suffered. God’s prophets suffered. Jezebel didn’t want competition, so she killed the prophets until Elijah, rightly or wrongly, says, “I’m the only one left.”

It turns out that there was more to the story than that. He confronts Ahab on Mount Carmel and thinks everything is great, and then Jezebel again sends one threatening letter, “You’re so dead,” and he runs for his life. God has to meet him in Horeb and re-encourage him.

At that point, Jezebel kind of drops into the background for a while. I think the next major account which we mentioned a minute ago was that of Naboth. Naboth was a godly man who had a vineyard near to Ahab’s summer palace in Jezreel, and Ahab said, “Hey Naboth, I’d like to buy your vineyard.”

Now, that in itself was not a problem. In Israel you could sell your property until the Jubilee. If the person you were selling it to was already in his 50s or 60s, and Jubilee is 30 years away, that’s in effect a sale that does revert to your heirs when it’s all over. Perhaps he wasn’t thinking that. Perhaps he wanted it absolutely, but in any case, Naboth simply says, “No. It’s the inheritance of my fathers, something that God has given our family line to treasure and to keep, so no, I can’t do that.”

So Ahab goes home and pouts a lot, and Jezebel comes and finds out. “What’s going on?”

“Naboth won’t sell to me.”

“All right, let Mama Jezebel take care of it. You just sit here and don’t worry about it. I’ll cover it,” and she arranges for Naboth to be judicially murdered, to cut through the story, and then comes and tells her husband, “Naboth is dead. It’s all yours. Go take it.” And Ahab, without asking any questions, jumps in his chariot and goes to claim the land. Elijah again confronts him and blames not Jezebel, but Ahab.

That’s the kind of woman we’re dealing with here. She is pragmatic. She knows which side her bread is buttered on. She wants to help her husband get what he wants. A happy king is going to be a happy queen, and happy children who will step in and fill Ahab’s role when he’s gone.

In those days, kings did still fight in battle, and Ahab, despite all of his weaknesses, was not physically cowardly. He does go into battle eventually and dies there. Jezebel outlives him and becomes Queen Mother for a while and is the spider in the background pulling the webs on her children.

I believe the next time we run into Jezebel is at the end, when God finally says, “Enough is enough with Ahab’s household. We’re going to get rid of this whole Baal thing. It’s been going on long enough.” It’s gone through a couple generations of kings, and he has Elisha send a young man to anoint a frontier captain, Jehu, to go exterminate the whole house of Ahab, and he does. He does a great job.

And having killed both the king of Israel and the king of Judah, he rides into Jezreel and there’s Jezebel. This is the story that most people remember about her. This is 2 Kings 9.

And when Jehu was come to Jezreel, Jezebel heard of it and she painted her face, and tired her head, and looked out at a window. And as Jehu entered in at the gate, she said, Had Zimri peace, who slew his master? And he lifted up his face to the window and said, Who is on my side? Who? And there looked out to him two or three eunuchs. And he said, Throw her down. So they threw her down and some of her blood was sprinkled on the wall and on the horses, and he trode her under foot.

And when he was come in, he did eat and drink, and said, Go, see now this cursed woman, and bury her for she is a king's daughter. And they went to bury her, but they found no more of her than the skull, and the feet, and the palms of her hands. Wherefore they came again and told him.

And he said, This is the word of the LORD, which he spake by his servant Elijah the Tishbite, saying, In the portion of Jezreel shall dogs eat the flesh of Jezebel. And the carcass of Jezebel shall be as dung upon the face of the field in the portion of Jezreel so that they shall not say, This is Jezebel.

We’ll see more of her influence in later episodes as we talk about her daughter, Athaliah, but that’s the end of her immediate story and it’s what most people remember. Fundamentalism has made a big deal out of her getting all gussied up and she put on make-up.

How dare she?

I bet she danced right before.

Maybe she even read a book and had her own ideas and started thinking.

Pastors have often seemed to have misread this. Isaac Asimov, interestingly enough, got it right in his science fiction novel, Caves of Steel. His protagonist, Elijah Baley, is married to a woman named Jezebel, and his Jezebel is rather proud of her name because it’s kind of racy and spicy.

Basically, Elijah her husband, in a moment of orneriness says, “No, Jezebel wasn’t at all what you think.” This is the quote – “In a moment of irritation I insisted that the historic Jezebel was not particularly wicked and was, if anything, a good wife.” That little thing of putting down his wife’s pretentions to be a little spicy and racy because of the name actually becomes a major plot point, and that almost gives things away right there.

He explains that she wasn’t trying to be seductive. She was dressing up as a queen. She was going to carry this to the end. She was going to be proud and defiant and royal. She’s looking down at what, in her mind, is an assassin and a usurper. You don’t yield to such people. You don’t bow the knee to them. You don’t cringe. So she dresses up to present herself in all of her nobility, in the political sense, all of her aristocratic power and glory, and perhaps is hoping to over-awe him, but at the very least she’s not going to go down cringing.

Her one line is, “Had Zimri peace who slew his master?” Zimri was an earlier regicide who managed to live for all of a week before other people took him out – Ahab’s father, actually. But Jehu won’t deal with her and just asks the eunuchs to throw her down.

Most children remember the dogs eating Jezebel, because children like bloody gory stories, as witness fairy tales, which is one reason God puts these things in here. Then we hide them from children.

And we wonder why the children don’t like to read the Bible.

Yeah, we hide all the good stories. So there’s that.

The interesting thing about the eyeshadow actually is that it’s something that God uses. In Isaiah 54:11 God speaks of adorning his own bride, and the word he uses is a mixed metaphor as he switches from describing her as a temple being built, or a city or a house, to being a bride. He goes for painting, but the word he uses is the same word for eyeshadow. So God puts eyeshadow on his bride.

The problem is not the eyeshadow thing. The problem is the character of the woman who’s doing it and why she’s doing it. I don’t think any of us have a problem with a strong woman standing up to a usurper and saying, “You’re not getting away with this,” if such a thing could happen in the abstract, but it never happens in the abstract. There’s always a context. There’s always a historical situation that involves commitment to one ethic or another, one worldview or another, one god or another, and she’d chosen the wrong god. She’d chosen the State and power and nature, and she took her stand in terms of that.

While we can appreciate your boldness and her courage…

She’s a go-getter.

Yeah, she is, on the wrong side.

She’s strong, but that doesn’t make her good.

No. I mean we can appreciate Hitler’s gift for oratory, too.

He made the trains run on time, I hear.

Yeah, and Julius Caesar’s military prowess, or Alexander’s. As Christians we don’t compromise by seeing the good gifts that God has left, even in the character and personality of unbelievers, and yet we must judge them by the same standard we judge ourselves. There’s no pluralism allowed here.

We cannot say, “Well, from the neutral point of view…” There are no neutral points of view. There’s God’s and there’s everything that’s not God’s. God passed judgement on this woman and it wasn’t good.

There is one more reference to Jezebel, not to her historically but her name is used in Revelation when Jesus wants to condemn a self-appointed prophetess in the church in Thyatira. This is Revelation 2 –

And unto the angel of the church in Thyatira write, These things saith the Son of God, who hath his eyes like unto a flame of fire, and his feet are like fine brass. I know thy works, and charity, and service, and faith, and thy patience, and thy works, and the last to be more than the first.

He doesn’t condemn them, but there’s just sort of this, “You know, there’s more to the faith than just working, but still, okay, good works.”

Notwithstanding, I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess…

In other words, she wasn’t really but she put on airs as if she were one.

…to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.

And I gave her space to repent of her fornication, and she repented not. Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds. And I will kill her children with death, and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts, and I will give unto every one of you according to your works.

But unto you I say, and unto the rest in Thyatira, as many as have not this doctrine, and which have not known the depths of Satan, as they speak, I will put upon you none other burden. But that which ye have already, hold fast till I come.

It seems that this woman – and it’s unlikely her name was actually Jezebel; it just seems to be Jesus’ label for her – claimed some kind of prophetic gift. She was accepted by the church as a teacher of doctrine, as a spiritual leader, but what she was teaching amounted to – we’re not told with what word she did or know exactly what her rational was – but she taught Christians in the church to commit fornication and to eat things sacrificed to idols.

This is very similar to the critique of the previous church in Revelation 2:14 –

But I have a few things against thee, because thou hast there them that hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balak to cast a stumbling block before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed unto idols and to commit fornication.

The reference is to Numbers, when Balaam, having proved incapable of cursing Israel, off-camera says to Balak the king, “I can’t curse them, but I can tell you how you can get God to curse them. Send in a few more prostitutes. Send in the temple prostitutes and have them make nice-nice and see what God does,” and God brought plagues upon his people. That seems to be the reference here in both cases.

The idea was you really need to understand the other side. Either there’s truth there or at least there’s knowledge there. You know what kids say, “Well, mom and dad, you never really did drugs so you don’t know what it’s all about,” or “You did drugs and therefore you can’t criticize me.”

Catch-22.

Yeah, that. So apparently she was doing this. She was telling people to blur the line, blur the antithesis. You can go and you can visit these temples and you can commit ritual fornication, and you will understand the other side so much better.

The Lord mentions their doctrine, which they apparently called knowing the depths of Satan. “If you really understand how the powers of darkness work and know the deepest of the dark, then you’ll be a more effective Christian.” No. Like some Christians who give them stuff to study evil conspiracies, magic, and occult weirdness, rather than concentrating on knowing Jesus better.

When we get down to externals, it’s very easy to forsake the gospel for a list of things to do, and one of the things that often comes up is being afraid of the enemy, and because you’re afraid of him you’ve got to know all about him, and that’s scary.

And that blinds you to other pitfalls. If you’re so focused on fighting the occult instead of fighting for Jesus, you’re not going to be fighting against all of the other things that are fighting against Jesus. You’re fighting on one front when it’s a 17-million-front battle.

And too often you’re going to pick up the weapons of the enemy. “This stuff works so well for them, if we just kind of turn it on its head…They’re using black magic. Let’s use white magic.”

Fight fire with fire.

We may not call it that. We may not even think of it as magic, but when someone looks at – “Where is that in the Bible?”

“Well, it’s just this thing that we picked up here and there, and because of this…”

“We’re calling on angels to help fight the principalities and powers.”

Yeah, that kind of thing, or these special kind of prayer cloths or these special formal prayers.

“We have these shofars that were blessed by Jewish rabbis and a Baptist minister, and we’re going to blow them and it’s going to save America.”

What scares me, Bryan, is this sounds like you’re speaking from personal experience.

Oh yeah. Not personal experience in my upbringing. There was never anyone, to my memory anyway, who brought in a shofar and blew it in service, but in those circles I have heard and seen social media posts about it.

I have several friends who grew up experiencing those things. They’re real. It’s not just a legend.

I didn’t see that in my religious upbringing, but in my conservative conspiracy-oriented upbringing I saw a lot of obsessions with the powers of darkness and what might lie behind all the conspiracies, and it was frightening. The response was never the gospel. It was, “Well, educate people,” like you can educate them out of their own sinfulness and covetousness. No, you don’t even understand the issue yet.

It also reminds me of that wonderful sermon, or I don’t know if you would technically classify it as a sermon, but something R.C. Sproul taught I think at the Strange Fire conference way back when. His talk, wherever it was, was called “Pentecostals and the Sovereignty of Satan,” and how in those circles Satan is treated as more sovereign than God. He’s the one who causes all the problems. He’s the one who’s in control of every little thing that’s making your life go wrong. It's never really your sin, or your own sinfulness that caused problems. It’s always, “Oh, this is an attack of the devil.”

It’s like how powerful is Satan? And it’s not limited to Pentecostals, obviously, but in those circles especially it’s more obvious there, the focusing so much on what the enemy is “capable of,” and then therefore figuring out or, like you said, educating yourself on the ways to combat it.

There’s different methods. “Here are the 7 keys to victory. Here are the 5 spiritual practices that lead you to contentment,” and it just goes on and on and on. It’s just a constant influx of law preaching.

Exactly, good point. “Here’s a list of the 5 things you must do to take on a demon. First, ask the demon its name.” What? Why would I be having a conversation with a demon in the first place, but it degenerates down.

It’s not that somebody comes in and says, “Let me teach you magic.” But that magic is the natural default when we walk away from the sovereignty of God, because if God is not sovereign then we’re thrown out into a universe full of powers, and we better grab what we can. Maybe God’s got a few hints out there, and if the Bible doesn’t tell us, then maybe somebody else can and we’ll find a way to take on this darkness.

There have been a lot of Christian novels and movies made around this whole idea, that there are ways of fighting the demonic. “Well, they’re not exactly in the Bible, but you know, they’re spiritual,” whatever that means.

To get us back to Jezebel and perhaps look for an ending here, this Jezebel in Revelation at first glance isn’t exactly like the other except in this – she’s a pluralist. She says that you can dabble in all of these religious experiences, and certainly ritual fornication is an experience, and God’s going to be okay with this.

There again is no absolute moral or ethical antithesis. There’s no religious antithesis. There’s something true here to be found and maybe something negative to be avoided, but you won’t know until you try it. And the original Jezebel was sort of the same sort. I mean she tolerated golden calf worship, which supposedly was Yahweh worship.

When the confrontation with Elijah comes on Mount Carmel, not only are the prophets of Baal there, but there are other prophets, presumably those of the calf, so it was alright, this idolatrous “Yahweh worship.” It could be mixed with Baalism, but Baalism took the ascendant role.

But true Yahweh worship where the prophet comes and wags a finger in your face and says, “Thus saith the Lord, a famine is coming, drought is coming, no rain, you better repent,” that was intolerable. A lot of stuff is okay, but – I’m thinking here of Francis Schaeffer’s lines in How Shall We Then Live? – when a group of people has a standard by which to judge the State, the State cannot tolerate that. That’s unacceptable. Polytheists and pluralists and open-minded people are great until you stand up in the name of the sovereign God and say, “That’s wrong.” It doesn’t mean that we’re calling for anybody’s death or torture or anything like that. We’re just saying you’re wrong, but that’s unacceptable.

You can’t call people wrong. We can be wrong, but no one else can, which is the great absurdity and paradox of all this because it’s not about love and equality. It’s about kicking God out of the universe. Whatever takes his place is fine. The critical thing is to get the true God out of the universe. After that we’ll figure it out.

And also, with the prophets of this golden calf, it’s just another example of the fact that when you try to find the compromise points on the essentials, you end up completely losing the heart of true worship of God.

It’s sort of like with the recent debates around things like EFS/ESS/ERS or insert whatever acronym other people are using for it. It doesn’t necessarily find itself in the same root of trying to compromise with blatantly pagan systems, but it is still something where you mess with an essential, and in so doing you end up losing the heart of the very thing you’re claiming to defend. It’s self-defeating.

And we are all good creedalists and confessionists, as well as believers in inerrancy and verbal inspiration, so we believe that you can say the truth in simple words, and having said it, it is true. It’s true in an absolute sense and it’s true in the sense that anything that disagrees with it is wrong and absolutely wrong.

Being creedalists, we know that even the most basic doctrines of the faith are not up for grabs. The doctrine of creation, the Trinity, the inspiration of scripture, the hypostatic union of the two natures in one person in Christ, justification by faith – these are not things that you can mess around with. The unity of God – we’ve had that discussion here before. What happens if you start saying, “Well, God’s kind of complex and he has many parts and angles.” No. In that sense, Christianity is fairly easy to track. There are things that are beyond human comprehension to be sure, and yet we can say them in ways that, “Okay, this and not that. This and not that. There you go.”

“We don’t like that.”

“It doesn’t matter what you like. This is what the Bible says.”

“Says you.”

“Yes, and 2,000 years of Christian testimony, too. So take it or leave it.”

2,000 years of Christian testimony by people who were smarter than I ever expect to get.

Yes, and who often gave their lives defending these things. Anyway, that makes us sort of a minority within a minority, but that’s okay. May God continue to use these things as we talk about them, line upon line sometimes, piece by piece.

This is why teaching children the faith is not something you do in a quick one-week session, let alone over the mountaintop experience at some retreat. This is something that you have to go into. This is why catechisms – whether using a traditional catechism or something that just emphasizes the doctrines and practices of your own communion – are basic things. This is why parents sit down and read the Bible with their kids.

It takes a long time to build these things, but the wise man says, “If you train up a child in the way he should go, when he’s old, when he has a beard, he won’t depart out of it.” We build for the future. We build to stay, but it takes time and our generation does not like that. Our generation wants instantaneous accomplishment. “Show us how we can win back America in one month and we’ll raise millions of dollars.”

Instantaneous accomplishment under our own power.

Under our own power, because God hasn’t promised anything like that. We try to usurp the role of the Spirit and put him under our thumb. It’s always that amusing thing of, “Revival coming here in three weeks!”

“Revival was postponed due to rain.”

Can’t the Holy Spirit work in the rain?

I think that’s probably a good place to draw it to a close. I think the kind of tying it up in a bow point would just be the fact that one of the primary things that made Queen Jezebel such a destructive influence – I guess that’s the best way to describe it – is the fact that she undermined the true worship of Yahweh and introduced a pluralistic idea of what truth could be, and it just absolutely wreaked havoc on Israel.

The solution to that was Elijah being the preacher of the truth, and ultimately obviously the true solution was the coming of Christ and his death on the cross, but in the temporal limited generation that Jezebel was adjacent to, it was Elijah.

And we will see more of Elijah in the weeks to come.

Very good. Thank you all so much for joining me for this. Thank you to you, our listeners, for joining us as well.

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