- 9 - • Finally, the taking of interest was forbidden, thereby forestalling usury at the outset. If the people of Israel observed these statutes, the danger of their being ruled wholly by worldly considerations and breaking faith with God out of love for Mammon would not be all too great. The other danger that threatened their faith was, however, far greater. This was the idolatry of the peoples the Hebrews would encounter in the so-called ‘promised land’.. This idol worship was all the more dangerous because, like all of its kind, it consisted of humanly perceptible communication with the evil spirit world. The spirit realm is mysterious in human eyes, and mystery exerts an irresistible attraction on everyone. Ghost stories are listened to with the greatest attention, and wherever anything mysterious and spectral actually or allegedly happens, a crowd will gather. Thus, the Israelites had already in the past been attracted by the mysteries of Egyptian idol worship. The Apostle Paul refers to this in writing to the Corinthians when he says: I Corinthians 12: 2: ‘You know that when you were still heathens, it was the dead idols to which you were irresistibly drawn.’ I need scarcely add that the Israelites did not content themselves with merely looking at idol images, for lifeless stone and wood attracted the people of those times as little as they attract people today. • The allurement of idol worship lay in the actual communication with the low spirit world. The speaking of spirits through images and human mediums and the performance by them of other marvellous feats were the factors that attracted people. It was here that they were told so much that was mysterious, that they received answers to their questions relating to their worldly prospects, and that they heard predictions about their supposed future, something that all people welcome eagerly. In addition to this, they were told things highly gratifying to their human passions, for here vice was elevated to virtue, while virtue was branded as vice. Whoever once became addicted to this kind of spirit communication found it difficult to desist from the habit. “As the leader of God’s people, Christ took two measures to try to prevent his followers from lapsing into idolatry. • One of these measures was to give them the opportunity of communicating with good spirits, as a substitute for the form of spirit communication that had been forbidden. He gave the Israelites the Tabernacle, the breastplate of judgment, and the good mediums, known to you as ‘prophets’, as I have already taught you at length in my previous accounts. • As the second measure, he commanded the Israelites to exterminate certain tribes into whose land they were to emigrate. There were six of them that had fallen into such idolatry and abomination that their conversion to a faith in God seemed impossible. Instead, there was every reason to fear that they would soon have corrupted the Israelites who settled among them. The command to exterminate these peoples has led many of you to look upon the God of the Old Testament as a cruel Deity and to maintain that the writers of the Old Testament were as yet incapable of conceptualizing a God such as Christ preached, since otherwise they would never have attributed such cruelty to the will of God. In this you are mistaken.
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