Prepare the Way Part 2

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Welcome to the Teaching Ministry of Jubilee Church International. Jubilee is devoted to making disciples, winning the loss to Christ, building strong families, and taking the gospel to the nations.

Open your Bibles and join us as the presence of the Holy Spirit helps us to grow a little deeper.

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Turn in your Bibles with me to the Book of 2 Kings 17, starting with verse 16 And they abandoned all the commandments of the Lord, their God, and made for themselves metal images of two calves.

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And they made an Asherah.

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You know what an Asherah was? It goes back to Canaanite gods, Babylon, and many of the other pagan cultures worshiped Asherah, goddess of heaven, and all kinds of perversion.

If you go look up, and you can look, there's different illustrations of an Asherah pole. In fact, many times throughout scripture, God told kings and men of God who turned back to him to go throughout the land cutting down the Asherah poles.

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Basically, you ever seen a totem pole? It's an Asherah pole.

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It's a pole that has faces or images or represents multiple gods upon gods of Pagan peoples.

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Many of those gods represented things in creation.

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They stacked them together in one pole, carved them into trees, carved trees into them.

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It's an Asherah pole.

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It says, And they made an Asherah, and they worshiped all the hosts of heaven, and they served by all. In your Bible, that's probably a capital B, because eventually the word by all became a proper noun, as a pagan god that was superior to all the other pagan gods.

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But by all is a Hebrew word that means husband.

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It means husband.

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When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the law of God which were wedding vows, God was going to take a bride unto himself called Israel.

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So that he could illustrate for all the rest of humanity his love as a husband.

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And when Moses came down with the wedding vows of how this relationship was to work, the first wedding vow was what?

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Monogamy.

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You shall have no other husbands but me.

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No other gods.

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And when he comes down, what is Israel doing?

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They have created their own Baal, their own God.

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And they, being Israel, burned, listen, this is how bad it got. They burned their sons and their daughters as offerings.

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They offered their own children as sacrifices to these pagan gods.

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In fact, the scripture says at some point, they began to give their children as foundation offerings.

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You know what a foundation offering is?

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It's when they would build a new temple or base for a pagan god or a pagan temple, and they would take one of their children or some of their children alive and bury them in the cement of the foundation of the pagan altar or temple.

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You think, how could a people become so wicked? How do we live in a day where women and people celebrate taking an abortion pill to kill their baby?

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Because it wasn't the gender they wanted.

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How wicked can we get?

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Well, we are well on our way.

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And they burned their sons and daughters as offerings. They used divination and omens and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger.

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Therefore, the Lord was very angry with Israel, and he removed them out of his sight, and none was left but the tribe of Judah.

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Everybody say, they took another husband.

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That's what they did.

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Now, look at 2 Kings 17, verse 24

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And the king of Assyria brought people from Babylon.

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Watch this.

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Babylon, count them with me.

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That's one.

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Kufa, two.

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Ava, three.

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Hamap, four.

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Sefervam, the fifth one.

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He took the people from these five pagan peoples, and he placed them in the city of Samaria.

Instead of the people of Israel. Now, what remained there was who? The people of Judah.

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And this king of Assyria took these pagan peoples from five pagan nations, and mixed them with the people of Judah and Samaria.

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And they took possession of Samaria, and lived in the cities. The Samaritan people, in Jesus' day, are people who are descendants of those Jews who intermarried with these people of these five pagan nations, who were sent following the conquering of the northern kingdom. Are you following me so far? Amen? They developed their own, listen, they were so far from God, that they developed their own pentateuch, their own law of God, which was not the word of the Lord. It was their own word. Are we not living in that day? People make up their own word, based on their own opinion, and call it the word of the Lord.