Your Sons & Daughters Shall Prophesy - Prophetic Gifts Today In The New Testament Church

A Profile of the Ancient Hebrew Prophet

The True Character of Heathenism

The electrifying news of Egypt's devastation by Moses and the Hebrew God swept far and wide with surprising rapidity. Along the caravan routes excited traders told and retold of a land stripped of her wealth, vegeta tion, livestock, firstborn and renowned cavalry and chariots. Egypt's gods had been demolished! Never before in history had a nation been so formed and delivered as Israel had. The great horde of people (the census at Mount Sinai showed 603,550 males above the age of twenty) moved ponderously like a slow lava flow across the sparsely populated Sinai peninsula. But then the Hebrews' entrance into the Promised Land was postponed. Unbelief brought them forty years of wandering in the wilderness. Grad ually those who remembered Egypt died off, and a new, desert-toughened generation made ready to enter Canaan. The people who had been brought out that they might be brought in were finally poised to make their entrance. The exodus had shown Israel that their God was not just a tribal god, another in a religious menagerie of gods galore. But another lesson had to be learned before they entered their Promised Land-even as they stood on the threshold of their inheritance, kept separate only by the boundary line of the Jordan River. This lesson has deep meaning for the Church today as well, and is a foundation truth espoused by every true prophet. The heathen nations were more than antagonistic political and mili tary powers that would oppose the Israelites' progress. The intrinsic nature of heathenism was hostility to the purposes of God. Israel, following the true and only God, was to make no alliances, cultivate no relationships, make no treaties. So evil was heathenism, and so diametrically opposed to God and His ways, that Israel was allowed to make no compromise. Our Western minds find it difficult to think like those ancient peoples. To them the god of the Hebrews was simply one among many (1 Kings 20:23; 2 Kings 18:33-35). To the heathen the question was a practical one: Are their gods stronger than ours? The heathen worshiped different gods, believing that some were more powerful in the valley and others on the mountain. The claim of the Hebrews about their God, therefore, dis turbed the neighboring nations. This God was jealous of Israel and would tolerate no variances or insubordination. A people with such a belief sys tem could not coexist comfortably with the tribal peoples already in the land. Israel was not to intermarry with the resident peoples, and Israel felt this land belonged to them! The invasion of their lands brought great consternation to the nations of the Jordan. The story of God's victory over Egypt was known by all. Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, had heard (Exodus 18:1). Rahab, in Jericho, had heard and told the spies how fear and dread had fallen upon the inhab- ■ 114