Passing through the Fire
An exploration of the ancient history of child and human sacrifice, demon worship, and how it factors into today's abortion debate
It’s taken me a few days to gather my thoughts about the abortion debate raging in this country. I wanted to present not only a Biblical perspective on the issue of abortion, but I additionally wanted to present my own personal perspective, which includes my observations on the online reaction from people purporting to be “conservative Christians” who are dogmatically running with wildly inaccurate claims regarding the demise of Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992).
However, today I’ll be largely focusing on the historical roots of how we have found ourselves embroiled in a pro-choice American culture.
The Spilling of Innocent Blood
To understand abortion, the Christian must first understand the Biblical history of child sacrifice. The killing of children - specifically, infants - has a long and sordid history throughout ancient times.
Politicization
The first thing to know about abortion is that it has been unnecessarily politicized. Everyone and their dog wants to have an opinion on it, and usually, that opinion is either a regurgitated replay of what celebrities have to say or a recitation of what they heard on someone’s Instagram graphic.
Some people have tried to walk the line between being pro-choice and being pro-life by authoring posts like this:
“I’m pro-life BUT we need to understand that so many women are now going to be in DANGER of going to jail because they had a MISCARRIAGE.”
“I’m pro-life, but women everywhere are scared and in mourning. This is a troubling time and we need to come together in LOVE.”
Here’s my take. Don’t say, “I’m pro-life BUT.” There is no BUT. You’re either pro-life or you’re not. You either believe women should be able to dismember a baby in the womb or you don’t. You either think baby lives are just as valuable as a woman’s life or you don’t.
First of all, no woman is going to jail for having a miscarriage or an ectopic pregnancy. Those are not abortions. This is what the kids these days call “fake news.” This is simply untrue. Anyone who has experienced a miscarriage or an abortion procedure are well aware that there are huge differences between the two.
An abortion is an elective procedure that, 98 percent of the time, is performed for no other reason than economic pressure or because it would be really inconvenient for the mother to allow that child to live.
Less than two percent of abortions are performed because of rape or even fetal abnormalities. It’s not true that women across the country won’t be able to access healthcare because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade - such arguments are nothing more than fear porn. Plain and simple.
Abortion has become a polarized topic in this country mainly because the media sensationalizes it and because the entertainment industry both glamorizes the idea of abortion and advocates for it.
The Church’s Reaction
I saw an article that was shared by The Gospel Coalition on Twitter that really chastised Christians for being too loud in their celebration of the destruction of Roe v. Wade.
My question for tepid and sleepy-eyed Christians who are walking a thin line between a watered-down Gospel and Marxist Christianity is what then should we celebrate? Triumph over evil, particularly the evil of infanticide, should be celebrated. Absolutely. It’s been a long-awaited victory.
But to understand culture’s religious dedication to demanding a “right” to kill unborn children, the historical roots of child sacrifice must be examined - because we cannot understand the corruption of today’s culture without reflecting on the events of yesteryear.
Passing Children through the Fire (Demon worship and human/infant sacrifice)
The ancient Hebrew people had a bad habit of turning their backs on God and resorting to idol worship - and the idols they chose were not merely smirking tiki heads with toothy grins. No, the idols the Hebrew people pledged themselves to were demonic entities that demanded worship in the form of both open sexual ritualism and child sacrifice.
The most well-known religious worship that the Israelites engaged in was the worship of the ancient demonic god Molech. Jewish scholars have revealed that as a part of ritual religious practice, parents would hand over their children to a pagan priest, who would then pass those children through two huge fires.
The Bible references this practice in several places. Ezekiel 16:21 states, “You slaughtered my children and offered them up to idols by causing them to pass through the fire.” Additionally, 2 Kings 17:16-17 states, “They abandoned all the commandments of the LORD their God and made for themselves two cast idols of calves and an Asherah pole. They bowed down to all the host of heaven and served Baal. They sacrificed their sons and daughters in the fire and practiced divination and soothsaying. They devoted themselves to do evil in the sight of the LORD, provoking Him to anger.”
Baal is often used as another word for Molech. This deity was considered to be the “king” of the gods. Asherah poles were usually erected as monuments, an ode to goddess worship that occurred in tandem with bloody paganism. Asherah was considered a “mother” goddess and was closely connected with Baal/Molech worship.
The single most defining factor of worshipping Molech was the ritual sacrifice of children, specifically infanticide - that is, the sacrifice of infants. Horrifically, an infant would be placed into the burning hands of a demonic depiction of Molech - the body of a man with the head of a grotesque bull - and worshippers would look on as the infant screamed as he or she burned to death.
An article from Christianity.Com makes the assertion that there may be a strong connection between the worship of Molech and the presence of Nephilim in the days of Genesis, when fallen angels consorted with human women. Their offspring were said to be demonic. While there is not a lot said on this subject in the Bible (Nephilim are mentioned in Genesis 6), it is clear in Scripture that these hybrid demonic creatures had some kind of a hand in society’s corruption before the Flood - although we will never know exactly how much of a hand:
When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.
The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.
The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.
Genesis 6:1-5
The non-canonical book of Enoch, however, which is often considered to be a reliable historical text (note: is not inspired by God, therefore we must treat it as any other secular historical text that provides context for the cultural events of the day), presents some backstory on the state of the world before the Flood: a hybrid race of demonic Nephilim creatures became violent, and their evil became so overwhelming that God completely wiped them off the face of the planet. Only Noah and his family survived.
Enoch, for reference, was Noah’s great grandfather. In Genesis 5:24, the Bible says that Enoch was taken away to heaven after living 365 years, suggesting that Enoch was snatched into heaven in the same way that Elijah was. Enoch was also said to have lived a holy and faithful life - and because this information comes from the inspired Scripture, we know that it is true.
There is a case to be made that much of ancient deity worship was rooted in demon worship, and this case is veritably strong, based on international history. Cultures across the world have engaged in similar ritualism and deity worship despite being geographically isolated from each other. The ancient Greek deities mirror the deities of the ancient Mayans, for example. Mayans and Aztecs also engaged in ritual human sacrifice. Many Egyptian deities are thought by some to have been manifestations of demons, as well.
It also begs the question: How did ancient societies like Egypt and the Maya build architectural wonders like pyramids and ziggurats and leave no record of how they did it? Could it be that they were indeed guided by spiritual entities - demons who bequeathed them with knowledge in return for their worship and their blood offerings?
While we can’t be completely sure that this was the case, as Christians we can be certain of two things. First, the spiritual realm is very real, and tapping into it in any way that is outside of praying to the God of the Bible can and will open people up to contact with a demonic sphere ruled by Satan himself. And second, the ancient mimicry of deity worship across the globe is too overwhelming to dismiss - it seems highly unlikely that every continent on Earth has inexplicably originally conceived upon the idea of sacrificing their own people for the sake of fertility, survival, and safety. It also seems unlikely that these ancient deities were so incredibly similar to each other (Zeus, for example, was known as the king of the gods, just as Molech was).
Let’s take a look at the ancient cultures who have demanded the bloody sacrifice of children to placate their demonic gods:
Aztecs
Canaanites
Babylonians
Israelites (off and on for centuries)
Mayans
Celtics/Druids (no surprise there, Druid and Celtic magic is often glamorized today, but it has heavy demonic roots - check out the Celtic illustrations of “burning men” that darkly mirrors the Burning Man music festival tradition in the Nevada desert)
Carthaginians (a Phoenician colony, check out an interesting article about it here)
Chinese (Historical Honey notes that this occurred most prominently during the Shang Dynasty)
Hawaiians (they were known to sacrifice humans to placate their violent god of war, Ku. In fact, I believe Holoholoku Heiau is still partially standing on the island of Kauai. It’s an ancient sacrificial war temple. Check out the Shaka Guide’s information on it here.)
Egyptians (scholars debate whether or not Egyptians engaged in ritual sacrifice in the later years of their dynasty, but it likely occurred during the earlier phases of their empire)
Greeks/Romans: Although this is debated among historians as well, there is a fair amount of archeological evidence linking Greece to ritual human sacrifice related to their gods, as well as ancient Romans doing the same in their early history (check out these pictures of bones and evidence from LiveScience)
There are too many civilizations to list when it comes to pinpointing cultures who engaged in ritual human or child sacrifice. These are just some of the major ones.
A persistent dedication to killing children
It is clear that, throughout history, the practice of sacrificing innocent children or adults to appease gods or demonic entities is common and recurring. Humans have an insatiable appetite for discarding innocent life in the hopes of becoming more godlike themselves. They are willing to give anything to attain special knowledge, power, and prestige - even if that means giving up the lives of society’s most vulnerable and innocent members.
Jeremiah 7:30-31 tells us that when the sons of Judah in ancient Israel turned to the worship of other gods, they did “evil” in God’s sight: “They have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, and it did not come into my mind.”
I personally think that understanding the ancient practices of idol worship around the world, particularly the Israelites, is so important to understanding why our culture has become so catastrophically debased.
With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which does nothing more than return the issue to the sovereign states, women have screamed, wailed, and gnashed their teeth. Some have feverishly smeared themselves with fake blood, marched around Supreme Court Justices’ homes with plastic baby dolls, and brought bloody hangars to protests at the court.
One woman hauntingly displayed her very pregnant belly, smeared with paint that read, “NOT YET HUMAN.” She told a reporter, “This is a part of ME, it’s part of my body…life begins with the first breath.”
And yet, she fails to acknowledge that the child inside her has a beating heart.
Culture’s obsession and its deep-seated animalistic desire to dismember an infant, which is the single most innocent and vulnerable member of society, is nothing short of religious.
I must kill my child, they say, or I cannot be successful.
A sacrifice. A life for a life.
And all of this religiosity is clinically sterilized with words like “reproductive healthcare” and “women’s rights.”
We as Christians would be wildly remiss to fail to acknowledge that the culture of death that we live in is deeply demonic and has its roots in the same kind of spiritual debauchery that brought down formerly glittering civilizations.
If the majority of men and women today aren’t outright worshipping at the altar of demonic deities like Molech or Asherah, they are still crushing the skulls of infants and starving them to death with abortion pills. They are discarding their bodies in bins and bags, selling body parts and harvesting organs. They are inserting needles into the backs of their skulls and causing their hearts to fail.
The ancients passed their children through the fire, but we pass ours into the hands of bloody, coldhearted abortion providers who knowingly and willingly silence the screams of babies with a painful and swift death, robbing them of a sacred American right: the right to life.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Our culture has been groomed by the entertainment industry, the mainstream media, and most prominently, education, to worship themselves. To worship their own needs and desires, no matter how debased or selfish or wicked they might be.
Live your life.
A life for a life.
Pass your children through the fire, and in exchange, you will be successful.
Happy. Fulfilled.
Although, one might come to the conclusion that, based on the deranged protestations of women smearing themselves in blood and screaming, “MY BABY IS NOT HUMAN,” that abortion access will not make them happy. Nothing will.
There is no placation or satisfaction in catering to a culture hellbent on feeding the demons of child sacrifice. Whether or not Christians today want to openly acknowledge it, abortion is a spiritual battle. The fight has only just begun. Even today, Joe Biden signed an executive order aimed at countering the Supreme Court’s ruling that abortion would be a state issue.
The need for politicians and progressives and leftists and lukewarm Christians to provide access to legalized infanticide should be disturbing to everyone. We often look at civilizations like ancient Israel or the Canaanite people and think pompously, “How uncivilized they were! They sacrificed their children! Human sacrifice! Horrible. I can’t even imagine living in a culture that openly did that!”
My response is this:
You don’t have to imagine it.
You’re living in one.
Resources
The Silent Scream is an old but impactful abortion film that anyone who has any doubts about what abortion actually is should watch. It is horrifying, startling, and will cure you forever from believing, for even one second, that a baby is not human (a stupid argument anyway, but I digress) and that a baby “can’t feel pain.”
PreBorn is a wonderful organization that provides ultrasounds for mothers who are on the fence about what they’re going to do about their baby’s life. While in some red states abortion is now illegal (praise God!), thanks to Roe v. Wade being overturned, it is still legal in states like California and New York. I have become familiar with PreBorn’s ministry through my screenwriting and editorial work at the Counter Culture Mom Show. You can donate by visiting here. Just one $28 donation provides an ultrasound for someone in need. Most of the time, when a mother hears her baby’s heartbeat, she chooses life.
The Case for Life. This is an abortion apologetics book written by abortion apologist Scot Klusendorf. I’ve recommended his work before and I still do. If you are a Christian who needs to know how to argue against abortion from both a sound intellectual/philosophical perspective in addition to a Scriptural one, READ HIS BOOK and tap into his resources at Life Training Institute.
Read my previous column on how to teach your teens to debate on the topic of abortion. There are a lot of good resources in there, too.