ADDICTION: The Idolatrous Worship of Deceiving “Spirits”—

I think the inability to get DRUNK while following God was the real main (but unconfessed) source of ancient Israel’s main complaint in the Wilderness. We know that suppressed craving burst out at the golden calf orgy which was literally the Egyptian “Festival of DRUNKENNESS.” That festival was adorned with the “Hymn to Hathor– The Golden One.” Part of that hymn says, “The procession is in the place of INEBRIATION.”

DEUT. 29:6

“You have not… DRUNK WINE or STRONG DRINK, that you may know that I am the Lord your God….”

The KJV has a unique textual variant in the verse which warns against “a root bearing bitterness or wormwood” that causes people to fall away from God into damnation (Deut. 29:18). The anatomy of cursed apostasy is dissected in the following verse. The fledging apostate is a person who “when he hears the words of this curse… blesses himself in his heart, saying, ‘I shall have peace, even though I follow the dictates of my heart’—” and then comes the special variant of the KJV: “AS THOUGH THE DRUNKARD COULD BE INCLUDED WITH THE SOBER” (v.19).

Pastors are out there preaching to drunkards and other idolatrous addicts in their pews, and the addicts tell themselves they’re fine.

The consequence of not employing church discipline and casting out idolaters is the ruin of the church. The consequence of the ruin of the Church is the ruin of society, which shall be left barren like a field sown with salt; rather, like salt that has lost its essence and is only good for being trampled underfoot.

He that minimizes the atom creates an atomic bomb. Likewise, we are most self-destructive when we minimize our unforsaken OR sins which we only abstain from due to lack of opportunity. Eg, he that prostitutes his daughter risks plunging the whole country into whoredom. By one man’s sin a whole land can be “filled with wickedness” (Lev. 19:29).

Hebrews 12:14

“Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. 15 See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no ‘root of bitterness’ springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled; 16 that no one is sexually immoral or unholy like Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal.” 17 For you know that afterward, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no chance to repent, though he sought it with tears.”

Any person who has seen the result of Drunkenness and addiction knows that this one sin is a chain of bondage WITH MANY OTHER LINKS! It leads to other sins, welcomes them, conceives them like a fetus in the womb of a whore, then aborts them in the glowing dawn of returning sobriety and self-reflection.

With addiction, the illuminating inhibitions of self-accusing Conscience are quenched like a torch dipped in vomit, and prohibitions are scoffed at and rebelled against in a rage of self-indulgence. With addiction, one stumbles through and passes out in castles in the sky only to awake in a dungeon under the earth. Excess feeds folly, and folly is a man-eating giant with many children.

Every atheist is a fool —“for the fool has said in his heart, ‘there is no God’” (Psalm 14:1)— and atheists often scoff at what they claim is the cruelty of the Old Testament God. One of their favorite examples is a passage where God counsels people to kill their rebellious children.

However, one could be tempted to ask, What crime is so bad that a man is sanctioned to kill his own children? Surely, the consequences of such a crime must be atomic! Here is the passage

Deuteronomy 21:

18 “If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them… 21 Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear.”

What is the crime?

Stubborn rebellion.

How bad could that be since God endured the stubborn rebellion of Israel for 40 years in the wilderness? Couldn’t God just turn the other cheek and forgive 70×7? No. First of all, those notions are commonly misunderstood and misapplied. Secondly, as was said above, Israel did its best to celebrate the Egyptian orgiastic “Festival of Drunkenness,” but only lacked the means. The Levites killed 3000 of the would-be drunken fornicators, and God was proud of them for it.

So, was there anything else to the crime

of the stubborn rebellious son doomed to die?

Was there a contributing factor?

Yes. There was something that evidently contributed to the stubbornly unreproveable rebel.

Take a guess.

In the passage I cited, I didn’t include the contributing factor. Verses 19 and 20, tell us that God instructed “his father and his mother” to “take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a DRUNKARD.’”

If a man becomes a drunk or addict, some of his friends will, and this will spread until the cumulative count of stubborn and rebellious drunks/addicts will equal whole villages, cities, states, countries, and with this sin will come the worst sins of Sodom, their haughty abominations, their “gay pride” (Ezek. 16:50). Then God the Father himself will take that nation out and stone it to death as it were.

Therefore, in God’s name, for His glory and the good of those who are both near far beyond ourselves, let us call to remembrance the warning of God to the fledging apostate who “when he hears the words of this curse… blesses himself in his heart, saying, ‘I shall have peace, even though I follow the dictates of my heart’—” and then comes the special variant of the KJV: “AS THOUGH THE DRUNKARD COULD BE INCLUDED WITH THE SOBER” (v.19).

The Siren of God still blares:

Deut. 29:20 “The Lord would not spare him; for then the anger of the Lord and His jealousy would burn against that man, and every curse that is written in this book would settle on him, and the Lord would blot out his name from under heaven. 21 And the Lord would separate him from all the tribes of Israel for adversity, according to all the curses of the covenant that are written in this Book of the Law, 22 so that the coming generation of your children who rise up after you, and the foreigner who comes from a far land, would say, when they see the plagues of that land and the sicknesses which the Lord has laid on it: 23 ‘The whole land is brimstone, salt, and burning; it is not sown, nor does it bear, nor does any grass grow there, like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim, which the Lord overthrew in His anger and His wrath.’”

Christ Himself says “God commanded, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die’” (Matt. 15:5).