It seems almost pointless: to ‘wipe away tears’, and then to conclude there will be no more mourning, lamentations, sorrow and pain. Yet, this strengthens and confirms the opinion that, at the ‘final and last judgment’ before the ‘great white throne’, there will definitely be people who had no part in the first resurrection, but who will nevertheless be saved eternally. What kind of life did they have behind them? What were some of their first things that have now fortunately passed away? We can only guess. However, God’s relationship with them speaks of immense and tender love. They knew so little about Him. They lived between hope and fear in times and circumstances of great darkness. They knew almost nothing about Him, being imprisoned in religions and forms of occultism and animism, in ancestor worship and necromancy, attempting to appease the ‘gods’ and the ‘demons’ by means of child sacrifices. Such is again the case in India today, even though it has been forbidden since 1865, but ‘tantrism’ is promoting child sacrifices once again, as was the case in the past among the Incas and among the Canaanite tribes who practised the cult of Molech.1 They have groaned under atheistic dictatorships and yet, deep in their hearts, they knew about the one God and tried to live good lives, to live as He would doubtless wish, based on their conscience, Romans 1:18-20. They had two sources of knowledge of God. With their mind, looking at the works of Creation, they could come to the conclusion that there must be a Creator. And with their inner conscience they could sense what this unknown Creator asked of them, how He intended that they should live. They would sense ‘peace of mind and heart’ when they acted according to their conscience, and unrest when they went against it. But that was all. Now they are able to get to know Him. They are finally able to experience how full of love He is. They no longer have to groan under what the unrighteous have done to them. But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars shall have been thrown into the ‘lake of fire’, Revelation 21:8. They were the victims, the countless, anonymous people who were brutalised by obscene violence over the centuries. They are now standing in the ‘full light’ and realising that the past is never going to come back. It will never happen again. It is almost unbelievable, but there will be no more mourning, no more lamentations in the quiet of the night, no more ‘sorrow and pain’ from the hard life of exploitation, no more death, no rape, no violence, but the endless ‘love of God’. Abraham longed for that ‘City of God’, that presence of God, and therefore he never felt really ‘home’ in this world, and he became a nomad on earth. Hebrews 11:8-10 “By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed by going out to a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he lived as an alien in the ‘Land of Promise’, as in a foreign land, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, fellow heirs of the same promise; for he was looking for the ‘City which has foundations’, whose architect and builder is God.” He left the human culture that he was acquainted with of Ur of the Chaldees (Ur of the Babylonians, the prototype of ‘Babylon’) and went on his way to the ‘Promised Land’.2 He never possessed it on earth, and he even had to purchase the burial ground for his wife’s grave3 in the land God had promised him. Nevertheless, he will possess it one day, together with so many others. Everyone who gets to know Christ also ‘leaves’ the ‘culture of man’ to which he or she belongs to. You become a foreigner on earth, on this earth that has been poisoned by sin and the devil. You do not feel at home here. You are sometimes disgusted by things around you, by television programmes that others, on the contrary, seem to find thrilling. Just like Abraham, you are on the way to the Holy City of which God is the Architect and the Builder, and which will be the heart of the New Earth and the New Universe. Then one-day you look around you and you really are there and God tells you personally: ‘It really is over! All misery is over, and will never return!’
• Molech was represented by a bull’s head, sometimes with a phallus, a penis on it, because of the associated temple prostitution. Sometimes, these bronze or copper images of the bull stood upright, and the victims who were to be sacrificed would be hoisted up with chains on to the bronze front paws, so that they finally slid down, into the open jaws, where they were burnt alive in the flames inside the bronze statue, that became red hot. Such was the unrighteousness of the Amorites.4
• Human sacrifice is the act of killing one or more humans, usually as an offering to a deity, as part of a ritual. Human sacrifice has been practiced in various cultures throughout history. Victims were typically ritually killed in a manner intended to please or appease ‘gods’, ‘spirits’ or ‘the deceased’, for example, as a propitiatory offering or as a retainer sacrifice when a king’s servants are killed in order for them to continue to serve their master in the next life. Closely related practices found in some tribal societies are cannibalism and headhunting.
• In India, human sacrifice is mainly known as “Narabali”. Here “nara” means man and “bali” means sacrifice. It takes place in some parts of India. In Maharashtra, the Government made it illegal to practice with the Anti- Superstition and Black Magic Act. Currently human sacrifice is very rare in modern India. However, there have been at least three cases through 2003– 2013 where children have been murdered in the name of human sacrifice implying the practice may still be ongoing in greater numbers in the unpoliced slums.
• A four-year-old boy has reportedly (October 2015) been beheaded as a “human sacrifice” as part of a witchcraft ritual in India. Tirumala Rao, 35, seized the child, named in reports as Manu Sagar, from a nursery in the Prakasam district of Andhra Pradesh, southern India. He then took the boy to his house and cut off his head, offering the child’s blood to Goddess Kali seeking “divine powers”, the Times of India reported.
• There is some evidence that outside of Lamaism in Tibet, there were practices of ‘tantric’ human sacrifice which survived throughout the medieval period, and possibly into modern times.
Bible References:
1.Leviticus 18:21, 20:2–5; 1 Kings 11:7; 2 Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 32:35; Acts 7:43 2.Hebrews 11:8–9, 13–16 3.Genesis 23 4.Genesis 15:16
