The Canaanites Had No Bible

‘For the land has become defiled’ – Leviticus 18:24.

In Leviticus 18, after Yahweh has given specific instructions through Moses to His covenant people on the various offerings for the atonement of their sins, He switches gears, as it were, and gives a long list of commands concerning sexual conduct. He begins by telling His people that they are not to act as the Egyptians from where they had come, nor like the Canaanites to where they were going. They were to keep His judgments and statutes. He then commands His people not to approach any blood relative to uncover their nakedness. In other words, they were to refrain from sexual activity with:

• their father’s wife
• their sister, their half sister
• their granddaughter
• their aunt
• their uncle
• their daughter-in-law
• their sister-in-law
• a woman and her daughter
• their neighbor’s wife
• a man, it is an abomination
• an animal, it is perversion.

Then Yahweh summarizes all this by saying to His people,  ‘Do not defile yourselves by doing any of these things, for by all these the nations which I am casting out before you have become defiled. For the land has become defiled, therefore I have brought its punishment upon it, so the land has spewed out its inhabitants,’ (Leviticus 18:24,25). That is, the inhabitants would be cast out of their own land in judgment for their sexual perversion.

Very soon, within forty years or so, God would send Joshua and his army into the land of Canaan and utterly destroy every living thing. He said, ‘When the Lord your God delivers them (the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites) before you and you defeat them, then you shall utterly destroy them,’ (Deuteronomy 7:2). ‘You shall not leave anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them,’ (Deuteronomy 20:17). Yahweh is righteous in His wrath. ‘He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and on their grandchildren to the third and fourth generations,’ (Exodus 34:7).

Then Yahweh makes direct application to His covenant people, using the Canaanites as a vivid example. They were to keep His statutes and His judgments and not do any of these abominations of the other nations, lest their land also become defiled, lest they be cut off like the nations before them.

My dear friends, the Canaanites had no Bible. Neither did any of these other nations which Yahweh destroyed through His fearful, awful judgment. They had no one to preach to them and they were utterly corrupt, perverted beyond measure.

If God poured out His just and righteous anger upon them, what does this say about the United States? We have never had more Bibles than now. We have great preachers and authors. We have multi-million dollar church buildings. We have bountiful Christian classics on doctrine and life from the earliest days of the church readily available in book form, Kindle, or on a plethora of websites. We have the best, most orthodox preachers available to us on Sermon Audio and Youtube. We have theological conferences galore. We have Christian elementary and high schools, a strong Christian homeschooling movement, Christian colleges, seminaries, on line theological degree programs.

We have the Bible and all these wonderful tools which flow from it, yet we wallow in unprecedented sexual promiscuity and perversion. State courts, and now the Supreme Court of the United States, have approved same sex marriage and state legislatures have codified it. When states like Georgia and North Carolina enact laws to protect people against the madness of mandating men in women’s bathrooms and vice versa, and Hollywood and the NFL threaten to boycott those states, and rock stars like Bruce Springsteen cancel their concerts, then we have lost all sensibility. We have fathers violating their daughters, brothers violating their sisters, fornication and adultery with neighbor’s wives, beastiality, and every imaginable perversion.

Why then, my friends, would we ever think that God will give us a pass? If He utterly annihilated the Canaanites, who had no Bible, for sexual perversion, why should we not expect the same when we have so much Biblical data available to us?

There is only one remedy. We need prophets of God who will thunder the law from the streets and pulpits, men who are full of the Holy Spirit. We need preachers who will double down with passion and fervency, who fear no man, who will say to the nation, ‘A jealous and avenging God is the Lord; the Lord is avenging and wrathful. The Lord takes vengeance on His adversaries and He reserves wrath for His enemies,’ (Nahum 1:2). Then these preachers need, without apology, to preach Christ crucified. I am all for godly, principled men in public office, but our hope is not in the next election. God has always used powerful, Spirit anointed preaching to humble men to repentance. Today is no different. Do you sense any urgency at all in our present condition? Rome was utterly perverse and she fell from within. Where are such preachers? I know a few but we need many more. The remedy is really quite simple. We are prayerless, at ease in Zion, content to fiddle while Rome burns, satisfied with our own salvation, perhaps believing that somehow we will escape expulsion from our land which has been defiled by our nation’s perversion. The solution? Seek the Lord while He may be found. Call upon Him while He is near. Little prayer, little power. More prayer, more power. Much prayer, much power.