Revelation 2:14

14. Doctrine of Balaam The teachings of Balaam and of the Nicolaitans, had each a very different historical origin and doctrinal basis. The former is Shemitic, the latter is Aryan; the former came from Phoenicia, the latter from India. Baal-Peor, the god of Balaam and the Moabites, was no other than the Phoenician god Baal, with Peor added to designate the local name of his Moabite worship. Baal was held by the glowing sensuality of the Phoenicians to be the sun-god, the fire-god; thence the god of all sexual generation in nature, vegetable, animal, human. The taurus, bull, was his animal representative, the type of vigorous generative power. His image for worship was the phallus. In the religious theory the sexual impulse was a holy sensation, the temple was a consecrated brothel, the priestess was a harlot, and the rites were debauchery; not only made decent and respectable, but sacred and religious by this most satanic of systems. As counterpart this same Baal, as fire-god, was Moloch, the representative of the destructive power of the element of heat. Human victims were made sacrifices to this form of the god, by “passing through the fire,” fully proving the serious earnestness of the belief of the people in both forms of deity and both systems of rites. Ashtaroth (Greek form, Astarte) was the feminine side of the same worship, to which the lustful Venus was in later ages the Roman parallel. It was the most seductive of religions, and haunted Israel through his whole history, requiring all the energy of prophets and priests, and of pious kings, to repel its inroads and preserve the nation true to its holy mission. The failure was at last complete, and brought on the captivity. Pictures of the ruin wrought by Israel’s adoption of this double system of sensuality and cruelty of Baal and Moloch abound in the sacred history, but as specimen passages, 2 Kings 17:6-33, and Hosea 4:12-14, may be read. In the Apocalyptic age, some of the more sensual traits of this system passed to the Roman mythology, (see our vol. iv, p. 9,) and its ideas would often be adopted by mystical sensualists who loved to veil base indulgences with religious sanctions. In our own day sexual promiscuity is sometimes blended with religious pretences, but more usually under the authority of physiology and race developments. The existence of the doctrine of Balaam at Pergamos seemed to be rather in intimate proximity with the Church than within it. The Church was responsible, not so much for sharing in it, as for too little energy of opposition to it.

Stumblingblock Note on Matthew 18:7.

Idols… fornication It was this union of sacrificial feasting with regularly established and expected debaucheries, which we at this day can hardly understand, that rendered it dangerous for the Christian to attend a feast or to eat of sacrificial meat. It was by this route that sexuality would have a short cut into a primitive Church. So it was in Corinth. 1 Corinthians 5:1.