The foreign deity ‘Moloch’ was one that required child sacrifice as part of the ritual. Crazy as it sounds, imagine for a moment the ‘Moloch’ evangelist coming to town (evangelist = proclaimer of good news so a rather large oxymoron there!). Presentation of the advantages of acknowledging the deity, and then comes the requirements – sacrifice your child, preferably your first-born. And amazingly the deity has takers. What is going on here?
There is a very sobering account of the sacrifice of a first-born by the king of Moab:
When the king of Moab saw that the battle was going against him, he took with him seven hundred swordsmen to break through opposite the king of Edom, but they could not. Then he took his firstborn son who was to succeed him and offered him as a burnt offering on the wall. And great wrath came upon Israel, so they withdrew from him and returned to their own land (2 Kings 3:26,27).
Sacrifice tomorrow to obtain something today is at the heart of all this. How do we get prosperity today – the sacrifice of tomorrow will appease the ‘gods’. Favour will come for us once we sacrifice the future… the next and future generations.
We see this in motion with climate change such as in this recent report:
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/climate-set-warm-by-31-c-without-greater-action-un-report-warns-2024-10-24/
Our behaviour today and our willingness to bury our head in the sand means rather than storing something good for the next generation(s) we are, at the minimum, making it harder for them to do well, and perhaps actively annihilating the human race in the process. Of course we can hide behind it is all going to burn up anyway, ignoring that is NOT what the good book says and our requirement to steward what is here from one generation to the next.
We see the sacrifice of tomorrow for current blessing in the mouths of so many politicians with their appeal to go back to some apparent good old day… where is the imagination among them for the future? Oh, I guess if that imagination is not there in the hearts of those who follow the God who raised Jesus from the dead as the ‘firstborn of all creation’ why should we expect it to be in the heart of politicians – so the reverse of the Pauline trajectory where the ‘Asiarchs’ were not even settling for maintaining the prosperity of Rome but were fascinated by Paul’s future political vision.
So in summary ‘Moloch’ might not manifest as a big bad deity demanding blood… but probably is too visible in other forms, particularly in the agreement with mammon.