The Israelites did not take God seriously when he told them to eradicate the religious practices of the Canaanites – even when those practices included offering infant children as burnt sacrifices to the god Molech (Leviticus 18:21, 20:1-5, Deuteronomy 12:31, 18:9-10).
The Canaanites had thrown open the gates of hell, and century after century the Israelites blindly (or knowingly) walked through those gates into the domain of demons. By the time Jesus arrived on the scene, demonic forces were taking up residence in people and controlling them like puppets – like the man “possessed by an evil spirit” in Mark 1:23.
The “good news” that Jesus brought, then, was “to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight to the blind and release for the oppressed,” Luke 4:18, all of which tied in with Jesus freeing people from the grip of these demonic forces.
And the means by which Jesus would make that possible would be the building of his church, “against which,” he told his disciples in Matthew 16:18, “the gates of hell” would not prevail. And to make that real to his disciples Jesus staged a teaching moment for them in Caesarea Philippi (13) where the “Gates of Hell” was an actual place.
It was a deep cave cut into a massive cliff, long held by Gentile pagans to be a gate into the underworld through which their gods travelled. And it was rightly named the “Gates of Hell,” because it was the religious centre for the worship of the sexually perverted Greek fertility god, Pan, and (to quote one source) “when people came to worship Pan, they would bring with them an infant child to be offered as a sacrifice. The child was thrown into the water that flowed from the rock on the side of the cliff. If the child went under the water and disappeared, that meant Pan had accepted their sacrifice. If instead, the child was dashed apart under water and its blood flowed into the river below, Pan had rejected their sacrifice. Either way, the child’s life was over.”
So here at the Gates of Hell the same demonic practice of sacrificing infants was being done. Nothing had changed since the time of the Israelites sacrificing infants to Molech. So why on earth would Jesus deliberately take his disciples to such an awful place? It was to ask a question: “Who do you say I am?”….(next blog)
