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) 

God gave strict orders to the Israelites, that when they entered Canaan they should “break down the altars” of the Canaanite gods, “smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire,” Deuteronomy 7:5. But instead the Israelites “prostituted themselves to other gods and worshipped them,” Judges 2:17. 

So what was the appeal of these other gods? 

Well, imagine being an Israelite and all you’d ever known was God taking care of your needs, which he’d faithfully done too. But in Canaan the people had other gods taking care of their needs. They had Ba’al, the ‘lord’ god who had mastery over the weather, and his female consort Asherah, the goddess of motherhood and fertility. So here were gods providing physical security in an uncertain world, dealing with crop-destroying storms, providing rain in season, and enabling couples to have children.

It was a totally new experience for the Israelites, which might excuse them being curious, but what led them to “prostituting themselves to these gods and worshipping them” as well? 

In a word, it was sex. And God knew that because he’d spent much of Leviticus 18 and half of Leviticus 20 warning the Israelites about the sexual practices of the Canaanites that they should strictly avoid. But sex was a strong draw, especially when it was associated with releasing the power of these gods. Asherah, for instance, was the goddess of fertility so to release her power temple prostitutes were provided to have sex with. Imagine, then, having gods that condoned sex with prostitutes to guarantee fertility. It was very easy, therefore, for women to attract Israelite men into sacrificing to their gods (Numbers 25:1-3).

The Israelites understandably had deep concerns about their livelihoods and families, about survival, security and their hope for health, wealth and happiness in the future – and the Canaanites had gods offering the exact powers to take care of those needs, which was a draw in itself. But add in sex with no boundaries – and condoned as worship too – and it’s no wonder that God told the Israelites to get rid of the Canaanite religion totally. 

And especially because there was a sinister and highly destructive side to these gods too, which we see in Jesus talking about “The gates of hell”….(next blog)

It’s quite something witnessing the impact of the kingdom of God on someone who clearly hasn’t been hit by it yet. 

A case in point was an interview with a Doctor by a seasoned TV presenter who despairs at what’s happening in our world of late, evidenced by the Doctor herself and what had happened to her.

As a highly qualified Doctor she began to see holes in the prevailing narrative of the pandemic – not intentionally because she’d gone along with it too. But in voicing her concerns to her colleagues she was met with outright hostility, and none of them expressed any interest or curiosity in what concerned her, which to her was totally contrary to true science and scientific enquiry, and deeply disrespectful toward the foundational ethics of medicine. 

Massively censored and her career in tatters, she found herself, just like the Naphtalians in Galilee in Jesus’ day, “walking in darkness,” sunk deep in what she called a “spiritually heavy, dark feeling” she could not shake, just like the “gloom” predicted for Naphtali in Isaiah 9:1. And being an ardent atheist she also found there was nothing that could ease her distress or combat her fear of dying. It was her “darkest period.”  

But “During that time,” she said, “I was being introduced to Christians” and when asked if she was a Christian and she said, “No,” something very different happened. No hostility or disinterest, but a little peek into the kingdom of God, because the answer she kept getting was, “I’m praying for you.” Like Mark 2:12, she’d “never seen anything like this!”

It was “really strange,” she said, because “while the world was becoming more ridiculous than ever and I was under more attack than ever, I started to feel completely at peace in a way I hadn’t since being a child.” 

But Jesus did say in John 14:27 – “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” And she’s not. She was, but not any longer, because that’s what Jesus came to create for people when he said, “The time has come; the kingdom of God is near,” and its impact, therefore, would be felt – because that’s what’s meant to happen. So what distracts us from that? It’s “Our problem with gods”….(next blog)

Jacob gave his son Naphtali a most unusual blessing: “You’re a doe set free that bears beautiful fawns,” Genesis 49:21. And that was it, no more said, leaving us scratching our heads wondering what Jacob meant. 

But tie it in with Jesus’ ministry, much of which was done in the land of Naphtali, and a picture emerges from Jacob’s prediction that describes Jesus’ ministry perfectly. Jesus truly was “a doe set free,” springing into action right after “John was put in prison” to “proclaim the good news of God” in Galilee, the land of Naphtali, in Mark 1:14. 

This would tie in with the “bears beautiful fawns” in Jacob’s prediction too, because in Hebrew it can also mean “gives words of beauty,” which is exactly what Jesus began doing in verse 15, when he came roaring out of the shadows like a deer leaping out of the forest crying out, “The time has come; the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news.”

So instead of just putting up with “walking in darkness” and being pushed this way and that by the prevailing winds of the culture – and never knowing or expecting anything better either – it was time for people to “repent” of all that and listen to what he had to say, because if they did they’d get the chance to enter a new world, the evidence of which he immediately made clear by the most extraordinary things he was teaching and doing. 

It worked too, because “News about him spread quickly over the whole region of Galilee” (28). People “came to him from everywhere” (45), because they’d never heard such teaching, or seen such healing power in a human before (1:27, 2:12). So when he returned to Capernaum “a few days later and the people heard he’d come home” (2:1), they were desperate to hear more, so “he preached the word to them” (2). 

There was something in what he taught, therefore, that turned the lights on to the possibility of another world in operation, that was so much more lovely than the only world these people had known. It was a world where “Repent” meant “Clue in to the good news, folks, and see what it does for you,” which Jesus made clear when he told a paralytic he’d just healed, “Son, your sins are forgiven” (2:5). That was different, and extremely good to know. But that was the kingdom of God, because “the words of beauty” Jacob promised Naphtali, were “Meant to have an impact”….(next blog)

Right from the start Naphtali was associated with struggling. He was born to Bilhah, Rachel’s maidservant, but it was Rachel who named him “My struggle,” because – she explained in Genesis 30:8 – “I have had a great struggle with my sister (Leah), and I have won.” 

So Naphtali got stuck with that name, and all because Rachel was jealous of her sister having so many children (1), and thinking she’d scored a victory over Leah by having two children of her own. But there was also a prophetic side to Naphtali having such a name, because Jesus would later set up his home base in Capernaum, in the land that Naphtali’s descendants inherited, and the struggle he would then go through.

He willingly brought that struggle on himself too, because he left his hometown of “Nazareth and lived in Capernaum” instead, Matthew 4:13, which Isaiah had described as a pitifully lost land where “the people were living in darkness, and in the shadow of death” (15-16). And the evidence of that soon became apparent in Mark 1:21-24, when Jesus began teaching in Capernaum and was immediately confronted by a man “possessed by an evil spirit” that accused Jesus of “coming to destroy us” – “us” meaning there were many more demons in people in that area too, which Jesus “also drove out” (34, 39). 

And that’s how Jesus’ struggle in the lost land of Naphtali began. For us it would be like starting from scratch with a person who’s had a horrible life, terrible childhood, having had all kinds of nutty ideas pumped into his head by people who either knew nothing about God or had some really weird religious ideas about him. Where on earth do you start?

It’s encouraging to know, then, that even when people are “living in darkness” it’s possible for them to “see a great light,” and in their minds “a light dawns,” Matthew 4:16, because that’s what happened when Jesus began to teach in that area. And it’s amazing how quickly thousands of people responded. They were Galileans too, viewed as “Gentile” rejects (Matthew 4:15), the lowest of the low. 

But these were the people Jesus spent most of his time with, because to him the struggle was worth it. He came to teach (Mark 1:38), because his teaching had the power to “remove the gloom for those who were in distress” (Isaiah 9:1). Which brings to mind the blessing that Jacob gave his son Naphtali in Genesis 49:21, that predicted “The lovely ministry of Jesus”….(next blog)

Like her ancestor Jacob, Anna the prophetess saw God face to face. And the reason for them both seeing God face to face was the same too. For Jacob it came after years and years of struggling in his relationship with God, and then suddenly coming face to face with the realization that a very real and personal God had known his struggle and been with him all along (Genesis 35:3). 

For Anna it came after years and years of struggling with God too, wondering when on earth he was going to come and save their nation and the whole world as promised in the Scriptures, and praying and fasting for that day to come, and then suddenly coming face to face with him in the arms of his parents, and realizing that a very real and personal God had known her struggle and been with her all along too.

Was their experience a foretaste, then, of Jesus knowing we’d have a struggle too, because in John 14:18 he told his disciples, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” and “you will see me” (19). He also promised to “show myself” to them (21), and along with his Father “make our home” with them (23). 

And in 1 Peter 2:19, it sounds like God really appreciates us believing that, “For it is commendable (or to your credit, verse 20) if you bear up under the pain of unjust suffering (or you receive a beating for doing wrong and endure it, verse 20), because you are conscious of God.” 

And fortunately it’s God who makes us conscious of him, just as he did for Jacob, so that Jacob could get through the unfair treatment he got at the hands of his uncle Laban – and survive some of the stupid things Jacob did to himself too. God never left Jacob as an “orphan.” Many times he “showed himself” to Jacob to prove that “I (God) am with you and I watch over you wherever you go.…and I will not leave you until I have done what I promised you” (Genesis 28:15). 

And God didn’t leave Anna either, keeping her encouraged and hopeful through all those many decades of her not yet seeing the promised Saviour appear. And he does the same for us, that “even though you do not see him now,” 1 Peter 1:8, “you believe in him” – we’re “conscious” of him “shielding us by his power (through our struggles) until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time” (5) – when we fully see Jesus face to face (1 John 3:2). Which ties in nicely with the next of Jacob’s sons, “Naphtali: where Jesus struggled”….(next blog)

The tribe of Asher hit the jackpot in the land they were portioned in Canaan. The soil was so rich it could happily provide “delicacies fit for a king,” just as Jacob had predicted for Asher in Genesis 49:20. 

But the most famous Asherite in the Bible wasn’t rich. As a frail old lady Anna the Asherite had nothing to offer a king. She did have a king in mind, however, in how she spent her time each day, and many nights too. As a “prophetess” (Luke 2:36), it was her job to continue speaking about and confirming what “God said through his holy prophets of long ago,” Luke 1:70, that God would fulfill “the oath he swore to our father Abraham, to rescue us from the hand of our enemies” (73-74) through a person from “the royal house of his servant David” (69). 

She was in the temple every day, then, to make her life fit for such a king, despite the fact that year after dreary year under the thumb of Roman rule there was no sign at all that the king whom God had promised was coming to save them. But that didn’t stop Anna offering the delicacies she knew her king would relish. 

And in the culture of her day what she offered was truly exotic, because the reason her fellow Israelites were in such a bind was their inability to see and fit in with God’s plan for the world through them (Isaiah 49:6) – and through a very special member of their clan from the house of David too. But Anna the Asherite had cottoned on, so she prayed and fasted to keep her faith in God and his saving plan alive.

And to God these were delicacies fit for a king, because this little old lady of all people was doing what so few of her fellow Israelites were doing – struggling day and night to keep her belief alive in a world where there was no evidence that God was either saving them as a nation or saving the whole world. 

And the great blessing she received for that was knowing when Joseph and Mary arrived in the temple carrying the eight day old Jesus, that the king she’d been making her life fit for had arrived. And in return for gearing her life to what her king would relish, she was given what she would most relish, the richest delicacy of all, actually seeing the King and Saviour of the world face to face. So was that just meant for her, or is “Seeing the face of Jesus” the same blessing for keeping our faith alive too?….(next blog)

If Anna the prophetess in Luke 2:36 was alive today and saw the demise of our western nations steadily growing, what would her advice to us be? – taking into account that she too was living in a biblically based nation that had been invaded by foreigners enforcing their pagan culture on the indigenous people as well. 

She also knew the solution, and she’d been praying and fasting about it for decades, “looking forward,” like many of her fellow Israelites (38), to the time when God would rescue them from their enemies, heal them as a nation and get them back on the track he’d set them on when changing Jacob’s name to Israel back in Genesis 32:28. 

And there’s a hint of that solution back in Luke 2:36, when describing Anna as “the daughter of Phanuel.” Phanuel meant “The face of God,” the Greek version of the Hebrew word Penuel, or Peniel, and Peniel was the name given by Jacob to the place where, he said, “I saw God face to face,” Genesis 32:30.

And now the daughter of Phanuel is seeing God face to face too, when she sees Jesus and immediately recognizes who he was. 

But the connection between Anna and Jacob goes one step further, because the reason God changed Jacob’s name to Israel was “because you have struggled with God,” Genesis 32:28. Well, that’s exactly what Anna had been doing for years, struggling with God, praying and fasting nights and days (Luke 2:37), hoping for God to intervene and rescue Israel from its demise. 

What would her advice to us be, then, as we find ourselves in much the same situation her country was in? The biblical values and traditions her country had been built on were being threatened with extinction, and revolution was in the air, just like today. But she knew that no populist uprising or civil war would free them from the tyranny of state control. Only God could. 

But no leader, governmental or religious, dared admit that. So the oppression and suppression would only get worse, and Anna knew it in her bones. But as a frail old lady what could she do? Well, she did what her country was founded on, good old Jacob who wrestled with God and would not quit until God gave in and blessed him. Was Anna the Asherite, then, the perfect illustration of what Jacob meant when he predicted Asher would provide “Delicacies fit for a king”?….(next blog)

The Asherites were a proud lot, but they didn’t have a proud record. According to Judges 1:31, Asher “did not drive out” the Canaanites in their portion of Canaan as God had commanded, and instead, verse 32, “the Asherites lived among the Canaanite inhabitants of the land.” 

But why would God tell them to wipe out the Canaanites and “break down their altars” (2:2), when surely it would be better to get along with the locals and make use of their skills, or “press them into forced labour” (1:28), wouldn’t it?

Well, it would’ve spared the Israelites a lot of agony if they had listened to God (2:17), because after 500 years of thinking they knew better the entire nation of Israel had become saturated with the Canaanite worship of Baal and Ashorah, thanks mainly to Jezebel, the Phoenician princess married to their Israelite king Ahab (1 Kings 16:29-33). As queen she influenced her husband into establishing her Canaanite worship of Baal as the state religion, and set about killing all God’s prophets in a massacre so thorough that Elijah thought he was the only one left alive (19:10). 

And the Israelites had no answer to their troubles. They had a few good kings, like Jehoshaphat who tried hard to rid the country of Baal worship (1 Kings 22:41-46), but never did they get rid of it totally, resulting in God destroying the Asherites and nine other Israelite tribes at the hands of the mighty Assyrians.

And from then on, it seems, the Asherites joined “the lost ten tribes of Israel” and disappeared from history. Or did they? Because when Jesus’ parents took the eight day old Jesus to the temple in Luke 2:21-22, “There was a prophetess, Anna, of the tribe of Asher” there (36). “She was very old,” possibly as old as 105, and according to verse 37, “She never left the temple but worshipped night and day, fasting and praying.”

So, not only had the Asherites survived, they also had a good one in Anna, who was the total opposite to the proud and arrogant tribe of Asher of old. Her heart instead, verse 38, was set on “the redemption of Jerusalem (representing all Israel).” She knew the only solution to Israel’s demise was a child being born to save them, and when Jesus’ parents came in carrying Jesus she knew he’d come. 

Would the Asherites have guessed, therefore, that one of their own, and a little old lady too, would know the answer to all their troubles – and actually see him in person too? So what would “Anna’s advice to us” today be?….(next blog)

In Judges 6:16, God told Gideon, “I will be with you, and you will strike down the Midianites as if they were but one man.” It was a massive slaughter too. According to the numbers given in Judges 8:10, 135,000 Midianite men were cut down in vicious fighting, including their top leaders and kings – the kings killed by Gideon himself (21). What possible purpose, though, did God have in such a horrible scene?

There’s a hint in where God directed Gideon’s violence first of all. It wasn’t against people. In Judges 6:25 God told Gideon to “Tear down your father’s altar to Baal and cut down the Asherah pole beside it.” God gets right at the heart of the problem, illustrated by Gideon’s own father who’d built an altar to the Canaanite god Baal and made that his “lord,” not God. Which never would have happened had the Israelites got rid of the Canaanite religion as God had commanded back in Judges 2:2. But instead, Judges 1:28, “When Israel became strong, they pressed the Canaanites into forced labour but never drove them out completely.” 

Which resulted in the Israelites being constantly stuck with the Canaanites “being thorns in their sides,” and the Canaanite religion being an endless “snare” to them, Judges 2:3. And that spelt trouble, because the appeal of Baal and Asherah was sex, as seen in Numbers 25:1-3, when Israelite men “began to indulge in sexual immorality with Moabite women, who invited them to the sacrifices of their gods.” And that made God fiercely angry (3-4), seeing the people he deeply loved and cared for being so easily seduced by demonic charm (17-18). 

So God got Gideon to strike at the very heart of what had got the Israelites into their horrible mess in the first place, to get the point across in vivid and brutal terms that if they didn’t get serious about eradicating every vestige of the Canaanite religion it would become an endless source of temptation and deception distracting them from God’s purpose for them, of curing the world of all its ills as he promised he would through Abraham and his descendants (Judges 2:1). 

The solution, then, was to get rid of the distraction so they wouldn’t be led into temptation (as Jesus phrased it in Matthew 6:13). But the Israelites were never able to do that, so where’s that leave the rest of us? Well, that takes us back to the tribe of Asher and “The little old lady from Asher” who had the answer….(next blog)