Mad Goat Disease
Leviticus 17:7a
“So they shall no more sacrifice their sacrifices to goat demons, after whom they whore.”
Politicians have recently been playing a game of fill-in-the-blank with the phrase, “The single greatest threat to American democracy is______”, and I’ve lost count of the spectrum of answers. Some stand out due to their obvious propagandizing though, such as ‘White Supremacy’ or ‘Climate catastrophe’ or even, if you can stomach it, ‘The overturning of Roe vs. Wade by the Supreme Court.’ As if women not being able to abort their babies conveniently is our greatest existential threat! Other answers are based more in tangible problems, however. Answers like ‘The lower class being unable to afford basic necessities’ or ‘The CCP buying up farmland and decimating food production’ or ‘Widespread fentanyl trafficking’ or, more fundamentally, ‘Censorship of speech and governmental abuses of power.”
But when you get down to it, beneath the plague of bad ideologies that are swarming like locusts through media outlets, beneath all the transient symptoms of cultural demise, and beneath the web of bad policies that politics is concerned with improving, I think the answer to that question is a bit more sinister. In fact, as odd as it might sound, Leviticus 17:7 spells it out for us in black and white.
Now, a critic might butt in here and say, “Goat demons? really?! In our sophisticated age? In our technocratic commonwealth full of talking robots and self-driving cars and AI technologies? In our post- God, post-angels, post-religion, post-Bible, post-superstition world? That’s the best you’ve got?!” Yes—that’s right. Goat demons. The same unclean, destructive forces of darkness that tempted the people of God in Moses’ day to twist the words and alter the altar and change the sacrifice and eat the fruit of self-sufficiency and try to usurp God’s design by their own will and sacrifice for their own pleasure rather than commune with the LORD in clean and undefiled fellowship. I think goat demons really do sum up the ill quite succinctly.
After thousands of years of progress, after learning from the mistakes of former generations, even with libraries of Congress filled from floor to ceiling with the catalogs of ancestral vices, even with the Bible being the number one best-selling book year after year, men still prefer the bleating little goat-gods to the Lion of Judah.