ANCESTOR WORSHIP. Ezekiel 43:7,9.

There is an interesting line in Alex Haley’s novel ROOTS. When the author travels to West Africa, he discovers that the tribe of his ancestors requires children to be able to recite their ancestry to ten generations. But ten generations would include over a thousand people.  It’s understood that children were memorizing only one branch of their family tree, probably Dad, then Dad’s dad, then Dad’s dad’s dad, and so on, for a total of ten people. Mine goes like this: Ernie Wales, Willie Wales, Bennie Wales, Edward Wales, Larkin Wales, Edward Wales, Thomas Wales. My father spent years doing genealogical research, but he could trace only seven generations in that line. All we know about the earliest one—Thomas Wales—is that he was born in the English colony of South Carolina in 1750.

It is easy to obsess over ancestors. People love to discover connections to famous people or to claim they are heirs to the throne of some nation, or cousins to some famous king and more, all the time ignoring the fact that the numbers are mathematically insignificant. For example, King James IV of Scotland is my 12^th great grandfather. But don’t get too excited!  He is one of 16,384 grandparents at that generation. Sixteen thousand! I may pull up his portrait and joke that he looks just like me, but honestly the bloodline is meaningless at this point. 

Again, the phrase is

“mathematically insignificant.”

Yet it feeds our pride if we let it. What’s worse, in many cultures, ancestors are not merely remembered, but worshipped as deities—as gods.

But there is only one God, and “you shall have no other gods before me” Exodus 20:3.

Remember the burial of Moses? After God showed him the Promised Land, the prophet died on Mount Nebo and God buried him—but no one knows where, Deuteronomy 34:6. Do you know why? Because God knew people would turn Moses’s grave into an altar—and go there to worship the man’s bones. (Look at Graceland.)

No one ever found the body of Moses. But the people found plenty of kings to worship, burying them on the high places of Israel and using them as part of their idol worship.  

God spoke to Ezekiel: “The house of Israel and her kings will no longer defile My holy Name by their religious prostitution and by the corpses of their kings at their high places … let them remove the corpses of their kings far from Me and I will dwell among them forever” Ezekiel 43:7,9.

The Bible encourages respect for ancestors, but that respect must never be perverted into the capital crime of ancestor worship.

By one count, God included 25 genealogies in the Bible. Some of these extend for pages. Clearly God is interested in families. God seems to value family trees, and perhaps we should too. But we must not obsess over it. Ancestor worship or “consulting with the dead” is strictly forbidden, Deuteronomy 18:11.  “You shall worship the Lord and Him only shall you serve” Luke 4:8.

God, help us to have a proper respect for those who have gone before us, but to never allow anything to fill us with pride or otherwise take our eyes off of you.

ΑΩ