Godbey's Commentary - Acts - Romans - Enter His Rest

superfluities of Babylon that the multitudes of so-called Christendom have actually lost sight of the
amiable, simple, pure, humble Bride of Christ, the loving companion of her ascended Lord, still
surviving upon the earth to prepare all nations for the coming kingdom.
IDOLATRY IN THE WILDERNESS.
40-43. While Moses tarries forty days on the summit of Sinai, complimented as no other man with
the very audience of Jehovah, revealing to him the wonderful truth which he wrote in the Bible, the
apostatizing myriads of Israel, their faith faltering, turned back to the gods of Egypt, whom they had
served in the days of their bondage, constraining Aaron to go back to his former lucrative mechanism
and manufacture for them a small golden image of the Egyptian Apis, i.e., the sacred ox, copiously
worshipped in Egypt as the representative of the divine attribute of power. This fact of Egyptian
idolatry, I saw in the museum in Cairo in the many magnificent statues of the colossal ox.
42. “And God turned away and gave them up to worshipping the host of heaven,” i.e., the sun,
moon, and stars. I do not wonder that they worshipped the unparalleled splendor of an Egyptian sky,
where clouds are never seen, rain never falls, and the sun in his glory accumulates a splendor and
grandeur inconceivable in these occidental lands of cloudy skies. Four thousand years ago
Heliopolis, a compound word which means City of the Sun, stood on the banks of the Nile, literally
constituted of palaces so gorgeous and monuments so splendid as to reflect the sunbeams in all
directions from every conceivable point of the compass, so as to exhibit a splendor and glory as if
a thousand meridian suns had evacuated Apollo’s chariot and come down to show the world their
unearthly glory. The most of those gorgeous monuments and splendid statuary have been carried
away. I saw a number of them in Rome. However, one majestic red granite monolith [I.e., all one
piece], too ponderous for manipulation and unsusceptible of disintegration, still stands in its majesty,
a vivid reminder of their wonderful Heliopolis, and “monarch of all he surveys.” In Coptic language
the sun is Osiris, and the moon is Isis, under which names they were extravagantly worshipped by
the Egyptians in the days of Israel.
43. “You took up the statue of Moloch and the star of your god Remphan, images which you
made, to worship them; and I will carry you away beyond Babylon.” Moloch is the Tyrian word and
Remphan the Coptic for the Hebrew word Baal, all meaning the sun-god, which was so extensively
and extravagantly worshipped by the polytheistic idolaters of that day. They would heat the hollow
brazen image of Moloch and lay an infant in his arms, thus offering human sacrifices, which
continued till the days of Josiah, during the periods of apostasy and idolatry in Israel. Here Stephen
certifies that Israel practiced these idolatries, carrying with them the little images throughout all of
their peregrinations in the wilderness. When they crossed the Jordan, Joshua required an
abandonment of all this idolatry, administering to them the rite of circumcision, symbolical of their
right to sanctification, during their great holiness campmeeting held at Gilgal, immediately after
crossing and before they set upon the conquest of the land. Unfortunately, after arriving in Canaan
they never did utterly expurgate the land of idolatry, hence the surviving Canaanites proved a snare
to them, leading them into idolatry and superinducing the sad and mournful downward trend of four
hundred and fifty years of backsliding, recorded in the book of Judges, developing long-established
alienation from Jehovah and culminating in their awful Babylonian captivity. Nothing but entire
sanctification saves people from idolatry. That is the distressing trouble in the churches of the present