Altars, Idols and Spiritual Gates: Unlocking Heaven and Hell
Genesis 12
Introduction
There was an incredible comment left on my last episode: “God is the biggest sci-fi nerd ever”
And I loved it because yeah, I know lately I’ve been talking about portals and gateways and UFOs and someone might wonder if I’ve been watching too much Star Wars instead of reading my Bible. But these concepts didn’t start with science fiction; we’re seeing that they go all the way back to ancient times, written in Scripture itself, and will have a profound impact on how we understand spiritual warfare today.
And yeah, I’ve probably been watching too much Star Wars as well, but that’s always true. A lot of these revelations I’ve been finding are actually new to me, including what I’ll be talking about in this episode.
So in the last two weeks, we established a few facts we can observe from the text of the Bible:
1- for spiritual beings to pass between our realm and the spiritual realm, they can’t just pop in anywhere they want to. There has to be a way made through; a gate.
2- there are gates of heaven and gates of hell, and these are for the angels/good spiritual beings and the demons/bad spiritual beings
3- the gates are tied to physical locations on planet earth
4- the gates can be tainted or closed, as we observed in the story of Bethel
5- once the gates open, they stay open. It’s not like Dr Strange where he opens a portal, jumps through it, and then closes it right behind him. Once the gate opens, it stays open.
But how does it open?
Well as I was reading about these locations where gateways had been established on the earth in Genesis 12 and 28 and 35 and I Kings 13 and several other places, there was a particular word that I would see come up again and again and again throughout these stories: “altar.”
I found this to be weird, and I’d like to explore why it’s in the Bible.
Turn to Genesis 12, and let’s get weird.
[theme music]
Altars Defined
Welcome to Weird Stuff in the Bible, where we explore scripture passages that are bizarre, perplexing or just plain weird. This is Luke Taylor, and today we’re going to be talking about altars, idols, and their relationship to spiritual gates. By the end of today’s episode, I believe we will have a greater understanding of what is going on the spiritual realm in regard to objects that have been used in occult activity or the worship of false gods.
So let’s begin with where we left off last week. At the very end of the episode about Bethel last week, we went back to the first place that Bethel is mentioned in the Bible: Genesis 12.
If you recall, Bethel is this place that Jacob saw a vision of angels ascending and descending on that very spot of the earth; they were traveling through the portal between heaven and earth right here, and this caused him to declare Bethel to be “the gate of heaven.”
That was in Genesis 28, but the location of Bethel first comes up in
Genesis 12:5-9
When they came to the land of Canaan, 6 Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. 8 From there he moved to the hill country on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. And there he built an altar to the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord. 9 And Abram journeyed on, still going toward the Negeb.
So Bethel is mentioned here as being right by where Abram (Abraham) built an altar.
Some might wonder: why is it being called Bethel back here in Genesis 12 when Jacob doesn’t give it that name until later in Genesis 28? That’s simply because the Bible often uses the names of what places were called at the time that book of the Bible was written. Genesis 12 took place in about 2000 BC, but it would be written by Moses later in more like 1500 BC. So Moses used the name that the place had in 1500 BC.
So Abraham built an altar on that spot. Let’s define what an altar is real quick. Baker’s Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology says an altar is a “Structure on which offerings are made to a deity.”
The Hebrew word is mizbeach (miz-bay’-akh), which comes from a root that means “to slaughter.” The Greek word is thusiasterion (thoo-see-as-tay’-ree-on), which means “a place of sacrifice.” So an altar is some kind of structure on which these offerings are made.
They can be a place of an actual blood sacrifice, but not necessarily. There are also altars of incense in the Bible, which don’t receive a sacrificial animal.
Altars are made of different types of materials in the Bible: metal, brick, wood, earth, bronze, and stones or rocks. Earth is interesting; if no materials were available to create a structure for your altar, God said you could literally just make a mound of dirt for your offering. But generally, they were constructed out of nicer materials. As you get to the times of the Temple, they constructed an altar out of gold-covered wood and another out of bronze.
An altar is very important, though there is not a hard and fast rule for how you create them. The importance comes with what you do with them. You provide some kind of offering to a deity: a sacrifice or burning incense or anointing it with oil.
Now, I am going to put forward a theory today for which I do not have a clear verse that states this. Instead I am going to make some logical deductions based on what Scripture says. So I am going to take us to several passages in the Bible to try to make the case that these spiritual gates are tied to altars, they are opened by an act of worship at an altar, and that the continuing existence of these gates depends on what happens to that altar.
Meaning, if the altar is defiled or destroyed, it closes the gate. If a heavenly gate is opened but its altar is corrupted, it closes the heavenly gate for angels to pass through and perhaps even replaces it with a gate of hell for demons to pass through.
The existence of spiritual gates or portals is tied to their altars.
Bethel Revisited
So let’s revisit the verses we’ve already looked at over the past few weeks in regard to Bethel, and this time I want you to specifically notice the appearance of the word “altar.”
Genesis 12:8 said
And there he built an altar to the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord.
Now, it doesn’t say the word sacrifice there, it said he called upon the name of the Lord. I looked up what this phrase meant in ancient times in the time of the culture in which the Bible was written. In Mesopotamian texts, to call upon the name of a deity meant to perform rituals to that deity. The same in Ugaritic texts. It meant to perform acts of worship to that deity.
Psalm 116:17 says
I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving
and call on the name of the Lord.
So we don’t know exactly what Abraham did in regard to his worship of the Lord in Genesis 12, if he performed sacrifices or what, but I believe it activated this altar and opened a gate to heaven in that spot. Years later Jacob is passing through this territory, and it says in
Genesis 28:10-11
10 Jacob left Beersheba and went toward Haran. 11 And he came to a certain place
What an interesting phrase. “A certain place.” It was the exact spot Abraham had built his altar years earlier.
and stayed there that night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place to sleep.
I wonder if perhaps the stone that Jacob laid his head on was one of the stones of Abraham’s altar. I don’t think Abraham’s altar had necessarily been destroyed or defiled, but due to the passage of time, it has fallen apart. It didn’t say that Jacob came across his grandfather’s altar, so I wonder if perhaps this was one of the literal stones of that altar. Just an idea. Because as he lays his head on that stone…
Verse 12
12 And he dreamed, and behold, there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven. And behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it!
He wakes up in verse 16
and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.” 17 And he was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” 18 So early in the morning Jacob took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. 19 He called the name of that place Bethel, but the name of the city was Luz at the first.
So he anointed this stone and, in my opinion, renewed the gate of heaven at this spot. God later sends Jacob back to this spot in Genesis 35 and told him to build an altar again, and Jacob does so; we looked at that story in detail last week.
This ends up being a holy site throughout Israel’s early history, and we also reviewed all of that, and how that lasted up until King Jeroboam built some idols to a golden calf at Bethel.
II Kings 12:28-30
28 So the king took counsel and made two calves of gold. And he said to the people, “You have gone up to Jerusalem long enough. Behold your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.” 29 And he set one in Bethel, and the other he put in Dan. 30 Then this thing became a sin, for the people went as far as Dan to be before one.
Now we read these verses last week, but pay attention this time to the word altar. There are rules in the Old Testament about altars. They can be profaned. Altars can be corrupted by using them for worship of false gods or by not using them in God’s ordained way. Jeroboam is going to do both.
I Kings 12:31-33
31 He also made temples on high places and appointed priests from among all the people, who were not of the Levites. 32 And Jeroboam appointed a feast on the fifteenth day of the eighth month like the feast that was in Judah, and he offered sacrifices on the altar. So he did in Bethel, sacrificing to the calves that he made. And he placed in Bethel the priests of the high places that he had made. 33 He went up to the altar that he had made in Bethel on the fifteenth day in the eighth month, in the month that he had devised from his own heart. And he instituted a feast for the people of Israel and went up to the altar to make offerings.
So this altar of the gate of heaven has been corrupted. If anything, it has now created a gate of hell. This is where we stopped last week, but let’s keep reading into the next chapter today- again, pay special attention to the word “altar.”
I Kings 13:1-5
And behold, a man of God came out of Judah by the word of the Lord to Bethel. Jeroboam was standing by the altar to make offerings. 2 And the man cried against the altar by the word of the Lord and said, “O altar, altar, thus says the Lord: ‘Behold, a son shall be born to the house of David, Josiah by name, and he shall sacrifice on you the priests of the high places who make offerings on you, and human bones shall be burned on you.’” 3 And he gave a sign the same day, saying, “This is the sign that the Lord has spoken: ‘Behold, the altar shall be torn down, and the ashes that are on it shall be poured out.’” 4 And when the king heard the saying of the man of God, which he cried against the altar at Bethel, Jeroboam stretched out his hand from the altar, saying, “Seize him.” And his hand, which he stretched out against him, dried up, so that he could not draw it back to himself. 5 The altar also was torn down, and the ashes poured out from the altar, according to the sign that the man of God had given by the word of the Lord.
In the past 7 verses that we read, there were 18 references to an altar. I do not think that an altar is just a mere pile of stones or dirt. It’s not just a box or a platform to set stuff on. I believe there is some major spiritual mojo going on with these things. Once a ritual of worship has been performed on the altar, they are activated, and this creates a spiritual gate in that spot.
Altars Throughout Scripture
Altars carry deep significance. They might be physical objects, but they make significant things happen in the spiritual realm. Altars are spiritual warfare. This is why God wanted them destroyed when Israel came across altars in the Old Testament.
Deuteronomy 12:1-4
“These are the statutes and rules that you shall be careful to do in the land that the Lord, the God of your fathers, has given you to possess, all the days that you live on the earth. 2 You shall surely destroy all the places where the nations whom you shall dispossess served their gods, on the high mountains and on the hills and under every green tree. 3 You shall tear down their altars and dash in pieces their pillars and burn their Asherim with fire.
(Ashrerim were idols)
You shall chop down the carved images of their gods and destroy their name out of that place. 4 You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way.
God didn’t treat them as superstitions. He didn’t just say throw them in the trash. He said to totally desecrate them. Chop them to pieces. And Israel did follow this instruction early on in their conquest of the Promised Land.
The taking of the land of Canaan in the Old Testament was not just conventional warfare. It was spiritual warfare. And when Israel petered out and didn’t take all the places in the land that they were supposed to,
Judges 2:1-3
Now the angel of the Lord went up from Gilgal to Bochim. And he said, “I brought you up from Egypt and brought you into the land that I swore to give to your fathers. I said, ‘I will never break my covenant with you, 2 and you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land; you shall break down their altars.’ But you have not obeyed my voice. What is this you have done? 3 So now I say, I will not drive them out before you, but they shall become thorns in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare to you.”
If you look at a map of the territory that Israel failed to take in the book of Joshua, and then you compare that to a map of the land that Israel has given to the Palestinians in modern times, it’s uncanny how similar it is. The exact same spiritual strongholds that existed in the time of the book of Judges have been the same strongholds today.
How do we explain that? I think it could go back to this idea of the territorial spirits, but Israel did not do their job of evicting the spirits. What did God say back in Deuteronomy 12 when he told them to destroy the altars and their idols? “These are the statutes and rules that you shall be careful to do in the land that the Lord, the God of your fathers, has given you to possess…”
They were to POSSESS it. Not just to commingle with the evil spirits; to kick them out. How do you move into a new apartment if the previous tenant is still living in there? You can’t. They have to be evicted before you can move in. The evil spirits needed to be evicted from the land. How do you evict evil spirits? Destroy their altars. Israel didn’t destroy all their altars in the book of Joshua, and so certain people groups like the Philistines remained.
When the Bible describes the ancient Israelites destroying the altars and idols of past generations, it calls this “cleansing the land.” He didn’t say to put them in a museum and say “let’s educate ourselves on the sins of our past.” No, crush it to powder. This altar is making a gate of hell so that demons can pour into your land. You cannot cleanse the land unless you smash the altars.
To go back to Bethel for a minute; it wasn’t just the presence of the golden calf idol that made it unclean. It was the altars to those idols. When we study idolatry, I think we focus on the statues so much that we forget about the altars.
Amos 3:13-14 (we read these verses last week, but this time pay attention to the word altar)
13 “Hear, and testify against the house of Jacob,”
declares the Lord God, the God of hosts,
14 “that on the day I punish Israel for his transgressions,
I will punish the altars of Bethel,
and the horns of the altar shall be cut off
and fall to the ground.
I believe that this defiled altar was unleashing evil spirits upon the land. God wanted it destroyed. We’re going to look at some more gates of hell in next week’s episode.
Good altars
There are good altars in the Bible, too, that bring good spirits. Let’s look at Zechariah in Luke.
Luke 1:11
8 Now while he was serving as priest before God when his division was on duty, 9 according to the custom of the priesthood, he was chosen by lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense. 10 And the whole multitude of the people were praying outside at the hour of incense. 11 And there appeared to him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense.
Zechariah meets an angel at the altar, where incense was being burnt. I believe this spiritual act and the prayer activated the altar, created a spiritual gate, and that’s why the angel appears right here right now.
In I Kings 18, you probably know the story of when Elijah and the prophets of Baal had their face-off.
I Kings 18:30-32
30 Then Elijah said to all the people, “Come near to me.” And all the people came near to him. And he repaired the altar of the Lord that had been thrown down. 31 Elijah took twelve stones, according to the number of the tribes of the sons of Jacob, to whom the word of the Lord came, saying, “Israel shall be your name,” 32 and with the stones he built an altar in the name of the Lord.
There’s an altar, and then he prays- I think prayer is very important here when it comes to activating an altar- and it says in
Verse 38
Then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt offering and the wood and the stones and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench.
I’m going to run out of time, but when Solomon built the Temple in I Kings 8, he stood before the altar, prayed a prayer to the Lord, and the glory of the Lord filled the Temple like a thick cloud. I believe that all of these prayers made at an altar opened portals to heaven, which is why we see these appearances of angels or God Himself manifesting there.
Genesis 8:20-21
20 Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. 21 And when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma-
Huh, how interesting. Altar, sacrifice, and God was right there.
Next Time
So again, do I have a clear verse in the Bible that says, “activating an altar opens a portal or gate”? No. But I think it’s a pretty logical inference based on what we’ve been studying.
And we’ve been doing a lot of studying over the past few weeks on the podcast! We have been collecting data over the past few weeks of the podcast. Making logical deductions like a detective about the spiritual realm. So we have all this data. How do we put it to use?
I like learning all this information, but I don’t want to just know where the gates of hell come from; I want to learn what to do about them. Jesus said that as a member of the church, the gates of hell will not prevail against us. So that’s what I want to talk about next time: closing the gates of hell.
I am very excited to be bringing you that episode! Make sure you’re subscribed so you can get it!
This past weekend, I launched a newsletter for the podcast where I can share some additional insights, stories, Bible references- things I don’t always have time to share within these episodes themselves. If you’d like to get on our newsletter mailing list and keep up with the podcast and get some cool insights, go to the link in my show notes and sign up for it.
Or, you can just send me an email directly and I’ll sign you up for it: weirdstuffinthebible@gmail.com
Closing Thoughts
So again, next week’s episode is called Closing the Gates of Hell. You might be wondering: if the problem is physical altars to the devil, do we combat that by building physical altars to God?
Well, that might have been an effective strategy in Old Testament times, but the New Testament doesn’t instruct us to build altars. Something changed with the coming of Jesus, and we’ll talk about what that is next time.
But in closing today, I want to comment on something that the Bible warns us about in both testaments, and that’s the practice of witchcraft. The occult. And idolatry.
All of it is playing around with demons. Witchcraft is a little bit more direct, but even if you’re trying to summon or talk to false gods, it’s all messing with demons. And the practices of witchcraft and idol worship are very similar.
Good altars are activated by sacrifice, by incense, or by anointing them, along with prayer.
Evil altars are activated by a blood sacrifice, by sexual immorality, by idolatry or broken covenants. We will talk more about these things in the coming weeks.
And I don’t mean to just make it about the altars. Any items used in these rituals could be spiritually tainted and have spiritual gates tied to them. The Old Testament also talks about pillars and idols being anointed or sacrificed to, and those ended up needing to be knocked down and destroyed as well. In the story of Jericho being taken, one of the men- named Achan- got into trouble for taking some of the “devoted things.” A cloak and some precious metals. But this wasn’t just a robe and some money; they were “devoted things,” objects that had been used in pagan rituals. They were spiritually tainted. And they opened up a curse on the Israelites because they weren’t destroyed.
So when you let items that were used in witchcraft or pagan rituals into your life, you are actually inviting the presence of demonic activity into your life. Because these can be “devoted things.” Devoted to the dark side. If you bring them into your home, you could literally create a gate of hell in your own house.
I can remember as a teenager that there was a family in my church got back from (I think it was) a missions trip to Africa, and one of the souvenirs they brought back was a mask. They hung it up on the wall in their living room, thought of it as a cool trinket from the trip.
Immediately, they start having problems. They couldn’t get along; everyone was fighting with each other. The dad lost his job. Everyone was angry and in a bad mood all the time. This went on for like four or six weeks. Finally, the parents were like, “we thought we’d face resistance before leaving, but it seems like the devil has just been after us ever since we got back from that trip.” So they prayed, and they felt like the Lord told them to get rid of the mask from their house.
I don’t remember if they destroyed it or just threw it away or what. But they said as soon as they got rid of it, everything went back to normal. The dad immediately got a new job. Everyone stopped fighting with each other. Peace was back in their home.
Again, can I prove anything from that story. Can I prove that this mask created an opening for demons in their house and that this wasn’t just all coincidence? No. But I can make some logical deductions. And the Bible is super duper clear that we shouldn’t have anything to do with these things. Idols, trinkets, pagan objects.
And don’t just throw them away. Destroy them. That’s the only way to cleanse the land.
Author Bill Scott who I interviewed on an episode last fall about his book The Day Satan Called- he shares a story about his experience with finding some demonic trinkets- which, like the Joshua 6 story, included a cloak- and what happened when he tried to destroy them. It’s a wild story, but I don’t have time to include it here today. I’m all out of time. But I reached out to Bill, and he gave me permission to share it in this week’s newsletter. So go to the show notes and make sure you’re signed up for the newsletter, and you can receive that story this weekend.
Pagan practices and witchcraft and the objects used in these rituals- what I used to call “open doors”- might literally be an open portal, a gate of hell.
So if we want to close the gates of hell, do we need to build an altar and make a sacrifice on it?
No. Not as a New Testament Christian. Because Jesus was our sacrifice, and our altar was the cross- and we’ll talk about what that means in our spiritual warfare next week!
The stuff I’m saying about spiritual gates and altars and all that might be obvious to some. Someone told me this week, “Well I always just assumed there were portals.” Well, I’m a little slower than that. I need things explained to me one piece at a time. I’m figuring all this out real slow. I’ve never thought too much about the spiritual mechanics behind altars before. And maybe you think all this talk about activating altars sounds weird.
The Bible is not weird. WE are weird, because we don’t know about how altars work. But now we do. Thanks for listening, God bless you for sticking around until the end, and we’ll see you next time on Weird Stuff in the Bible.