Today, I am reading and commenting on  Deuteronomy 18-20.

Moses warned the Israelites against imitating the “detestable ways” of the people already living there.  To make sure we would know what he meant describes those “detestable ways”.  First, he calls sacrificing their children detestable.  Then he lists a bunch of methods for either determining or controlling the future: divination, sorcery, interpreting omens, witchcraft, casting spells, consulting the dead.  We have long considered sacrificing children to be something horrific (although I would argue that many today no longer do so as long as the sacrifice takes place before birth), but dismissed the others as relatively minor misdeeds by the uneducated.  However, this is not the only place in the Bible where we are told such acts are serious sins, comparable to sacrificing a child.  We must place our faith in God.  When He desires for us to know more about the future than what He has revealed in the Bible He will raise up a prophet to give us His message.  We will know that such prophets are from God because the message they give us will be consistent with what He has already revealed and the predictions which they make will come to pass.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.