17:1-7 No creature which had any blemish was to be offered in sacrifice to God. We are thus called to remember the perfect, pure, and spotless sacrifice of Christ, and reminded to serve God with the best of our abilities, time, and possession, or our pretended obedience will be hateful to him. So great a punishment as death, so remarkable a death as stoning, must be inflicted on the Jewish idolater. Let all who in our day set up idols in their hearts, remember how God punished this crime in Israel.
And hath gone,.... The Targum of Jonathan adds, after the evil imagination or concupiscence, lusting after other lovers, and forsaking the true God, and departing from his worship:
and served other gods; strange gods, the idols of the people, other gods besides the true God; the creature besides the Creator:
and worshipped them; by bowing down before them, praying to them, or ascribing their mercies and blessings to them, and giving them the glory of them:
either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven: the two great luminaries, and the planets, constellations, and stars, any of them; which kind of idolatry very early obtained, and was in use at this time among the Heathens, and was an iniquity to be punished by the judge, Job 31:26, which sin, though so strictly forbidden, the people of Israel sometimes fell into, 2 Kings 21:3.
which I have not commanded: and which is a sufficient reason, in matters of worship, to avoid and abstain from anything, that God has not commanded it; for in things of that nature nothing should be done but what he has ordered, who is a jealous God, and will not suffer any to take upon them to direct what should be done as a religious service and duty; and if any are so presumptuous, they must expect it will be resented; see Isaiah 1:12 and especially with respect to the object of worship, as here, and which relate to things if not forbid expressly, yet tacitly, to do which was an abomination to the Lord.
and served other gods; strange gods, the idols of the people, other gods besides the true God; the creature besides the Creator:
and worshipped them; by bowing down before them, praying to them, or ascribing their mercies and blessings to them, and giving them the glory of them:
either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven: the two great luminaries, and the planets, constellations, and stars, any of them; which kind of idolatry very early obtained, and was in use at this time among the Heathens, and was an iniquity to be punished by the judge, Job 31:26, which sin, though so strictly forbidden, the people of Israel sometimes fell into, 2 Kings 21:3.
which I have not commanded: and which is a sufficient reason, in matters of worship, to avoid and abstain from anything, that God has not commanded it; for in things of that nature nothing should be done but what he has ordered, who is a jealous God, and will not suffer any to take upon them to direct what should be done as a religious service and duty; and if any are so presumptuous, they must expect it will be resented; see Isaiah 1:12 and especially with respect to the object of worship, as here, and which relate to things if not forbid expressly, yet tacitly, to do which was an abomination to the Lord.