Deliverance-obstruction

I put them both together, because they both go together for the most part; the one, whereby a people or person take in a false Lover; the other, whereby they take in a false God, or a false Worship of the true God. And into both these that witch Balaam bewitched the people in the wilderness,¹ to a great not abstruction only, but destruction, as you may read in the story. And how often afterward these two bastned their Captivity, and hindered their enlargement out of it, I cannot stand to tell you: the whole Prophecy of Hosea inculcates it over and over.

I put them both together, because they both go together for the most part; the one, whereby a people or person take in a false Lover; the other, whereby they take in a false God, or a false Worship of the true God. And into both these that witch Balaam bewitcht the people in the wildernesse,¹ to a great not abstruction onely, but destruction, as you may read in the story. And how often afterward these two bastned their Captivity, and hindred their enlargement out of it, I cannot stand to tell you: the whole Prophecle of Hosea inculcates it over and over.

1. 1Numb. 25.1, 2, 3, 4, 9.

You know upon what Commandment it is, that God calls himself a jealous God; namely,¹ upon that Commandment which forbids Idolatry; to show that much unto us, that as a jealous husband cannot endure a wanton look in his wife upon a stranger; so God cannot endure a whorish glance in his people towards Idolatry and Superstition: ²Their eyes went after their fathers Idols; it was no more hut an adulterous look; and for this when they might have expected a REFORMATION, God blasted them with a DEFORMATION: Wherefore I gave them Statutes that were not good,