Sun Worship

"When the people of God apostatized from him, it was always some form of sun worship that seduced them. 

When Job would plead his peculiar uprightness, he urges the fact that he had never worshiped the sun or the moon. 

He says: Job 31:26,37,28  If I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon walking in brightness, And my heart has been secretly enticed, or my mouth has kissed my hand, This also were an iniquity to be punished by the Judge; for I should have denied the God that is above. 

Kissing the hand was a common act of reverence to the gods. 

In the Octavius, of Minucius Felix, chapter 2,15 the writer, in speaking of a walk which he and his friend were taking on the banks of the Tiber, says: Caecilius, observing an image of Serapis, raised his hand to his mouth, as is the custom of the superstitious common people, and pressed a kiss on it with his lips. 

It is from this custom that we get our word “adore,” Latin ad orem—to the mouth.

The prophet Ezekiel was given a view of the abominations that they were committing, which he describes in chapter 8. 

He beheld them practicing abominable rites in the temple, weeping for Tammuz, the Assyrian Adonis, and lastly, greatest of all the

abominations, worshiping the sun. 

Ezekiel 8:15,16 Then said he unto me, Have you seen this, O son of man? turn yet again, and you shall see greater abominations than these. And he brought me into the inner court of the Lord’s house, and, behold, at the door of the temple of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, were about five and twenty men, with their backs toward the temple of the Lord, and their faces toward the east; and they worshiped the sun toward the east. Thus it appears that sun worship in some phase was the special form of false religion with which in all ancient times the true religion had to contend." 

E.J. Waggoner