At first glance, the Bible’s references to child sacrifice in Leviticus 20 and the slaughter of the firstborns in the New Testament seem like some of the darkest and most troubling passages. Yet, as with all of Scripture, these stories are written in psycho-symbolic language. When read with the understanding that the Bible teaches inner processes of consciousness rather than external history, the meaning transforms.
Leviticus 20: Child Sacrifice
Leviticus 20 condemns offering children to Molech, declaring that such acts defile the land (of consciousness) and sever a person from the people of God. Taken literally, this is abhorrent. But symbolically, “children” represent our newly-formed thoughts, the tender beginnings of an assumption before it has matured into manifestation.
To “sacrifice” these children to Molech means to hand over our delicate new states of imagination to the destructive gods of fear, doubt, or external authority. Instead of nurturing them in faith, we abandon them to the fire of disbelief. The law of assumption demands that once an idea is conceived within, it must be protected, clothed, and raised in persistence—otherwise it perishes.
"But whoever is a cause of trouble to one of these little ones who have faith in me, it would be better for him to have a great stone fixed to his neck, and to be dropped in the deep sea." — Matthew 18:6, Mark 9:42, Luke 17:2
And when the Philistine looked about, and saw David, he had a poor opinion of him: for he was only a youth, ruddy and good-looking. — 1 Samuel 17:42
The Firstborns in the New Testament
The massacre of the innocents under Herod, where the firstborn males are killed in an attempt to destroy the Christ child, reveals the same symbolic pattern. The “firstborn” is always the initial conception of a new state of being. It is vulnerable and easily struck down by the old order of thought—the Herod state of consciousness, representing fear of being displaced.
Every time a new assumption arises within us, the old dominant state seeks to kill it. The mind clings to its established patterns and resists change. Yet the Christ child—representing the awareness of imagination as God—escapes, for divine ideas cannot be destroyed. They may seem threatened, but hidden within the Egypt of the subconscious, they are preserved until their appointed time.
Clarifying the Symbolism
Children in these passages do not represent literal infants, but the beginnings of spiritual birth within us. Leviticus warns against destroying these tender states by feeding them to false gods of the external world, while the New Testament story shows how the old regime of thought violently resists the emergence of a higher state.
Both passages urge us to guard the life of our inner child—the new assumption—until it grows to full stature. Faith, persistence, and imagination protect this birth. To “sacrifice” it is to betray the law of assumption. To protect it is to allow Christ to be born within us.