So when you look into the Bible, about what they were doing in this land, there was strong and huge occultic involvement. The nations worshipped Baal. They worshipped Ashtoreth; so they worshipped the Gods of the Sun, they worshipped the Gods of the Storm and the Winds and the Weather, they worshipped the Gods of Fertility, and they had tremendous perverse acts went with it - and they got themselves tattooed.
It was part of the allegiance to their Gods that they had the tattoos. A tattoo's just a mark in ink, but actually it's what it opens your life to, is what's important.
So when God gives this command, He's talking in the context of making sure you don't get defiled by demonic powers. Notice what He says here:
Verse 4 - “Do not turn to idols, nor make yourself moulded Gods, for I am the Lord your God”.
Verse 28 – “You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh. Don't mark, cut or destroy or blemish your flesh for the dead; nor any tattoo marks on you, for I am the Lord”.
You go down a little further, and then He begins to talk more in Exodus 20:1, He talks about then the practices in the land; so this scripture on tattooing is set in the context of occult involvement that went on in Egypt, and went on in Canaan.
God was quite strong, and very forceful, in His directions about being involved in the occult. He said: “do not be defiled by them”. Do not do any of these abominations. In other words, do not open your life to occult practices in any way - you will give room for demonic powers to enter your life.
So the reason that God set this principle in place was because He knew the connection between: tattooing, and the occult realm. He wanted to keep His people free from occult involvement, so that they could walk in the blessings and inherit their land.
So the only other places that there are references to this kind of thing - of the cutting of the flesh - are found in 1 Kings 18.
Remember the story when Elijah had a confrontation with the prophets of Baal; and when he had a confrontation with them, he called on them to demonstrate the power, the supernatural power of their Gods.
What they did was, they began to cut their flesh! They made themselves bleed; and he just mocked them and belittled them; and then demonstrated the true power of a covenant keeping God.
In the New Testament, there's a story of a man called the Gadarene, in Mark 5. When we look at that man, he was heavily demonised. He had a legion of demons in him - that's 6,000 demons.
Here's the interesting thing it said: “when he came near Jesus, the demons began to manifest” - and the guy used to cut himself! So you notice the cutting, the marking of the flesh, in the Bible, is continually associated with the occult realm, and with bondage, or slavery, or servitude to that.
So in a number of places in the Bible, it talks about the issue of blood, and bloodshed. When God began a walk with Abraham, one of the things He required Abraham to do was to cut a covenant with Him.
A covenant is the most strong, or the most binding, agreement that could be made between two people; or between a person and God. God is a covenant-keeping God; so covenants in the Bible are important.
God instructed him how to make a covenant, and it involved these things: there was a sacrifice, there was a loss of an animal, an animal shed its life; so he killed the animal, and cut it in two, and the blood was sprinkled there.
Then the two people making covenant would walk between the two parts of the animal, and various promises were made, or commitments were made; but a blood covenant, or a covenant - one of the things that characterise covenants in the Bible: always there was the shedding of blood.