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January 1, 2025 |
| The Best God | ||
Is there more than one God in your life? That's the focus of this study. Do we play favorites with that God and even hide that God from the other gods perhaps?
The problem here is that we don't often recognize when we have multiple gods in our lives. There are many Christians who do, in fact, have multiple gods in their lives, but they don't really realize that.
That's part of what we'll look at, but mostly we're focused on whether you have more than one God in your life. Do you have a best God and another God that you may not even think of as a God at all?
God says something through Ezekiel that sounds very strange at first.
Thus says Lord Yahweh, "Because your lewdness was poured out and your nakedness uncovered through your harlotries with your lovers and with all your abominable idols, and because of the blood of your sons which you gave to idols, 37 therefore, behold, I will gather all your lovers with whom you took pleasure, even all those whom you loved and all those whom you hated. (Ezekiel 16:36-37)
The highlighted texts, especially the second one, struck me as odd at first. Why does God care about the gods you hate? Then I understood what it meant.
The first thing we need to understand is that this is not about sex. God isn't really speaking of lewdness, nakedness, harlotries, and lovers in a physical sense. He's speaking about them in a spiritual sense, which we know of as idolatry. Verse 36 especially makes this clear. These verses are about spiritual harlotry and spiritual nakedness.
This was a message to God's people about what they were doing and a warning that they were about to be in real trouble because of it. But our focus is on the last of those highlighted pieces, where God says the idols you hated also offend him. The ones that you spurned, even the gods that you hated and despised, those also offend him. I hope you find that as interesting as I did.
The reason God hates people who have idols that they hate is that those are still gods to that person. You still recognize them as being gods, meaning they have something good that they can offer you, something they can do for you, even if you say, "No, I hate that God, I like this God over here better, this is the one true God over here, Jesus, and I hate these other gods," you still recognize them as being gods. They are still a part of your life, they still have meaning to you, they still have value to you.
[…] we know that the idol is nothing in the universe and that there is no other God but one. (1 Corinthians 8:4)
Paul says something that should be obvious to everybody … unless you've never thought about it. The idol is nothing. If there is no other god but the God of the Bible, then there is no other god.
Paul is saying this to the Corinthian church, and the same thing could be said to us, I think. We aren't a culture that has statues as idols, but we can have other idols.
An idol should be nothing to us. It shouldn't be something we love; it shouldn't be something we hate. It should be nothing to us. We should see it as having no value. If it is a stone or metal thing, or a piece of paper with some writing on it, or whatever physical thing, it should just be nothing to us. It has no meaning. We don't love it, we don't hate it, it's just nothing.
If we do love it, or if we do hate it, it is still something to us. It has some value to us. This thing, whatever it is, if we believe that it has something that it can do for us or to us, it is a god to us. Remember, it is only a god to us because we have made it a god within us.
If you think that this thing can actually do anything at all, it is still a God to you. If you think that it can bring you joy, it's a god to you. Can it bring you luck? Can it tell your fortune? Can it hurt your enemies? Can it heal you? We need to understand that if you look at anything with the attitude that it can do something for you, then it is still a God to you.
If you say, "Oh, I hate what that ideology causes", or "I used to be involved with those, but I'm not anymore," there's the problem. You still see them as having had some value in the past. They meant something to you then. Maybe they don't mean so much to you now, but you still recognize them as what they are, and that they had value to you, and they could still have in the future.
God speaks about this directly.
You shall have no other gods before Me. (Exodus 20:3)
The phrase "before me" doesn't mean ahead of me. I've heard people talk about this verse, and they say this means other gods shouldn't be ahead of God in the priority you give them in your life. But that's not what it's saying.
The words "before me" appear often in the Bible. They mean "in my presence". We see examples in the Bible like, "Bring those people before me," which means, "Bring them in front of me, into my presence. I'm going to deal with them.
When the verse says "no other gods before me," it means they shouldn't be in my presence, which really means they shouldn't be in you, because God is in you as well, so they shouldn't be in you at all either.
God's point is that the gods that others have shouldn't be anything to you. If they're nothing to you, then they're not in God's presence either. They're not anything that means anything to either of you.
Back to the previous verse from 1st Corinthians. We saw the part about the idol being nothing in the universe. The verse continues on, saying there is no other God but one. Paul is essentially quoting from the Exodus verse, saying "no other God". If the idol is nothing, if there is no idol in you, then there is no other God but one in you. The phrase "no other God" connects these two passages.
God should be your one and only God.
Yeshua said to him, "You shall love the Lord Yahweh your God from all your heart and from all your soul and from all your power and from all your mind." (Matthew 22:37)
This verse gives us some more understanding as well. Note what it said, all your heart, all your soul, all your power, all your mind. If all of these things are dedicated to God, that leaves nothing for any other god in your life. You should have nothing to give any other God, and that God has nothing to give to you either.