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How Many Gods Do You Serve?
Brian Mashburn
September 20, 2009
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American Idols
Polytheism - the belief in and worship of multiple deities, called gods and goddesses. These are usually assembled into a pantheon, along with their own mythologies and rituals (Wikipedia).
There is a God who has an incredible—bordering on unbelievable—story. The story says that this God created and rules everything. This God demanded perfection of his subjects. He actually became a part of his creation, with all of its frailties and limitations, to show them how to live perfectly. However, his subjects could not meet his demand for perfection. So, as the story goes, this God demanded that He Himself pay for His subjects sins. He could pay for all the lack of perfection of his subjects through his own suffering and death, so that He would be free to have love them anyway and have them in His presence now and for eternity.
While this God is available to you, He's not the only one available to you. It may surprise you that there are others. It also may surprise you how much you actually serve them, buying in to their "mythologies and rituals".
Oh...most of us are, in word and belief, monotheists. We believe that the God described above is the only one. However, in practice, most of us have assembled our own pantheon of gods. There is even a fancy name for those who don't serve all the gods they believe in equally: monolatrists. It's the 10 dollar word for those of us who specialize in serving one God primarily, but give homage occasionally to some others.
There's another title (kathenotheists) given to those of us who worship different gods at different times. You know, singing to one God on Sunday, another on Monday.
The Bible lists about 40 other gods other than Yahweh within its covers. They are ancient but many of them are still alive and well, trying to infiltrate the purity of attention, and unity of life, of the true mono-theists.
Let's expose a few of them together over the next few weeks. Several times in scripture, a great leader of God's people would be convicted about how compromised the lives and worship of God's people had become with the worship of "foreign gods". They would then initiate a revolutionary time of repentance, a cleaning up of the Temple, and a return to a purer, truer life of following the One True God.
It's your turn to be the great leader of God for your life.