Chapter 10

Can you identify the God you worship in a line-up?

I spend a lot of time among atheists. There are plenty among the scientific community. A common quote they say is that they “only believe in one God fewer than you do, and when you understand why you disbelieve in the others, you’ll understand why I disbelieve in yours.”

It’s an arrogant claim, but it does raise a very real question – what is it about the God that we worship that makes us so sure that He is the reality, and that others are fictional?

Such a thought in our world is so unusual as to be scandalous. This is because our society enshrines values that are pluralistic – that is, your beliefs are equal to my beliefs in value.

Now, I’m going to go out on a limb here and point out that there is good in this philosophy (I know this might get me branded as a heretic for some Christians!). There is merit in accepting that someone else sees things differently to yourself, and that there may be more than one way to interpret the same data. I accept this.

But on the other hand, not all beliefs in fact ARE equal. If one believes that there are no cars on the road, they face the problem that their beliefs don’t square with reality, especially when they try to cross the road!

In Jeremiah 10:1 – 10, the Prophet attempts to compare the God of Israel with the gods around them. He dismisses the local gods as being false; “a tree chopped down, shaped with the Woodsman’s axe.”

The concept to which Jeremiah refers is that the usual methods of worship for many of the local gods of his time involved what is known by historians as a “cult image”. There was a statue or a picture of the god, perhaps a representation, perhaps seen as a focus for belief. Either way, though, the image was viewed as being connected to the god in a real way.

God, the God of Israel, tells them that there is to be no cult image.

I have sometimes wondered why this was – where’s the harm in allowing people to use a cult image if they want to?

There are a lot of reasons, I suppose, but we will examine a couple now.

One reasons is that it encourages people to see God as a physical being – and so promotes a mythological view of God as a “super-human” – with all the pluses and minuses that implied. This was how most of the ancient gods were seen – say, Egyptian gods[1], Roman gods, Greek gods. Of course, God’s people understood this fairly early on, but as they went to other gods, the practices of other religions became part of the Jewish faith; and God wanted to stop that.

As instead of being seen as a cartoony being God wants to be seen as present and active. He isn’t a statue stuck in a temple somewhere, He is present everywhere, whether he is worshiped there or not.

Finally, God wanted to demonstrate an objective difference – that He is interested in each of us, though not all of us reciprocate.

God is very different from all other gods – and the sooner we get this through our heads, the better.

[1] Okay, perhaps super-humans with weird animal heads.