Who is God #2

Having established in our first installment of this series on God, that He is, in fact, God, we move on to the next step.

God Must Be Our Only God. We should have no gods before Him – or beside Him. This claim of God to our allegiance to Him is an exclusive claim. In other words, if we worship Him, we may not worship any other, whether it be a false god, a person, or things. Let me give you an example. US citizenship is intended to be exclusive. Technically, an adult may not be a US citizen and a citizen of another nation. We do not allow dual citizenship. Now I know that this law is poorly, if ever, enforced, but the principle is that it is impossible to split your allegiance between two sovereign nations.  Jesus stated the principle pretty clearly in Matthew 6:24 - "No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other." 

So what’s the practical application of this principle?

First, we may not make things (even ideas) into gods. Men and women worship just about everything. Today’s great false god is Nature. To be an environmentalist today doesn’t mean caring about your environment and being a good steward of the universe God has created. No, it means to call the earth, “Mother Earth,” and to extend to this mother all the worship and allegiance due the only true God – who created the earth. 

We also worship wealth and belongings, and power.  Some even worship their own children. Then of course, there are the false gods in the traditional sense: Buddha, Allah, etc. We cannot worship Buddha and the true God; Allah and the true God. Deuteronomy 4:39 states the case plainly - "...know therefore today, and lay it to your heart, that the LORD is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other...".

Second, we may not make ourselves into gods. Romans 1:25 says, "...they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator." Mankind chooses to worship - mankind. We human beings do tend to deify ourselves. Instead of reliance upon our God; our reliance is upon our own wisdom. 

We make science into a god and claim that discoveries come from our own fertile minds, while we are merely discovering what God has created and put in place for us. We worship strength and beauty and youth. We adore wealth and power and connections. But we need to be brought back to our senses and remember that we already have a perfectly good God who does not need to be replaced. Why try to replace Him with a frail or faulty copy which can only lead to hell?