What Kind of God Do We Worship? 3-23-08
A news headline caught my eye as it flashed up on the Windows Sidebar on my computer screen last week. It was the sort of headline you would expect to see in the grocery store check-out line, not coming from a major news network:
Baby Girl Born With Two Faces Worshipped as Reincarnated God
Monday , March 17, 2008
She’s only a few days old and already a baby girl in Northern India is being worshipped as a reincarnated god. The newborn is unlike any other child villagers have seen before — she has two faces. The girl was born on Monday at a hospital in the suburbs of Delhi, according to the Daily Mail. Since then, people in her rural village have been singing and dancing — offering money and asking for her blessings. The parents are hoping the government will help with medical treatments needed for their baby girl in the future. For now though, both mother and child are healthy and doing fine, according to a doctor at the hospital.
[http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,337492,00.html]
When I read the story, I felt a growing disdain for the misguided simpletons who would worship something so obviously human and earthly. This baby will be lucky to survive at all, much less live a full life; how could anyone be so stupid as to believe her to be a god? But then I had to stop myself; after all, is that so much more absurd than believing in Mormonism, Islam, or Humanism? No, these villagers are just like the rest of us: we cling to anything and everything that we can find so that we can avoid having to accept the truth that is Jesus.
Many in America would claim that my beliefs are only as valid as these. I disagree, of course, especially in light of the three that I mentioned here. The Book of Mormon has changed dramatically over the past hundred years (such as the LDS view on why some people have dark skin…), which should not surprise us as the whole religion is based on a completely fabricated “translation” of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Islam, the so-called “religion of peace,” took the idea of a holy war to new heights and is a mass of contradictions. But these two pale in significance to the real threat facing Christianity today: Humanism.
Christians should be able to see that both Mormonism and Islam are incompatible with the truth found in the Bible. But many in the church are falling for the humanist ideals that morality is not absolute and that religion is the real problem in the world today. We Christians seem to bow down to the moral authority of man (such as trying to mollify the offended sensibilities of the homosexual crowd), not realizing that by doing so we deny the sovereign authority of God.
You will suffer the penalty for your lewdness and bear the consequences of your sins of idolatry. Then you will know that I am the Sovereign LORD.” (Ezekiel 23:49 NIV)
Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. (Colossians 3:5 NIV)
God demands that we worship Him only! We cannot see anything else as equally valid, and we cannot “learn to tolerate” (i.e. acquiesce to) those who persist in the belief that man is God; we must instead fight for the hearts and minds of the people of this country and turn them back to God by teaching them the truth of the Bible. The Bible easily withstands scrutiny that destroys the texts of any of the other major religions. God’s word prevails; all we have to do is trust in God and believe his holy word. Anyone who does not worship God is on equally shaky footing as those villagers who worship a deformed baby. Only those who are standing on the Stone laid in Zion can claim sure footing.
-Charles Peterson