No God, Baal, Twitter and Climate Change
The oneness of God is under relentless assault today — though not in the way we might expect. At least in the West, very few try to make a public case for traditional polytheism. There is little pressure in the mainstream to affirm many gods (at least not formally). Rather, the pressure which continues to rise with each generation, and each passing year, is the pervasive assumption of secularism — the pressure to sideline any talk of the one God and live together as though there were none. In the ancient world, various pantheons of gods abounded. In Canaan. In Egypt. In Babylon. In Athens. In Rome. Everywhere God’s strange monotheistic people turned, they encountered polytheists. They were tempted incessantly to adopt the world’s gods to try and improve their lives. Against this pressure, the Hebrew Scriptures, again and again, assert the oneness, and supremacy, of the true God, not many gods. But today, the mounting social pressure is to believe in (or at least to live as if...
