Life's Inanities and Ironies

  This eight-part series is written for readers who hold the Bible as the inerrant, sufficient, and authoritative Word of God and who take its historical narrative at face value. Each post is self-contained yet builds on the others. The goal is to strengthen confidence in Scripture’s account of origins, to answer common objections with biblical clarity, and to turn our attention from debate to worship of the Creator. 1: The Biblical Framework for Creation — Genesis 1–2 in Its Own Terms Genesis 1–2 is not poetry in the modern sense, nor is it myth. It is structured historical narrative written in the same style as the rest of the early chapters of Genesis and the genealogies that follow. The text itself defines the days: “And there was evening and there was morning, the first day” (and so on through the sixth day). The Hebrew word yom with a numerical adjective and the evening-morning formula consistently means an ordinary 24-hour day elsewhere in Scripture. God finished His work in...

  The gods Israel kept turning to never answered. Across this series we have walked through the idols that pressed in on God’s people from Canaan, Philistia, Moab, and the empires to the east. This wrap-up gathers those threads, sets them beside the One who actually speaks, and names what stood behind the images. Israel did not invent these gods. She borrowed them. The land was already thick with cults when Joshua crossed the Jordan, and the temptation never stayed outside the camp. High places, household shrines, royal alliances, and fear of the weather kept pulling hearts away from the covenant. The prophets did not treat that drift as a minor taste in religion. They treated it as adultery against the living God, and as fellowship with powers that were not God. Baal was the storm and fertility lord of Canaan. His name means “master,” and that is how his worship worked: rain, grain, flocks, and children were treated as his to grant or withhold. Elijah’s contest on Carmel was not a...

  Ashtoreth, also called Ashtaroth in the plural of her shrines, was the goddess of the Zidonians. She belongs to the same family as Ishtar of Mesopotamia and Astarte of the Phoenician coast: a goddess of desire, fertility, and war, the queen men set beside the storm god when they wanted both the rain and the bed. Sidon carried her name. Israel learned it. The Bible never gives her a hymn. It gives her a charge sheet. The pattern starts as soon as the generation that buried Joshua is gone. They forsook the Lord and served Baal and Ashtaroth (Judges 2:13). In the days of the judges the same pair returns: Baalim and Ashtaroth, the gods of Syria, Zidon, Moab, Ammon, and the Philistines (Judges 10:6). Samuel later stands before the nation and makes the condition of deliverance plain. If you do return unto the Lord with all your hearts, then put away the strange gods and Ashtaroth from among you, and prepare your hearts unto the Lord, and serve him only (1 Samuel 7:3). They did. They pu...

  Dagon was the god of the Philistines, and before them a god of the Euphrates lands, known there as Dagan. His name belongs with grain, not with fish. Later readers heard the Hebrew word for fish in his name and pictured a man above the waist and a fish below. That image stuck in commentaries and in Milton. The older evidence points to a god of corn, provision, and the settled city. He was the one a people thanked for bread and for victory. Whole towns carried his name. Ashdod kept his chief house. Gaza had a temple large enough for the lords and for thousands on the roof. When Israel’s enemies wanted a god who could feed them and finish their wars, they went to Dagon. The Bible shows what that worship looked like when it met the living God. After the ark was taken at Ebenezer, the Philistines carried it into Dagon’s house at Ashdod and set it beside the idol, the way a victor sets a trophy beside his god (1 Samuel 5:1–2). They went to bed as conquerors. In the morning Dagon had f...

  Chemosh was the national god of Moab, the people east of the Dead Sea who came from Lot’s line and lived as Israel’s near neighbor and frequent enemy. His name sits on Moab the way the Lord’s name sits on Israel. Numbers calls them “the people of Chemosh” in the same breath that it sings their ruin (Numbers 21:29). Jeremiah later picks up the line: Chemosh shall go forth into captivity with his priests and his princes together, and Moab shall be ashamed of him as Israel was once ashamed of Bethel (Jeremiah 48:7, 13, 46). A national god does not stay in the shrine. He becomes the explanation of the nation’s wins, the excuse for the nation’s losses, and the owner of the nation’s wars. The Moabite Stone, cut for King Mesha in the ninth century before Christ, says this in Moab’s own words. Mesha built a high place for Chemosh because the god had delivered him from all kings and let him look down on his enemies. Omri of Israel had oppressed Moab many days, Mesha writes, because Chemos...

Marduk began as a local god of Babylon, a storm and fertility power, marked on early monuments by a triangular spade. He did not stay local. In the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish, the younger gods are terrified of Tiamat, the salt-water chaos. Marduk steps forward with a condition. He will fight if they will make him king, if his word will fix fates, if no other decree will stand against his. They agree. He kills her, splits the carcass, and builds sky and earth from the body. Humanity is fashioned afterward from the blood of a slain rebel god, made so the gods can rest and men can do the labor. Then Marduk is handed fifty names, each one a title taken from some other deity. Babylon shortens the whole claim to one word. Bel. Lord. His temple was Esagila. Beside it rose Etemenanki, the ziggurat called the house of the foundation of heaven and earth. At the New Year festival, the Akitu, the creation story was recited in his court. The king was stripped of his regalia, struck, ...

Molech, also written Molech and Milcom, enters the Bi Molech ble as a name Israel was forbidden to speak over a child. He is called the abomination of the Ammonites. Solomon, old and turned aside by his foreign wives, built him a high place on the hill east of Jerusalem, facing the city of the Lord (1 Kings 11:7). The law had already closed that door. “Thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the Lord” (Leviticus 18:21). The penalty is not a fine. Anyone who gives his seed to Molech is to be put to death. If the people hide their eyes, God says he himself will set his face against that man and against his family, and will cut them off (Leviticus 20:2–5). This is not a private taste. It is a public defilement of the name. The place became as infamous as the god. In the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, south of the city, stood the Tophet. Ahaz burned his son there. Manasseh made his son pass through the fire (2 K...

  Baal means lord. In Canaan he was not one quiet statue in a back room. He was the storm, the rider of the clouds, the god who each year went down to struggle with Mot, death itself, and, if the rites worked, came back with the rain. Without him, the story ran, the fields died. With him, grain, wine, oil, flocks, and children followed. His places were the high hills, open to the sky he was supposed to rule: a stone pillar for the god, a wooden Asherah pole for the goddess beside him, an altar, incense, sometimes a grove. Worship was imitative. Sexual acts at the shrine were meant to wake Baal so the earth would conceive. When the rain came, he received the praise. When it failed, the priests cut themselves, shouted louder, and limped about the altar, which is exactly what Elijah watched from morning until the time of the evening sacrifice (1 Kings 18:26–29). Israel’s besetting sin was not a clean exchange of Yahweh for Baal. It was the blend. Keep the feasts. Keep the name of the ...

 Series introduction — Old Altars, New Names The gods Israel was commanded to tear down did not retire when the prophets fell silent. They changed their clothes. Ishtar still asks for the body. Baal still offers rain in exchange for loyalty. Marduk still wants the throne, the city, and the right to name what is true. The shrines look different. The invoice does not. This series sets each ancient cult beside the modern altar that asks for the same things, and sets both under the Word of God, who does not share his glory Over the next few days we will look through the lens of scripture at how the gods that plagued Israel have not gone away but changed name and form to plague us today.  No matter how things change how much they stay the same. 

  Before she was Ishtar, she was Inanna of Uruk. The Sumerians sang to her. The Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians carried her name across the river plain and into the courts of kings. Her planet was Venus, the morning star and the evening star, and that double appearing already told the truth about her. She was desire and destruction in one person. Love and war. The bed and the battlefield. Hymns said battle was a feast to her. The same tablets called her the patron of the prostitute. She was not a quiet mother-goddess of hearth and harvest. She was the power men invoked when they wanted pleasure without bond, and victory without mercy. Her great temple was Eanna in Uruk, and she had houses in nearly every important city from Ur to Nineveh. Daily offerings of food, incense, and flowers went up to keep her favorable. At the New Year the city rehearsed her descent into the underworld and her return, a dying-and-rising drama meant to restart life in the land. The center of that re...

  Scripture Reading: Genesis 40:1–23; Genesis 41:1–14 Key Verse: “Yet did not the chief butler remember Joseph, but forgat him.” — Genesis 40:23 (KJV)  The Silence of Two Full Years Few things in this fallen world sting quite like being forgotten. Deep beneath the royal courts of Egypt, in the damp chill of Pharaoh’s state prison, sat young Joseph. He was a man with every earthly reason to be bitter: betrayed by his own flesh and blood, sold as a chattel slave into a foreign land, and falsely accused of a heinous crime he refused to commit out of reverence for God ( “How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” Genesis 39:9). Yet even in chains, God’s favor rested upon Joseph. When Pharaoh’s chief cupbearer—a high official cast into prison under suspicion of treason—woke troubled by a vivid nocturnal vision, it was Joseph who unraveled the dream under divine inspiration. The message was glorious news for the cupbearer: in three days, Pharaoh would li...

  "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice… that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God." — Romans 12:1–2 We end where a guided life actually happens: on the altar of ordinary days. Most of the will of God is not found at a crossroads with thunder over it. It is found in a body presented, a mind renewed, and a Tuesday afternoon offered up as reasonable service. Romans 12 does not begin with techniques for hearing voices. It begins with mercies — the gospel mercies of the eleven chapters before it. Because you have been justified, because there is no condemnation, because nothing shall separate you from the love of God in Christ — therefore present your bodies. Guidance is for living sacrifices, not for consumers shopping for a destiny. A man who will not yield his body will not be able to discern a path. How do you prove that good and acceptable and perfect will? By refusing con...

  "As they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them." — Acts 13:2 After the risen Christ ascended, He did not leave His people without direction. He gave the Spirit, the apostolic Word, and a missionary church. Acts is not a catalog of techniques for getting personal messages. It is the record of the church’s founding, and it still teaches a guided people how to live together under that Lord. Notice the setting. They were ministering to the Lord and fasting. Guidance for world mission was given in worship, not in restlessness. Barnabas and Saul were not sitting in a corner demanding a destiny. They were in the work when the next work was named. The Spirit’s call was confirmed in the body. The church fasted again, prayed, laid hands on them, and sent them away. Private impressions were not treated as sufficient. That pattern rebukes two kinds of men: the man who will not be sent, and the ma...

  "For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me." — John 6:38 All lesser examples bow here. The Lord Jesus is not merely our pattern of guidance. He is our Savior, and only the saved can follow Him. You cannot treat the obedient Son as a model while refusing Him as a substitute. Yet once you belong to Him, the Gospels show a human life lived in perfect, glad submission to the Father. “The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do” (John 5:19). He moved when His hour had come and refused when it had not. At twelve He must be about His Father’s business, and still He went down to Nazareth and was subject unto His parents. In Gethsemane He yielded the cup He naturally shrank from. There is no conflict in Him between the will He came to do and the sorrow He felt while doing it. This silences two errors. First, that God’s will is always immediate comfort. The will of God sent the Son to the cross. If your definition of...

  "But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD." — Jonah 1:3 Not every crisis of guidance is a lack of information. Sometimes the Lord has already spoken, and we do not like the assignment. The most honest sentence some of us could write is not “I cannot find God’s will,” but “I have found it, and I am booking a fare the other way.” Jonah is the patron saint of the informed rebel. “Arise, go to Nineveh.” The word was plain. He went down to Joppa, down into the ship, down into sleep, down into the sea. Sin always has a downward grammar. He had theology enough to confess that he feared the Lord which hath made the sea and the dry land. He still ran. Knowledge without surrender is not guidance. It is indictment. God’s direction includes pursuit. He sent out a great wind. The lot fell upon Jonah. The fish was prepared. You cannot outrun the God who made the sea you are sailing. Psalm 139 asked the question Jonah tried to answer: whither shall I flee from...

  "I waited patiently for the LORD; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry." — Psalm 40:1 David was anointed long before he was crowned. Between the horn of oil and the throne lay caves, betrayals, and opportunities to seize what God had promised by the wrong means. The most important education of his life was not how to be king. It was how not to take the kingdom. Twice he could have killed Saul. In the cave at Engedi his men whispered that the Lord had delivered the enemy into his hand. The circumstances looked like providence. David cut the skirt, and then his heart smote him. “The LORD forbid that I should do this thing unto my master, the LORD'S anointed” (1 Samuel 24:6). Not every open door in a cave is from God. Some are tests to see whether you love the promise more than the Promiser. David inquired of the Lord again and again — at Keilah, after Ziklag burned. He did not treat yesterday’s instruction as today’s automatic answer. First Samuel 30:6–8 is worth han...

"And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light." — Exodus 13:21 Israel did not wander because God lost the map. He refused the near road through Philistia, “lest peradventure the people repent when they see war, and they return to Egypt” (Exodus 13:17–18). He led them about, through the wilderness of the Red sea. The long road was not a mistake. It was mercy they could not yet recognize. We want the shortest distance between conversion and ease. God wants a people who know His name in the desert. The pillar meant guidance can be unmistakable and still uncomfortable. Israel did not lack direction. They lacked contentment. Those are different problems. Moses himself had to be led. Forty years in Pharaoh’s house. Forty years on the backside of the desert. Then the bush that burned and was not consumed. If you are in a hidden season — a small church, a plain job, a long obedience with little...

  "By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went." — Hebrews 11:8 Genesis 12 is the schoolhouse of guided faith. “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee.” The command was clear. The map was not. God named the leaving before He named the coordinates. He often gives enough light for obedience, not enough light for control. Abraham had a promise, an altar, and a tent. He did not have a completed itinerary. Faith does not require omniscience. Faith requires a trustworthy Speaker. If you must see the whole road before you will take the first step, you are not asking for guidance. You are asking to stop needing it. Guidance demanded separation — country, kindred, father’s house. Some paths cannot be walked while you remain entangled with the old life or the approval of people who do not fe...

  "And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye are called in one body; and be ye thankful." — Colossians 3:15 Many have been taught to “let peace be the umpire.” There is a biblical place for that sentence. There is also a ditch on either side of the road. Colossians 3:15 does not float as a method for choosing a house or a spouse. It sits in a paragraph about putting off the old man, putting on mercy, letting the word of Christ dwell richly, and living as members of one body. The peace in view is not a private shiver of excitement. Even the phrase “in one body” warns us against treating peace as a purely individual sensation. God can restrain a believer through holy unrest. But Jonah slept in the storm, which proves a quiet conscience is not always a clean one. The flesh can feel peaceful while walking toward disaster. Conversely, obedience can feel costly and still be right. Jesus sweat as it were great drops of blood in Gethsemane and was in the exac...

  "Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety." — Proverbs 11:14 The lone-ranger Christian is not a picture of faith. He is often a picture of pride. God has set believers in local churches under qualified pastors and among mature saints. The man who will not be advised is already announcing that he trusts his own heart, and Jeremiah 17:9 has answered that confidence. “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes: but he that hearkeneth unto counsel is wise” (Proverbs 12:15). “Without counsel purposes are disappointed: but in the multitude of counsellors they are established” (Proverbs 15:22). God frequently guides through people who know the Word and know you. That is not a downgrade from “hearing God.” It is one of the ordinary ways He has chosen to be heard. Choose counselors carefully. The world will counsel you toward comfort. A carnal friend will baptize your flesh in spiritual language. Rehoboam forsook the old men who had s...

  "A man's heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps." — Proverbs 16:9 God’s guidance is not only inward. He rules weather, kings, delays, illnesses, unexpected meetings, and the failure of plans we thought were wise. This is providence: His almighty power whereby He upholds and governs all things. Joseph could not see the purpose of the pit or the prison. Years later he said, “Ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good… to save much people alive” (Genesis 50:20). The Lord was directing steps Joseph did not choose. That does not make the brothers innocent. It means their sin could not outrun the purpose of God. Paul intended Asia and Bithynia. The Spirit suffered them not. Then came Macedonia, and the gospel entered Europe (Acts 16:6–10). Closed doors are not always the devil. Sometimes they are mercy. An open door is not always the Lord. Sometimes it is bait. First Corinthians 16:9 shows Paul recognizing a great door and many adversaries. Oppor...

  "Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth." — John 16:13 Every true child of God is indwelt by the Holy Spirit. “If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his” (Romans 8:9). “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God” (Romans 8:14). This is precious. It is also one of the most abused sentences in the modern church. The Spirit of truth guides into truth. He does not authorize a divorce Scripture forbids, a scheme the Word condemns, a partnership with darkness in the name of ministry, or a departure from a sound church because the preaching has begun to meddle. The same Spirit who moved holy men to write Scripture (2 Peter 1:21) will not now whisper a different gospel. God is not at war with Himself. His leading is bound to Christ and to the apostolic Word. He shall glorify the Son (John 16:14). He shall bring to remembrance what Christ has spoken (John 14:26). He produces the fruit of Galatians ...