Life's Inanities and Ironies

  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...

  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...

Beloved brethren and sisters in Christ, grace and peace be multiplied unto you through the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. In the previous message we stood on the firm ground of Exodus 20:1-3 and asked the penetrating question: **Who is on first?** The first commandment is not ancient history—it is a living, daily demand upon every blood-bought believer. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” is still in force. Idolatry is not merely bowing to a statue in a pagan temple; it is anything or anyone that occupies the place of priority that belongs only to the Lord our God. Let us explore what idolatry looks like in real life—both in Scripture and in the everyday walk of the fundamentalist Christian in 2026. We do this not to condemn, but to examine ourselves, repent where needed, and return to first base.  1. Biblical Examples – The Pattern God Hates The Bible never leaves us guessing what idolatry is. It shows it plainly: - **The Golden Calf (Exodus 32)**: While Mos...