What God Do You Serve?

Introduction

            Our passage today comes from Joshua 24, starting in verse 14:

Joshua 24:14-31: “Now therefore fear the LORD and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD. 15 And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the LORD, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.”

16 Then the people answered, “Far be it from us that we should forsake the LORD to serve other gods, 17 for it is the LORD our God who brought us and our fathers up from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and who did those great signs in our sight and preserved us in all the way that we went, and among all the peoples through whom we passed. 18 And the LORD drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorites who lived in the land. Therefore we also will serve the LORD, for he is our God.”

19 But Joshua said to the people, “You are not able to serve the LORD, for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions or your sins. 20 If you forsake the LORD and serve foreign gods, then he will turn and do you harm and consume you, after having done you good.” 21 And the people said to Joshua, “No, but we will serve the LORD.” 22 Then Joshua said to the people, “You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the LORD, to serve him.” And they said, “We are witnesses.” 23 He said, “Then put away the foreign gods that are among you, and incline your heart to the LORD, the God of Israel.” 24 And the people said to Joshua, “The LORD our God we will serve, and his voice we will obey.” 25 So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day, and put in place statutes and rules for them at Shechem. 26 And Joshua wrote these words in the Book of the Law of God. And he took a large stone and set it up there under the terebinth that was by the sanctuary of the LORD. 27 And Joshua said to all the people, “Behold, this stone shall be a witness against us, for it has heard all the words of the LORD that he spoke to us. Therefore it shall be a witness against you, lest you deal falsely with your God.” 28 So Joshua sent the people away, every man to his inheritance.

29 After these things Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of the LORD, died, being 110 years old. 30 And they buried him in his own inheritance at Timnath-serah, which is in the hill country of Ephraim, north of the mountain of Gaash.

31 Israel served the LORD all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua and had known all the work that the LORD did for Israel.

What god do you serve? This is the essential question Joshua asked the Israelites shortly before his death. Joshua was the leader who took over after Moses died and he was familiar with the history of the Israelites. Colby read the beginning of chapter 24 which was Joshua retelling the history of how Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, came to their people and led them to the Promised Land. He told of how the LORD protected them, winning their battles to give to them the land he promised to their ancestors. He emphasized the fact that God gifted them cities and vineyards that they didn’t work for. He also was familiar with their tendency to forget all that the LORD had done for them and to turn to other gods. He knew that they had a potential to turn from God when they had no strong leader just like they did when they created the golden calf. So he called the leaders together and had them covenant that they will not turn away from Yahweh and to the gods of the lands around them. As we could see from verse 31, Israel actually did follow the LORD for that entire generation and that is a great encouragement. However, this week serves as an introduction to our series on Judges and if you have never read the book of Judges, let me warn you, it is an exploration of the depths that sin can take people who are supposed to be serving Yahweh, but turn to other gods. It is gory and depraved and I love it so much.

All jokes aside, I love it because it reveals to me how much we need the LORD and how prone we are to falling to sin and temptation. However, I fear that we believe we are different from the Israelites and are immune to falling to the temptation to serve other gods. I fear that we take comfort in the fact that we have a background in Judeo-Christian morality and even in the fact that secularism, or anti-religionism, has had some strength in recent generations. But as humans we are deeply spiritual beings as God designed us to be and we are as much, if not more at risk of falling to pagan spirituality, like the Israelites in Joshua’s time, as we are in danger of falling to atheism or secularism. Let’s pray and then dig into this.

Prayer:

The Western world has been seeing a renaissance in spiritual interest. This might come as a shock to you as nearly all of our news articles says that Christianity is in decline. However, I am not talking about Christianity as part of this renaissance. Here are some newsworthy events from only the past five years.

1.               Iceland has built the first temple dedicated to the old Norse gods (such as Odin and Thor) in over a millennium.

2.               Thousands of practicing pagans gather each year to celebrate winter and summer solstices at Stonehenge.

3.               In our own nation witches and pagans outnumber mainline Presbyterians.

4.               Astrology has become far more popular and accepted than ever before.

5.               The makeup company Sephora released a “witchcraft for beginners” kit that was targeted to young women.

6.               The Getty Museum in Los Angeles invited parents and children to write prayers to the Roman goddess Venus, also known Aphrodite in Greek mythology, who is the goddess of love, sex, and fertility. Thousands responded every week, leaving prayers and various sacrificial gifts.

7.               Throughout the year people flock to various sites across North America and engage in pagan spiritual practices for the purpose of having group UFO sightings and to try to meet extraterrestrials.

8.               With the rise of paganism, worship of the god Pan has grown exponentially. This interest in paganism and the occult is not isolated to the world outside our church walls.

9.               Pew research found that over 60% of those claiming to be Christians also hold at least one prominent New Age belief. This confirms the fact that New Age spirituality, a false spirituality, has been infiltrating our ranks for decades. Its to the point that prominent leaders of churches are encouraging their followers to dig into the New Age to see what practices we can take from them. Let me read a quote from The Physics of Heaven, a book that is promoted and distributed by Bethel Church out in Redding, CA. This is the same church that produces and distributes the worship music from Bethel Music and Jesus Culture. Their two main leaders, Kris Vallotton and Bill Johnson (as well as Bill’s wife, Beni) each contributed to the book and it is currently available to purchase on Bethel’s website (please don’t).

In chapter two it reads,

“In 2006, through God’s inexplicable sense of humor, I found myself with an empty nest and a job offer in Sedona, AZ, the global epicenter of New Age thought and practice. By then I had experienced most of what charismatic Christianity had to offer—miracles, prophecy, healing, deep revelation, transformative experiences of the presence of the Holy Spirit, excellent Bible teaching—and I had been involved in at least five modern-day moves of God in the church.

I moved to Sedona fully prepared to discount everything I saw and heard as coming from a source other than the God I knew and loved. But, as a scientist, I was intrigued by what I found there. I saw healings and mystical experiences and revelations to rival anything I had seen or experienced in the church. I encountered an understanding of the natural world and how it interacted with the spiritual that I had sensed but had never been taught in any of my science classes.

It wasn’t that I wanted to become a New Ager, I just wanted to find out if maybe they had uncovered some truths the church hadn’t. The strange thing was, much of what I saw and heard embodied biblical principles and could be backed up by Scripture...

I could not find a single Christian leader who shared a similar interest in finding out if there were truths hidden in the New Age. Now we are beginning to hear more and more revelation that is in line with what New Agers have been saying all along and we are hearing more and more teaching about Christians “taking back truths” from the New Age that really belong to citizens of the Kingdom of God.”

I say all of this to make you aware of the fact that our culture is extremely spiritual. We are not immune to the pagan gods that the Israelites had to deal with. So, with so much spiritual fervor gaining traction we should genuinely consider asking people we meet, not what used to be the staple question for gauging interest in spiritual matters “Do you believe in God?”, but rather, as Joshua asked the Israelites, “What god do you serve?”

A.    The gods of Our Culture

            Modern America, like every culture ever, has gods that we worship and bow down before. When you hear this, you might object by bringing forward the fact that our culture has become overwhelmingly secular and that most people would not even confess to belief in a god, let alone service to one. While on the surface that appears to be true, it is not. There is a deeper truth that we as Americans must accept, even if it is uncomfortable. Every culture throughout all of history has set up gods for themselves and modern-day American culture is no different. The Canaanites worshiped gods such as Dagan, the god of crop fertility, and his more famous son Baal, whose prophets engaged in the famous showdown with Elijah. The Egyptians have Ra, Anubis, and countless others. The Greeks have Hermes, Zeus, Kronos. The Romans have Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto. The Hindu still worship Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. The Mayans had Itzamna and Chaac. The Norse have Odin, Thor, and Loki which still have some adherents. The Chinese have Changxi (chahng-shee) and Caishen (cai-shen). All cultures in all times have gods that they place their trust in and sacrificed to for various reasons and as the recent headlines have shown, we are no different.

            You might press the point by saying that we don’t have specific gods like those ancient cultures. Again, it may seem that way, but there is a truth that lies deeper. Allow me to turn to Neil Gaiman, an author and self-proclaimed agnostic to help you see this truth. In his fantasy novel, American Gods, Gaiman introduces his readers to an America that is populated with Irish, Norse, Slavic, African and Middle Eastern deities whose power depends on how much they are worshipped. In this world the “old gods”, many of whom I just mentioned, are dying due to the lack of worship to them, but there are “new gods”, the truly American gods who are enjoying a lot of worship. To name a few of the groups of new gods,

·       we have the “techies” the gods of technology who come from Austin and San Jose,

·       the “players” the gods of the film industry who hail from Hollywood,

·       the “Intangibles” who are the “invisible hand” driving the fluctuations of the economy,

·       the “Spookshows” who are fed by conspiracy theories and headquartered in Washington DC

·       the “TV people” who look like perfectly kept news anchors

·       deities that look like aliens from Roswell

·       and gods of airplanes and cars, of credit cards and banks, of internet and telephones, of hospitals and television, of shopping malls and online stores.

In one scene in the book, the main character named Shadow has an interaction with one of these new gods. Her name is Media and she reveals herself to him through his TV screen, taking the likeness of Lucille Ball from the show “I Love Lucy”. Hear what she has to say when he asks her what she is.

 “Good question. I’m the idiot box. I’m the TV. I’m the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray... I’m the little shrine the family gathers to adore.”

“You’re the television? Or someone in the television?”, he asked her.

 “The TV’s the altar. I’m what people are sacrificing to.”

“What do they sacrifice?” asked Shadow.

“Their time, mostly,” said Lucy. “Sometimes each other.”

Are you starting to recognize a god you have worshipped at some point in your life? In addition to these we could add comfort, physical pleasure, safety, social media, a retirement of ease, pornography, and countless other things. All of these things we put our trust in and if we are not careful we may wake up one day and not realize that our worship of these things has created a god or gods we primarily serve and only give a slight nod of veneration for an hour or so on Sunday mornings to the God who created you. 

With all of this in mind, I ask you once again, what god do you serve? It should be a question that begins to lose its strangeness as we continue today.

B. The gods We Make Up in Our Minds

            But let’s turn from looking at those gods and look at perhaps some more insidious gods. These gods are worse because, unlike the gods of Paganism, they masquerade as the LORD God. These are the gods that we make up in our minds when we think about who the LORD is and we bring in our preconceived notions and don’t allow God to tell us who He is.

·       These gods could be based on how we view our own fathers, placing their human characteristics on the god made up our mind. Even with the best of human fathers we will fall far short of the truth of who God truly is when we try to superimpose them onto our Creator.

·       Or perhaps we think of God like what C. S. Lewis called the “senile grandfather”. He has no issue with other religions or beliefs because all he wants is for everyone to have a good time while they live.

·       We can have an image of a god who is really excited to smite people down for displeasing him so you live anxiously, desperately hoping that you do not cause his wrath to be kindled.

·       Maybe instead of a smiter, you see god more like the fun police, just looking for people who are having too much fun and telling them to stop.

·       Or how about you only have an image of god that your parents offered, but all of your spiritual experience is second-hand through them because you’ve never actually taken it seriously enough to actually dive in and investigate what faith in God truly means.

·       Maybe you view god as a genie who is out to grant the wishes, or declarations of whoever will simply believe in him enough and so you try and try to make the genie happy, but no matter what you do you are not good enough.

·       Or perhaps you view god as a force of love that lives inside of all of us and we only need to tap into that “Christ consciousness” so that we all can live in peace.

            I could go on and on about these gods we create in our minds, but I am too limited on time. My point is this, if you base your perception of God on anything other than what HE says He is then you have created a god in your mind and you are not worshipping Yahweh, the God of the Bible.[1] You have turned to other gods.

            You might be pushing back on this, after all God sees the heart, right? That’s what He said to Samuel about David, isn’t it? He knows that knows that you mean to worship Him as you worship these figments of your imagination, right? With a little bit of Scriptural context, we can find that meaning and focus of that text is a little different from improper worship and is instead focused on character. We do see God addressing improper worship through Samuel in 1 Samuel 15 when Saul disobeys the orders of God to destroy everything in a city they conquer. Instead of destroying the livestock, Saul offers them as a sacrifice to God and gets this rebuke we see in verses 22-23:

“Has the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices,

as in obeying the voice of the LORD?

Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice,

and to listen than the fat of rams.                                               

23  For rebellion is as the sin of divination, (or witchcraft)

and presumption is as iniquity and idolatry.

Rebelling against the Word of the LORD is no different from witchcraft.

And making presumptions about what He likes and how he wants to be served is no different from iniquity, or sin against God, and no different from worshipping other gods.

What god do you serve?

C. The god of Self

            The final god that tempts us away from the One True God, is going to be one that each of us knows intimately. In fact, it is probably the god we worship most as individuals in America. Everyone in this room is either actively killing this god or they are serving it. It is the god of self. This is the god that originally drew humans away from the LORD. In the Garden of Eden, it was the desire to be like God, making decisions on what is good and evil that drew our ancestors, Adam and Eve, to rebel against the LORD and commit the original sin. That same desire to rebel against the commands of Yahweh on what is good and what is evil lives within each and every one of us. Recognizing this, the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 3: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.”

·       It is this god that leads us to choose to trust other gods over our Creator.

·       It is this god who leads us to put our faith in our retirement plans and the stock market.

·       It is this god who causes us to turn from our spouse and to look for intimacy in other places.

·       It is this god who causes us to throw away the possibility of us or our children going out to the dangerous places in the world in order to bring the hope of redemption to the Creator through the Good News, choosing safety and comfort over souls.

·       It is this god who causes us to fail to share the hope we have in Christ with our neighbors or coworkers.

·       It is this god who leads us to tribalistic tirades online, murdering fellow image bearers with our words and intentions.

·       It is this god who leads us to come to church every Sunday, sit in the seats, listen to the sermons, sing the songs, and never pray with our families or read the words of Yahweh at home.

·       It is this god who leads us to fight for our preference and never talk or think about what the command is of the God we supposedly worship every Sunday.

            The god of self is so worshipped in our culture that we don’t even really recognize the hold it has on our hearts. We allow cliches like “follow your heart”, “you do you”, and “God loves the sinner, but hates the sin” to rule our thoughts and actions and don’t ever turn to the Creator to see if those are even morally true and good statements. If we did turn to the God of the Bible we would see verses like:

·       Jeremiah 17:9 “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”

·       Romans 8:7 “For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot.”

·       Psalm 5:5-6 “The boastful shall not stand before your eyes; you hate all evildoers. You destroy those who speak lies; the Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.”

            Are we willing to stand against this god? Are we actively trying to kill this desire within us to be in control and to rebel against God?

D. The God of the Bible

            You see, in contrast to all these little gods that ensnare and subjugate you, the One True God, the God who Created us, is big and terrifying and mysterious and so good.

            So again I ask you, What god do you serve? Will you serve Yahweh? The good God who created you and everything that exists and who singularly knows what is best for you and for others. The God who walked with His creation in the Garden? The God who promised, even from the beginning to send someone to crush the serpent’s head when humanity rebelled? The God who revealed Himself to Moses in the burning bush, giving His name, Yahweh, so that the Israelites would know Him. Really quickly, any time you see the words “LORD” or “GOD” in all caps that is a translation choice that has existed for millennia, to sub out God’s name, Yahweh, with those words. I can’t get into the exact reasons why today, it will take too long, but I just wanted to offer that for those who do not know to help in reading and comprehending the Scriptures.

            Will you then serve Yahweh, the God who is faithful and patient, withholding his righteous wrath against your rebellion in order to allow you time to repent? Will you serve the God who did not withhold His own Son in His plan to bring us to redemption?

            Or will you, like the Israelites so regularly did, serve the gods of our culture? Will you continue to be captive to money, pleasure, safety, technology, and countless other things? Will you serve the gods you have created in your mind that don’t actually have anything to do with the God of the Bible? Will you continue serving your desires and your sin as if you were some sort of a god, able to choose good and evil for yourself?

            I will leave you with the words of Joshua from chapter 24 verses 15:

“Choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served… or the gods of those in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.”

Let’s pray.

[1] To consider more options of gods we create in our minds I recommend you check out the book Your God is Too Small by JB Phillips