Discusion board

   The God of the Bible “made all, owns all, and rules all.”[1] He is incomparable, sovereign, and unique from everything and everyone else.[2] It is God’s desire that all should know him, therefore, part of God’s mission is necessarily to battle other gods and idolatry.[3]

            Whether other gods are imagined or real spiritual beings, the only true God is in a class of his own. He alone is creator, the ruler of all, and nothing created, physical or spiritual, is comparable to him.[4] While other gods from the time of the Bible were believed to exert agency through their respective nations, the God of the Bible controls the history all nations.[5] Other nations at that time perceived the defeat of a nation as synonymous with the defeat of that nation’s god; yet, the only true God claims responsibility for the national defeat of his own people as an act of judgement.[6] In comparison to the only true God, the gods and idols are nothing, but they are something to those who worship them.[7] However, regardless of if it is wood or stone or a spiritual being, what people worship is something created that is unable to save them.[8]

            Because the worship of anything other than God denies God of that which is rightfully his, part of the mission of God is leading people “to acknowledge the only true and living God.”[9] God battles those that seek to rival him because he himself is the greatest good for us. He hates idolatry because of how it harms people.[10] Wright emphasizes that as we confront idolatry as part of God’s mission, we must discern how to approach it appropriately, based on the examples we see in Scripture.[11] We are to witness in confronting idolatry, but it is God who wages war for us against idolatry and the gods.[12]

 

[1]. Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (IVP Academic, Downers Grove, IL, 2006), 71.

[2]. Ibid., 77-80.

[3]. Ibid., 178.

[4]. Ibid., 80.

[5]. Ibid., 83-84.

[6]. Ibid., 96.

[7]. Ibid., 139.

[8]. Isaiah 43:10-11, (English Standard Version).

[9]. Wright, 171-172.

[10]. Ibid., 177.

[11]. Ibid., 188.

[12]. Ibid., 178.