What’s the big deal?

• false deities
• bad role models
• worship is due to God alone

False gods

Greek gods were made in the image of man. They didn’t know how to satisfy the deepest desires of their heart, so the personified human emotions. If they get angry, they go to Mars. If they crave for sexual pleasure, they go to Aphrodite. And so forth. At the end of the day, they were never satisfied. Rituals were made to escape the pain of existence. Dionysus asked us to get drunk so we forget about reality. Christianity however, it’s us made in the image of God. Our heart was made for the eternal union with our Divine Father. God isn’t created, He is rediscovered. If we go back in time, we’ll find that there’s a Creator behind this universe, and uncaused First Cause. Israel was right about God since the beginning. Man was a lost orphan.

Tired of all the superstitions of humanity, man had moved to atheism. By doing so, man made himself an orphan is a vast & scary universe. What else is there to life? A matter of evolutionary survival? It has empty himself spiritually from the infinite love of the Creator. Once it’s dry, it seeks to fill this thirst. But it doesn’t want to get hurt again by false belief.

Pagan gods were “created” by man to help their civilizations for specific tasks. They were hopeless. They need ‘something’ beyond themselves to motivate their existence.

If you rely on X, then your season of harvest will flourish. The problem is, they are only local gods, applicable only to your own community. You can’t harvest in Antarctica, there’s snow all year long. It is man-made.

The pagan gods were superior to human being in power, but as flaw and limited as human beings (ex: Zeus cheated on many wives).

Idols were represented in statues in human forms. Or mixed with animals. God can’t be represent by anything in this world, since He’s not part of this world.

The pagan gods were personified forces of nature, so they are part of this world. God is outside of this world. God transcend nature.

The pagan gods have good and evil gods. Some of them are equal in power. Osiris and Seth (maybe those 2) battle each other every day, thus turning from day to night. God is sovereign and supreme, and have no equal antagonist. Satan is just a creation of God who rebel.

Because of magic, people could take control over nature, and thus, take control over a god or goddess in the divine realm. God can’t be controlled, neither by magic or special prayer. Magic was a sin because it was a mistaken view that God is limited in power.

The pagan gods have a theogony, meaning that they have birth and a beginning. That notion is absent in the Bible. God is eternal, unaffected by time. God is simply is. God doesn’t age, doesn’t mature. Time begin to exist at the Big Bang. If we put the Greek gods in a timeline, they were born before the human being.

The God of Israel is much closer to the God envisioned by Aristotle, which himself, reject the pagan gods in favour of the unmoved Mover.

Contrast that to the God of Christianity, He’s a universal God, creator of Heaven and earth, who exist everywhere, as the perfect Being. He can be perceive by scientific deduction (cosmology, 1st cause, etc), historical events (prophecies), and numerous other reasons. In Christianity, we believe universally that God created each of us, that each of us has committed sin, and is in need of repentance to get our way to Heaven through Jesus Christ.

Against the Pharaoh

What best explained the story of the 10 plagues in Egypt was a conflicting cosmic battle between Yahweh and the Egyptians gods. The Nile was a god (Hapi). The sun was a god (Ra). The son of the Pharaoh was himself a deity for the people, and having his ‘death’ means that their incarnated ‘god’ has been defeated & Yahweh is Lord.

Identity of the gods

The pagan gods were personified forces of nature. The sun was a god. The sky was a god. The moon was a god. The water was a god. That’s why they were polytheists.

The Greek gods were made in the image of man.

Cosmogyny

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Magic

Since the pagan gods were personified forces of nature, it makes sense that the usage of magic would make it possible to ‘control’ those forces of nature or a spiritual entity, and thus, being able to manipulate the divine realm.

Bad role models

The pagan gods were bad role models.

Christianity transformed the world

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