Why All Other Gods Will Fail You
Edited transcript of a lesson written and presented by Chad Sychtysz on April 30, 2006.
Transcript by Michael Franklin; editing by Chad Sychtysz.
Tonight we’re going to go a little deeper in thought, although it’s not going to be too deep for anyone here, I think. We need to talk about why all other gods will fail you because someone might actually believe—even though his belief remains unspoken—“Well, I have a god that saves me. I don’t need to be saved by ‘your’ God!” So we need to address this position. We need to ask the question, “Well, what about all other gods?” Can you create a god of your own making? Can that god save you?
I want you to picture the nation of Israel, for example, in the Promised Land after their exodus from Egypt and forty years of wandering in the wilderness (and you can read about all that in Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). Moses is dead, Joshua is his successor, and he himself is near death. The people have seen great things in their lifetimes and have won many battles, but there are still some who are clinging to false gods. And so Joshua admonishes the people in Joshua 24:14-15. He says,
Now, therefore, fear the Lord and serve Him in sincerity and truth; and put away the gods which your fathers served beyond the [Euphrates] River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. If it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the [Euphrates] River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
So Joshua just lays it out and says, in essence, “You get to choose what god you will serve, but make a decision. And as for me and my house, we are going to serve Jehovah God. Whatever God you choose to serve is really the god you place your trust in the most.” That’s really what it comes down to. That’s what we’ve alluded to in our prior lessons, and that’s what we’ll talk about tonight.
Not only do we have the record of the miracles wrought for Israel, we also have the record of the miracles wrought at the time of the gospel’s revelation to us in Christ’ ministry, and especially that of His resurrection. And, like in the time of Joshua, we also have people today who claim allegiance to God at the same time they’re clinging to other gods. They’re claiming to serve Jehovah God, but they’re refusing to let go of other gods. God has given us every reason to believe in Him. Let’s just say it like it is: Christianity, when presented accurately, is logical and fact-based. It’s not a “wink, wink, nod, nod”-kind of religion, or a “let’s just hope that we all this is really true—cross our fingers and all”-kind of belief. It’s just not like that.
But not everyone is willing to believe. And it’s not because they can’t believe, as though it were impossible, because it is possible. It’s that they will not believe and, for whatever reason, they’ve got this other hope which they are unwilling to let go of. This happens; this is human nature. People do these sorts of things. And this is really the biggest reason why people will not become Christians—or, having taken the name of Christ, they will not take on the work of Christ, or they might not take on the cross that Christ asks them to bear, the cross of being a Christian [Matthew 16:24]. They know that having the name of Christ provides some security for them, but quite frankly, they have more faith in other gods than in the God of heaven.
You know Satan is the god of this world, and we have proved through this weekend that he is a liar, he is a murderer, he is a hater of God, he is a failure, he is a promiser of much with nothing to offer. And yet you look at the world around you and it is obvious that more people believe in Satan than do believe in God. There’s something terribly wrong with that picture. The imitation god has more followers that whom Paul calls the “living and true God” in 1 Thessalonians 1:9.
Nonetheless, the gospel is clear: all other gods, including Satan himself, will ultimately fail, and they will fail you. Not only are these gods unable to save themselves but they are unable to save you. Satan himself is already doomed and he knows it. On the other hand, Jesus Christ lives forever by the virtue and power of His own authority, and He is able to save all who come to Him. The question is: which God will you choose? As Joshua asked, “The gods over here, the gods over there, or Jehovah God? As for me and my house,” he said, “We will serve the Lord.” What are you and your house serving? What “God” do you follow?
The Uselessness of Idolatry
God delivered Israel with unprecedented signs and wonders. Think about the ten plagues against Egypt, and how God protected the Israelites from those same plagues at the time. Think of the pillar of fire and cloud with which God led Israel; the parting of the Red Sea; the overthrow of the Israelite’s enemies; the provision of the Promised Land. Nonetheless, despite all these things, Israel really struggled with letting go of idolatry. When we talk about idolatry, we are talking about the worship of, or the affection toward, false gods. And idolatry has a lot less to do with the thing being worshipped than it does the person who worships it. It has a lot to do with a person’s heart, the attitude of the one who gives such worship. And so it is today: an idol is anything that a person puts his trust in, puts his hope in, and gives his allegiance to, more than he does God. That is an idol by definition—at least that’s how God defines that.
An idol cannot bring itself to life. You have to give life to an idol because an idol is incapable of providing its own life. In fact, what you find concerning those who are engaged in idolatry, their idol sucks the life out of those who worship it. In Isaiah 44:9-17—I invite you to read that on your own; it’s a very interesting account there but time will not allow us to delve into that tonight—God mocks idols and idol worshippers. He says (in essence), “Here’s a man who takes a tree and he cuts it in half. One half of the tree is used for firewood to cook his food, and to warm himself. The other half he fashions into an idol. He sets it up, bows down before it, and says, ‘Deliver me O god!’” God ridicules the very idea. Here the man subjectively, arbitrarily chose one half of the log and burned it. And he chose the other half of the log and made it into a god! We look at that and say, “That’s just kind of silly, isn’t it?”—and that’s exactly God’s point. It is really silly, but idolaters do not realize how ridiculous they are in that they have this idol that cannot give life and it cannot preserve life, yet they forfeit their own soul in order to give life to this idol! And for what? For what benefit? What do they get out of that?
An idol always requires sacrifice. Of course, the ancients sacrificed animals and sometimes they even sacrificed people to their idols [2 Kings 17:13-17]. But even today, your idol, if you choose one, will require your sacrifice, your time, your energy, your money, and whatever else it is that you have to give to it to feed it constantly in order to keep it “alive.” Sometimes that even includes people: your spouse, your children, your grandchildren, your friends—whatever it is that you need to feed this idol because it cannot sustain itself. And if you stop giving your time, your energy, your money, and everything else including all your attention, that idol dies. It has no power of its own. Its life is completely dependent on your life.
Furthermore, it is evident that the heart of the idolater becomes like the idol that he worships. In other words, if the idol itself is cold and lifeless, if it is hard and unfeeling, if it is unable to love and unable to care, so is the one who worships the idol. He becomes all those same things.
Finally, idols are useless in defending against divine judgment. There’s an interesting passage in Isaiah 31:7, where God says (concerning the day of Israel’s judgment), “Every man will cast away his silver idols and his gold idols which your sinful hands have made.” Can you imagine that? In times of prosperity, when everything’s okay, Israel sets up the idol and bows down to it and says, “O deliver me, my god.” But when the wrath of Jehovah comes against them, they’ll throw that idol aside and run for their lives because that thing never could save them anyway! And nothing can stand in the face of God’s judgment. So God says, “Your sinful hands have made this idol and I’m going to bring this to judgment—this thing that you have done.”
The Need to Worship Something
But people are naturally inclined to worship something. Ironically, this is another proof—one that we didn’t allude to earlier in the series—of the existence of the spiritual soul of man. Animals operate on instinct and appetite; people operate on physical appetite and spiritual desire. Animals don’t show any evidence of any spiritual desire; they just operate on instinct. Everything that plants and animals do, they do as a matter of physical survival. This drives all other needs that we might see in those creatures.
People also respond to the need to survive, of course, but we have needs that cannot be explained in mere physical context. We have a need for love, for example. We have a need for acceptance. We have a need for fellowship. We have a need for intimacy. We have a need for redemption—and I don’t mean just the redemption of the soul. We need to be redeemed from guilt. We need redemption from our poor decisions, our failures, the losses that we have incurred. These things have nothing to do with our physical person. They have nothing to do with a physical, flesh-and-blood creature; they have nothing to do with that by itself. These needs appeal to the spiritual qualities, the spiritual dynamics, of people themselves. Every person has a soul; therefore, every person needs those things.
But such needs are often corrupted by selfishness. When we talk about selfishness, we’re really talking about satanic things, satanic qualities: lust, greed, envy, covetousness, sexual deviancy, self-exaltation, self-gratification, and domination over other people. These are our needs gone bad, if you will. They’re needs that we’re trying to fill, but we’re trying to fill them in a satanic way.
I want you to think about some passages with regard to this. In Ephesians 5:5, for example, look at what Paul says here: “For this you know with certainty, that no immoral or impure person or covetous man, who is an idolater, has an inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.” Think about that idea that Paul is getting at here. He is equating this immorality and covetousness with idolatry. He says that that is an idolatrous man. Do people have a problem with immorality and impurity and covetousness today? Yes. Do we then have a problem with idolatry today? We most certainly do! We may not have our little shrines or some little household idol that we set up on the shelf to bow down to, but we most certainly do have a problem with idolatry. Here’s another passage: Colossians 3:5, where Paul says, “Consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry.” Do we have a problem today with evil desire and greed? Doesn’t that in some way define part of our culture? Do we have a problem then with idolatry? Someone says, “Idolatry is what the ancients did. We have other problems today!” No, we have the same problem; we just have different names for it, or it might look differently—it’s a different package. These are forms of idolatry, though, and they are very present in our modern age.
We all have spiritual cravings that we try to satisfy or gratify with physical, sensual, or sexual pleasures. And our methods may even appear to work for some time. But they are often very temporary and often at the expense of one’s well being. At the very best, they are only limited to this life. They will not help you any more than in this life.
God the Creator has made us prone to worship; we are a worship-prone people. But He will not force us to worship Him! This is a personal decision that each person has to make: to choose God over and above all other gods, to choose God over any false god or man-made idol. As for God, He says, “I know no god but Myself.” In Isaiah 44:8, God says, “Is there any God besides Me…? I know of none.” But, of course, man claims to be smarter than God and thus creates his own god with his own hands. Such is the arrogance of man! God says, “No, this doesn’t exist!” or “No, this cannot happen!” and man comes back and says, “Well, I think you’re wrong!” And so we make gods to save us.
Contemporary Idols
I want you to consider several of our modern idols today. People are idols; we worship people. Man is as close as we can get to God, therefore many people will worship the god that they can see and hear and feel as opposed to the invisible, unseen God of heaven. And those people that we worship and idolize might be our parents or other relatives. They might be our spouses. They might be our educated, intellectual people among us. They might be our clergy. They most certainly are our celebrities. You cannot look into our culture—you cannot look into our society—and walk away without realizing that we are worshipers of people. We have made people our idols.
And then there is, of course, money—money which is man-made and man-supported. U.S. currency, for example is sustained by “fiat,” which means its value exists by declaration of the government alone. Have you noticed this? We no longer base our currency on the gold standard or even on the silver standard. We basically have taken all the fixed standards away and our money is worth what it’s worth only because the government says so. When the government disappears, or the government fails, guess what happens to your money that we’ve been worshipping? Well, that goes away too! We have historical precedent for this. Does anyone know anything about “Confederate” money, which was printed based upon a government that existed for a short time in this country and no longer exists? What about the usefulness of that money? Now it’s in the hands of collectors and that’s about it. It has no monetary value. But people worship money nonetheless.
We worship technology (and when I say “we,” I just mean “people” in general). No matter what happens, we believe that machines or computers or science will deliver us. So we rely and depend upon those things. However, the human soul is so much more powerful and complex than anything that a machine or a computer program can address. We can’t fix moral or spiritual problems with man-made machines and computer programs. That doesn’t stop us from trying, though, does it? And so we do worship our technology.
We worship medicine. We look to doctors and pharmaceutical companies to deliver us from the “evils” of aging and disease and birth defects and viruses and bacteria and, yes, even our own self-indulgent living. We hope that they come up with something that will allow us to carry on in the way we’ve become accustomed without having to change. We don’t want to change our lifestyles; we want medicine to make our lifestyles trouble-free. We’re hoping, then, that the “god” of medicine will find favor with all the trust and adoration we give to it.
We worship our government and our military. We claim to want to be “free and independent” people, but the fact is: we look to our government as our savior, our redeemer. We hope the government will bail us out from our poor decisions, or we hope the government will bail us out from our disasters. Think of 9/11, or Hurricane “Katrina” and so on—the hurricane mess down there in Louisiana and elsewhere. Or we try to save the world by “sending in the troops.” We really do think that our military is going to save us. Again, we do not want to change our lifestyles, we just want the military to protect the lifestyles to which we have become accustomed. Thus, we are compelled to sacrifice our sons and daughters to the “god” of government and military.
We worship the media. We have TV, we have movies, we have Internet, and the news media. They all provide what we crave: entertainment, escapism, voyeurism, sensationalism, graphic blood and sex, gossip, and vengeance—all of the forms of feel-good religion and made-man salvation. All the things that we crave, it’s out there! Anything you want, it’s out there! People worship it. They give their time, their money, their possessions, their spouses, their children, even their souls to worship these things.
We cannot address this list without mentioning sex. We worship sex, or we worship the sexual creature, if you will. By bowing down to the image of the human body, we think we’re going to achieve something that we do not already have. There is no purpose for all of this except for self-gratification. No wonder pornography is, in this country alone (not to mention the world), a multi-billion dollar industry.
We have our narcotics that we worship. We have our addictions to and dependence upon pain-killers, whether they are real or imagined, literal or figurative. I’m talking about anything that tries to relax us or take away the pain in order to fill the spiritual emptiness and vanity of our lives. We look to whatever it takes to take away the pain, to give us the next high, to give us the next pick-me-up, to help us escape from the drudgery of who we really are without the fellowship of a living and true God.
The Destruction of Idolaters
You cannot tell me that we are not an idolatrous people, because we worship all kinds of idols. And all such worship does not rely upon the God of heaven. All these things [that I’ve mentioned] rely upon the intelligence, creativity, and effort of man. They are our modern idols.
God allows everyone to choose who or what each person will worship. But just because a person chooses something to worship does not mean that that choice is equally valid with another, or that it will lend to a positive result. You see, people confuse “freedom of choice” with the ability to choose one’s freedom. We think those two things are synonymous, and they are not. God gives you the freedom to choose, but it does not mean that just because you have the freedom of many multiple choices that every choice is going to lead you in the right direction. In fact, there’s only one choice that works. God allows you to choose it, or you can choose another. The truth is: not all choices lead to spiritual freedom. And every choice other than life with Jesus Christ leads to spiritual death. As Paul says in Romans 6:23, “The wages of sin is death.”
There are many false teachers peddling all kinds of freedom out there. Second Peter 2:19, Peter says that they promise freedom while they themselves are slaves to corruption. That sounds like Satan himself, doesn’t it? Isn’t Satan a peddler of false freedom? Doesn’t he try to sell you a package of so-called “freedom”? Yet he himself is doomed to his own torment in the future. In Revelation 20:10, it says that Satan himself will be cast into hell, “tormented day and night for ever and ever.” But then a few verses later, in verse 15, it says, “If anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.” Satan’s going there and so is everyone else who has worshipped him or worshipped whatever idol that he sold them. In other words, that person will join Satan’s company and his suffering and misery forever. Now, I understand that there isn’t a literal “lake of fire” with flames and so on. These are symbols to depict something really awful and eternal. Nonetheless, let me just say it in this way: you don’t want to be where Satan is because it will be an awful end—not only for him, but it will be an awful end for you.
The Glorious Future of the Faithful
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Those who choose to follow the Lord will be forever with the Lord. I’d like to read a much more positive account over here in Revelation chapter 22. Again, we’re looking at a vision that John is seeing. Jesus is showing John a vision, and even though these things may not be taken absolutely literal, nonetheless they point to literal truths. So think about the picture, the ideas that are being presented in Revelation 22:1:
Then he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb, in the middle of its street. On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. There will no longer be any curse; and the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and His bond-servants will serve Him; they will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads. And there will no longer be any night; and they will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them; and they will reign forever and ever.
This is not a myth. This is not a fantasy. This is not a fairy tale. This is not for the lucky or the fortunate or the financially secure. You don’t have to be super-intelligent or good-looking or have perfect health to enjoy what He has promised here. Nothing on earth is so powerful so as to prevent you from being in this picture—except for one thing: your own failure to choose the only God that can save you. Because all other gods are going to fail you.
In Hebrews 13:5-6, if we cling to the God of heaven, God Himself says, “‘I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you.’ So that we may confidently say, ‘The Lord is my Helper, I will not be afraid. What will man do to me?’” That doesn’t mean that man won’t do anything to you; it means man will never be able to do anything to you that will sever you from your God. Do you trust Him that much, to serve Him even to that end?
What Matters in the End
In 1 John 2:15-17, John tells us not to love the world, or the things in this world, or the passions of men, or all the lusts of the world, or all the lusts of the eyes. These things are not from the Father; they are from the world, which means they’re from us. They’re satanic in nature. John tells us not to worship these, or to cling to these, or to love these things, because they’re all going to pass away when the world passes away. But he says in the last verse there, “But the one who does the will of God abides forever.” Those things that are not from the Father are the creation of man; they are idols and they are idolatry. They cannot save us and they will not last. But the things that are from God are eternal. They most certainly will last and those who cling to those things will last forever as well. So I invite you to look around this room, look around this city, look around this life of yours and say to yourself, “What of all of this will survive?”
Someday all this will be gone. It will all be gone and you will be standing before the Lord. What will you have then? Think very seriously about that, for it is not going away just because you choose not to think about it. Someday all this will be gone and there will be nothing that remains except your soul and the record of your life in the mind of God as He recalls to you that life that you have lived. And He will ask you, “Did you trust in Me in this life?”
So be careful what you trust in. In the end, you and I will be with whatever “God” we worshipped here on this earth. If it is false gods of our own making, then those idols will be cast into the fire with us. But if it is the God of heaven, then we will live in His presence forever. Either way, we will forever be with the gods that we chose, or the God that we chose.
In John 3:16, Christ said, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” This is a promise that Satan can never make; this is a promise that Satan could never keep. But God’s promise is supported by the testimony of the Holy Spirit, by witnesses of the miracles that were wrought, and by the ultimate resurrection of Jesus Christ. How can Satan’s offer ever compare with what God offers? Or, how about our man-made gods, or our own efforts? How can these ever compare to what God has provided?
Our intent throughout this whole weekend has been to provide anyone who would listen with God’s truth about your soul. So the intent of our entire series, and of this lesson, is to bring you to your senses, if necessary. Our intent is to get you past any of the delusions, opinions, façades, or anything else that you might have constructed otherwise, and to get right to the core of what God has said about your soul.
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