Keeping God Invisible

During his teenage years, Robert participated in youth retreats intended to communicate the basics of the Christian faith and to train young people in the practice of key spiritual disciplines such as prayer and Bible study. Nearly twenty-five years after his last retreat, Robert ran into a woman who had helped lead these retreats. To his dismay, he learned that she was now practicing Wicca alongside Christianity. She did not think there was anything wrong with combining the two; rather, she believed worshiping the goddess alongside Jesus enriched her experience of the divine. She was willing to say that Jesus has the highest place among deities but not that He is the only true God.

This woman had adopted a form of what religion scholars call henotheism. Henotheists, like polytheists, believe in the existence and worship of many gods and goddesses. These beings are even parallel to one another in many ways. But while polytheists generally believe that the various divine beings are all basically equal, a henotheist believes that there is one chief God to whom our highest worship should be directed while we show worship at the same time to other deities as well. When a henotheist encounters a new god or goddess, he does not give up his worship of the god he has been worshiping; rather, he just adds the new deity as a being to be praised alongside but under the god he has been serving.

Henotheism was the prevailing religious worldview of the ancient Near East, and it was the outlook that came to characterize the Israelites before the exile. For the most part, before the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles, the old covenant community did not reject Yahweh, the covenant Lord of Israel, as the highest god; rather, they just worshiped other deities with Yahweh, giving them a kind of lesser worship. In so doing, they were violating the law of God, as we see in today’s passage. The Lord told the Israelites that they could not make gods to be “with” Him (Ex. 20:22–23). This provides additional clarity to the first commandment. To say that Israel should not have any god before Yahweh (v. 3) might imply that one could serve other deities as long as they were not served before Him, that worshiping other gods was acceptable as long as Yahweh was given first place. That is not the case at all. We cannot split our allegiance between God and other deities. No one can serve two masters (Matt. 6:24). God will be our only God, or we do not love Him at all.