Cassian's Recap: Do gods still exist today?

Biblically Speaking

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:00

Hey everybody, this is Cassine Blino, your host of Biblically Speaking, and this is my post -episode recap.

00:09

This is going to be a recap of the episode with Dr. Joseph Miller, where we discuss, do gods still exist today?

00:15

And I mean that in a genuine sense, because if we look at history, we know about polytheistic religions, we know that there were gods, like multiple gods, hundreds of gods, and I guess my background, if I'm going to again speak through a

00:30

Sunday school mentality, is I was raised to be like, well I've got my Christian god and you've got your

00:36

Hindu god, and which one's going to be true, we'll find out when we die. I think that is where we're starting here, because I want to know, do other gods still exist?

00:46

How do they exist? And more specifically, what's the differences between the polytheistic origin story and my

00:53

Hebrew Almighty God creation story that we see in Genesis? What are the key differences?

00:59

And I think I'm just curious, what did people believe before? So if you want to hear the full episode that was literally spoken to you by an expert, listen to the episode with Dr.

01:10

Joseph Miller. These are just my thoughts, because at the end of the day, did he answer my question? Do other gods exist today, and how did they start?

01:17

What were their creation story, and how does it differ from Genesis? My main thoughts about this is,

01:24

Dr. Joseph Miller does a really great job breaking down the timeline of it, and kind of showing why certain things happen in the

01:31

Bible, that we just kind of say like, oh, okay, why was that included? How does that play a part? He shows very clearly how.

01:39

And the way that we start off is the Tower of Babel, and how this was people worshipping false gods, because the gods of people that were dispersed from the

01:48

Tower of Babel were in nations that were led by these fallen entities. Doesn't that sound familiar?

01:55

Which when he mentioned this, I was like, this is exactly what Josh Waltman was talking about on the

02:00

Unseen Realm episode, is that when you have the Tower of Babel, people were dispersed, and then

02:05

God sent out his angels to lead those nations, but those angels said, no, I want these people to worship me, not

02:12

God. So they defected. They went rogue. Now they're demons. They don't worship God.

02:17

They're not letting these people worship God. They're letting these people worship them. So now you've got these people, they've got a religion, they're worshipping what we can see now are demons, but to them, they are gods, and they need to reverse engineer a origin story.

02:33

So let's say it's for greed. I don't know. I wasn't there. Now we need to reverse engineer. Well, we got to build a temple because there's a

02:40

God, okay? So the creation story of these other religions led by demons are an origin story that's come out of reverse engineering, of justification for the human sin, versus a

02:52

God creation story is it's the opposite, that he intended to create humans, that he has a purpose, that we have a

03:00

God, so let's build him a temple. Let's build him a tabernacle. We see this in Exodus and Leviticus, is

03:06

I'm a God, build me a temple, versus there's a temple, we need to find a God, if that makes sense. So if we look at Genesis language, there's a lot of stuff like gardens, the creation of the world in seven days, there's a flood, and we see those, a garden, a flood, the seven -day creation theory.

03:22

We see that in other religions, and we see that in the Babylonian, the

03:28

Akkadian version. They have a creation story. They all have these similarities. It's just slightly twisted, and this is the meat of it.

03:36

This is what was really interesting to me, is that, okay, we have the creation story. We know, we've read

03:42

Genesis, we're Christians. So what was theirs? He said, there's a lot of different versions, but the

03:47

Babylonian, Akkadian version is called the Enuma Elish, and this is where you see the hierarchy of power between gods and humans, or higher being gods are more powerful, have more value, and then you've got lower gods, which are less value, and they serve those gods, and then you've got humans, which is like slavery, it's like bottom of the barrel.

04:08

And so, totally different from Genesis, where he breathed life into us. He gave us jobs to have dominion and subdue the earth.

04:16

In these Akkadian Babylonian stories, it's the opposite. In Enuma Elish, there's essentially a greater god, lesser god.

04:23

The greater gods are going to kill the lesser god, and the blood of the lesser gods that died mixes with the clay of the earth, and through that, you have humans to do the bidding.

04:34

They have no purpose. They have no intent. There's no design. We don't see the hand of God in that story.

04:39

We see an outcome of violence. There's even other stories, like Medugan, Tiamat, and it's essentially a female god and a male god.

04:49

He kills her and rips her body in half. So again, this violence, this conquering, that is their origin story, not love and intent and creation, design, complexity, and creativity.

05:01

No, rips the female god's body in half. Half of it goes to the sky, half of it goes to the earth.

05:07

So again, the degradation of the human life doesn't mean anything, that you just use that to create other things.

05:13

It's a life from bloodshed versus purpose and intent. I think that it is really interesting that people heard this and they were like, that's cuckoo bananas.

05:24

I won't believe that. People heard that and believed it. We have to live in that truth, and they're not weird for that.

05:30

They're not even dumb for that, because if I'm going to be honest, we do that. That's us, and we'll get there.

05:36

But essentially, the Israelites, the ancient people, heard these stories of polytheistic gods, heard these stories of violent origins, and they believed it.

05:45

They lived in it. They celebrated it. That was their religion. And if we move forward with that knowledge, that they lived that, they believed that, we can then look at the characters in the

05:54

Old Testament and be like, oh, that's why they reacted that way.

06:00

Oh, that's why God did that. That was random, like all of the plagues that he gave to Pharaoh.

06:06

Why did he choose locusts? Why did he turn the Nile into blood? Obviously crazy cuckoo things that God was doing, but why locusts?

06:16

Why frogs? Why blood in the Nile? And papyrus isn't cheap.

06:22

This was all intentional, and it's because God knew that he was speaking to people that their gods were the

06:29

God of water, their gods were the God of crops, were the God of livestock, were the God of specific animals or fertility.

06:36

They worshiped that. To them, that was the ultimate deity. And here comes a Hebrew God that says, I have power over those things.

06:42

That Nile that you worship, I can turn it into blood. These crops you rely on, I can ruin them with locusts.

06:48

Those animals that you worship, the cow, I'm going to kill it. I'm going to create a famine. And so that was a very intentional design in order for God to speak to people that worship these things as gods can now be like, oh, we're dealing with a bigger boss.

07:00

Even after they see, oh, we got a bigger boss, we've got a boss God that can split the

07:08

Nile, that can create a walkway through the river. You would think, and we look at these poor

07:14

Israelites and we're like, idiots, how did you see the splitting of the Nile and then create a golden calf to worship?

07:22

How did you see all the wonders of that God? And then three days later be like, uh, what are we going to eat?

07:28

And like have doubt and have worry and have anxiety. Like you're dealing with the biggest boss ever. And so God had to really pull out all the tricks to be like,

07:37

I understand your hearts. I understand that you don't know me yet.

07:42

You're unfamiliar. I'm showing you my capabilities, but you don't trust me yet because you just, you have more trust in the comforts that you're used to.

07:49

You would rather go back to Egypt and be a slave and worship your other gods, your gods of Ra because you know them and you're familiar with them.

07:57

Even though I just showed you that I could split the Nile, that I could create all of these plagues, you still would prefer that because that to you is more familiar and comfortable.

08:07

And how often do we do that? How often are we like, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, no church is cool, but like I really love sleeping in and I, I really love my yoga class and my workout class and that's like during church and I just,

08:20

I would rather do that. We do that. They're doing that. And this was thousands of years ago.

08:27

We're not any different. And God knows that. All right. That's the good news is God's not ignorant to our hearts and desires.

08:34

So when they start seeing this like, Oh, this new God, this new Yahweh who splits the Nile and causes these plagues, he's cool.

08:42

But I still like love my other gods. And now it's not just Yahweh as the one and only the

08:48

God almighty, you know, it's there's Yahweh, who's this cool new God among the lineup of other gods that I still worship and he's still not the main player.

08:58

So that to me was very identifying. And that's like, Oh, we still have gods today.

09:03

Like to me, that was the answer to the question is like, do we still have gods today? Yeah. It's called comfort. It's called gratification.

09:09

It's called a 401k. We worship all of those things. A perfect family, perfect, like meeting perfect beauty standards, having a good job, gods, all of those are gods.

09:20

They might look a little different. Sacrifices are a little different, still the same thing. They're still, there's a lineup of things we worship and sure are

09:28

Christian gods in the lineup, but so are all those other things. And to me that was mind blowing.

09:35

So yeah, we do have gods today. That's what they look like though. They're not Baal, they're not, you know, the

09:41

Hindu gods or whatever. It's that. And even as a Christian, we're polytheistic, which,

09:46

Oh, that knocks me off my feet. Some other really cool things that I'm just going to kind of briefly touch on is that we see similar events in other religions, like Noah's flood.

09:56

We see stories of this flood in other religions. Like the Epic of Gilgamesh also mentions a flood.

10:03

And I was posing this to Joseph Miller, like, how do we know that, you know, Noah's flood is the one to believe when like, we see it in other epics,

10:10

I kind of that, like, how do we know that like ours is true? And we just have to know that the Bible has the most evidence to support it.

10:17

If we're going to look at like this one event and be like, is this one likely? Well, look at the whole Bible. All of that was unlikely yet it has evidence to support it.

10:25

And then we kind of talk about marriage. He says like the point of marriage, like the way that God is saying, like, do not marry outside your beliefs.

10:32

And it wasn't because like, Oh, theirs are worse. You're going to dilute your value by marrying outside your religion.

10:39

It was a very intentional, like when you marry someone of a different belief system, you marry that belief system.

10:47

Those beliefs are now your beliefs. You don't keep that separate because in marriage, it's a full unity.

10:52

So when God's saying, go into Canaan and be there, but do not marry them because then you will marry into their religion.

10:59

And I need someone that is going to be Christian. And so when God shows Abraham and he's like, you go in and defeat these people.

11:07

It's not because Abraham's ethnicity or his belief systems were better than the people that he was attacking.

11:15

Abraham was chosen because his lineage is what led to Jesus. Essentially, we needed to go down and fulfill the one to salvation, not bring in other belief systems.

11:26

And I think people try to like frame it as like, Oh, this race or this group is better than the other. That's not it at all.

11:32

Okay. On top of that, you might be thinking like, well, those Canaanites, those poor Canaanites, God came in and he's like, don't mix with them.

11:40

They've got the wrong beliefs. They can't even marry in because we need to make sure that the belief system is going to lead to Jesus, the one true salvation.

11:47

And God is faithful. And he essentially outlines like, listen, I'm still going to give these Canaanites a chance to turn away from their pagan beliefs and know

11:54

God. I'm going to give everybody that chance. And that begs the question of like, really, God's going to make sure every single person has a chance to experience him and they have the choice to say yes or no.

12:06

What about the babies and the Amazonian rainforest? Are they going to experience

12:11

God? And it's one of those questions where it's like, I don't know. Okay. How, how could I possibly know that?

12:16

How could I give you an answer about that? But I know my God and I know what I have faith in.

12:21

And he says he does do that. He says that he will be true and will give everybody opportunity and will bring the word to everybody.

12:28

So I have to believe in that. And that's simply the end of the sentence. That's the end of the response.

12:33

It's like, I have faith in a God that said he would do something. So I believe he will. And for us to be like, well, I don't think that's possible.

12:39

So it's probably untrue. That logic is not as smart. Just because we can't prove it doesn't mean it's untrue.

12:45

Moving on. Do we have gods today? Yeah. They're called comfort. They look a little different.

12:51

And will everybody have that opportunity to experience God? Yes. I believe so. Is it really important that we understand the mentalities of the

12:59

Israelites in the Old Testament? Yes. Because we're them. And God has shown that he will still repeatedly show his glory to reach these people and give them that authentic opportunity to choose him, knowing what we believe and knowing about the comforts that we hold close.

13:14

This is just me. If you want to hear the full, real, way better explained explanation for this topic, listen to the full episode with Dr.

13:23

Joseph Miller. Also, biblically speaking is growing. Follow us on Instagram to know about all of the updates.

13:30

But if you want to tune in to listener support, we have options. We have Venmo if you just want to send a one -time donation.

13:36

There's options for monthly contributions to support the show. Everything I do for the show isn't free, nor is it cheap, and it all adds up.

13:44

So I'd appreciate any contribution to keep this going so we can keep finding guests to give us really simplified answers in the

13:51

Bible to help us grow in our faith. We're also building a school community that essentially allows you to ask these scholars your questions and gives you access to the things that helped me completely transform in a year.

14:02

I want to share that. All those things are available in the show notes below, so go ahead and join. But thanks so much for listening to Biblically Speaking.