Which
Gods Will You Serve?
August
13, 2021
Several years ago
when I had moved into a house near the church I was serving at the time a
member of that church gave me a little plaque that had written on it, “As for
me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” I thought it a nice sentiment,
but at the time I didn’t know where it came from or its the context, if any.
Well, it turns out it comes from chapter 24 of the book of Joshua. In the story
in which it appears Joshua, Moses’ successor, had led the Israelites across the
Jordan into the land they believed their god Yahweh had promised their
ancestors that they would possess. He has fought various battles against the
inhabitants of that land, most famously the battle of Jericho. He has distributed
the land he has taken from its inhabitants to the twelve tribes of Israel.[1]
At the beginning of chapter 24 he has gathered “the elders, the heads, the
judges, and the officers” of Israel at the city of Shechem. He says to them:
Now therefore revere the Lord,
and serve him in sincerity and faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors
served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. Now if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will
serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or
the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my
household, we will serve the Lord.
Joshua 24:14-15.[2]
We see that Joshua has given the
leaders of the people the choice of serving Yahweh or serving the gods of the
people of Mesopotamia (“beyond the River”) or of the Egyptians. Make the choice
he says, but “as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord,” that is, we will serve our
Israelite god Yahweh and not some foreign gods.
We know from
parts of Hebrew scripture that come after Joshua that the Hebrew people were
constantly being drawn to the worship of the local gods and goddesses of Canaan,
especially the god Baal and his consort Ashera. Perhaps they were drawn to Baal
because Baal was, among other things, a weather god . In the ancient religion
of the Hebrews Yahweh was a war god and nothing else. It’s good to have a war
god I guess when you’re fleeing the Egyptian empire and conquering the people
of the land you intend to possess. Once you’ve done that and become settled in
the land however, most of the time what you need is a rain god to facilitate
the growth of your crops. A war god is pretty much useless in that regard. In
any event, the choice of which gods to serve was a big question in ancient
Israel.[3]
Now, I assume
that choosing between the war god of ancient Israel and the gods of other
ancient peoples isn’t an issue for you. I know that it isn’t an issue for me. So
does that mean that the choice Joshua put before his people so very long ago
means nothing to us? No, I don’t think it means nothing to us. I suppose if I
did I wouldn’t be writing this blog post. I think that God actually calls all
of us continually to choose what god we will serve, but to understand what I
and a lot of other people mean by that contention we need first to consider
what the word “god,” not God, means in that statement.
We find the
answer to that question in the work of the great 20th century
German/American theologian Paul Tillich. Tillich taught that every person has
what he called an “ultimate concern.” By that he meant that for every person
there is something that is more important to them than anything else. Tillich
said that a person’s ultimate concern is that person’s god. It is that to which
she looks for fulfillment, care, meaning, and reward. A person’s ultimate
concern is that to which he will sacrifice everything else. A person’s ultimate
concern can be that which is truly ultimate, i.e., God, or it can be something
that isn’t ultimate at all. Tillich thought that most Americans have that
second kind of ultimate concern and that the two most common of such ultimate
concerns are wealth and the nation.
So many Americans
spend their whole lives, their time, their energy, and their resources pursuing
material wealth. Material wealth actually is the ultimate concern not only of
individuals but of our culture as a whole or at least of white American culture
as a whole. We look up to wealthy people and look down on poor people. We
equate material wealth with success. We look to money as the ultimate source of
our security and wellbeing. When wealth is a person’s ultimate concern he will
sacrifice everything in his efforts to obtain it and keep it, often even his
family.
Others of us make
the nation our ultimate concern. Some whose ultimate concern is wealth may see
the nation primarily as a device there to help them get and stay wealthy. For
others the nation not wealthy is truly their ultimate concern. These people
look to the nation as a source of identity and even pride. They’ll say “I’m
proud to be an American” even if they’ve done nothing to make them Americans
other than be born here. They’ll say “America first” and “America: Love it or
Leave it.” They look to the nation and its various instruments of force
(police, the military) as the source and guarantor of their security. Most
telling of all, people whose ultimate concern is the nation will do things the
nation tells them to do that they would never do on their own. They will join
the military and kill other human beings, convincing themselves that they’re
just doing their duty and doing it honorably. Never mind that there is nothing honorable
about killing. They will put their lives at risk, going “in harm’s way” as they
often put it. They will even willingly die if they think their dying will serve
the nation.
Those two things,
wealth and the nation, are what Tillich thought most Americans’ ultimate
concerns are. Based perhaps on my personal experience however, I’d like to
suggest a third possible ultimate concern that I believe a great many people
have. That other ultimate concern is the family. I’ll use myself as an example.
I’m not wealthy, and although I used to be a lawyer I have never considered the
pursuit of wealth to be a worthwhile way to live. I oppose a great many things
my country does and will not willingly die for it. But I have a family. My
parents are gone now, but I still have a twin brother, badly disabled by
strokes as he is. More than that I have a wife, two adult children, and five
grandchildren. They are the ones for whom I would do very nearly anything. I
want to say I wouldn’t kill to protect them, but in dire enough circumstances I
might even do that[4]. I
would willingly give up my life if I had to in order to keep them safe. Maybe I’m
projecting here, but I believe that the family is the ultimate concern not only
of many Americans but of many other people around the globe as well.
Here’s what all
that has to do with Joshua’s question to his people about which god or gods
they would serve. Tillich taught that a
person’s ultimate concern is that person’s god. He taught that an ultimate may
be that which is truly ultimate, i.e., God, or it may be something that is not
truly ultimate. An ultimate concern that is with something that is not truly
ultimate is always idolatrous. Idolatrous ultimate concerns always fail the
person who holds them. Wealth does not insure happiness, satisfaction, or
security. Pursuing it as an ultimate concern certainly does not bring mental or
spiritual health. Our nation fails us in more ways than I can even begin to
recite. It fails some of us more than it fails others of us, but in the end,
sooner or later, it will do something that seems to us to betray what we
thought our nation was. Even the family is an idolatrous ultimate concern. It
is idolatrous because like any ultimate concern other than God is it not
ultimate. It is not infinite or immortal. Members of our families disappoint
and even fail most of us at some time or another. Ask anyone who has raised
teenagers, or if you have raised teenagers yourself you won’t have to ask. Only
the truly ultimate, that is, only God, will never fail us, although of course
to understand that God never fails us we can’t expect God to do things God just
doesn’t do.
So we are all
faced all the time with the choice of which gods we will serve. Will be serve
the small, idolatrous gods that so beguile us and demand our service and
loyalty? Or will we serve the one true God, the only reality that is truly
ultimate, that is true God and not an idol? Joshua said that as for him and his
household they would serve Yahweh, the only god of the Israelites. The text
tells us that after he made that commitment all the people joined him in vowing
their allegiance to Yahweh.
But what about
you? What about me? When I said above that under the most dire circumstances I
might even kill to protect my family I actually wrote “I won’t kill” in the
first draft of this post. I wanted to say I would not because I am so convinced
that that violence is never God’s way and must not be our way either. In
writing that part of this post I was experiencing something many people
experience. The conflict between different concerns that we might want to be
ultimate but only one of which can be can get really messy. That truth does
not, however, obviate God’s call to us to make only the truly ultimate, to make
only God our ultimate concern.
Making God your
ultimate concern doesn’t mean neglect your financial security. It doesn’t mean
don’t care about your country and wish the best for her. You can make God your
ultimate concern and actually work to make your country the best that it can be,
with best meaning what is best in God’s eyes not the world’s eyes. Making God
your ultimate concern certainly doesn’t mean neglect or otherwise harm your
family. It means always putting God first. It means doing the best you can to
see that your non-ultimate concerns are informed by and loyal to the truly
ultimate, to God. That’s an easy thing to say and can be a very difficult thing
to do. Yet God puts before us all the directive Joshua gave to his people.
Choose which god you will serve, the idolatrous god that is not the ultimate or
God the only truly Ultimate. May God help us all as we make that decision over
and over again throughout our lives.
[1]
Sort of like the way we have divided the land we’ve taken from its original
inhabitants into states, but never mind.
[2] The
word Lord here, spelled in small
caps, renders the Hebrew name of God, Yahweh, without actually making anyone
utter the name of God, something that in the Jewish tradition one is never
supposed to do.
[3]
Yahweh would eventually evolve in the people’s consciousness into the one true
universal God, but he didn’t start out that way. See Exodus 15:21, where the
prophet Miriam sings an ode to Yahweh as a war god.
[4] Then
I would beg God’s forgiveness, for I know as Dietrich Bonhoeffer did, that
necessity does not make killing moral.
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