Does It Matter?

 

Does It Matter?

October 14, 2021

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

There is a question that should concern every single person. Sadly, most people don’t know what that question is. The question is: Which God (or god) do you choose? Mostly we don’t think about that question or even know that it is a question. Most people who say they believe in God believe in a God taught to them by people of their particular faith tradition. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, although an awful lot of people of faith teach a woefully inadequate interpretation of God. The question of which God we choose, however, is one that we all answer whether we know we’re answering it or not. We answer it in how we live as much as or more than we answer it by what we say. It is question that has plagued humans for a very long time. It still does, or it does at least if you stop to think about it. I want to consider this question here. I’ll start with an issue about a choice of gods that we find in the Hebrew Bible.

The book of Hosea in the Hebrew Bible, which is the Protestant Old Testament[1], has a central theme. The prophet, working in the eighth century BCE, presents the god Yahweh as mad as hell at the people of Israel. Hosea’s Yahweh isn’t mad at Israel because the leaders and the elite have been unjust to the poor the way Hosea’s rough contemporary Amos is. No, Hosea’s Lord is mad at the people because they have been worshipping gods other than this Lord.[2] They have worshipped “the Baals” instead of him.[3] In Hosea and elsewhere in the Old Testament the word “Baal” is used mostly as the name of the storm and fertility god of the Canaanites. Thus these ancient texts set up a rivalry of sorts between the Hebrew god Yahweh and the Canaanite god Baal. Many Old Testament texts at least suggest that Baal worship became quite widespread among the Israelites after they were settled in the land of the Canaanites.[4]

The Hebrew prophets whose voices are included in the Old Testament all decry the worship of Baal as idolatry. It’s not so much that they denied the reality of Baal, though sometimes they did. It’s more that they believed that Yahweh was the only god of Israel and was thus the only god the Hebrew people were to worship. Hosea in particular presents Yahweh as furious  with the Israelites because they stopped worshipping him and started to worship Baal instead. The way the Old Testament prophets condemn the people for worshipping Baal rather than Yahweh raises the question I’m addressing here: Does it matter which god we choose?

People in the ancient world thought of gods and goddesses in very anthropomorphic terms. The gods and goddesses were men and women writ large. In the religion of the Israelites in particular Yahweh was first seen as a tribal war god. To their way of thinking they didn’t escape from Egypt, their war god Yahweh defeated the Egyptian army and got them out of Egyptian slavery.[5] For much of ancient Hebrew history Yahweh, still always conceptualized as male, was the only god the Israelites had and the only one the prophets said they were to worship. Before the mid-sixth century BCE the Israelites were not monotheists. They were henotheists. That means not that believed there was only one god but that they themselves had only one god. So in the years in which the eighth century Hebrew prophets because active they railed against Baal worship not so much because they believed that Baal wasn’t real but that they believed that the Baal was not their god. The Yahwists among them, including of course the eighth century prophets, believed that their god Yahweh got really angry with them when they worshipped Baal rather than him.

In considering whether it made any difference whether the Israelites worshipped Yahweh or worshipped Baal we need to understand why so many of them might have found Baal worship more satisfying than Yahweh worship. To understand why they might have we need to look at the differences in the way the people understood between the two gods in question here. Yahweh was a war god. The Hebrews turned to him for victory in battle, and they believed that if they won a battle it was really Yahweh who won it for them. Baal, on the other hand, was a storm and fertility god. He didn’t fight battles, he brought rain and assured the fertility of the land, the animals, and the people. People in those times considered both Yahweh and Baal to be real, but understood them has having very different functions in their lives.

Now consider the geographical circumstances of ancient Israel. Yes, there were always foreign enemies. There were wars between the Hebrew kingdom of Judah and the Hebrew kingdom of Israel. Also, those kingdoms were constantly threatened by aggressive empires much stronger than they were to both the east and to the west. Israel was located right between those empires. Those empires sometimes fought each other, and at times they both tried to use the Hebrew kingdoms as a buffer between them. There were wars between the Hebrew kingdoms and Aram (Syria) and other smaller states east of the Jordan River and south of the Dead Sea. Many people believed that it was a very good thing to have Yahweh on your side when you went to war whoever it was that you went to war against.

The people, however, had another constant and even more threatening problem. Egypt had the Nile. Assyria and Babylon had the Tigris and the Euphrates. In other words they had more or less reliable sources of water for themselves and their crops. Israel didn’t. There were (and are) no significant rivers in the land the Hebrew people populated. Yes, there was the fabled Jordan River, but it was (and is) small and located hundreds of feet below sea level and below the places where most of the Hebrews lived. It was essentially of no use to them. Egypt depended on the Nile, Israel depended on rain. If the right amount of rain fell at the right times and in the right places the land would produce enough food to support a subsistence level of life for the people. If it didn’t people starved to death. The Old Testament speaks of different famines that struck the people. To understand what those famines were like think of the horrific pictures of African women, men, and children dying of hunger in the famines that sometimes strike parts of that continent. That’s what ancient Hebrew famines were like, and only an adequate amount of rain prevented them from happening.

Now, consider yourself to be an ancient Israelite. You knew about Yahweh as the god who had freed your people from Egypt. You also knew about Baal, the god of storms and fertility. Yes, war was sometimes a factor in your life, but the threat of crop failures and famine was a constant factor in your life. Among you there were many people who worshipped Baal rather than Yahweh. Which god did you need most, Yahweh the war god or Baal the storm and fertility god? And remember, the Yahwists said that Yahweh was the only god you should worship, so it wasn’t really possible to worship them both. It’s not hard to understand why so many Israelites turned from the worship of Yahweh to the worship of Baal. They believed that their lives depended on Baal a lot more than they depended on Yahweh, so it was Baal they chose as their god.

The Hebrew prophets whose words made it into the Hebrew Bible thought that the Hebrew people who worshipped Baal not Yahweh were sinful and evil; but were they? I don’t think so. In the context of their time and place with its religious and cultural components that shaped how the people thought it made perfect sense to worship Baal not Yahweh. The people believed, and had no way not to believe, that worshipping Baal might keep them alive because Baal controlled the weather. The weather was not Yahweh’s sphere of influence, it was Baal’s. So worship Baal many of them did.

Many people today, I suppose, take the attacks of the Hebrew prophets on Israelites who worshipped Baal as correct. They are, after all, in the Bible, and it is likely that no one in a position to know has ever suggested to them that what the prophets say about Baal worship was in any way problematic. Many people may agree with the prophetic attacks on Baal worship because they understand the Hebrew god Yahweh to be the one true God so that Baal worship really was idolatry. It is true that in the mid-sixth century BCE during the Babylonian exile Hebrew theologians developed a truly monotheistic faith in which Yahweh was indeed seen to be the one true God of all people. But considering the Hebrews of the eighth century BCE to have been monotheists who understood Yahweh to be the one and only true God is a significant anachronism. Hebrew faith didn’t become truly monotheistic for nearly two hundred years after Hosea. We must judge the ancient Hebrews, if we judge them at all, by the standards of their time not the standards of our time or even of a later time in Hebrew history than theirs. By those standards  the Hebrews who worshipped Baal weren’t evil. They were actually being pragmatic. The prophets were Yahwists who saw Baal worship as evil. We needn’t agree with them, and I don’t.

Here’s another point to consider. Whether or not Israelites worshipping Ball mattered depends on the perspective from which you ask the question. Presumably it mattered to the Baal worshippers. Whatever their reason was, they made a choice of which god they would worship. They’d hardly have made that choice if the choice didn’t matter to them. We know that it mattered to the Yahwist prophets. They railed against it, or at least Hosea did. Those who condemned Baal worship believed either that Baal wasn’t real but Yahweh was or that Yahweh was the god of Israel who would punish the Israelites if they worshipped any god other than him. So yes, the choice of which god to worship mattered in ancient Israel.

Now I want to consider what the choice of which god to worship looks like from our modern or post-modern perspective. We start with the concept God. In the ancient world gods and goddesses were anthropomorphic, as I’ve already noted. Not so with the best contemporary understandings of God. In those understandings the word “God” is a symbol for ultimate reality. God may interact with us in human ways, but that’s because we’re human not because God is. This God is ultimate reality and, as Tillich said, both the ground of being and being itself. This God is universal. We can relate to this God only through symbols and myths that are not themselves God but that point beyond themselves to God. A religion is precisely a set of such myths and symbols. Religions also have their own rituals through which they seek connection with God, rituals like the Christian sacraments for example. Any religion which connects people to the truly spiritual, that is, to ultimate reality, is true to the extent it does that and false to the extend it connects people with something that is not the spiritual, that is not ultimate reality (or if it connects them to nothing for that matter). The question for us, then, is different than it was for the ancient Israelites. Our question is neither whether a particular god is real nor whether a particular god is the only god a particular people are supposed to worship. It is rather whether the symbols, myths, and rituals of a religion connect those who practice the religion with ultimate reality, that is, with God.

So we ask: Did the symbol Yahweh and/or the symbol Baal connect people with ultimate reality? I don’t’ think we can know the answer to that question with any certainty. We can know that both Yahweh worshippers and Baal worshippers believed their god to be real. We also know that God as ultimate reality is a contemporary, quite philosophical way of understanding God. We can’t expect the ancient Israelites to have had that understanding. I think that worship of either Yahweh or Baal connected people with ultimate reality as closely as anything in their world could. The fact that both forms of worship lasted over long periods of time certainly suggests that the people who practiced them were getting something out of them. That something may have been at least a partial connection with God. If that’s true, then in any ultimate sense it didn’t matter which god people chose to worship. They both represented ultimate reality as well as anything in the ancient world could. And certainly the people could make either of these gods their “ultimate concern,” a concept to which we will return shortly.

But what about us? The God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam developed out of the ancient Hebrew god Yahweh, but in Christianity at least we no longer call God Yahweh. We may occasionally call God something related to that name like “the Great I Am,” but we don’t much use the name Yahweh. We are not faced with choice between the tribal war god Yahweh and the storm and fertility god Baal the way the ancient Israelites were. We are all, however, continuously facing the choice of which god (or God) we will worship and seek to serve; and I’m sure that for most people that statement requires a good deal of explanation.

The explanation begins with a definition of the word God from the twentieth century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich. He said that a person’s “ultimate concern” was that person’s God. A person’s ultimate concern is that to which she will sacrifice everything else. It is the thing that she believes will save her from whatever she need saving from. She expects to find in her ultimate concern care, meaning, and purpose. We can make anything our ultimate concern. We can make the truly ultimate our God, that is, we can make God our God. But we can also make something that is not ultimate our ultimate concern. Tillich gave the examples of wealth and the nation as non-ultimate things that many Americans make their ultimate concern, that is, make their God. I believe that a great many of us make our family our ultimate concern, make it the thing for which we will sacrifice everything else. These and other things can function as a person’s ultimate concern, but none of them except for God Godself is truly ultimate, is truly God.

The ancient Yahwists sometimes thought that Baal didn’t exist and that Baal worshippers were therefore engaging in idolatry. Tillich said that any ultimate concern that is not truly ultimate is an idol. Making some non-ultimate thing the most important thing in your life is a modern form of idolatry, though of course people of all times and places have done it. Yet we still need to consider whether a person’s ultimate concern being something is not ultimate matters. What difference does it make in my life if I worship and serve, say, my nation rather than worship and try to serve ultimate reality, that is, God?

Well, it makes a great deal of difference indeed. The difference between an idolatrous ultimate concern and an ultimate concern with the truly ultimate is that sooner or later an idolatrous ultimate concern will fail you whereas an ultimate concern of the truly ultimate never will.  Or at least it never will if we understand God, our symbol for ultimate reality, properly, which sadly a great many people of faith do not. Say a man makes wealth his ultimate concern. He lets the pursuit of money dominate his life, and he gets it. He gets monetarily rich. He will eventually find that wealth as his ultimate concern has failed him because it brings neither the happiness nor the personal security he thought it would. Look at the statistics for divorce, alcoholism, drug addiction, and mental illness among people with a lot of wealth and you’ll see what I mean. Making wealth your ultimate concern will sooner or later leave you with an empty space where your soul should be.[6]

Say a woman makes her nation her ultimate concern. She is a proud patriot. She is driven to serve her country to the point that she joins one branch of the military or another. She knows that serving in the military brings with it the risk of bodily injury or death, but she willingly accepts that risk because her nation is the one thing she thinks she would willingly die for. She believes the line the recruiters and the politicians always repeat that says the US military is all about “defending our nation’s freedom.” But then she discovers that the military she has joined is not about defending American freedom at all. Our hypothetical woman here gets sent, say, to an indefensible war like the war in Vietnam of the 1960s and early 1970s. Or she is ordered to participate in an illegal war of aggression like the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. She finds herself compelled to risk her life and perhaps take other lives in the course of something she absolutely abhors. Her nation, her ultimate concern, has failed her and failed her badly.

Nations of course fail patriots in other ways too. Since the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s the US government has served not the American people but the American wealthy. The result has been the demise of the middle class. It has been people working fulltime jobs and still needing food stamps and rental assistance because the nation will not compel employers to pay a living wage. The government pandering to the wealthy—who are after all the ones who mostly fund their political campaigns—has led to the US failing to do meaningful things to deal with life-threatening issues like climate change. Or with racism. Our nation fails us in so many ways that anyone who has made it their ultimate concern will end in despair and disillusionment if she ever wakes up to what our reality really is. So it with any idolatrous ultimate concern.

It is not so with the truly ultimate as one’s ultimate concern. That statement however requires a caveat. A great many people make God into something that can and will fail them. They anthropomorphize God. They make God less than truly ultimate. Then they expect their anthropomorphized, finite God to be their Santa Claus and give them everything they ask that God for. They believe that that God will keep anything bad from happening to them or their loved ones. It is around these expectations that this God will fail them. No one gets everything they pray for. More significantly, bad things happen to all of us. We are all subjected to illness or injury at some point in our lives. And of course we and our loved ones are all mortal. We all die, yet time and time again people who have made God less than truly ultimate have their faith shattered when a loved one for whom they have prayed dies. They cry, “Why did God do this to her?” “Why did God do this to me?” They may eventually return to the faith, but for a time at least they lose their faith altogether. They called their ultimate concern God, but their God wasn’t truly God at all.

When we understand God the ultimate reality properly God the truly ultimate will never fail us. We understand that this God doesn’t cause everything that happens to us. Instead, this God is present with us in everything that happens. God holds us and supports us come what may. God is always there—here actually—for us to turn to for comfort, inspiration, and courage. That God never fail us. That God is truly ultimate reality. In God ultimate reality stands in unshakable solidarity with us no matter what. This God is the only possible ultimate concern that is absolutely reliable and will never disappoint or disillusion us. The sad thing is that so few people understand God that way. Those of us who do understand God that way know that God never will and never could fail us.

So does it matter which God we choose? Oh yes, it matters a great deal. Finite things and people we make our ultimate concern, our God, are as fallible as we are. Because such idols are finite not infinite they will inevitably, unavoidably fail us. The one true God never will. Saint Paul knew that truth. He wrote, “For I am convinced that neither death, or life, not angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love in God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:38-39. Only a God who truly is ultimate reality is or can be that reliably present with us, loving us no matter what. So lets make that God our ultimate concern, shall we? With that God we can fully live and grow into the whole people God intends us to be. Let all the people say, “May it be so.”

---

[1] Protestant Old Testament not Christian Old Testament because the Roman Catholic and other traditions include writings in their Old Testaments that are not in the Hebrew Bible and therefore are not in the Protestant Old Testament.

[2] In Old Testament texts in the NRSV and many other English translations the word Lord, printed that way in what are called small caps, means that the Hebrew text being translated is the sacred name of God, YHVH, usually transliterated as Yahweh. It never means Jesus. English translations handle the name that way out of respect for the Jewish practice of never saying the name of God aloud.

[3] I know that God isn’t male, but Yahweh, the god of ancient Israel, always was. That’s the god I’m talking about here, so I use the male pronoun that I never use when I’m talking about the one true God. I spell “God” with a capital G when I writing about that one true God. I spell “god” with a lower case g when I’m talking about any god, including Yahweh, from a text that does not consider its god to be the only, true universal God. I certainly mean no disrespect to my Jewish brothers and sisters when I spell the name out. I do so only for convenience.

[4] The Hebrew Bible tells a story of the Hebrew people living in the land of Canaan after they have escaped from slavery in Egypt. Contemporary scholars don’t believe that’s what actually happened. There is no record of the Hebrews ever having been in Egypt. The archeological evidence suggests that the Hebrews were one of the many different people who began in Canaan not elsewhere. The Hebrews eventually consolidated their power in the Hebrew kingdoms they created, but they didn’t come from Egypt. I use phrases like “once they were settled in the land of the Canaanites” once again only for convenience.

[5] See Exodus 15:20-21.

[6] Yes. I know. It sounds a little bit like I’m talking about sour grapes. There may be some truth in the claim that I am. Retired small church pastors like me rarely have much money, and I surely don’t. Still, I think the analysis here holds.