Contemplative Bible Reading

Ezekiel 20:5 (New Living Translation)

Give them this message from the Sovereign Lord: When I chose Israel—when I revealed myself to the descendants of Jacob in Egypt—I took a solemn oath that I, the Lord, would be their God.

The last part of this verse is quite simple and yet profound. All the people’s in the surrounding world at this time had gods, i.e., something they worshiped. Here, we have YHWH (Hebrew) or Jehovah (English), the Creator declares to be the god of the Hebrews and later the Christians.

This is the god I worship—Jehovah the Creator.

This implies the question, “Whom do you worship?”

The answer for many today is, “I worship the god of choice. I worship the god of indecision. I choose this weekend whom I worship and well, uh, next weekend, maybe some other god.”

In an agricultural ancient world, sometimes the farmer paid homage to the god of rain (we’re having a dry year and the crops are suffering) and sometimes to the god of the sun (have to bring in the hay for the winter feed and we need a few dry days).

In our amazing post post post modern world, we have the god of white powder, gold liquid, climbing the mountains, sailing the seas, and all sorts of other things that in the right context are fine, but gosh we never seem to keep them in the right context and they consume our lives in the end and become like gods and how did we ever get here.

Whom do I worship? The Creator or some other thing? The question hasn’t changed in a few thousand years.