Jesus of Nazareth dismisses all the gods in the world.

The Bible shows us many conflicts between the different gods of the world and the One God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit... and in every single one of these contests, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit win in spectacular and conclusive ways.  

The “gods” are angelic powers that have fallen and rebelled against the Living God who created them in the beginning.  Corrupted and proud, they try to take the place of the LORD God and deceive the world.  Every god that stands in the way of the Biblical God is humiliated and shown to be false.   

The LORD had to humiliate the god Dagon in his own temple in order to demonstrate to the world that He had total sovereignty over this false god.  Dagon is nothing more than a creature who has rebelled against his Lord and Master.

Isaiah 36-37 is a wonderful story of the Angel of the LORD confronting the power of the “gods”.  It seemed that the world and evil was about to utterly triumph over the ancient church.  The pagan commander literally mocked the LORD Jesus - and yet, when the church went to sleep one night, by the time morning had come, without any help or input from the church, the LORD Jesus defeated all their enemies.  The story ends with the pagan gods unable to protect their king from even the threat of two murderers.

In Exodus 12:12 we see how the gods of Egypt were judged.  After the crossing of the Red Sea, Moses sings a song of triumphant worship (Exodus 15:11): 

"Who among the gods is like you, O LORD? Who is like you - majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders?"   

Moses' father-in-law, Jethro, makes a wonderful speech about all this in Exodus 18:9-11.  After all this it is no surprise that the Ten Commandments begin in the way that they do (Exodus 20:1-3): 

"And God spoke all these words: "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.  You shall have no other gods before me."  

As soon as the Ten Commandments have been spoken, the Father again insists on His people rejecting all the gods in the world: “Then the LORD said to Moses, "Tell the Israelites this: `You have seen for yourselves that I have spoken to you from heaven: Do not make any gods to be alongside me; do not make for yourselves gods of silver or gods of gold.”

In Exodus 23 this becomes an insistent and constant message:

verse 13: "Do not invoke the names of other gods; do not let them be heard on your lips".

verse 23-4: "My Angel will go ahead of you... Do not bow down before their gods or worship them or follow their practices. You must demolish them and break their sacred stones to pieces."

verse 31-33: "Do not make a covenant with them or with their gods. Do not let them live in your land, or they will cause you to sin against me, because the worship of their gods will certainly be a snare to you."

One of the biggest challenges to our theological foundations in this age is the modern Western idea of the world religions.  

Most of the Christians in the world have always lived as a small minority surrounded by powerful religions.  All their theology and culture has developed with this awareness.  However, Western theology has had a long history of “Christendom”, where churches dominated the entire continent of Europe.  Therefore, when they began to explore the world and discover that there were vast, ancient and diverse religions all over the world, it created quite a crisis for Europeans who had never thought about this before!  

At an international theological “workshop”, one of the questions set by a European was “how are we to understand the challenge of other religions?”.  

All the African and Asian theologians in the room were genuinely completely puzzled: they knew nothing else than this profound conflict with religions.  

Why didn’t the Europeans understand how to deal with this?