I think I might have figured something out, something than many already knew, I am slow, and sometimes it takes me a while.
This I already knew, that God Almighty is Sovereign, it is why He is called the Almighty, He is omniscient, omnipresent, He is self-sustaining, He is in control of everything, everywhere, all the time. He created man with a free will, He has allowed sin so that free will can be exercised, He has determined, for His own glory, that those who recognize His Son Jesus Christ as Lord will receive eternal life, (John 3:16) and those who choose not to, eternal damnation. He can do this because He is Sovereign.
But I have learned something else, I now know how many false gods there are on planet earth, subtract those who believe everything I just stated above, and you will have the total number of gods on this little rock. “I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.” (Psalm 82:6)
Free will is what makes us gods, we get to choose who we will serve, and when you factor out all of those who profess a faith in anyone else but Christ, you end up, sadly, with a lot of gods. Now, one person might exclaim that they belong to a church where everyone is saved and all are submitting to the Word of God, and that is awesome, but it does not make you as an individual a group, you are still an individual, you just happen to be part of a group that submits to the will of God. Others would proclaim trust in a different organization, one, that whether it has a cross on it or not, does a lot of good works, that has traditions that are, while not entirely Scriptural, do not actually contradict what the Scriptures say, they are not all “in-line” with the truths of the Word of God, but they do not believe they offend the Lord either.
Then of course you have the Mormons, the million or so gods of India, even the state-run churches in China, all so far from the truths of Scripture as to not even be counted among the children of the Most High. In each and every case though, what these people have done is pulled their own personal little throne up to the table, and have proclaimed themselves gods, because they have free will.
Those who will not recognize the Lord for who He is, will always make Him into what they want Him to be, and thus have created their own god, one that is easier to serve for they have made their god into a form that they can recognize, one that is easier to mold into what they want to serve. In a religious setting, Satan is more than willing to help, in fact, the more the merrier, but in the heart of man as an individual he need do little more than sit back and watch. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jer. 17:9)
If you have not been saved as Ephesians 2:8-9 exclaims, then you are not saved, and it will be easy to find your god, simply look in the mirror. It is why so many today use Hebrews 10:25, “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.” Because it is how they reaffirm this truth within themselves, that many of them do not even recognize within them, much less as truth.
The only person that most people trust implicitly and without much debate is themselves, and while they may defer some of that trust to a loved one, a close friend, or even the “church” that they attend, when any final decision is to be made, they will always defer to themselves for the best advice. To ease any personal accountability though, they will either serve a god of their own making, one that the majority, or even the community they live in serves, or one that they have decided is close enough to the true and living God. It removes all need for excuses, at least in their eyes, and makes them “good people.”
If you are not saved by grace through faith, with nothing added to it, just the shed blood of Jesus Christ covering your sins, then you are not saved, and your god is in the mirror.
