“They sacrificed to demons, not God, to gods they had not known, new gods that had just arrived, which your ancestors did not fear.” (v. 17)

There are a lot of words that an unbelieving world might attach to your faith: Traditional. Old-fashioned. Conservative. Maybe even out-of-touch or out-of-fashion. Your steadfast belief in an unchanging truth rubs against the wider world’s incessant syncretism and secularism, which operate behind a veil called “progress.”

The danger, of course, is what you end up worshiping if you try to worship like that.

The world teems with lesser “gods.” Material idols. Sexual ideologies. Moral—or, frankly, immoral—mandates. Truthfully, it’s always been this way, but the enemy dresses them differently from generation to generation.

Here’s a good matrix for evaluating the things the world would lure you toward, the things others are giving their hearts to:

If it is something new and novel and contrary—if it requires yet another reinterpretation of the truth as we have known it for thousands of years—it likely isn’t of God.

Beware any of the culture’s “gods” who have only “just arrived.”

— Tyler