The church in America has taken a major hit.  In the PCA, homosexuals stand in some pulpits every Sunday as teaching elders.  The church’s response to Covid-19 was pathetic.  After the original panic period, most churches in America continued to close their doors and prevented the people of God from worshiping together as a congregation.

Christianity was once the dominant religion in America, and Christian morals had a major impact on all of our cultural institutions.  Americans had faith in the integrity of these systems.  That time has ended.  As Christians slept, most of these institutions were secularized over a period of years.  However, many Christians appear to be clinging to these institutions and have made idols out of them.  But the idols are falling down one by one.  The Wizard of Oz is fake. Consider the following.

Democracy – The idea of America as a Constitutional Republic has inherent in it an element of democracy (rule by the people). The people still elect representatives. We were told that democracy makes life safe for the people and guarantees freedom.  This became the American gospel.  However, this idol is quickly falling down.

First, we can no longer trust in the voting system that puts people into office, no more than we can trust in people to vote for godly men to serve in these offices.  The federal government is mostly ruled by bureaucrats who are not elected.  Wokism has taken over the White House and old white men like me are declared to be racists – enemies of the State. The Supreme Court has no law higher than itself, and it finds in the Constitution the legitimacy of both abortion and homosexual marriage. The Wizard of Oz is fake.

Public Schools – I was raised in the public schools in the 50s and 60s of the last century. As a covenant child, my parents could send me off to school with confidence that their Christian world-and-life-view would not be contradicted by my teachers.  The principal of my high school was an elder in my local church. Today, Critical Race Theory has become the underlying curriculum of the public schools.  Teachers are under the dominion of hegemonic unions such as the National Education Association (NEA).  Parents who protest before school boards are now put on a potential domestic terrorist list by the FBI at the direction of the Department of Justice. The Wizard of Oz is fake.
Military – A calling to serve this country in the Armed Forces has always been considered an honor. After the debacle in Viet Nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the legitimacy of that honor went on trial.  Now the military is on a witch-hunt to purge its ranks by expelling anyone who voted for Donald Trump.  We must never forget that when the people become the enemy of tyrants, that the military becomes the most powerful weapon of tyrants against the people. The Wizard of Oz is fake.
Media – The days of Walter Cronkite are gone, even though probably behind the scenes, all was not well in those days either. The media has become a ministry of the State. Disinformation must be censored. Fake News is real.

Even Fox News is disappointing.  Recently, I watched political conservative Tammy Bruce, who is a self-declared lesbian, critique the plight of NCAA sports where men who identify as women are taking over women’s sports.  She herself identifies as a man in the boudoir, but it’s wrong for a male to identify as a female in a college swim meet.  Incongruity has become significant even on the political right.  The Wizard of Oz is fake.

Corporations – Intersectionality has taken over the universities in America. Free speech is dead.  Label a man who identifies as a woman by the pronoun “him,” and you will be fired rather quickly.  Most corporate boards are filled with graduates from these universities.  Americans used to respect the success of corporations who were founded by men who risked so much.  Neo-Marxist equality is now the religion that rules Big Corp. Free-enterprise America is now taken up the mantle of this new righteousness. The Wizard of Oz is not real.
Church – Finally, the church in America has taken a major hit. In the PCA, homosexuals stand in some pulpits every Sunday as teaching elders.  The church’s response to Covid-19 was pathetic.  After the original panic period, most churches in America continued to close their doors and prevented the people of God from worshiping together as a congregation. Attendance in most churches is down at least 20% from pre-covid days.  This appears to be permanent.  In conservative denominations, wokism is gaining ground every day.  I know people who have quit the church and who will never go back. They believe that The Wizard of Oz is fake.

I’m sure much more could be said.  I guess that most readers would expect me to say that all we can do is trust in Christ, for he is not an idol, and he will never leave us nor forsake us.  Well, this is true!  However, Christians are in for the fight of their lives, and what we need to do is begin preaching the Lordship of Christ over all things.  We must be ruled by Christ alone and not by Caesar.  We must believe that God’s kingdom will come, and we must have confidence that we will see his will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  As long as the Holy Spirit is on this earth, cultural transformation is possible.  As the American idols fall, a Christ who rules over all must be our message to those who have put their hope in false gods. The Wizard of Oz is fake, but the Kingdom of God is real.
Larry E. Ball is a retired minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is now a CPA. He lives in Kingsport, Tenn.

Understanding biblical monotheism helps us to be clear about what we believe and are to teach. We do not believe in one God who is known by many names and who offers many paths of salvation. We do not affirm that it is enough to believe one God exists. We confess that we must trust in the God of the Bible, who is not worshiped even by the most well-meaning Muslims, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, animists, or modern Jews.

Eighteen years ago, my jaw figuratively dropped to the floor as I sat in the first Old Testament course of my academic career. I attended a secular university, so I did not expect much true biblical teaching. However, I had hope the Scriptures would be treated fairly because my professor was an Orthodox Jew. You can imagine my surprise, then, when my professor said faithful ancient Israelites did not deny the existence of other gods. They worshiped Yahweh above the rest of the gods, he said, but they believed those gods were real.
Liberal “highercritical” circles accept as dogma my professor’s view, which is henotheism. True monotheism—the belief that only one God exists—came late in Israel’s history, these critics say. Advocacy of henotheism is based largely on reading references to “other gods” in the Pentateuch as proof that Moses attributed true existence to the deities of other peoples but believed Israel was to worship Yahweh alone (for example, Ex. 20:3).
Unbelieving scholarship must focus on minutia and ignore larger contexts to “find” henotheism in Scripture. That Moses affirmed the existence of only one God is plain from the Pentateuch’s first chapter. Unlike other ancient Near Eastern creation accounts, we do not read that battles between deities brought forth the earth. Genesis 1 presents one God who “created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). Yahweh, the sole actor in the narrative, formed the universe by His Word.
Given the prevalence of polytheism in the ancient Near East, the biblical authors repeatedly insist that there is but one God. Just prior to the Shema and its affirmation of monotheism, we read that “there is no other” Lord (Deut. 4:39). Only Yahweh responds in the confrontation between Elijah and the prophets of Baal, for Yahweh exists and Baal does not (1 Kings 18:20–40). Isaiah says, “Besides [Yahweh] there is no god,” and points out the folly of serving deities represented by wooden idols (Isa. 44).
The Apostles proclaimed monotheism most strongly when they encountered Greek paganism. Paul continues the Old Testament’s denial of the existence of other gods in Romans 1, explaining that polytheism arises as people suppress their knowledge of the one true God and fashion deities they can manipulate (Rom. 1:18–23). The same Apostle reminds Timothy, who ministered in a pagan context, that “there is one God” (1 Tim. 2:5). Throughout Revelation, John points out the futility of Roman religion, describing the eventual fall of any pretender to the Lord Almighty’s throne.
That the one God reveals Himself to His creation undergirds biblical monotheism.
Read More
Related Posts:

We think that as modern people we don’t believe anymore in a God who makes the snow to fall or the grass to grow. But in fact our very sophisticated modern perspective on nature depends on that very thing. God’s decree is why there are natural laws that we can discover through science. What’s more, the fact that natural laws proceed from the mind of God explains why these laws are comprehensible to our minds. This Christian understanding of a universe ruled by the decree of a rational mind lies at the origin of science, and this understanding of the universe still stands behind all our science today whether we recognize it or not. 

In the Bible, God is presented as being directly responsable for all kinds of natural phenomena. Consider the praise the psalmist gives him in Psalm 147 for the way he takes care of his creation:

He covers the heavens with clouds; he prepares rain for the earth; he makes grass grow on the hills. He gives to the beasts their food, and to the young ravens that cry. […] He sends out his command to the earth; his word runs swiftly. He gives snow like wool; he scatters frost like ashes. He hurls down his crystals of ice like crumbs; who can stand before his cold? He sends out his word, and melts them; he makes his wind blow and the waters flow. -Psalm 147:8-9, 15-18

God himself claims similar things in Job 38-39, and Jesus also affirms that his Father is the one who feeds the birds and clothes the grass (Mt 5:26, 30). The biblical God is one who is constantly involved in maintaining and taking care of the world he has created.
But in the 21st century, we don’t believe that God does that anymore.
Armed with modern science, we are inclined to think that we know that rain and snow are a function of humidity and temperature and pressure in the atmosphere, that grass grows because of nutrients in the soil and the light of the sun, and that birds don’t need feeding because they feed themselves. Once upon a time we put the label “God” on all these mysteries because we didn’t know how things work. Now that we do know, we can safely dispense with primitive ideas about God making rain or causing the sun to rise. That is to say, God is a God of the gaps, the explanation we appeal to when we don’t have a natural one. And as science continuously closes the gaps, the place for God gets ever smaller.
Of course none of that is true.
God is not the God of the gaps. And science, rather than explaining away God, has opened a marvelous window for us to see in ever greater detail what it is that God does every day to govern and take care of his creation. Consider the example of gravity. All of us are familiar with gravity as being responsable for keeping planets in their orbits and bringing apples down on the heads of pondering physicists.
Read More
Related Posts: