The Truth About God And The Bible
By Robert Roberts
Chapter 10: A Nation That Changed Its God
The aversion of Israel to the teaching of the true prophets, and
their relish for those who led them to idolatry, is another remarkable
fact in the Bible record. The Jews have always been on the side
of those who drew them aside from the One God, and against the
few faithful men who, in different ages, have striven, under Divine
command, to bring them back to the paths of Moses. Why did the
Jews prefer idolatry to the Divine institutions? The Mosaic worship
was contrary to human inclinations. It called on them to serve
an invisible God: it required faith at their hands. Other nations
had gods they could see, and whose worship they made the occasion
of licence and delight. To these foreign gods Israel turned aside
from the beginning of their history, as soon as Joshua and his
contemporaries were dead (Judges 2:11-13); which is proof that
their God was no invention of their own, or the outcome of a national
idiosyncrasy. Other nations have always been faithful to their
invented gods, because they continued subject to the taste and
fancy that led to the invention.
Such a thing as a nation changing its gods is unknown. This very
fact is made the basis of expostulation by God with Israel, through
the prophet Jeremiah: "Pass over to the Isles of Chittim and see,
and send unto Kedar and consider diligently, and see if there
be such a thing: hath a nation changed their gods, which are yet
no gods? But my people hath changed their glory for that which
doth not profit" (Jer. 2:10). This fact of itself -- that the
Jews as a nation continually departed from the God of their fathers,
while no other nation deviated from their traditional idolatries
goes a long way, in a logical process of treatment, to prove that
the religion of the Jews was not a religion of Jewish origin,
in the sense of its being the invention of the Jews; but was higher
than they, namely, what it professes to be -- a system Divinely
communicated to them by the hand of Moses.
