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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.

CHAPTER 11: The Purpose Of God

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