The False Gods Christians Still Believe In

Music Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brandham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brandham Historical Research at William-brandham.org, and with me I have my co-host and friend, Bob Scott, former co-founder of the Kansas City Fellowship, and the author of three books, the latest is some said they blundered, breaking my decades of silence on Mike Pickle, the Kansas City Prophets, and the International House of Prayer.

Bob, I hate to do this to you, but I decided today we're going to go controversial, and I'm going to step it up a few notches from your controversial. That's one wasn't controversial. I'm going to take it to the next level. I've actually been wanting to do this for a long time, and there's a reason why. We grew up in the strange world of angels and demons, and we've talked about this almost every podcast.

You're scared you're going to stump your toe because the demon of stump tonus is not going to get you. That's how bad it is. Whenever I left the Brandham movement, I started reading the Bible over and over and over, just reading it for what it said and not for what I was told it was to say. I started to understand that the whole world view I had didn't quite match the Bible, but there were bits and pieces that if you took them out of the historical context, you could kind of make it fit. One of them had to do with the false gods.

I've mentioned this to you. I've mentioned this to a few co-hosts, but I became fascinated probably about 2014. I was two years out of the Brandham movement. I became fascinated with studying ancient mythologies and the pantheons of gods and what did the gods mean to the people.

In the world view that I had, they were these evil, powerful forces that eventually came to what Nar would consider to be territorial spirits that you must climb a mountain and scream at and do weird stuff, but to the ancients, it actually meant much more. It was their political system, their religious system, their family system, sometimes their family lineage, and it all comes down to the totem pole. I remember growing up when I was a kid, I had some toy set, lone ranger or something and had a totem pole, and my family had no problem giving it to me, but we encountered other families

who were very, very fundamentalists in their mindset, and they started to say things to their children. They didn't know I had it, but no, you can't have that toy. Oh, because a demon will come out and get you.

And I started thinking, well, no, it's made by Mattel, man. It's not something like this. And then I came across the Bible passage. I'll look it up while you're talking, but there's a Bible passage that says exactly the same thing.

Don't you know the woodsmith down the street made that idol that you're worshiping? And it's powerless. It's a hunk of wood. And so I wanted to have the conversation with you today about our false gods real.

And ask the question, because of this, I did some research after leaving and the vast majority of Christians, the majority. If you were to tell them the statement, the Bible teaches that pagan gods are imaginary and idols are just pieces of wood or stone.

The vast majority of Christians would say, yes, that's what the Bible says. The vast majority of Charismatics and Pentecostals would say, no, those people are apostate. And that division and Christianity, people believing both of these things, it changes their entire worldview, and that's why they actually can't communicate with each other.

So I wanted to explore our false gods real. One of the things that I think we struggle with is the difference between perception and facts. I notice quite a bit when people are having discussions, they make very dogmatic statements as though they have a fact.

The reality of it is, is I think we all know, especially as you've gotten older, a lot of the things you thought were facts turned out to not be facts, right? Our culture by virtue of the way we've been programmed, we have a tendency to default to people who are classified as experts.

What ends up happening is by virtue of the way we've been programmed to think we default to their perspectives, because they claim their facts. But when you get to be our age, you realize when you look back at your life, the vast amount of things that you were told that were facts that have since been proven not to be facts.

We tended default to a very small group of elite leaders who either by virtue of their knowledge of the written Bible or in the charismatic world, their relationship with God and their special standing with them as to being the experts, and we default to them.

I think one of my frustrations in one of the reasons why I think I value our friendship is that the vast majority of people that I've had discussions with in Christendom, when I start peeling back the layers of their worldview, I get about two layers in and just...

However, they actually don't have first-hand knowledge based on research they've done. They're merely mimicking a worldview, a perspective, or a perceived fact from somebody that's an expert, i.e. their pastor, something they learned in Bible school.

And what ended up happening is we've really become a culture of parrots, or apers, I guess, or whatever you want to call it. We mimic, we just regurgitate things we've been told. We don't actually drill down to find out if they're facts.

Why are there gods in the first place? Why do we need a god? I mean, what was the root of gods in the first place? And the root is, we don't know what the heck's going on out there.

We're looking at all this stuff around us. There's actually two things. If you go back to study the ancient worldviews, there are gods because of what you said. Absolutely. How do you explain this world where did it come from?

There must be something else. But once everybody came to the understanding of the something else, now we had to say our something else is better than you're something else because we're more powerful. And it becomes political.

It really does. In the ancient world. No, that's absolutely true. That's what I mean. In the ancient world, it was predominantly conflict over our gods better than your god. This is not the Kansas City chiefs, you know, versus the Indianapolis cults tonight.

It's the god of the chiefs, versus the god of the cults. I mean, that's exactly how they went to. Then what people may not understand is there's a whole religious system around these. So now all the prophets of the cults and the prophets of the chiefs are all prophesying against each other that they're going to win.

Now, of course, I'm joking here, but I'm trying to, you know, use a word picture that describes the ancient world because nobody really knew. So there had to be a reason. So therefore, oh my gosh, there's got to be a being behind all this, right?

And then, because of the fact that every time they sort of thought that they were, you know, that they'd appease the gods and then nature did something catastrophic, like bring a drought or a tornado or whatever, they developed the whole concept that the gods were what?

Capricious, unpredictable. And so, you know, it was like, okay, well, our gods, you know, are unpredictable because they're like humans, right? They got to be like, it's the only thing they knew, like nobody could concede with the fact that a god may not be like us, like it might be a spiritual entity that doesn't need any of the things, but we gave them, you know.

Man attributes, that's all we knew. And therefore, because humans are unpredictable and capricious, the gods must be too. I'm gonna look around, you know? We just, man, we just gave all of our money, all of our harvest to the god, and we still ended up in trouble and lost that battle.

And that's why, when you look at the pantheons of gods, that's why it's really interesting. They put human personalities, personality traits on gods. Like in Egypt, you had the gods of judgment, you had the gods of fertility, et cetera.

What they're trying to do, basically, is say, we have Patrick Mahomes, and you don't. Right, they're essentially creating gods for every situation that matches a human personality. And that's where it gets interesting. So before I said, the vast majority of Christians don't believe that there are such things false gods and the idols were powerless, Pentecostal Charismatics, most of them believe the other way.

However, it's interesting because if you were to ask a Pentecostal Charismatic, do you believe that, Yahweh, the god of the Hebrews, set in a divine council among other gods and was the leader of the gods above them, much like the ancient Egypt.

Every one of them, I can't think of any who would agree with that statement. They would all disagree except for those who went to seminary. Because when you read Psalms, what is it, 82?

It says something to the effect that Yahweh sits in the council of the divine. And the divine, when you read that word in King James version, it says divine, but the actual word is L.

So Yahweh sits in the council of gods. Actually, I said that incorrectly. It says Elohim sits in the council of the gods. Elohim in Hebrew means both singular in some cases and plural in others.

In this particular case, because it's in the council of L, council is plural, so Elohim means plural. Literally it's saying that there's a divine council. So when you read that and understand that it is talking about a divine council, the next question in your head, if you're coming out of the Pentecostal Charismatic movement is, oh my gosh, does that mean that there is a divine council?

And let's go there and let's try to wrap every single passage of scripture around that. But if you understand the progression of world view and how it changed for the Hebrews, you can't make that passage a line with some of the later passages, because they began to understand the world view was different than they believed thousands of years before.

So things like the Ten Commandments, you should have no other gods before me. That's a good example, because Pentecostal Charismatics will say, well, that says gods. So therefore there must be false gods. Fast, majority of Christians would say, no, that doesn't mean what you think it means, because it does not actually say that there are in existence other gods.

It says you will not worship. other gods. So there's this debate and actually read long forms about that debate, but it all comes down to this. When you understand the progression of history that is recorded in the Bible itself, what you find out from the very beginning, whenever they left Egypt, they left a group of people that had a worldview that there was a pantheon of gods, and you find that in their language. There's a pantheon of gods. Over time, that worldview began to change because they started to see that, number one, these false gods are powerless,

especially before Yahweh, our God. Number two, they're praying to these idols, and we just watched the carpenter down the street cut it from a tree, or we watched a stone carver, or whatever. So they begin to understand, and there's a progression of worldview.

And that's the part that I think because of Christian fundamentalism, Pentecostalism and Charismatics who are influenced by Christian fundamentalism, it's really hard to grasp. They view the entire Old Testament as static. Everything has the same worldview over time.

And it's not true. Yeah, most Christians understand. There is a progression of time. Well, even the word L, right? It's like, where did that come from? But people don't understand, and if you don't understand history, is that when they came into the promised land, the Canaanites that lived there, their primary God was L. L was in a creation of the wandering nomadic Hebrew people. He was the God of the Canaanites. And when the two cultures ended up merging, L and Yahweh almost became synonymous with each other. So it gets tricky. One of the things I think that people, you know, let me give some more context here, because we're venturing

into areas that I know are going to flip people's switches. One of the things people have to remember about the Bible is it's a cliff notes version of history. And if people don't know what cliff notes are, when we were going to college and we didn't want to read Homer's Odyssey, we went and got the cliff notes version, which was the outline in the summary. And, you know, it's the highlights, right? Based on the cliff notes version of what's important. That's the Bible. People need to realize there's only maybe at best one to five percent of people in the ancient world could even read or

write. So what you're reading in the Bible is written from the perspective of a very small and elite group of people who, oh, by the way, are controlling the religious, political, and economic narrative of this people. So where this gets tricky is that because most American Christians and I would virtual to say most Christians around the world don't understand the fact that there's a whole lot more going on in these stories than what's recorded in the Bible. They don't use the tools that we have i.e. history, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, all these different fields to actually dig into a story and take the cliff notes

version and fill in a lot of stuff because when you do that what ends up happening is you begin to realize you kind of have a distorted view here of what's really going on. This is one of my favorite books. It's called Tragers People's Chronology. And what it is is it's the history every year of the world and what was going on. And so when I'm reading a story in the Bible, the thing I want to do is I go to Tragers and I look what was happening in that same decade around the world. What was happening in Syria? What was happening in Babylon? What was

happening in Egypt? What was happening around this little group of people? Because what you began to realize when you get into the archaeology and many of these stories, there's another perspective when they start unpacking the uniform writings in clay in Babylon, the same event has another perspective from the Babylonians or from the Assyrians or whatever. I'll give you an example.

We read the Bible from the perspective of the Hebrew people are the heroes of the story. They're the chosen. They're special, right? All the kind of same things we do in the Christian community with our leaders. Do the three other kingdoms that have been in place for thousands of years before this group of people have that same perspective? When this Ragtag family shows up in Egypt, they don't even want them around the Egyptians. Their perspective of these people is the exact opposite of our perspective of these people. We're thinking, we got this chosen family and God's with them and these people are going, who are these people? Why are they here? We

got to feed them. Anyways, but then to your point, when they leave, what people don't understand, they've been in this culture for 400 years. They are more Egyptian than anything else because why? Because when they came there, they were just goat farmers, you know, herdsmen moving around, they had very little culture. So again, this is where this all gets very tricky, right? So they bring all this stuff with them.

And you see it like if you go to Israel, here's the problem with Israel. Israel makes three and a half billion dollars a year by telling Christians exactly what they want to hear. It's a massive industry.

The people that run this industry all know what they're doing. And they're taking you to all the places that you want to go and they're telling you all the stuff you want to hear.

But the people that actually know the history are the anthropologists and the archaeologists and the people then all the museums. Which Christians don't visit. They just go to the sacred sites. They don't actually go back and study the culture and the people and what's going on.

I've had the privilege to do that, which is shaped a lot of my understanding of the Bible because I got to go and see what? The concrete evidence. So as I mentioned to you the other day, one of the big ones is that the ancient Hebrews believed that God had a wife.

Nobody wants to talk about that. But in all the archaeology, what are they finding? There's Ashram and Yahweh statues in all these houses. So again, what was happening on the ground in the civilization with the people like us, right?

The citizens of this land and what the religious elite claim is going on are two very different things. Two very different perspectives. And so once gotta be very, very careful here when they make very dogmatic statements because guess what?

As again, perspective. Well, if God's a he, he needs a she. Everybody else has a she with it there. He, every animal, every insect, every bird, there's a he and a she. So therefore God needs a she because he's a man.

He's a male. Add to that the level of complexity just simply by the history of the text of the Bible. This is another study that I found fascinating whenever I left because we were King James only.

And I know that there are listeners who are King James only. So if you're already offended by this podcast, I'm gonna take it to the next level even higher. I can, I can see the buttons going up.

So let's talk manifested sons of God. Oh, wow, okay. There are a lot of people who are in the NAR that love to talk about the manifested sons of God because that came from their lineage.

Much like we're talking with the different world view beliefs, this was the world view belief of the lateral reign movement. They went into charismatic into NAR. And there are passages that are favorable of that concept.

So they use it. One of them is in the English, When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.

If you're a manifest sons of God person, this verse just lights you up. But only if you're reading the ESV because if you read the King James version, it says according to the number of the children of Israel.

And so there's this debate that happens by King James only people who are unfamiliar with the transmission of the text. They think of the King James version much as though it is the original Bible, which it is not, not understanding the complexities of translations or the history thereof.

And what happened actually there was a there were different text families and the Septu-Jewent, I think I said that correctly, actually preserve sons of God and the other text lineages use sons of Israel.

It was actually a division of words and whenever you think of what they believed, the original text actually makes sense. We are all sons and daughters of the high God, sons of God is actually a valid translation, but sons of Adam which I think is or sons of Israel is how it was translated in the others.

That's also a valid translation, both are valid from their inception, but when you read more into it than the text actually says, now you have a debating point. So the point I'm trying to make is if you are familiar with manifest sons of God, you're familiar with King James version ESV battles, this is a point where they start fighting with each other.

No, it says this, no it says this, they both say the same thing and they both were translations of an original text and some of that text actually had a verbal history. So as they lost text, sometimes they remembered passages and wrote them down later.

There's a lot of complexities into the history, but the point I'm trying to make is this, we lose things to time because of language transmission. Well, we're in America and now there's this vast network where we can communicate with each other in other countries, but think about back in the day when it couldn't happen, when it was an instant text communication, each language is developing in a vastly different direction.

And so separated continents had different languages. Now spread the gospel and spread the Hebrew Bible to those, we have to translate it in their variation and the variations change. So it's not like one is right and one is wrong, it's that back when it was originally translated, it made more sense to the people it was translated to.

So that adds a level of complexity because if you go back to read about the false gods, which I'll get into that in a bit, when you read about it, the original text actually makes sense.

You should have no other gods before me. Well, I just came from a place where they had. many, many gods, and we don't want you to worship those gods. We want you to worship Yahweh.

We're not saying those gods are real. The text actually does not say you shall not worship the other gods because they're real. They don't exist. Yeah, it doesn't say that, right? Well here, let me complicate this. I give you two scriptures and then you jump off from there on this thing.

Psalm 82 6. I said, you are gods. You are all sons of the most high, right? Then you jump to John 1034. Jesus says, is it not written in your law? I have said you are gods. So John, what is a God? Because we all have this impression that the word God means the spiritual being that's sentient like that's over us, but now we have two scriptures here that are saying we humans are gods.

Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new Apostolic Reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book. You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute

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The year gods thing really stumbled me whenever I left the Brannumite movement. Because again, we're in a movement that is teaching you the manifested sons of God, but we didn't have it branded as that. In fact, I think the vast majority of them would say, no, we don't believe that, but then they taught it, which was kind of weird. And I grew up listening to recordings where Brannum would say, did not the Bible say, year gods. And that developed into its own weird thing. We actually condemned the weird thing that cares Maddox and Narhat. We condemned it. But I never

really stopped to think about it. And the ancient cultures, their view of God and what God meant to them is different from our view of what God means to us. I wondered about that. From my understanding of the text of the Bible and the combination of that with the cultures, is that the sense was that you are representatives of the gods. You are, because think about how, think about how Pharaoh worked. To the people in Egypt, Pharaoh was their God, but they didn't actually If he was the God, he was the divine representation, the God manifested in this human called Pharaoh.

And when they worshipped, they worshipped Pharaoh and the gods. That's how I understand ancient Egypt and somebody who's a historian may correct me on the complexities of that. But in its essence, that's what it means.

Whenever that passage was said back in the ancient world, it meant to us like your representatives of God. But to them, they could just say simply year gods, and it made sense in that culture.

The difference is today, they try to empower what it means to be a representative of God. In other words, you represent God. So therefore, you can do all of these miraculous mind-bending, mind-altering things because you're gods.

The ancient world didn't look at it like this. There's one hour, all powerful God, or multiple, if you're in a polytheistic religion. Those gods have the power. We look to them for the power, but we're a representative of the God that has the power.

Well, because in the ancient Egypt and places like that, they saw the Pharaohs as gods. That makes me wonder, in the ancient world, do they see a god as just somebody who's over others?

Right? In other words, we're gods because in the Garden of Eden, God told us the rule and reign over the earth. So we're in control of certain things. We might not be the Supreme God, but we're gods in the sense that we rule our own little worlds, right?

As Pharaoh ruled Egypt, right? Because you see this all the time, is that in these ancient inscriptions, they're always inferring these leaders as God-like, like they're superior to everyone else. The majority of the world was polytheistic, and if you understand that concept and understand that they came out of a polytheistic worldview from Egypt, while they were still monotheistic.

When they come out of this, some of the verbiage did make sense. So if you're in a polytheistic religion, you have, like I said, the God of judgment, the God of wisdom, the God of blessings, the God of fertility, all of these different gods.

You're representatives of those gods. It meant that you could, in idolatry, you could pray to this idol, and you are representative because you are invoking that God. It wasn't that you were empowered and had the same powers as that God.

Well, they came out of that polytheistic mindset, and they had a monotheistic mindset. We are a representative of the God that has all of this. So even the Divine Council makes sense because our God, Yahweh, has all of this.

We don't need all of these things that the ancient world has. We have them all encompassed in our God, and all we have to do is pray and to the ancient Hebrews we had to sacrifice.

So there's this worldview that is changing over time where it gets really... Scary is whenever you get into the laterane movement and beyond. They're trying to say that you now as a human have all of the powerful attributes that the ancient Hebrews were trying to invoke from God.

In other words, you become more of a God than even that statement and compasses in the Bible. So from a historical perspective here, while the religious leaders of ancient Israel were monotheistic, the vast majority of the population was polytheistic.

And this is an archaeological fact. And the reason is people didn't actually trust their leaders so they had to cover their bases. I mean, think about it. You're just an average Joe trying to raise sheep or goats, right? Like, you don't really know.

So, you know, I better make sure L and I better make sure Yahweh and I better make sure Ashrith and anybody else out there, you know, I got to cover my bases here to make sure I, you know, I want my goats to multiply.

So they're covering all their bases. So again, this is a perception. There's a perception that you have this whole group of people that are monotheistic all following these religious leaders. The archaeology and the anthropology and the history prove that that's not actually what's going on.

It's a very elite group of people who are saying this, but the vast majority of people are actually out there making sure that they, you know, they got an insurance policy with a number of different companies.

Well, what's funny about that is whenever you think along those lines, people who are anti-education, I know people who have contacted or even on the comment feed, you can read this. They're saying, you're going outside of the Bible. We need to stick with the Bible. Don't study archaeology and all these other things.

Even if you just simply read the book of kings, you find everything that you've said. You had ruler of Israel who rose up to great power because they were God's elect person and then suddenly they fell to idolatry.

So they had to wipe out all of the idols and start over again. It kept happening again and again and again. They did have idolatry. Here's where things began to change in Isaiah. Long before this, in Isaiah 43, I think it is. It says something of the fact before me, no God was formed nor shall there be any after me.

I'm paraphrasing, I think. It basically is saying, I am the only God, you who are believing in polytheism in our Israel camps. You're all wrong because there's only one God. There is no false God.

And that's why the vast majority of Christians do not believe that. this charismatic Pentecostal thing that all these false gods are out to entrap you. And I think if you continue reading, it says, it repeats that phrase, besides me, there is no God.

That sounds vastly different when you compare to what the early Israel believed, where it says, who is like you among the gods plural? So you had this evolving worldview, and it's fully documented in the book of kings, but people who are reading the Bible, often they read one, they do the passage a day thing, they've got the little calendar they flip, and they're not getting the full context of history and understanding that kings has the history both good and bad.

They fell to idolatry, they had idols, they had false god worship, they had all of these things and Yahweh, and then Yahweh said, no, don't do this, and then they did it again. So as this is happening, it is actually shaping their worldview, and that worldview makes it documented into the historical context of the Bible, then in Isaiah it begins to shift.

You've had this false dichotomy, you've had this false understanding of these gods, there's only one god, there is no other false god. Yeah, the real big shift happens with the Babylonian captivity. That's the point, to your point, where you start seeing the big shift, and the reason for that is that you have 12 tribes, 10 of which 150 years earlier, it all been taken and scattered.

Yet one major tribe left, and then little Benjamin, who get taken into Babylon, that's where you have the Babylonian Talmud. That out of that, that's where you see the shift historically where the culture ended up focused on a single Yahweh, but that doesn't happen until the seven, 600, during that captivity period.

That's when the synagogue comes in, the Babylonian Talmud, the whole culture that we know, because this is the problem, we look at modern-day Judaism, and we see through that lens, but the version of Judaism we know only happens as a result of their captivity in Babylon, well in Susa, but they're there.

So you see that, so now I'm gonna ask, you're really controversial question, since we're on controversy. Is Christianity a monotheism, or a polytheism religion? I was actually hoping that you would ask me this in this, because it's both.

If you study the Pentecostal Charismatic progression that I've been talking about, to believe in other false gods, you must be polytheistic. You absolutely have to be. If you believe there is only one God, and there are no other gods, if you believe what Isaiah says, you are monotheistic, but take these people that go up on the mountain tops, and I was reading crazy histories of Nara, that go up on the...

Scream at these gods, these territorial spirits that are hovering over areas geographically. That is a polytheistic religion. And Isaiah, what is it? It's Isaiah, I think, 44. It mocks the whole system. If you read Isaiah 44, it's in the ESV, which I sometimes refer.

I think it even captions it, the full, what is it, the full of idolatry or something like this. It says basically that this man cuts down a tree and he cooks dinner, he bakes bread, and then with the leftover wood after cooking his meal, he carves this god and says, save me, you're my god.

If you read Isaiah 44, I'm paraphrasing greatly. It's basically mocking the idea that a human can fashion a god and that god can save him. When you understand that the Pentecostal cares, nor especially.

When you believe that NAR is teaching all of these territorial spirits, all of this polytheistic religion and that you as a human have to do something to fight the territorial spirits, you are empowering yourself so that you are becoming more powerful than a human.

You're demoting the all-powerful god who's taking care of you and you're creating this false dichotomy. You actually are fashioning idols, but it's worse than Isaiah is mocking because it's not even wood or gold, you fashioned it in your head.

The early church struggled with this and that was where the whole battle came about whether there's eternity or not because you have God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Well, if those are three distinct entities, then we're a monotheistic, a polytheistic religion because we have three gods, but they're one.

You see, they were struggling, the theologians, they've been struggling with this for years. How do I take three distinct entities and yet they're one? We have a monotheistic religion that actually in practice is polytheistic, sorry, I'm just trying to wrestle with this in my head because I always have struggled with this.

What do you mean we're monotheistic? You keep telling me that God the Son, God the Son gave me die for my sins. Well, that means there's a second God. Then he left and then he sent the Holy Spirit and he said he's got to, well, that's the third God.

Right? I mean, this is just me as a young Christian going, wait a minute, how is this monotheistic? That's the funny thing. I came out of a religion that viewed it as polytheistic. We were oneness in randomism, but I spent long hours reading and trying to understand exactly that.

What is the view on the Godhead? It was Brannemarite, it was Brannemarong, and I sat down with a person who had been to seminary who was highly educated and he explained to me, I went to the specific passages of the oneness view of God, and then I went to the specific ones that are trinitarian. And what's funny is when you compare them, there's actually more in the New Testament that support trinitarianism than there are. There's support oneness.

And I asked him to explain it, and then he did, and it made sense in a theological way. And then I said, now explain how that makes sense. I'm sorry, man. He says, I don't understand it.

I can't understand it. And so what it comes out to be, it is a polytheistic by, if you understand the definition of polytheism, it is a polytheistic religion. But if you understand how theology tries to interpret it, you have to take that leap of faith, so you have to believe that it is monotheistic while it is describing something logically that is polytheism. I think one of the biggest problems we have in the church role is because of the fact that we're so dogmatic in our world rules, we create expectations in people sitting in pews.

And so then they build their lives around these dogmatic statements, and then they run into situations. Like, I'll give you an example of one. Good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people. It's a weird default setting. I remember, was a young believer, when a really good guy who was like the Dr. Dobson dad and husband got cancer.

I think it was a complete meltdown for a whole community of people who go, but he's good. He's a good guy. My point here is, I just think we need to all like take a chill pill here and back up a little bit with what we think we know, and start realizing that, hey, let's focus on our relationships and loving one another, and kind of hold all of these big picture items loosely in the palm of our hand, realizing that one day it's going to all be revealed to us, and we're probably going to find out we really didn't know what we thought we knew.

So we can have these fun dialogues, but to your point earlier, the worldview of God or God's has shifted dramatically over the coister over the millennials of human history. A millennia, I should say, of human history. And to your also to your point, it changed in the Bible. Those that original guy Abraham, who was a polytheist, came from a culture where each of the Mesopotamian cities had a deity that they were built around. Abraham came from earth, or worshiped the moon God.

that's where Abraham came from, right? Abraham decided to pick a side instead of like having all 32 NFL teams, he picked a team. He was a chief fan, I'm sure. But he picked a side. That's what, I mean, that's the big controversy, like Abraham picked a side.

Everybody else was picking, you know, had multiple sides. What does that mean, right? It's just, she perter decides to worship one God. That's it. And out of that, then comes these families and over time, right? All these things to develop. But, you know, it was a gradual shift in worldviews as understanding. The more people began to understand, the more things shifted. For me, it's really this simple. Over time, through millennia, whether we're talking about NAR Charismatics, Pentecostals, or go back to the ancient Hebrews, go through the New Testament, Old Testament, no matter what period of time you're talking about, the

only way that people can conceptualize God is to give human attributes, something that you said early on. The problem with this is, when the God doesn't match those expectations, which is another word that you used, whenever the expectations don't align with your theology, suddenly you have this crisis of faith and you try to reconceptualize God. And it all comes down to people struggle to grasp something that they can't understand all throughout history. Here's the world, talk to any atheist. Here's the world around us, and they'll say, we don't believe in the gods. Well, what created this? I know the big bang theory

I've studied all of this stuff. In the end, you still come down to, well, what was there in the beginning? There's still had to have been something, right? What sparked it? What's sparked the big bang you're talking about? And it all comes down to people trying to put human framework around God. When you do this, you're actually putting God in chains. If it's something that your human mind can understand, then it must be limited to the conceptualization that your human mind can produce. Read Corinthians. Here's another thing. I'm going to blow heads even more, I guess. Paul struggled, I think, to some extent to understand these things. If

you read Corinthians, there are passages that back everything that I've just said. There's no God but one is something that Paul says. There's no other gods. pagan gods don't exist as essentially what he's saying. If you keep reading in that same book, I think it's Corinthians.

He starts talking about pagans that sacrifice to demons and not God. He's referencing demons and not Yahweh, not I or not. But if you understand how polytheism worked, a demon was a God in the ancient world. In his language, he's talking...

talking about a lesser god, the greater gods and lesser gods, the demons were the lesser gods. So he's talking both, but also at the same time Paul is talking to a people in a way that they can understand because they have all came from this worldview.

So either A, Paul was trying to understand it himself and writing in both sides B, he was talking in a way that the people could understand because that was the language they were familiar with, or see, we don't understand it at all because the loss of time to translation and we can't go ask Paul at least.

Let's go down another road here. Do we all concur that there are spiritual beings and there's more than one? So for instance, I think there's pretty much a consensus that Lucifer, i.e. Satan, was a real spiritual being.

In fact, nobody, there's very little debate about that, right? There's very little debate about whether there's angels or what you just mentioned, demons, right? So we are very aware that there are at least, well, I mean, not everybody agrees with this, but I think there's a big consensus out there that there's a spiritual world with spiritual beings, right, in another dimension that come into our time and space world.

Are they gods? They're superior to us. There are people that worship Satan. So is he a god? He is a god to that group of people that worship him, right? There's angels, things that have appeared over human history.

It's kind of like I was watching Star Trek this week, and it's like the directive. They can't affect culture, right? But it's funny because they go into these primitive civilizations, and they're gods because that they have superior technology.

So I guess, or I'm going with this, is even the word gods is so vague, and it has so many different perspectives of what that word even means, right? Like, when you say gods, well, what does that mean, right?

Is this means somebody that's superior to you? Somebody that has giftings and abilities that are greater than you? Is that make you a god? Or is it make you a god because of the fact that you worship them, like you change your life or you do things in your life in relation to the fact that this UV is person as being one who provides or protects or whatever, you know what I mean?

It's like who defines a god, you know, we do. But humans are the ones that are saying who's a god and who's not a god. That's the funny part, if you study this from a historical perspective and understand what a pantheon of gods means, Satan...

would fall into that category. And interestingly, I think it's also in Corinthians, Paul calls Satan the God of this world or something like this. In Branemism, we had entire series of sermons on God of this evil age.

So we actually gave Satan God's status. And the Latter-in-Movie, polytheistic. We were polytheistic. Once it got into NAR, they gave Satan powers far beyond what Latter-in ever did. They actually empowered Satan, which is really, really scary.

If you think about it. But there are, and this is probably another podcast for another day, there are numerous passages that talk about how Satan is constrained. So instead of a God who is a powerful, all demon, all powerful demon that NAR has given him, it talks about how God controls Satan.

And there are passages that basically limit him to just another spirit being. Now to you and I who know history, another spirit being, is very similar to, this is a pantheon of God's and Satan is the lesser one.

However, to Christianity who is monotheistic, it brings it into the same realm of question that you have with the Trinity. How can you define Trinity as monotheistic? Well, you have to kind of change what the framework of monotheism is.

So the point I'm trying to drive at with all of this is, if you don't take the humanistic mindset and you ignore all of the stuff that we've said about history and just try to understand this, the Bible is really trying to tell you that God is this all powerful thing that is in full control.

You don't really even need to understand it. You don't need to fashion and carve woodstone idols, golden idols, et cetera, to invoke those powers. You don't need to climb on mountain tops and scream at the demons because God is fully in control.

Everything else, there's one God, everything else is subordinate. That's the, really. So do you think that the ancients actually believe those statues at power? Based on everything that I have studied, I think there's a point in time in which they did believe it and that's kind of documented in the Bible, whenever they're rebuking the people who believe this thing, but over time that changes significantly and I don't know at which point it did, but there came a time whenever they started to see it as a mediator figure.

And interestingly, we've talked about the political aspects of these gods. There's also a familial aspect. Some of these gods were part of your family lineage as well. You go down in Mexico, you can see some of this.

So I think at a point in time they did believe this for whatever reason, but later they came to realize, I can pray this thing all I want and we're still in the drought.

Well, you know, it's, I mean, an interesting story is, is the Exodus, because you have this whole group of people that are being let out. to a promised land. And they don't get there. And so what do they revert to?

They build a golden calf. Well, if you don't understand history, you don't realize that that golden calf is actually an Egyptian god. Right? So here they are. Like, okay, this isn't working out the way we thought. Let's go back. You know, what was it? What's the key screener suddenly like? So you want to go back to Egypt? Isn't that like one of his songs or something? Anyways, but you know, they go right back and it's like, well, how do they even know about this god?

Right? If they're monotheistic and they're worshiping Yahweh, then why are they going or straight back, you know, to the golden calf, representing another god, right? This is where it gets kind of fascinating to me. I don't think it's also neat and tidy as everybody, you know, has this perception that it is, right? And so I think that's a lot of that carries off into even where we are now in the church. Well, I don't think this is neat and tidy as everybody wants to present. Like, you know, we like to get everything sorted and you know, get our ducks in a row and compartmentalize

and define everything. And I just in my world, I just think it's a lot more murky, a lot more undefined. I think I'm with you. It's just like the reality of it is there's the creator.

You know, you can go home, God the Father, you can put a thousand names on them, but the creator. And that creator has given us life and he's given us a responsibility with that life and there'll be an accountability for what we did with that life. And I think that's where we kind of got to bring it back to that, you know, and I think another lesson out of this is that whatever you trust in is your God, you know, if your security is based on all the money you make, well, then that's a God, right? If your security is that your government is going to be the thing that protects you or

whatever, that's your savior, then that's a God too, right? So I'd say, what defines a God? I think, in some ways, a God is anything or any one that we defer to and give power over us, right?

Let's say we default to, right? We, you know, we look at them to save us, right? I think that's where a lot of your rulers, why they got to find his gods, right? Because they were going to save us from the big bad Assyrians or the big bad Egyptians or the big bad, you know, Babylonians or the big bad Israelis, you know, somewhere in there, you're going to save us from something.

Because if you think about it, I mean, that's where the whole thing with the gods came from in the beginning. We're powerless here. the middle of this existence with forces around us, they're like wiping us out here, like we need help, we need a savior. So the whole concept of saviors and, you know, and all that's been there from the beginning, you know, God save us. Well, this has been a wild ride. Thank you so much for doing this. Well, it's been fun. Hopefully we haven't offended a whole bunch of people. But again, we're just too curious guys asking a lot of questions, not making. I hope we haven't made

any dogmatic statements. But if we did, we'd take them back. The only dogmatic statement I would make is I have no dogmatic statements. It's like the only constant is change. Exactly. Well, if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web.

You can find us at William-Brandom.org. From more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, Available on Amazon, Kendo, and Autobahn.