People must decide whether to follow only Christ's gospel

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Excerpts of a sermon yesterday at Falls Church Episcopal by the Rev. John W. Yates:

In seminary I was taught to preach with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. ... The fascinating thing about the story of Gideon is how relevant it is to us this week [with the General Convention of the Episcopal Church electing the openly homosexual Rev. V. Gene Robinson as the next diocesan bishop of New Hampshire].

In Judges Chapter 6, Verse 1 ... we are historically in the period after the Exodus where the Israelites are settled in the Promised Land, but before the first king. The Lord is to be their king. But the people are constantly doing evil in the eyes of the Lord.

Then in Verse 7 the Lord sends a prophet, who rebukes them, saying: "Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I led you up from the house of Egypt, and brought you out of the house of slavery; and I delivered you from the hand of the Egyptian; and from the hand of all who oppressed you, and drove them out before you, and gave you their land; and I said to you, 'I am the Lord your God; you shall not pay reverence to the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you live.' But you have not given heed to my voice."

We are not to love the world or worship the gods of this world. It is called idolatry in both testaments and is abhorrent to the Lord. Jesus said that we can't have two masters; we will love either one or the other. We must choose either to follow Jesus Christ as Lord or not.

The Lord tells Gideon to take his father's bull, pull down the altar to Baal belonging to his father and cut down the sacred pole next to it. The altar was devoted to Baal, and the sacred pole was devoted to Asherah. These gods were worshipped throughout the ancient Near East. Baal was a male fertility god, and Asherah was his female consort. It was related to the agricultural seasons of the year, death in the fall and winter, and resurrection and fertility in the spring. It was an especially degenerate form of worship employing cult prostitutes and homosexuality. They were the gods the people surrounding the Israelites worshipped, and now the Israelites were worshipping Baal and Asherah.

The Israelites had become like the world around them, worshipping the gods of the world, rather than the Lord. This was a constant temptation and sin throughout the Old Testament, and eventually led to exile in Assyria and Babylon.

It was a constant temptation in the early Church. The epistles constantly warn us against this very thing. Paul says to the Galatians: "I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel -- which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned" (Galatians 1 6-8).

Peter warns us: "As there were false prophets in the past history of our people, so you too will have false teachers, who will insinuate their own disruptive views and, by disowning the Lord who bought them freedom, will bring upon themselves speedy destruction. Many will copy their debauched behavior" (2 Peter 2:1-2).

Jude says: "My dear friends, at a time when I was eagerly looking forward to writing to you about the salvation that we all share, I felt that I must write to you encouraging you to fight hard for the faith which has been once and for all entrusted to God's holy people. Certain people have infiltrated among you, who were long ago marked down for condemnation on this account; without any reverence they pervert the grace of our God to debauchery and deny all religion, rejecting our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ."

This all sounds rather familiar this week, doesn't it? But it really should not be a surprise to any of us that it is a temptation and sin today.