With our ancestors Adam and Eve, we humans broke our relationship with God. When we did this, we created a situation unintended by God. Rather than living with him and one another in a relationship of truth, freedom, love, and vitality, we suddenly found ourselves the inescapable victims and unwitting collaborators of parasitic powers.
These parasitic powers, including the six gods of Olympianity, deceived us into defining the meaning of our lives in terms of politics, war, technology, sex, money, and consumption. These six gods then bullied and bribed us into treating other humans and the rest of creation simply as means of living meaningfully in those terms.
What was God to do? Thankfully, despite the fact that we misused our freedom to repudiate our love for him, God decided to remain true to his own nature. He continued to freely relate to us in all truth with love. He freely chose in love to remain committed to our vitality in spite of the gods and our ridiculous devotion to them.
Still, the gods did play a dominating role in our lives and in creation. Worse, they would continue to corrupt us and all creation until overcome by God. To prepare us for his victory over them on our behalf, God decided first to teach us his ways. He freely decided to initiate a gracious relationship with Abraham and to freely continue it with his descendants. In that way he would enable them to discern the difference between himself and the gods.
The gods of politics, war, technology, sex, money, and consumption bully us by threatening us with radical insecurity, misery, insignificance, guilt, and meaninglessness. They also bribe us to hurt others by promising to give us the security, happiness, importance, merit, and meaning we crave because of their threats. In the history of his relationship with Abraham and his descendants, God would act very differently.
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