Overcome Modern Idols: Beat 31 False gods: Step-By-Step Bible Study Series, #3

By Bruce Leiter

This devotional Bible study will help you and your family identify and overcome thirty-one false gods in your culture. These gods tempt us to become as important as or more attractive than the true God of the Bible. They are ideas that rival him and are front-gods for the evil forces that are active in the world. You will be able to overcome them through Jesus' all-powerful victory when he was on the earth as the triumphant God-man. The Bible study shows you how to pray victory prayers to overcome the false gods. Discussion questions are included for discussion groups, and practical steps will help you grow in your Christian life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bruce Leiter
• Release date: Jan 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393493099

Book preview

Other books by the author

Doubtbusters! God Is My Shrink!

(a postmodern Mere Christianity—the author as himself in a fictional friendship with two thirty-something skeptics)

Be Bolder Growin’ Older

(a Bible study helping us deal with changes as we grow older)

Pray and Play: Dealing With a Fun-Loving Culture

(a Bible study helping us have God-honoring pleasure)

Divided Together 2084

(a romantic, thoughtful, mystery novel in which a Christian and a Muslim fight serial killers and terrorists in a fictional A.D. 2084 Muslim land, while discussing their differing beliefs that motivate them to protect life and seek justice)

Seven Essential Tips for Reading Overcoming Modern Idols:

Tip Number One: Please realize that this book has a section with important first thoughts. Then, it has parts including chapters describing various false gods and their evil sources, a description of the key to victory, and then important final thoughts.

It is very important that you read (and discuss?) the whole book to get the wide range of the evil forces’ attacks on us, the church, and our loved ones. In reading all of it, you will get the full scope of the Bible’s teachings about this subject.

Tip Number Two: Throughout the chapters on our journey with Jesus are steps of application, which are prayer-word-and-action ways that we can overcome modern idols to make progress in experiencing Jesus’ victory over those sins.

Tip Number Three: Those steps take us on a joyful journey with Jesus toward his final goal, final perfection for our lives, a great result that will happen when we die or when he returns.

Tip Number Four: In front of each step designed to help your life as a believer are discussion questions for small groups and Bible studies. A free leader’s discussion guide is available at my e-mail [e-mail].

Tip Number Five: This book contrasts the Bible’s old and new situations, the latter of which has our final goal to be completed some time in the future by God’s great grace. The point of this Bible study is that we don’t arrive at perfection during this life. However, God wants to give us his strength to make progress now toward our future resurrection perfection.  

Tip Number Six: This book is a devotional Bible study both for individual readers and for group discussion.

Tip Number Seven: The outline of the book with its seven parts follows:

Part One: An important pattern 

The desperate need to overcome the false gods and the evil forces 

Christians’ general unawareness of many modern idols 

The ways that idols creep into believers’ lives 

The Old Testament’s teachings against idols 

Who is more powerful, God or the idols/demons? 

God’s command about the false gods 

Recognizing and rejecting false idols 

How to overcome the evil forces’ attacks and influences 

Part Two: Who is the true God compared to the false gods?  

Part Three: The highest modern idol, the I-god  

The Old Testament’s teaching and depiction of the I-god or self-ism  

The New Testament’s solution to the I-god or self-ism 

Our connection to Jesus, the Source of our strength 

God says that confession is good for the soul 

Part Four: Six personal false gods often learned in our childhood 

✓  The bodyguard god 

✓  The on-demand god 

✓  The boy(girl)friend god 

✓  The guilt-god 

✓  The anti-science god 

✓  The god-of-the-gaps 

Part Five: False group-gods learned from the world’s cultures 

Six Human-gods 

The Me-god 

The We-god 

The Good-us-god 

The False-theory-god 

The I-think-god 

The My-experience-god 

Three Escape-gods 

The Separate-god 

The It-god 

The Fun-god 

Four Whatever-gods 

The No-god 

The ?-god 

The Shifty-god 

The I’m-okay-you’re-okay-god 

Four I’m better-gods 

The My-race-god  

The My-sex-god 

The High-head-god 

The Rage-god  

Five undefined gods 

The Form-god 

The Gone-god 

The All-god 

The Always-been-done-that-way god 

The Law-god 

Part Six: The One-person gods 

Part Seven: Prayer to the true God—the key to experiencing Jesus’ victory 

* * *

Part One: An important pattern

What this devotional Bible study will do

My devotional Bible study will show how:

A. Modern idols influence us but want us to be unaware of them,

B. Those cultural false gods are front-gods for the fallen angels attacking God’s people,

C. God’s calling and empowerment of our lives can make us Jesus’ winners over Satan and

his followers. Who me? Yes, you!

Overcoming Modern idols: Beat Thirty-One False gods will unmask those personal and cultural influences and give you God’s ways to overcome them in your family, church, and personal life.  

The desperate need to overcome the false gods and the evil forces

In my daily devotions this morning, I read Revelation 14, a chapter that I have never heard quoted by any preacher or teacher. However, its symbolic meaning points out people’s desperate need of the truth, especially if the devil controls them with one or more of his front-gods.

In Revelation 14:9-12, John sees a sobering vision of a beast (the world’s human religious system worshiping the false gods) controlled by the dragon (Satan). John sees those people’s horrible fate and the blessing of true believers’ destination:

9 A third angel followed them and said in a loud voice: "If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives its mark on their forehead or on their hand, 10 they, too, will drink the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. They will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. 11 And the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever. There will be no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and its image, or for anyone who receives the mark of its name." 12 This calls for patient endurance on the part of the people of God who keep his commands and remain faithful to Jesus.

13 Then I heard a voice from heaven say, Write this: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.

Yes, says the Spirit, they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.

Please understand the following comments:

(1) Make no mistake about it. One of God’s qualities is justice. He is the divine Judge of humans. What is the basis of his verdicts of guilty or not guilty? Well, it isn’t the amount of good deeds we do compared to our bad actions, the way many people think. That thought is Satan’s lie.

(2) Clearly, according to the Apostle Paul, we are all worthy of God’s guilty verdict and the punishment described in this passage, because we are far from perfect (Romans 1:16—3:20). God’s standard from which Adam, Eve, and the rest of us fell is perfect obedience to his Word.

(3) What is the pathway to God’s not guilty verdict? Jesus paves that road with pure, perfect gold by living the perfect life we could never live. He has also died on the cross to be our Substitute by experiencing the hell of separation from his Father there. He has risen from the dead to give us life that will last forever in God’s pure, perfect presence.

(4) Why would we ever want anyone near us to experience the horrors of verses 10 and 11? True, it is figurative language. The cup of God’s wine of his wrath represents his real, right anger against humans’ rebellion violating his will and his right rule of reality.

(5) We must understand the seriousness of unbelieving rebels’ fate here. John also mentions the burning sulfur in Revelation 20:10, 14, 15: 10 "And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever....  12 And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. 13 The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what they had done. 14 Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. 15 Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire. The court of everyone’s divine Judge is in session. All dead people, now risen, receive God’s just verdicts. The passage says twice that he will judge according to whether our names are in his book of life and our actions. If our names are in that book," Jesus has rescued us, and our lives’ actions reflect the changes he has made in us.

(6) Thus, being a good person through our own will power will not end us up in heaven. We must accept Jesus’ free gift of eternal life and live a resulting, grateful life empowered by the Holy Spirit. Then, we know that our names are in God the Judge’s book of life. Of course, since he has already chosen believers before he has created anything (Ephesians 1:3-14), he has already filled his book or supernatural computer then.

(7) Before we get fatalistic and complacent about people’s future in God’s hands, we don’t know who truly believes in the true God. Perhaps, they are hypocrites pretending to believe. Therefore, we need to get the Word out to as many people as possible through developing a few personal friendships and giving responsibly to our church and missionaries.

Christians’ general unawareness of modern idols

Sadly, like unbelievers, we Christians are not often aware of our cultures’ influences that make us drift away from the Bible’s teachings and therefore from God’s will.

Like all people, we often want other people to like us. As a result, we tend to become like other soccer and football moms, our neighbors, co-workers, and other people near us. In other words, we see no problem with becoming like the other parents at our children’s schools, the nice neighbors down the block, the actors on TV, and the people sitting near us at their office desks.

The result is that we don’t often reflect on our cultures’ false gods. Therefore, we tend to put them alongside of or make them more important than the true God. However, we may still pay lip-service to him when we attend our Christian church. Such a life involves loyalty to more than one god; it is polytheism like the gods that tempted ancient Israel.

The ways that idols creep into believers’ lives

The Bible says a great amount about idolatry and the worship of false gods. Some believers think that such teachings are only in the Old Testament and therefore have little to do with their lives.

However, even though that part of the Bible has a lot to say about this subject, we will see that the New Testament also bluntly warns against idolatry.

Furthermore, many people are under the mistaken notion that idols are only statues made of wood and stone. It is true that God uses Israel’s exile from the promised land to cleanse them from worship of wooden and stone idols. However, as time goes on, many of the Jews replace those objects of their attention with the law and their many added rules that become more important than God. As a result, Jesus and Paul both actively resist such idolatrous rule-worship.

As we will see, the fact is that any idea, desire, feeling, decision, intellectual thought, and imagination can also be idolatrous in our lives when we make it at least as important as God.

For example, if we attend a sports event in which our son, daughter, or grandchild participates, we may have no thought about God in our heads. During that event, some other god is prominent in our life, perhaps the god of pleasure called hedonism or the group we’re in, both of which are gods that I consider later in this book. (For a much more complete discussion of the fun-god, see my book Pray and Play: Dealing with a Fun-Loving Culture.)

The bottom line for us

The main point of this devotional Bible study is that we all need a refresher in the Bible’s teachings about idolatry as well as the Bible’s instructions about being God’s winners. The reason is that we need to overcome the false gods and the evil influencers lurking behind them that want to pounce on us to make our Christian lives ineffective in being God’s agents to change our cultures for the better.

Now, let’s go to God’s inspired Word to begin this part of our joyful journey with Jesus.

The Old Testament’s teachings against idols

The prophet Elijah and God versus 850 false prophets—no contest!

We go to a familiar passage, 1 Kings 18:16-40. In verse 17, King Ahab accuses the Prophet Elijah of being a troubler of Israel, but Elijah replies that he has not made trouble for Israel and that Ahab and his family have followed the Baals (verses 18, 19). Therefore, they have been the source of Israel’s struggles.

Please understand that the Baals are the gods of fertility both for the crops and human reproduction. Those gods are especially alluring because the men would frequent the gods’ places of worship to have sex with the temple prostitutes. Their main purpose is to get the Baals’ blessing for their crops and family size. We can imagine the other motives that they have.

Of course, the true God will have nothing to do with these gods that are only front-gods for the demons, who want to replace God with themselves in the Israelites’ worship and service. Up to this point in Israel’s history, they appear to be winning that battle.

At any rate, Elijah proposes a contest on Mount Carmel between his God and the Baals of the eight hundred and fifty prophets (verses 19-25). Elijah’s proposal is that the God who sends fire to burn up a slaughtered bull is the true God. Everyone agrees. Then, in a sadly comical scene, the false prophets kill a bull to be sacrificed and call on the Baals to send fire to burn it up (verses 26-29).

What makes that scene on Mount Carmel humorous is Elijah’s taunt in verse 27, Shout louder! ... Surely, he is a god! Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened.

On the other hand, humans like those false prophets imagine their gods to be like us, except that those gods are more powerful than their followers and therefore worthy of their respect.

Instead, the true God has made us like him in some ways but not in every way. For example, God is all-powerful, present everywhere, all-knowing, and will last forever from the past to the future. We neither have nor can have any of those qualities, though God gives true believers life that will last forever and a little of his power for positive change.

In contrast to the true God of the Bible, the false gods in those times are limited to a certain territory or city where people worship them. Humans always want to follow gods that they can put on their level and under their control.

God’s powerful demonstration of his unlimited power

Amazingly, in 1 Kings 18:38, the God of Mount Carmel and of the whole earth sends fire to burn up the slaughtered bull in response to Elijah’s simple request as follows, At the time of sacrifice, the prophet Elijah stepped forward and prayed: ‘LORD, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. Answer me, LORD, answer me, so these people will know that you, LORD, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again’ (1 Kings 18:36,37).

Notice that Elijah’s sole concern is that Israel know that the LORD is God and that the true God is turning their hearts back again to him.

Like Israel, we can let our lives blend into our cultures to accept false gods. Instead, like Elijah, we need to take a stand against our cultures’ false gods and for the only true God of the Bible. Our need is the purpose for this book. Continue reading to learn about thirty-one modern idols.

God’s command about the false gods

A very familiar Bible passage to some people (Exodus 20:1-6) shows God speaking his Ten Commandments to Israel in his own voice. On Mount Sinai, he spoke all these words: ‘I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.’ Moses’ inspired writing of God’s direct voice speaking his will causes several observations for our study:

(1) Notice that Israel’s obedience to God’s first two commands has a clear motivation in verse one. The awesome God who has fulfilled his promises to their ancestor Abraham has recently rescued them from four hundred years of Egyptian slavery (verse one) with eleven amazing miracles. The most impressive one has been his opening the Red Sea and making its water shoot up in a water-wall alongside a dry pathway between those lined-up fountains all the way across that deep sea. Their motive for obeying God without question is their thankfulness for his amazing deliverance from Pharaoh’s iron sandal crushing their necks. God’s reason for taking Israel away is his prior claim on them when he has called Abraham.

(2) Thus, we must also obey God and reject all other gods with thankful hearts because Jesus has released us from God the Judge’s rightful condemnation of us through Jesus’ death (Romans 5:1).

(3) God’s call is simple and straightforward. They and we are not to have any other gods before him. Furthermore, Israel is not allowed to make any images to stand for earthly creatures that they respect and to which they bow down in worship. All those statues are front-gods for Satan and his fellow fallen-angels.

(4) Nowadays, we don’t often make statues for our worship, but we do allow other values or gods from our cultures influence us. It’s much easier to think about visible things and people instead of the invisible God. Of course, he has been aware of that human tendency since Adam and Eve have chosen the devil’s way instead of his. Thus, he gives us this command for Israel to obey.

(5) People might say that