All One And The Same
There is an old expression that goes like this, “If you have seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all.” Or course, it may be true depending on what you are looking at, but it is more often not true and a gross over-simplification as well as a terrible lack of appreciation when it comes to the uniqueness and specialness of each individual.
But there is the flip side of that coin that is also being tossed around today which says, “If you look at them all, you are looking at all one and the same.” When it comes right down to it, it is the identical thing that is being stated but in reverse order.
Either way, it always ruffled my feathers when it is said about someone’s children, “Boy, they sure all look alike,” as it was and still is said about my dear wife and her 12 Dutch, blond, brothers and sisters. As if her mother kept on pushing out “Twinkies” or something. But I assure you, dear Harry and Jennie, my wife’s awesome parents, did not simply repeat themselves thirteen times by a long shot, even though people when congratulating them after the birth of another child, often had the look on their faces that said, “Oh, not that again.” I assure you that their thirteen children are as different as can be, and I of course got the best of the very varied brood.
GOD AND THE gODS
More exactly, what are we getting at here? Something critically important! As if there are any non-critical issues anymore these days! For many decades now, there has been and still is the move to ECUMENISM in the Christian world. Ecumenism means the coming together of denominations within Christianity regardless of profound doctrinal differences.
For instance, according to the “Evangelical and Catholics Accord II” drafted by Charles Colson in 1997, the following differences should not divide Catholics and Evangelicals as “brothers and sisters” in Christ – baptismal regeneration, the Eucharist, sacramental grace, justification by works, purgatory, indulgences, the role of Mary and the saints in salvation, and salvation for those not evangelized.
Now then on top of all of this, and it was bound to happen, there is the move to SYNCRETISM, that is, the blending of absolutely antithetical religions and gods into one religion and one god. This includes using practices from other religions which were formerly considered pagan now being used in the worship of the God of the Bible. Welcome to the modern world of syncretized religion, which includes the Christianization of yoga, Hindu-breath prayers, occult visualization, altar-aroma therapy, altered states of consciousness, spiritual chanting, drumming etc.
Now to the specific focus here. We were visiting with a precious new friend of ours who has attended the same Episcopalian church for many years, a church that is now being pastored (priested) by a practicing and avowed lesbian. And wouldn’t you just know it, a perverted priestess who on top of her own perversion is now leading the congregation into embracing other falsehoods and heresies such as the “Emerging Church Movement.” Where you find one untruth, you will find a train of untruths following. Always! And that is because error spawns error. What we sow we reap. If we sow error, we reap more error.
Our discussion with this dear friend went from one thing to another. I mentioned that one issue among many others that she has to guard herself against in these wacky days is the philosophy of not only bringing people of all faiths and religions together under the same religious banner, but also the resulting blasphemy that all of the different gods of all the different religions are in fact the same God but with different manifestations and names. That is, there is truth in every religion and there is a variation of the same God in all of them too.
This has been around for some time in the secular world, and you must have heard at least one time or another that same religious philosophy. I am sure you have! You may even remember having been troubled by it, but at the time you were not sure just how to think about it or how to respond to it. Here is a sample statement of what we talking about:
“IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT NAME YOU CALL GOD, FOR IT IS
ALL THE SAME GOD ANYWAY.”
Alan Jackson is a well known Country-Western Singer, and he expresses his convictions with absolute clarity in these words:
It doesn’t take a theologian to understand that ole’ Tex Jackson is singing that no matter what religion we espouse, we are all believing in the same God, and we are all that same God’s kids. Happy trails cowboys and cowgirls, and we will all see each other in the great heavenly “All The Same God Ranch” in the sweet bye and bye. Ride ’em godboys and godgirls!!!
Of course, Alan Jackson isn’t by any stretch of the imagination the first to articulate this. It was Mahatma Gandhi who once said:
“THE SOUL OF RELIGION IS ONE, BUT IT IS ENCASED IN
A MULTITUDE OF FORMS.”
The Baha’i faith claims the following on its official website at bahai.org:
“IN REALITY, THERE IS ONLY ONE RELIGION, THE RELIGION OF GOD. THIS
ONE RELIGION IS CONTINUALLY EVOLVING, AND EACH PARTICULAR
RELIGIOUS SYSTEM REPRESENTS A STAGE IN THE
EVOLUTION OF THE WHOLE.”
Swami Chidananda of Divine Life Society quotes from the Hindu scripture these words from their god:
“IN WHATEVER WAY MEN APPROACH ME, EVEN SO
DO I GO TO THEM.”
A god who is so user-friendly. Men determine which way god comes to them by which way they decide to come to god. A god who conforms to the religious preferences and customs of men. A god who becomes all things to all men that by all means more men will believe in him. In authentic Christianity men conform to Jesus Christ, but this god conforms to men. I have heard of the film A Man of a Thousand Faces, but this is The god of a Thousand Faces.
And now follow a couple of quotes I have found amongst gobs of other like-minded internet bloggers:
“YES, I BELIEVE IN JESUS, AND I BELIEVE IN ONE GOD. I THINK THAT
GOD HAS TAKEN ON MANY FORMS TO REACH AS MANY
PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE.”
And again:
“I KNOW THAT THE AMOUNT OF GODS CONTRADICT, BUT I BELIEVE THAT
THERE IS ONE GOD WITH DIFFERENT FORMS, REACHING
OUT TO DIFFERENT PEOPLE.”
Sneaky pooh Satan has begun to slip this into Christian circles as well. Pastor Joel Osteen, when interviewed on Larry King Live a few years ago now, said about the Hindus, “They really do love God.” He did not say, “Their god.” He said “God.” The implication being that there was no distinction between the Hindu god and the Christian God. That is, they really love God just like Christians really love God. Sort of the blending of Hinduism and Christianity – HINDIANITY! All of this of course is Satan’s skillful attempt to dissolve Jesus Christ into a generic and indistinct blob of godness. If you will:
“IF YOU’VE SEEN ONE GOD, YOU’VE SEEN THEM ALL,
AND IF YOU’VE SEEN ALL OF THE GODS, YOU’VE
SEEN ONE AND ALL THE SAME.”
Of course, it should not surprise us that gargantuan deceptions are now taking root in the Christian world as well. Satan isn’t picky. As Paul Crouch stated on TBN, “Christianity and Islam have far more in common than what they don’t have in common.” Sort of the blending of Christianity and Islam – CRISLAM! One religion for all and all for one! Is everybody happy? So then, while you are traveling through life, try ‘em all, for all the gods and religions of the world are simply different ways of stating the same thing. You know, sort of like:
“TRAILMIX RELIGION ALL FROM THE CONVENIENCE OF THE SAME BAG.”
One stop shopping! It’s a lot simpler that way, and it saves a lot of money, for unlike baseball cards for all of the thousands of baseball players past and present, all you really need is ONE GOD CARD. Whether it be ATOM GOD or COSMOS GOD or MOON GOD or SUN GOD etc. etc., you only need one card for they are all the same god anyway. But then you might want to try and collect all of the god cards just so you can see for yourself how versatile, flexible, and diverse the one God really is. Then you could play cards with your god cards and never lose, because each card would in fact be the trump card.
Or, you can get a jump on the “ALL THE SAME GOD SCAM,” and really cash in by architectually coming up with a design for UNIGOD CHURCH BUILDINGS. You know, sort of like UNISEX BATHROOMS. There will soon be a strong market for the UNIGOD SANCTUARY, and the designs are as limitless as the religions of the world. Modern day pastors will jump all over that, for just as politicians cater to homosexuals and lesbians to get more votes, so these New Age – Church Emerger pastors can build UNIGOD CATHEDRALS to get more parishioners and bigger offerings.
Or again, you can sell ONE AND ALL THE SAME GOD CARDS in your UNIGOD CHURCH BOOKSTORE, and assure your people that like the AMERICAN EXPRESS CARD, the ONE AND ALL THE SAME GOD CARD is recognized in UNIGOD CHURCHES all over the world. Don’t leave home without it.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THAT?
When I warned our friend about this rapidly encroaching “Same Religion – Same Faith – Same God” stuff, she disarmingly asked me, “What’s wrong with that?” I had the sense in me that she was inadvertently asking that questions for millions of religious and non-religious people everywhere. An important question indeed! I had never been asked that before, let alone so bluntly, but then we are living in a world quite unlike we have ever lived in before. Have you noticed that too?
Have you caught your breath so far? From a bit of a different angle, but in principle the same, Richard Wurmbrand states in his book Marx And Satan on page 125, “Emesto Cardenal is a Catholic priest who is a self-avowed Communist and was active in the Communist government of Nicaragua. He is also one of the most prominent exponents of the so-called liberation theology, which exists within both Catholicism and Protestantism and seeks to blend Christianity with communism.”
Then Wurmbrand quotes Cardenal from his book The Zero Hour:
“A WORLD OF PERFECT COMMUNISM IS THE KINGDOM OF GOD
ON EARTH…THE GOSPEL CAUSED ME TO BECOME A
MARXIST…COMMUNISM AND THE KINGDOM
OF GOD ARE THE SAME FOR ME.”
Here Satan is making Jesus Christ and Karl Marx synonymous. If Satan cannot convince people to embrace the rotten and hellish, then he tries to make righteousness and rottenness the same. Quite a trick if you can pull it off, and apparently he has! This is now getting folks by the scores into advanced deception. Likewise, if Satan cannot convince people to embrace false gods, then he tries to make the true God and the false god one and the same also. He is having great success, as growing multitudes believe exactly that.
I appreciated our friend’s total honesty and childlike innocence when she asked me, “What is wrong with all religions and gods being the same religion and god?” She was not being combative, clever, or rude, but rather she sincerely and earnestly wanted to know what was wrong with all the religions and gods of the world being the same religion and the same god. (I quipped to her that people in Florida would like this because they like everything the same – the ages, the temperatures, the mobile homes, and now the religions. Sometimes my humor is ill-timed and misplaced and gets me into trouble. Thankfully she laughed. Whew!)
Now then, understand what we are really dealing with here. It is another one of Satan’s schemes to degrade and dilute the God of Christianity. God tells us in Exodus 20:3,
“You shall have no other gods BEFORE ME.”
And in Isaiah 44:6, He makes it very clear that,
“You shall have no other gods BESIDES ME.”
But now I hear God saying against the devil’s newest strategy,
“You shall have no other gods IDENTIFIED OR EQUATED WITH ME.”
Why then is that so important? Let’s take a look.
But before we do, remember now, we are not dealing here with putting other gods before God in our lives. That is a totally different subject. Whatever we love more than God is before God and is in fact our god, and the God to end all gods will not stand for it. Not to put God before all is to place Him behind all. Not to love God above all is to value Him beneath all. Given the truth of all of that, this is not what we are dealing with in this teaching.
Nor are we dealing with having other gods besides God, that is, additional gods. Polytheism! That too is a completely different subject. The Bible tells us that we cannot love God and mammon on the same level and in the same way. No God but God! Polytheism is an impossbility and a bust, for the God to end all gods does not work well on a committee with other gods.The choice is clear. But we are not dealing with this teaching either.
What we are dealing with and what we are now confronted with is the devilish trickery that all the gods of all religions are one and the same God essentially. God in all of the different religions is called by different names, and there are different ways to come to this God, but all of the names and all the ways lead to the same God. So let’s all get together, let’s all be one, and see how much we have in common. This is a horse of a different color! This is not about priority gods, nor about additional gods, but about different extensions of the same God. We are now faced with the belief that all of the gods of the world religions are only species of the same genus. The one true and only God’s many alter egos.
ONE AND THE SAME GOD – GOOD OR EVIL
Well now, if it is true that all of the gods of the religions of the world are basically one and the same God when you get right down to it, then of course there really are no false gods and no false religions. Rather there are only variations of the same true religion and the same true god. There is eternal, divine truth in all of them, and in that we can all join together. There are only different manifestations and representations of the one, cosmic God. Bless be the same-god tie that binds Christians, Hindus, Moslems, Buddhists, Christians etc. One day we will all have one great big religious party in the hereafter, but let’s get the party started now. Hallelujah-Halleallah-Hallebrahma-Hallebuddha-Hallekrishna!
Apparently God is a God of greatly varied theophanies, and can make himself known to different people and cultures and religions in totally different manifestations and under totally different names and yet be the one and the same God. Divine ambidexterity! Just like the voice-imitator can capture the voice sounds of radically different celebrities, so God can convey Himself to radically different cultures and in radically diverse forms and yet be the same God in all of them, whether it be Allah, or Brahma, or Buddha, or Krishna etc.
Therefore to be intolerant of one of His manifestations is to in fact be intolerant of Him in total, for He may not be denied in one manfestation and yet be accepted in all of the others. It is all or none! All of the gods packaged in one and the same God.
But then, if that is the case, why is the God of the Bible, the Judeo/Christian God, so intolerant of all other gods, and why does He call the worship of them downright evil? By calling the worship of other gods who are the extensions of Himself evil, wouldn’t God then in fact be calling the worship of Himself sinful too. Do you think that God would be that dumb and cast aspersion on all of his alter-egos?
And yet He does call all other gods and the worship of them evil! We read over and over again in the Bible, words like those found in Judges 10:6,
“Then the sons of Israel again DID EVIL in the sight of the Lord,
served the Baals and the Ashtaroth, the gods of Aram, the
gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the sons
of Ammon, and the gods of the Philistines; thus they
forsook the Lord and did not serve Him.”
Certainly if all of these gods were one and the same with the God, and the God one and the same with them, then the Israelites by serving foreign gods would not be forsaking the Lord but only adapting and adjusting themselves to His divine variations on the same theme. It then certainly wasn’t spiritual adultery or whoring after other gods, which is what God calls their worship of other gods again and again in Scripture. No, they did not have a harem of gods, but rather remained true to the one true “Multi-Personality God” in His different personas.
But the Bible’s God tells us instead that the Israelites, who had a nasty habit of worshipping and serving about every god they ran into or tripped over, were sinning against God each time they did it, and not simply adjusting and adapting to His diverse forms, names, and manifestations. And the children of Israel agreed that they had sinned against God as we read in Judges 10:10,
“Then the sons of Israel cried out to the Lord, saying, “We have sinned
against Thee, for indeed, we have forsaken our God and
served the Baals.”
The point being:
“YOU CAN’T HAVE YOUR GOD AND ALL THE OTHER GODS AS ALL
ONE AND THE SAME AND NOT BE SINNING.”
It also all gets very bizarre if not insane if you really think about it, and not just sinful. If God and the gods are all one and the same, we must join Matthew and Mohammed for instance, and unite the Bible and the Koran, which is exactly what the “New Agers” and the “Church Emergers” are trying to do. I can still see and hear Paul Crouch on TBN presenting the Bible and the Koran as having the essentials in common even though the non-essentials were somewhat divergent. What can be more essential than God? If you will, what joins Christians and Moslems is greater than what separates us. What we are seeing as a result of all of this is the delusion and the illusion of “THE GREAT GOD-AMALGAMATION MOVEMENT” around the world.
To quote another “All One And The Same God” proponent:
“I SAY THAT ALL ARE CALLING ON THE SAME GOD…A MOTHER
PREPARES DIFFERENT DISHES TO SUIT THE STOMACHS OF
HER CHILDREN…IT IS NOT GOOD TO FEEL THAT MY
RELIGION IS TRUE AND THE OTHER RELIGIONS
ARE FALSE.”
But, the God of the Bible tells us that it is good to feel that only Christianity is true and all the other religions are false. It is the truest and best feeling that one can ever have, if it comes from believing in the Triune God of the Bible and Him alone, unduplicated and unvaried. We can have that feeling too if we do what the children of Israel did in I Samuel 7:4,
“So then the sons of Israel removed the Baals and the Ashtaroth
and served the Lord alone.”
SACRED OR PAGAN SHRINES
We read these words in Jeremiah 50:6,
“My people have become lost sheep; their shepherds have led them
astray, they have made them turn aside on the mountains; they
have gone from mountain to hill and have forgotten
their resting place.”
E. W. Martin in his book Little Foxes That Spoil The Vines writes on page 76, “ ‘They have gone from mountain to hill,’ said Jeremiah of certain of his compatriots, and although I am using his words figuratively, he was using them literally…He was referring to actual places on the map, those high places so frequently mentioned in the Old Testament, those mountain shrines dedicated to the old pagan gods, where people indulged in disgusting orgies and wild abandon and sought religious ecstasy by cutting themselves, by whipping up enthusiasm through erotic dancing, and by letting themselves go in every riotous excess.”
E. W. Martin continues, “To his great sorrow, Jeremiah found his fellow countrymen sneaking off to these pagan altars. Officially they were Israelites dedicated to the high, austere, moral worship of the One God, the God of truth and justice and mercy; but again and again their itching feet drove them to the hills for a religious jamboree, to seek ecstasy, release, and excitement.”
It was good King Josiah who found that exact, disgusting state of affairs when he came very early in his life to office as King of Judah. We read something vividly astounding in II Chronicles 34:2-5 as follows,
“And he (Young King Josiah) DID RIGHT IN THE SIGHT OF THE LORD,
and walked in the ways of his father David and did not turn aside
to the right or the left.”
“For in the eighth year of his reign while he was still a youth, he began to
seek the God of his father David, and in the twelfth year he began to
purge Judah and Jerusalem of the high places, the Asherim, the
carved images, and the molten images.”
“And they tore down the altars of the Baals in his presence, and the incense
altars that were high above them he chopped down; also the Asherim, the
carved images he broke in pieces and ground to powder, and scattered
it on the graves of those who sacrificed to them.”
“Then he burned the bones of the priests in their altars, and purged
Judah and Jerusalem.”
You know what is going on here don’t you? The children of God had not only begun to worship the pagan gods of their heathen neighbor nations, but they had erected shrines and altars to these strange gods and their priests sacrificed to these pagan gods in worship and allegiance. King Josiah destroyed the shrines, altars, images of the gods, and in all of this we are told that JOSIAH DID RIGHT IN THE SIGHT OF THE LORD. Not only that, but he killed the priests who sacrificed to these pagan deities, and burned their bones and cremated them on those same pagan altars before he chopped them down. He ground to powder the idols and scattered the demolished, powdered remains over the graves of the priests who had sacrificed to them. SO MUCH FOR ALL ONE AND THE SAME!!!
King Josiah didn’t just reprimand the people and their priests, but rather became a violent and brutal god destroyer, inflicting pain, terror and death from every pagan high place to every pagan shrine to every priest turned pagan. Anyway, this religious smorgasbord of idol dust and priest bones came from an acutely developed sense of the “One Holy God” and the falseness of all other gods who had nothing to do with THE GOD TO END ALL GODS.
Now then, what’s the point here? Obviously this, and that is if these gods of the other nations were but extensions of God Himself, why would Jehovah God grind them and therefore Himself into powder? And if those shrines of the pagan’s gods were God’s own worship places, why would He obliterate them? And if the priests who were doing due diligence and offering sincere sacrifices to these Asherim and Baal gods who were one and the same with Jehovah God, why would He massacre His own priests for honoring Them/Him? What and who is this God, a divine sadist, for God approved of all the misery that Josiah was inflicting upon Him/them?
You see, according to the ALL ONE AND THE SAME GOD advocates, not only are the gods of the nations all extensions of the one-and-the-same God, but that the one-and-the-same God dwells in many different houses and sanctuaries of worship throughout the world. You will find Him dwelling among His worshippers in a Mormon Tabernacle, a Buddhist Shrine, a Moslem Mosque, a Jewish Temple, a Christian Church, a Catholic Cathedral, a Hare Krishna Temple, and a Hindu Mandir.
Apparently, this very versatile God loves all kinds of religious architecture, and has dwellings all over the world with drastically diverse design, and really gets into radically different liturgies and forms of worship as the many-goded same God. And more than that, no matter which houses of worship He dwells in, He loves them all because for Him there are no places like homes.
All of that is a pack of lies. God with and through King Josiah became a wrecking crew of every other god’s high place and turned it into a very low place. God not only gave these false gods a crack over the head, but pulverized them into ex-divinity dust. When it came to other gods and their houses of worship, God was anything but a proponent of non-violence. God ended the fight before it even got going with these other gods. The question is answered and the matter settled once and for all – ALL NOT-NOT-NOT-NOT-NOT ONE AND ALL NOT THE SAME.
THE GOD WHO DECAPITATED HIMSELF
Never forget that we read about Satan that he is the father of lies. More exactly we read in John 8:44,
“Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature; for he is
a liar and the father of lies.”
In other words, everything fake, false, and fictitious comes from and is inspired by Satan who is the progenitor of anything and everything phony and fabricated. That includes all of the FALSE GODS that men not only believe in, but identify as the same and one with the God of the Bible. That is probably Satan’s greatest whopper lie of all time. And as it is with his fakeries and falsehoods, unlike Josiah, men are still falling for them left and right.
The Bible tells us about a god of the Philistines named Dagon. The Philistines believed the lie of Satan that this Dagon was not only their god, but also was the father of another one of their gods name Baal. Dagon had the shape of a man in the upper torso with the tail of a fish. I guess you could say that ole Dagon was fishy from the beginning, and his son-god Baal was known as the corn god and was like all fake gods – really corny.
Anyway, the Philistines had stolen the Ark of the Covenant of the one and only true God, Jehovah God of Israel. The Philistines had placed the Ark of the Covenant, to which Jehovah had attached His power and glory, in the shrine of Dagon to mock the God of Israel. While there, Jehovah didn’t look at Dagon and say, “You know, when I look at your face, it is like looking at myself.” No, instead, one night, Jehovah God knocked Dagon off from his pedestal as well as severing Dagon’s head from his body and breaking off his hands. There lay Dagon beside himself. We read in I Samuel 5:4,
“But when they arose early in the morning, behold, Dagon had fallen on
his face to the ground before the Ark of the Covenant. And the head
of Dagon, and both the palms of his hands, were cut off on the
threshold; only the trunk of Dagon was left to him.”
Just the trunk and fishy fail of his body remained in tack. Pretty hard to be the fish-god with just the tail but no head and no fins!
You see, if Dagon was one of the extensions of the great cosmic god, that god would have then knocked himself off from his throne by knocking Dagon off from his pedestal. By decapitating Dagon, he would in fact have decapitated himself. By dismembering Dagon, he would have dismembered himself. Now then, if you want to believe in a sadistic, headless, handless god like that, go ahead, but you are on your own.
Yet the only conclusion the Philistines came to was that it wasn’t safe for Dagon to cohabit with Jehovah God, and that they better get the Ark of the Covenant out of there. No, they didn’t conclude that Dagon was a false god, a fake god, a sham god, a no god, which he was, but rather concluded that “Devastated and Demolished Dagon” and Jehovah God were incompatible. Well at least they got that right.
CONCLUSION
When you really think about it, it has been the prime art of Satan, the great illusionist and enemy of the human soul, to take the one, true God out of men’s hearts and replace Him with false gods disguised as God. He does it so well, that men all over the world fall headlong like Dagon for these fake notions and false impressions and leave THE ONE TRUE GOD for other NON-GODS who the true God can knock to smithereens with a wink.
Finally, here is the reason that lies at the bottom of all false religions and false gods and eats at the very vitals and heart of faith in THE ONE TRUE GOD. Satan, who desperately wants to be worshipped as god, now in some sick, slick, seductive way, has persuaded and is persuading men that all of the gods of the world are the extensions of the one true God. When in fact, they are the extensions of Satan himself, for everything false comes from him.
So then, Satan has pulled off his quintessential masterpiece of deception, for in worshipping these false gods who come from Satan’s demented but brilliant mind, men are in fact worshipping Satan as their god. He finally got his wish, well sort of. It won’t last, for those who worship him now will despise him and be despised by him in Hell forever.
Dear one, turn from your false god whatever that may be, and turn to THE ONE AND ONLY TRUE GOD – JESUS CHRIST. He loves you, died for your sins, suffered your hell and my hell for your sins and my sins. He alone! He alone rose from the dead for your justification and mine. He alone! He alone is coming to judge the living and the dead. He alone.
We read in Acts 4:12 about Jesus Christ:
“NOR IS THERE SALVATION IN ANY OTHER, FOR THERE IS NO OTHER NAME
UNDER HEAVEN GIVEN AMONG MEN BY WHICH WE MUST BE SAVED.“
We read John 14:6 the words of Jesus Christ,
“…NO ONE COMES TO THE FATHER, BUT THROUGH ME.”
So then, all of the other names of the false gods of all other false religions are worthless, and all of the other ways to God are worthless too. Believe only in the name Jesus Christ and you will be saved. HE ALONE IS THE WAY, THE TRUTH AND THE LIFE!!!
