God has gifted me with a large number of Atheists in my close friends and family. I don’t mean that sarcastically. They are sincerely a gift to me. There are authoritarian congregations where Christianity is not to be questioned in any aspect, and my understanding is that that if you’re not allowed to question the beliefs of an organization, then that organization is a cult. The Atheists in my life come to me with all kinds of fascinating, hard-hitting questions about Christianity that sometimes take me years of thought and prayer to answer. These conversations lead to biblical research and periods of prayer that allow me to grow deeper in my faith in God, and they cultivate incredibly deep discussions which are like creme brûlée to my soul. Today I was reading Ezekiel and God helped me to understand finally the answer to one such question. If you’re reading this, no matter what you believe, God bless you, thanks for being here, and please keep an open mind and heart as you read.

Here’s an example of a common question/assertion I have had from several Atheists throughout the years:

You call me an atheist, but you only believe in one god out of thousands that are worshiped on earth throughout history, so you are almost as atheistic as me. What makes your god any different from any of the other gods? Why is your god real, and all the others are made-up?

I think I finally have a response to this excellent question/assertion. Turns out, I believe in those gods too. CHRISTIANS, WAIT – Before you stop reading and assume I’m engaging in blasphemy, read the explanation here: I used to believe, as the question above states, that my God is real, and all the others are made-up, but having read the bible all the way through three (almost four) times, and having done a lot more extra-biblical reading in addition to scripture, what I have come to understand is that the other gods, Greek gods, Hindu gods, Mesopotamian gods, are not imaginary, they are, in essence, demons counterfeiting the one true God. Ergo they aren’t made-up, but very real spiritual entities, and dangerous.

Every year for the past four years I have read The Bible Recap yearlong bible reading plan with host Tara Leigh Cobble, and every year I pick up something new. Right now we are in the book of Ezekiel. I’m not going to hedge about this, Ezekiel is weird, y’all. The first couple of chapters read like a fever dream. Ezekiel is a prophet during the time of the exile – when God allowed the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judea to be conquered by the empire of Babylon under the rule of King Nebuchadnezzar. In the book, the prophet Ezekiel is given many divine visions by God, and as I was reading through the first two chapters a couple of days ago I just found myself asking – Okay, God, what’s the point of this? (admittedly selfishly) What is the application for me and people of my time? We are not part of the Babylonian exile, but I know that scripture is widely applicable both in past and present contexts – that’s the cool thing about prophecy, God can give a prophecy thousands of years in the past to someone like Ezekiel, have it be fulfilled in the lifetime of Ezekiel, and also have a future, as-yet-unfulfilled application of the same prophecy as well. So I wanted to know not necessarily what’s in it for me here, but where am I in this? If it weren’t applicable to people who live in 2025, it wouldn’t be a part of Scripture, so I asked God to show me how this pertains to me and the rest of us alive today. Hoo boy, did He deliver. More on that in a minute.

Another book I have been reading lately as part of my extra-biblical reading is called The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible by Michael S. Heiser. It’s extremely academic and I’m not even a half way through it yet, but the basic premise is that the Bible is full of references to other supernatural beings besides God and angels. These beings are created, but divine. They inhabit the spirit realm as we inhabit the physical realm. Heiser scaffolds the hell out of his arguments with precise and well-researched scripture, pointing out that Christians in large part have a tendency to gloss over these passages because they don’t fit into our modern western worldview. If you’re reading this and interested in this topic, I hope you’ll read his book too (and I hope I get around to finishing it!) This book has helped me to better understand the cultural and historical context of scripture.

Back to Ezekiel. Yesterday’s reading ended in Ezekiel chapter 8. In this chapter, God is taking Ezekiel all around Jerusalem to show him the total and complete idolatry and corruption that has pervaded all of Israel and Judah all the way to the upper echelons of temple government. He brings Ezekiel to a wall in the temple court where he sees a hole. God tells Ezekiel to dig in the wall, which he does, and a doorway appears. God tells Ezekiel to go in and see what’s going on. Inside Ezekiel views “all kinds of crawling things and unclean animals and all the idols of Israel” (Ezekiel 8:10, NIV) God reveals to Ezekiel that the priests are offering incense – sacred incense meant only to worship God – to idols. Idols in scripture usually refer to inanimate objects created by humans. People would offer sacrifices to the idols and worship them in the hopes that a “god” would come possess the idol. Imagine it sort of like demon bait. They didn’t worship the idols in all the same ways they were required by Levitical law to worship Yahweh (Yahweh is the name of God – possibly pronounced like Jehovah, but that’s a whole other blog post.) They would sometimes sacrifice animals to these idols, but they would also often cut themselves and bleed in front of the idol, or even sacrifice children to the idols, which is abhorrent to God. (Jeremiah 19:5).

Ezekiel 10:14 describes a scene of women mourning the god Tammuz. The Spirit prompted me with this question: who is Tammuz? So I googled it. Tammuz was the name of a Sumerian deity. He had a tragic love story with another god named Ishtar, and part of Tammuz’s lore is (essentially simplified) that his death and rebirth brought about the seasons and the harvest, and mourning his death was part of his worship rituals depending on the time of the year. Tammuz is also connected with the Greek figure Adonis, and as I read this it occurred to me, these aren’t stories handed down from generation to generation that coincidentally happened to cross cultural boundaries, these are the same immortal entities that use the same stories to entice humans away from worshiping the one true God. They counterfeit the Gospel, the death and resurrection of Christ, in order to draw people off track from knowing God. I know that sounds backwards because Jesus lived hundreds of years after the book of Ezekiel was written, so it would seem instead that the story of Christ’s death and resurrection is following an established pattern, except that scripture says that God has made known the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:10), and it also demonstrates that even the devil can quote scripture (James 2:19, Matthew 4:6). They (demons) know the plan and they’ve known it from the beginning, and the best they can do to thwart it is to pull people just slightly off target to where they miss the mark of who God actually is, and one of their best strategies in this is by counterfeiting.

Many times, when we as humans experience hard things and ask God “Why?” He doesn’t answer us in words. Rather, he walks with us through the trials and then sometimes years later when we are surrounded by His grace He reminds us of the question we asked previously and as we look around at the fullness of God’s obvious presence in our lives He whispers “This is why.” He doesn’t tell us because we are too limited to conceive of the reasoning. He has to allow us to experience the reason. He meets us in the future and shows us the answer to the question “Why?”. God’s plans aren’t linear like a timeline, or even expansive like a flowchart. They’re not two-dimensional like a spiderweb, they’re more like a neural web that exists in four dimensions. It’s like Willie Wonka’s elevator that goes up and down and forward and backward and front ways and sideways and diagonal. God’s plans expand in all directions, touch every point in time and every part of creation. He is limitless and we are limited and no, we can’t understand the completeness of His purposes, but we can get small glimpses of our part in His plan, and in His mercy he does share that with us if we listen and pay attention.

I have learned so much from reading Ezekiel this time around, it’s at least my fourth time to read it. I learned from chapter 8 that things we think are done in secret are done in the full light of day to God – completely within his sight. He turns walls into open doorways, nothing is hidden from Him.

I was particularly saddened by the verses about the idol of jealousy being set up in the temple, and the vision of the priests turning their backs to the altar to gaze at the sun – they rejected the creator for the created. Scripture often compares idolatry to marital infidelity, so I imagined these scenes that Ezekiel witnessed would be like coming to visit a friend whose spouse is having a blatant affair, and when you enter the house you see that the unfaithful spouse has spent considerable money and effort commissioning portraits to be painted of the affair partner and hung them in their home to the point your friend now feels like they have to move out, they can’t even live in their own house, the house they built and paid for.

Modern idolatry is much less literal than worshiping and sacrificing to a statue of stone and metal, but it basically encompasses anything that takes the place of God in the life of a Christian. Non-christians can engage in idolatry, but the difference is that it will be a transgression, or a sin of ignorance, rather than a willful sin. One mistake many Christians make is to apply Christian laws to non-christians. While God’s laws are universal, each person must choose to follow Him, and therefore submit themselves to these laws. Prior to that, God’s laws will carry no weight with them. Why should they follow the laws of a God they don’t believe in? In the US many politicians and citizens are fond of enforcing biblical laws on a secular society, but this puts the cart before the horse, it’s like the church in Galatia trying to enforce Levitical law on the Galatian Christians (Galatians 2:14). A person’s heart must be submitted before their will can be submitted. That’s why Christ calls us, primarily, to love. That’s why Jesus ate with prostitutes and tax collectors and why he insisted, “It isn’t the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” (Matthew 9:12, NIV)

Another thing I learned in Ezekiel that has relevance to modern Christians is this: God doesn’t always send Christians to the nations, sometimes He sends the nations to the Christians. Ezekiel 3:5 says “You are not being sent to a people of obscure speech and strange language, but to the people of Israel,” God was sending Ezekiel to his own people to tell them to repent. God sends modern Christians not always across the globe, but sometimes across the street, to talk to their literal neighbors about Jesus, and God knows this is hard, and in response, he fortifies us for this work. All we have to do is trust and obey. The following verses (Ezekiel 3:5-9) acknowledges that some of the people we are sent to won’t listen. It can be more intimidating to speak to your friends and neighbors about Christ than it is to speak to strangers, because we worry about damaging our relationships. However, we are not off the hook to talk to the people closest to us, even if they won’t listen, even if they become aggressive or irritated with us for talking about Jesus to them. Christ said he didn’t come to bring peace but a sword (Matthew 10:34-36). We know some people ultimately won’t accept him, it’s not our job to enforce salvation, it’s our job to share the gospel with everyone. We don’t get to choose for them. We have to present the information, and they get to choose for themselves.

If you’re an intellectual, as many Atheists are, you may find the idea of an almighty God archaic or childish. However, there is a rich tradition of Christian intellectual philosophers and discussion – famous fantasy authors C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien had many intense discussions about Christianity, eventually culminating with Lewis becoming a Christian. The French mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal created an argument known as “Pascal’s wager”. Wikipedia defines it as:

“Pascal contends that a rational person should adopt a lifestyle consistent with the existence of God and should strive to believe in God. The reasoning for this stance involves the potential outcomes: if God does not exist, the believer incurs only finite losses, potentially sacrificing certain pleasures and luxuries; if God does exist, the believer stands to gain immeasurably, as represented for example by an eternity in Heaven in Abrahamic tradition.”

Another popular Atheist argument is actually not set up to create discussion, but it’s a verbal trap meant to prove the impossibility of a divine, all-powerful being. It goes like this:

Can God make a rock so big that even He can’t lift it?

This question is intellectually dishonest because, as I stated, it’s not meant to create discussion, it’s meant to shut discussion down. It’s meant to force the Christian to say either that God can’t make big enough rocks, or he is too weak to lift a really big rock. No matter how you answer you have to admit there’s something God can’t do, and therefore He can’t possibly be all-powerful. Setting aside the childlike nature of the question, I have spent a lot of time thinking about it, and here’s my simple answer: No.

There is no such thing as a rock so big that God can’t lift it. God isn’t bound by physical limitations, and therefore there is nothing He can’t move. He created all of existence, and scripture says He can move mountains. Nahum 1:5 says of God, “The mountains quake before him; the hills melt; the earth heaves before him, the world and all who dwell in it.” Furthermore, Jesus said that merely through a small amount of faith in God, that we can also move mountains: “Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” (Mark 11:23-24). The answer to this question is that God has all the power that exists. If you want Him to create logical impossibilities like creating a square circle in order for you to proclaim Him God, then I contest that you don’t have a problem with God, you have a problem with the concept of omnipotence. However, I would also like to present the idea that the DNA double helix shape comes pretty close to being a square circle, since it’s created from two ladder shapes twisted into a spiral, and a spiral, when viewed from above, creates a circular shape. But I digress.

So what now? I am not so naive as to believe that I can give an answer to a couple of atheistic questions and therefore solve unbelief. There are many arguments against Christianity – people have filled books on the topic. It’s a broad subject and I have come to love discussing it. I don’t get angry when people question the Gospel, it’s a crazy story. People don’t die and then come back to life every day. The abnormality of it is what makes Jesus special. If it happened often it would be more believable, but also, it wouldn’t mean anything significant about Jesus. But just in case you’ve never heard it, here’s how I would share the gospel with you:

God created humans to live in perfection with Him, but we sinned and rejected God. So in order to be with us, God sent his son, Jesus, to die on the cross for our sins. Jesus lived a perfect life, and he died the death we deserve as sinners. After three days he rose again, proving that he rules over death. All we have to do to accept the gift of his grace is to confess our belief in him and our need for him as our savior. That’s all it takes. It doesn’t require you to be a perfect person, there’s nothing for you to earn, salvation is a free gift of God, given to you, to save you from death.

If you find that hard to believe, but you want to believe, I would encourage you to pray and ask God to reveal Himself to you, and if you want to talk about Jesus, please reach out to me.