Deciding whom you will serve

Faithfully Yours column offers answers to area readers' spiritual questions

Date published: 3/5/2005

Have a religious or spiritual question that you'd like answered? The Free Lance-Star runs this twice-monthly column for our readers.

QI have recently become aware that three different friends are beginning to dabble in alternative religion--horoscopes and new-age kinds of things like Reiki, crystals, out-of-body experiences, and so on, and that has me worried. I am at a loss to know exactly how to address this stuff. As a Christian I don't believe in it and I think it's wrong, but I also don't want to come across as judgmental or haughtyhelp?

AHow you address friends who are into "alternative religions" depends on what kind of alternative religion they are into. Some strike me as silly but relatively harmless, while others are literally demonic.

But let me take a step back and put "alternative religions" in a wider context, the context of the Ten Commandments.

We tend to think of the Ten Commandments as restrictions on our freedom. Because most of them start out "Thou shall not," we tend to think God is trying to limit our freedom.

But God gave humanity the Ten Commandments not so much to limit our freedom, but to make true freedom possible. Each of the commandments can be read in light of the First Commandment, which doesn't start out with a commandment at all, but with a reminder of who God is: "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery." Then God says, "You shall have no other gods before me."

The First Commandment does not say there are no other gods--there are hundreds of them! It says that the Lord God--the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob--does not want us to "have them," give them credit or power in our life.

Why? God is warning us that the dynamic of all other gods is that they ask more and more of us and, over time, give back less and less. Eventually, we don't have them so much as they have us.

In other words, it is the nature of all false gods to take away our freedom, to enslave us.

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Date published: 3/5/2005