My christian wife wants my son to know more “bible”. One of her approaches is to get him a book about the “bible”. As she is a christian, of course she’s gonna get a book about the christian bible. Without going in-depth into how I live with a christian wife, I choose to scan through the book to see just how “biblical” it is, or, rather, how christian it is.

You see, I still get to see a section of the christian world. I know there are varying levels of Jesus-imposition on everything. I get to see apostolic pentacostal approach of stuffing Jesus into every place God is since, to them, God is Jesus. They are into the oneness doctrine, that Jesus is Father, Son and Holy Ghost; it’s all one person and that person’s name is Jesus. And I get to see the more subtle approach of the unitarian who says God is not Jesus. I see the things in-between, such as the trinitarian and the arian, those following doctrines said to come from an ancient christian called Arius, such as the Jehovah Witnesses.

So I get to see various levels and flavours of idolatry, from no idolatry – Jesus is not God and shouldn’t be prayed to – to full-on idolatry – where God is fully replaced by Jesus.

So I scanned through this book to see just how much it twisted the Jewish Bible and how much it tried to do the bait-and-switch, starting with God but only to make sure you believe in Jesus in some fashion.

Now although I saw some problems with it early on with regards to how it depicted the message of the Bible, such as saying Satan disguised as a snake to tempt Eve, which can never be said to be an attempt to teach a person about the text of scripture, the further I scanned into the book, the more I started to see a common strategy: even though it was explaining the “old testament,” it would first “explain” and then insert some lesson about Jesus to link Jesus to the “old testament.” Now this isn’t all-out idolatry, but from my experience it is only a hint at the possibility of it.

When it explained the early books of Genesis, it didn’t go all-out trinitarian, saying how God is actually three “persons” in one “thing” called “God.” Again, it was subtle and gentle in the beginning.

But then I started to see signs of idolatry with it ascribing Jesus titles that belonged to God. One place would say “God is king of kings.” But then later on, it would say that Jesus is king of kings. But the author almost refused to go all-out idolatrous until nearer to the end.

Let me be blunt with you. There is only one Creator of the universe: the invisible, immortal, timeless, transcendent, inhuman being, the first cause of all and the sustainer of all called God. There is only one Person to be prayed to, and that is that same being called God. Only he’s in the place to give ear to and give fulfilment to such a communication. Part of idolatry is where you attribute such credit to someone or something else, when you pray someone or something else.

The christian bible makes it abundantly clear that Jesus was human, changeable, growing in stature and wisdom, incomplete in knowledge, fleshy, etc. By very definition, he is something other than God. Yet this book that I was scanning through eventually taught its reader to gain salvation by doing what? Praying directly to … you already know, right? Yes, offering prayers to Jesus. Yes, idolatry. And then later on, it teaches that there was another creator of the universe, and what do you think his name is? Why yes, it would be “Jesus,” that flesh thing that fell asleep at times and got killed. That thing created the universe!?! That again is idolatry.

So the book may not be an overt idolatry-fest, but, in some cases, rat poison can be mostly good food. It just needs a little potent poison to kill the vermin.

This leads me to a separate case of idolatry that was not as obvious to me until later in my christian walk, the last stages of my christianity before I walked away from the belief in Jesus and some time after that.

I decided to just go through the worship song book of my church. Having come to the conclusion that Jesus was not God, and I believed that devotion and divine worship belonged to God alone, I thought I’d take a look and see just how much of the song book gave worship to Jesus and how much went to God (who I saw as “the Father”). There was over 400 songs in that book. I could count on one hand, maybe two, how many were focused on God alone or the Father. The rest focused on Jesus. That’s just a sign of how much of my worship was bent to Jesus, the glorified flesh thing! That was another sign of idolatry.

Going to different churches, especially apostolic pentecostal ones, again I see just how much focus is given to the executed flesh thing in the place of God.

The majority of my experience and observation of christianity seems to be idolatry, where flesh has been glorified into being God. And I don’t think you need to be an outsider to see it. Maybe one or two christians can begin to see it too. It’s at least one step in the right direction.