What does Tribe teach about other gods?

At Tribe, the teaching on other gods starts with an honest look at how small our picture of the spiritual universe usually is. Brian Sauvé opened both messages by naming what many people quietly assume: that the cosmos runs like a yin and yang symbol, God on one side and Satan on the other, two roughly equal forces in permanent conflict. He argued that picture actually shrinks the story, because the Bible describes a far more populated spiritual realm than most churchgoers tend to hold in their minds. Using the Hebrew word Elohim, Brian walked through a category that includes angels, demons, seraphim, cherubim, and other beings, and pointed to what he calls the divine council, the idea that God at some point delegated jurisdictional authority over nations to certain of these spiritual beings. Those beings corrupted the assignment by drawing human worship toward themselves rather than toward Yahweh. The gods of history, Baal, Molech, Apollo, Zeus, and others, are not simply products of human imagination in this telling. They had real influence and they shaped cultures, but they failed.

The reason all of that matters is the contrast it makes possible. When you actually hold God up against everything else that has ever claimed divine status, Brian says, the gap becomes almost impossible to overstate. God has no beginning and no end. As Brian put it, 'He has no end, but he also never had a beginning. He stands outside of space and time.' Every other spiritual being in the Bible's categories is a creature, made and bounded. Yahweh is not in that category at all. He is not the strongest member of the council. He is the one who convened it, delegated from it, and will judge what went wrong in it.

What Brian kept pressing toward, though, was not a theology lesson but a personal weight. This is the God who dwarfs everything else in the cosmos, the one with no rival and no equal, and Brian says, 'Not only does he not keep you at arm's distance, but he longs to draw close to you.' The teaching on other gods at Tribe is ultimately meant to make that closeness feel as astonishing as it actually is.

Taught from Exodus 15:11 · Psalm 89:6-8