For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols,
Psalms 96:5 (ESV)
but the LORD made the heavens.
A popular rebuttal of atheists to Christians is that they just worship one less god than we do. They claim that, as Christians, we have rejected all the gods of the other religions of the world. They have also done that, but just added one more to the list of gods they reject. But how valid is that claim?
It is true that, as Christians, we have rejected all the so-called gods of this world and worship only the God of the Bible. And it is true that atheists have also rejected them, along with the God of the Bible. But is the God of the Bible just one more god among many, as the atheists claim? Or is he unique?
This verse makes an argument for uniqueness. It claims that the gods of the people are worthless idols. Idols themselves are the images carved by people to represent their gods. Images made by people. But they believed that the gods these images represented were real.
Creator or Creation?
But how do these gods compare with the God of the Bible? The Bible, including this passage, claims that God created all that is. The God of the Bible transcends the creation, existing outside of and prior to the creation. In other words, God came first.
However, the opposite is true in Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology. The first of the gods emerged from the primordial sea or chaos. Then they, and subsequent generations of gods, formed order out of the chaos. These gods were not eternal and transcendent. They had a beginning, and their being was bound up in the creation. The universe came first, and then the gods.
To claim that the God of the Bible is just one more god that can safely be rejected is a category error. The God of the Bible is not just one Lord among many. He is fundamentally different. He is the creator. They are part of the creation.
This in no way proves that the God of the Bible exists. But he is, by definition, fundamentally different than all other gods.
