It started with the self-proclaimed “Digital Goddess” Kim Komando. It was exacerbated by sports commentators saying this or that player was a “god.” It burst into flames when the PBS cook referred to another as the “goddess of flambeau.”
I thought this ought not to be done. My reasoning gravitated toward Acts 12: 21-23. “On the appointed day Herod, wearing his royal robes, sat on his throne and delivered a public address to the people. They shouted, ‘”This is the voice of a god, not of a man.’ Immediately, because Herod did not give praise to God, an angel of the Lord struck him down, and he was eaten by worms and died.”
But this speaks to why they ought to be afraid of pretensions to divinity when they are nothing but humanity. (Even the pagan Greeks knew this to be foolish as well as dangerous.) Something still bothered me about their bandying about gods and goddesses. Then I read this in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon speaking of emperors who took titles of divinity says, “Such extravagant compliments, however, soon lose their impiety by losing their meaning…” (157).
I fear this is how it is among us later day Romans. The name of God used as it has been for punctuation, exclamation, and now in an acronym convenient for texting means little as a title. To say that someone is a “god” or “goddess” in their sport or area of expertise means nothing more than they are good. Of course, Jesus says in Mark 10, “”No one is good—except God alone.”
We have slouched ourselves to yet another Gomorrah. God is not good alone. No there are hundreds if not thousands of “goods” competing with Him, and now anyone who is good at anything at all is said to be god.
Ecclesiastes 8:11 says, “Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed quickly, therefore the hearts of the sons of men among them are given fully to do evil.” God, of course, is the one not executing the Herod-like sentence, but we do greatly err if we attribute this to inability or apathy rather than to mercy for His people and justice for others.
