How many of you reading this are Baal worshippers? I’m going to assume that nobody raised their
hand on that one. And yet, every one of
us is. Most people think of Ba’al as a
specific deity or false god, specifically the primary god of the ancient
Phoenicians. Any of you that thought of
Ba’al along those lines were not wrong.
That is a correct definition of the word, “Ba’al.” The problem is that it’s A definition and not
THE definition.
Easton’s 1897 Bible Dictionary – Ba’al is “The name
appropriated to the principle male god of the Phoenicians.”
The key word there is “appropriated.” The Phoenicians took the name of Ba’al from
an already existing word. So what did
the word mean originally? Ba’al, more
commonly spelled Baal today, is an ancient Hebrew word which can mean master,
owner, husband, or lord. So going by this definition, when I asked the
question “how many of you reading this are Ba’al worshippers?” all of you
should have raised your hands because all of you worship a lord of some kind, even
if it’s not YHWH.
What happened was a natural evolution of language. A word is used so often it becomes identified
with a specific person or object. It
happens all the time. If I asked you to
think of a video, most people would think of a small, black, plastic,
rectangular box filled with tape that you stick in a VCR. If I asked you to bring me a record album,
most people would bring me a black, vinyl disk to be played on a record
player. But a DVD is also a video and a
CD is a record album, and if I referred to them as such I would be correct. The term “video” simply means it can be
viewed. A movie on DVD is a video. In fact DVD originally stood for Digital
Video Disc until it was changed to Digital Versatile Disc once it sunk in that a
DVD could do so much more than just record movies. The term “record” simply means a
recording. The term “album” simply means
a collection. A record album is a
collection of recordings, so a CD with somebody’s songs on it is just as much a
record album as a black, vinyl disk. So
why do we have particular objects in mind when we use these terms? Because they were the most important and
widely used items to support these terms for many people, so the terms came to
belong exclusively to those items.
Ba’al came to be known as the name of a false god in the
same way. YHWH was Lord, but there were
other lords rising up. After calling the
primary one “lord” for long enough, that became his name. Calling YHWH ba’al, or lord, is not wrong at
all, but it’s indistinct. If you call
Him “Lord” as if that’s His name, you’ve altered who He is, and whether you
mean to or not, you’ve lessened Him to fit what you want Him to be.
This variance highlights one of the problems with the
Body of Christ today. We’ve changed who
YHWH said He is in more ways than just His name. For that reason, too many people today are
ba’al worshippers and that’s all they are.
They may use the name Jesus Christ even if they don’t know the name of
YHWH, but the form and substance of their worship is all their own as is the
god that they’re worshipping. When we
don’t seek the one true God the way He told us to seek Him, but instead seek
after a god in a form and manner that’s pleasing to our own sensibilities, then
we’re not truly seeking Him. And so
we’re not truly finding Him. We’re
finding a generic replacement of Him.
My hope for you today is that you want who He truly is
and not who you want Him to be, because who He is, is far greater than your own
desires.
Scott
