I just read an interesting blog post from my e-friend, Scott Smith, on his Sarcastic Xtian blog, entitled "The Bondage of Choice." (Click the title of this post to link to it.)
My response was something I had learned from being a Mac fan and a Palm fan. People used to poo-poo Apple's Macintosh computer system (and that's really how it was designed, as a system combining hardware and software) because you had "fewer choices of applications" than with Microsoft Windows. Last Friday I chose to lay my trustworthy Palm Trēo 680 to rest, replacing it with a new Palm Prē Plus; again, the AT&T guy, chatting with my wife (who was also drooling over it and the iPhone), mentioned that the Pre had "fewer apps."
My question was: how many choices do I need?
Choice is important. God gives us the ability to choose. He also gives us the responsibility to choose wisely.
Consider †his: how many choices of gods do we have?
Those in the world would say we have dozens, maybe hundreds. Some religions, such as Buddhism, say that we will become gods as part of our travel through the wheel of enlightenment. New Age thinking echoes that, saying that each of us are little gods in our own right. Even the claiming-to-be-Christian Word of Faith movement steps into that realm with the idea that, since we are all created in the "image of God," obviously we can do anything God can do as long as we depend on our faith, just as He did when He spoke the universe into existence.
But how many choices do we really have?
Two. God and Satan.
There is only one road to God (John 14:6). All others lead away from God. That's Satan. We can call him by various different names, we can mask him in various different forms of "light" by using terms such as "enlightenment," or we can clothe him in our own image. It still doesn't work.
We only need two choices of gods, and only one is the right choice.
