A nation must have its gods. There is no word for this concept, is there? Pantheon is not the same thing. A nation can acknowledge that other gods might exist and might even be part of a pantheon with that nation’s own gods. That leaves no room for considering their own gods to be a pantheon. Part of a pantheon, maybe. What to call their own gods? A godhead? Same problem as pantheon. There was in ancient Hebrew, as part of a concept shared by the ancients, a word Elohim. It is copiously threaded through the Hebrew scriptures. A nation’s gods are its Elohim. Yet for Abraham, patriarch ancestor of the ancient Israelites, the Elohim he knew and owned as his own, was one single being, El Shaddai, the Elohim of Abraham, the gods of Abraham, one god, who to many of us today is simply God. Abraham’s great descendant Moses knew this one God, the Elohim of Abraham’s descendants who walked in Abraham’s faith, as Yahweh. To me this One God is simply God. Jesus teaches us to call this One God ‘the Father’. In all this the initiative has come from this God Himself. To Abraham this God came down to speak to Abraham and to tell Abraham “I am El Shaddai”. To Moses this God came to visit and said “To Abraham I was El Shaddai, and to you I will be Yahweh”. Then Jesus came, with the word to us all that this God is the Father, his own father. Even to me this God once came and said “I am God”. Maybe others have been visited like this too. Yet, it is all one being, God. For many of us this One True God who sent Jesus Christ is our Elohim, our single person sufficient as our gods, content to have no other gods but God. Other gods do exist, yet only the Father is our One True God and Jesus Christ is His only-begotten Son. This One Lord of us all sent by this One True God. This Lord is Jesus. Son of the One True God.
