What is a pagan? What is paganism?

The case of this woman with a familiar spirit shows the presence of the witchcraft in Palestine at this time, which had been practiced by the original inhabitants of the land. When this began we cannot say, but doubtless it has been in existence from earliest times, and has manifested itself wherever idolatry has held sway. The essence of all idolatry is the displacing of God; and where He is ignored, we may be sure that Satan exalts himself in God's place. In one sense, man is the creator of his idols; and in another, their slave; for, while an idol is nothing, it is at the same time an embodiment of satanic power. The things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God."

Man from the first departed from God, Who left him to feel his exile from the paradise of Adam, though not without both sentence of judgment and a revelation of a suffering Deliverer, the woman's Seed. But the race willingly, contentedly, did without His presence and favour, save a few men of faith; and the rest gave themselves up to corruption and violence, till He intervened by the deluge which swept them all away. Only Noah and his sons, and their wives, with animals clean and unclean, were saved in the ark; and the present age began. But it was soon marked not only by fresh institutions of God, but by a new evil. As the apostle tells us, "Knowing God, they glorified him not as God, nor were thankful; but fell into folly in their thoughts, and their unintelligent heart was hardened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into likeness of an image of corruptible man, and of birds and quadrupeds and reptiles. Wherefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to uncleanness." It is his holy account of paganism, and of its utter absence of truth, piety, and moral decency.

130 This side of human nature is found in heathenism, as the apostle largely declares; but heathenism itself is a vast system of diabolical corruption and sanctifying of lusts, which was obliged to let this in, for Satan can only act in and by what was in man; and conscience and the sense of superior power was in man. But the heathenism was the exclusion of God in unity as far as possible, and the deifying of lusts and powers of nature. It was only the connecting of man, such as man was in sin, with devils; a departure from God without being able to destroy the idea of one, or the conscience which God had taken care should accompany sin; but it in no way sought to maintain the one or to meet the other, but to exclude the one and deaden and pervert the other. It took the character of each distinct nation. In Greece it was gay, poetic, and corrupt; in India, a wonderful apprehension of the powers of nature, with a tinge of kindness interspersed; in Egypt, wisdom, and sobriety of judgment as to man; in Canaan the filth of inveterate corruption: but in all, without exception, sanctified corruption. In the north, perhaps, the wilder and more warlike passions, but in all passion. It was the devil's revelation of a lie, if it was a revelation, unless Siva, and Jupiter, and Khem be truths. It seized existing facts, but only made a lie of them.

The worship of devils began. Men, when they knew God, "glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imagination, and their foolish heart was darkened: professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things." "The things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils and not to God."

Verse 8. "Howbeit then, when ye knew not God, ye did service to them which by nature are no gods." From their new and incomparable elevation as believers in the grace of God, he now turns their thoughts backwards to their natural condition as Gentiles in the flesh. In that state of darkness, of ignorance, and of spiritual death they had served a hard service once of vanity and shame. The objects of their worship were imaginary. Their gods were no gods. But the service which they rendered to these lying shadows was both real and costly. They were, like other Gentiles, "carried away to these dumb idols, even as they were led" (1 Cor. 12:2). A spirit of superstitious bondage held their souls fast to a covenant of falsehood and dishonour. Hope, they, had none. For a lie can never generate true hope, nor can hope exist at all without some real and definite object to call it into life. They were governed, but not blessed. They had lords many, and gods many, but no solitary gleam of either truth, or light, or love. Such gods as they had were at best but projections of themselves, and far oftener mere idealisms of their strongest and most evil lusts. Nor was this hopeless condition of depravity without its own producing cause. The Gentiles, it is witnessed, once knew God, but willingly ignored Him, through the instinctive dislike that sin must have for holiness. Their idolatrous delusions, with the moral degradation which accompanied them, were a judicial brand of their apostacy of heart from their Creator (Rom. 1:18, seq.). And this, let us remember, is essentially the state of every unconverted man. If he has not, in Christ the Son of the Father, the true God and eternal life, he has not God at all; though his days may be passed in sincere and laborious, though empty and utterly fallacious, exercises of religion. Ordinances and observances nominally Christian, if not really of the Spirit, are of no higher value or more beneficial effect than the ancient customs of the heathen. It is by faith only that men live to God. The apostle's object is to show, as appears more distinctly in what follows, that in turning to another gospel, the Galatians were resuming, under a more specious form, their previous condition of futile religiousness and hopeless spiritual debasement."

Scripture also shows that idolatry was essentially demon-worship, the idol itself being nothing. "They sacrificed unto demons (shed) not unto God," Deut. 32:17; 1 Cor. 10:19-20; "they shall no more offer their sacrifices unto demons (sair)." Lev. 17:7; Rev. 9:20. Jeroboam had fallen so low as to have ordained priests for the demons (sair) and for the calves which he had made, 2 Chr. 11:15; and some had "sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto demons (shed)."* Ps. 106:37. The things worshipped may have been unseen objects, or they may have had some mystical representation, or may have been mere idols; but behind all these were real beings, evil, unclean spirits; so that it was morally impossible to have fellowship with the Lord Jesus and with these demons. 1 Cor. 10:19-21.

Imaginary creatures were regarded as gods, and these were feared and propitiated. Some believed in a fetish of good and a fetish of evil. Others had an elaborate system of mythology, as the Greeks, with husbands and wives and sons and daughters of the gods and goddesses. Man himself was exalted by some into a god, as with the Greeks and the Romans.

But there is that in God, the sense of which is with difficulty lost in man, though he be without God in the world. This has turned the sense of a being above himself, perfect in knowledge and power, a Supreme Being, into what is the fruit of imagination or servile dread - Mythology and Fetishism. The visible powers of nature were deified, because a God was wanting for the heart. The legends of ancient days were turned into myths of the gods. Terror told of a revengeful power, and a world of retribution loomed to an unsatisfied conscience. Man would animate planets, because they moved without him: he would have poetical lusts in superficial and self-satisfied Greece; more calculated sobriety in Egypt, a sunny south of gods, and northern immensity of giants, and storms, and mountains in Scandinavia; or seek to solve the mystery of good and evil in Ahriman and Ahurmazdha in Arva, or revel in monstrous reveries in India. Cruelty and poetry might divide the world under the name of gods, but behind all there was everywhere Tertullian's "Testimonium animae naturaliter christianae," an "unknown God" - a Brahm, the origin of all things, a primeval source or power.

In Fetishism - degraded into a dread of some terrible unknown power, which priests used for their own purposes; in more cultivated religions, kept as the secret mysterious knowledge belonging to them, or to the initiated only, while the vulgar were kept in play with the more convenient everyday materials of popular mythology - the gods and goddesses of nature and imagination; yet still, though inconsistently, clothing them with attributes and powers which, if true, could only belong to one supreme God. And this was so true, that each local mythology had this twofold character, and that, even to particular cities.

The necessity for prayer is recognized over the greater part of the earth. Humanity has not yet reached to that dead blank of belief in nothingness which is attained by the modern "Christian" philosopher. The belief in prayer contains within it the acknowledgement of human weakness and want in view of a Higher Power — a Being, who is able and willing to hear supplications, and is traceable to a divine revelation to man; such as do not attribute this value to prayer are men whose religious ideas have developed into those of the lowest order of savages, or who have sped into the darkness of agnosticism or atheism. But while the belief in prayer is almost universal on the earth, it is divorced from faith in God in the masses of mankind, and men pray to false gods. Shortly after the flood, the truth of a prayer-hearing God was misappropriated to demons. Men, women, and children praying, are to be seen on the monuments of Egypt; but all are praying to demon! To demons they uplifted their hands, and from demons they expected mercies; and, as is common to the system of paganism, they looked to their priests, as intermediaries, to obtain the answers their gods sent them. And to-day the greater part of mankind falls down before idols, and supplicates the god the idol represents, for mercies. And as it was in the ancient world, so to-day, the priests are regarded as the communicators to the worshipper of the mind of the deity supplicated.

Such was the condition into which idolatry plunged mankind. Nor is this the worst aspect of it. It was far worse, and so displayed in Israel and Judah that the images of the gods whose worship sanctioned such abominations were placed in the temple of Jehovah. It was lowering the true God to the level of their idols. As with the Gentile so with the Israelite, their gods were not only the deifying the worst passions of man, but the blinded and perverse mind fastened upon the objects around it, and clothed them with supernatural power. All that was grand or fearful, all that inspired awe or admiration, was deemed the dwelling-place of a god. Day and night, the winds, the sea were presided over by an imaginary deity. A god was found on the mountain top, and in the gloomy cavern. The smiling cornfield and the dark recesses of the forest, rivers, fountains, each had its tutelary divinity. Gradually, near the sacred places, temples were raised, and a symbol of the god placed therein; then homage paid to it until at last even the imaginary deity had to give place to the material idol. If amid all this darkness there was with some the faintest idea of a sole Power or Being above all, as with the Athenians (Acts 17), it was only that he was too high and too great to be concerned with man. A god unknown must have his shrine; but the true God was unknown, for He is so much concerned with man that in His love He gave His only-begotten Son to die for him, that believing he might not perish but lave everlasting life.