Who are the gods?

Over the past several years, my research and reading has led me more and more to the conviction that the entities that people often call the old gods were not “mere mythology.” They were and are real.

Several threads of my thinking have re-enforced each other in coming to this conclusion.

First of all, as a Christian, I reject the Enlightenment-era, materialist notion that there is no spiritual world, that matter is all that really exists. I reject both the strong version of this, in which not even the human mind is real, and the weak version of it, in which we accept that human beings exist as minds, but we try envision as them as “arising” out of matter, and we disbelieve in any other spiritual beings, whether spirits, angels, demons, ghosts, or the one true God. This view, the one I reject, has held sway for most of our lifetimes. Even people such as myself who would not call themselves materialists will lapse into this sort of thinking by default, looking for a physical or mechanical process to explain what is “really” going on behind any claimed spiritual phenomenon.

Another thread in the tapestry has been my interest in the ancient world. Anyone with a passing familiarity with archaeology quickly comes to realize that ancient people were much smarter than they have gotten credit for, at least during the Golden Age of Scientific Triumphalism, the late 1800s and early 1900s. All the good, old-fashioned scientific materialists from this era took it as an axiom that human beings started out as apelike hunter-gatherers, and slowly “ascended,” developing shelter and clothing, “discovering” fire, slowly and painfully inventing various “primitive” tools, and then finally moving on to farming, language, and religion. By hypothesis, ancient people were stupid compared to us now.  

Genesis, my favorite history book, tells a very different story. It shows people being fully human from the get-go, immediately launching into writing, herding, weaving, art, music, and founding cities. And in fact, archaeology confirms this. Every year, we discover a more ancient civilization than the evolutionists told us existed. Some recent examples: the Antikythera mechanism is an ancient computer. The Vinca signs are an alphabet that pre-dates Sumeria. Gobekli Tepe is a temple complex that uses equilateral triangles and pi, and dates to “before agriculture was invented” (as is still being claimed). The Amazon basin turns out to have been once covered in cities.

Evolutionists’ dogmatism about early man being stupid has allowed them to ignore all the data that ancient history presents us about the existence of a spirit world. Why should we believe claims (universally attested) about heavenly beings that come to earth to visit, rule over, and even mate with humans? These are primitive people’s attempts to explain purely scientific phenomena that they didn’t understand. But if, as a Christian, I choose to respect ancient people and take seriously their intelligence, then I also have to grapple with their historical and cosmological claims.

Moving on to the third thread. The Bible itself confirms that there were entities called gods (“elohim”), some of whom, at one point in very ancient times, actually came to earth and reproduced with human women, creating a race of preternatural giants, “the heroes of old, men of renown” (Gen. 6:4).  The story is told in Genesis ch. 6, but it is assumed and referenced throughout the rest of the Bible and in Hebrew cosmology. This idea is also attested in oral and written traditions worldwide, which universally have gods and giants.  A Bible-believing Christian can take seriously the bulk of pagan history, cosmology and myth, whereas a strict materialist evolutionist has to reject it all as primitive superstition.

Two books that have helped me understand Genesis 6 and how it fits into Ancient Near Eastern cosmology were The Unseen Realm by Michael Heiser and Giants: Sons of the Gods by Douglas Van Dorn. I’ve also had conversations with Jason McLean and enjoyed listening to The Haunted Cosmos podcast. The historical record about gods and giants, once forgotten by mainstream Christians in America, is again becoming a topic of interest in the evangelical world.

Part of the Biblical understanding of the gods is that they are created entities who were supposed to help the one true God rule the cosmos. In the course of redemption history, the fallen gods were first banished from appearing physically on earth (in the Flood). At Babel, the gods were each given a nation of men as their “portion” to rule over (Deut. 32:7 – 8), which they did a pretty poor job (Psalm 82). Then God called Abram to make a people for Himself, with the ultimate goal of making all the nations His portion (Ps. 82:8, Ps. 2, Matt. 4:8 – 9). When Christ came, He began to drive the gods out of their long-held territories (Mat. 12:28 – 29). Whenever a region was Christianized, the old gods would first fight back, then become less powerful, and eventually go away altogether. Sometimes, their very names were forgotten. This disappearance of lesser spiritual entities from more and more corners of the earth is the only reason any person could ever seriously have asserted that there is no spirit world.

As a Christian, I am immensely grateful to have grown up in a civilization from which the old gods had been driven. It has been a mostly sane civilization, in which everyday life is not characterized by spooks, curses, possession, temple prostitution or human sacrifice.

This, then, is the background that I brought to Cahn’s book. This mental background helped me to accept many of his premises immediately. If you do not have this background – if you are, for example, a modern evangelical Christian but still a functional materialist – Cahn’s book might be a bit challenging. He dives into the deep end right away. He moves fast and covers a lot of material.

Who is Jonathan Cahn?

In his own words,

Jonathan Cahn caused a worldwide stir with the release of the New York Times best seller The Harbinger and his subsequent New York Times best sellers.

n.b.: I had seen The Harbinger on sale, but I assumed it was fiction in the style of the Left Behind series and avoided it.

He is known as a prophetic voice to our times and for the opening up of the deep mysteries of God. Jonathan leads Hope of the World … and Beth Israel/the Jerusalem Center, his ministry base and worship center in Wayne, New Jersey, just outside New York City.

To get in touch, to receive prophetic updates, to receive free gifts from his ministry (special messages and much more), to find out about his over two thousand messages and mysteries … use the following contacts …

From page 239 of this book

In other words, Jonathan Cahn swims in the dispensational or charismatic stream of Christianity. He calls himself a prophet. That’s a red flag to me, as a Reformed Christian. I believe that the prophetic age ended with John the Baptist (Matt. 11:11 -14). The prophets and apostles were the foundation of the church, and they died out with the first generation of Christians (Eph. 2:19 – 22). This exegesis of Scripture finds confirmation in daily life. I have met Christians who sensed God speaking to them (and have experienced it myself), but I have never met anyone who claimed to be a modern-day prophet, receiving authoritative words from God, who wasn’t a charlatan.

To make matters worse, Cahn asserts that he can “open up the deep mysteries of God” and that we can “find out about his over two thousand messages and mysteries.” This is a direct claim to have exclusive spiritual knowledge that is not available to all in the already-revealed Word of God. If he were just talking about knowledge already found in the Bible, he would call it “exegesis” or “Bible teaching,” not “messages and mysteries.” This claim reveals him to be part of the Gnostic or Hermetic stream of Christianity. Yes, I am using the words “Gnostic” and “Hermetic” loosely. They are big terms with somewhat flexible definitions. However, both are characterized by an emphasis on secret or esoteric knowledge which can only be accessed through a teacher (or, in this case, a prophet) who has been enlightened somehow. To see my posts about Hermeticism and why it is it antithetical to orthodox Christianity, click here, here, here, and here.

What was my approach to this book?

I knew when I picked up this book that Cahn was dispensational, a “prophet,” and therefore fundamentally a false teacher. So, I approached the book not as I would an exegesis by a trusted or mostly trusted, orthodox teacher or scholar like Michael Heiser or Douglas Van Dorn, but rather with curiosity. My interest in the topic of the old gods is such that I can’t ignore what anyone claiming the name of Christ had to say about it. I already knew there was a resurgence of interest in this topic in the Reformed world, and now I wanted to see what the Dispensationalists were saying. I picked it up prepared for anything up to and including rank heresy, but as it turned out, the most heretical thing in the book was the “About Jonathan Cahn” section that I just showed you. The rest was, for someone with my cosmology, mostly pretty hard to disagree with.

The Parable of the Empty House

Cahn spends four very short chapters (Chapters 2 – 5; pages 5 – 22) establishing the ideas I attempted to establish above: that the gods of the ancient world were real spiritual entities who ruled over nations and received their worship. He demonstrates briefly that this was assumed in the Bible and in Hebrew cosmology. He uses the word shedim, a Hebrew word for demon or unclean spirit, which is sometimes used in the Old Testament to describe the gods. He doesn’t get into the idea of elohim, Watchers, or other different names for spiritual entities, or many details of how they fell. Entire books can be (and have been) written about this (see Michael Heiser). However, Cahn wants to move on and see what is going on with these entities in the modern day.  

Moving at treetop level, he reviews how the coming of Christ progressively drove the gods out of more and more regions of the earth, in a process that took centuries. He describes civilizations as being “possessed” by the gods they serve. I don’t think he means that every person in a pagan civilization is demon possessed, but as a group, their thinking and behavior is shaped and to some extent controlled by whatever god they serve. As someone who has studied the Aztecs, I can’t disagree. Cahn also points out that it was common, indeed routine, for priests, priestesses, and prophets of the pagan gods to experience actual possession, such as the Oracle of Delphi, the girl with the “python spirit” in Acts 16, or worshippers going into a “divine frenzy.”

Having introduced the concept of possession, Cahn moves on to a parable Jesus told about the dynamics of possession in an individual.

When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, “I will return to the house I left.” When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation. Matt. 12:43 – 45, NIV

Typically of Jesus, this parable works on three levels. The house which is cleansed, left empty, and then re-occupied stands for a person who has been demon-possessed, has been delivered, and then ends up in a worse state than before. And the person, Jesus says, can stand for “this wicked generation.”

Cahn takes this parable and applies it to entire civilizations. He has already established that pagan civilizations were possessed, sometimes literally, by a variety of old gods, to their sorrow. When the Gospel came to them, Christ showed up in person, delivered and cleansed them, and lived in their house. Now, says Cahn, what might happen if a civilization rejects Christ, drives Him out? The house (the post-Christian civilization) has been “swept clean and put in order” by its centuries of Christianity, but it is now “empty,” having driven out Christ. It is now a very attractive vessel for “seven other spirits more wicked than the last.”

I honestly don’t think this is an abuse of Scripture. Cahn seems to be applying the parable in one of the senses in which Jesus meant it. Furthermore, he is not the first to point out that the many wonderful benefits of modern Western civilization are an aftereffect of about 1500 years of Christianity. Some commentators have said that “we are living off interest.” Others have compared us, as a society, to someone sawing off the branch he is sitting on. Doug Wilson has mourned that “we like apple pie, but we want to get rid of all the apple orchards.”

A post-Christian society, say Cahn and many others, for various reasons is vulnerable to much greater evils than a pre-Christian one. In the rest of the book, Cahn will show how the old gods have indeed come back. His focus is on the United States, because he’s an American, but also because the United States has a been a major exporter of culture to the world, and in recent years that culture has been of the demonic variety. Cahn’s book is so persuasive because he is not, as “prophets” often do, sketching a near-future scenario and trying to convince us of it. Instead, he is describing what has already happened.

Which gods, though?

When Cahn first started talking about “the gods” coming back, it occurred to me to wonder, “Which gods?” When Americans or Europeans become openly neo-pagan, I’ve noticed they often go for the gods their ancestors worshipped. So, many people research the Norse gods and cosplay as Vikings … except it’s not just cosplay. Other people are more attracted to the Celtic pantheon. These are the Wiccans. Interestingly, in S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse series, we have a very literal return of the gods when technology vanishes from modern society.  Creative anachronists suddenly find that their skills are useful.  A Wiccan busker becomes the leader of her own little witch community. Other people get into reviving the Norse religion. It’s a neopagan’s fantasy.

But there are a couple of problems with this. For one thing, neopagans’ version of the ancient religion often looks very different from the actual beliefs of the ancient pagans (many of which have been lost to history). Also, modern neopagans are happy to mix elements of different traditions from opposite sides of the globe: wicca, Tibetan Buddhism, or their kooky version of American Indian religions (probably also not very authentic). I once commented to a neopagan friend of mine (back when we were still friends) that her religion resembled a “personal scrapbook”. And she happily acknowledged this as one of its good points. A DIY paganism, popular with modern individualists, is not the sort of the thing that can become the state religion of a whole society. Finally, actual, hardcore neopagans are not small in number, but they are nowhere near the majority in the United States. Neopaganism does not appear, at this moment, to be the manner in which an entire postChristian society comes under the control of the old gods. And, in fact, that’s not exactly what Cahn has in mind.

America is not made up of any one ethnicity or people group but many, almost all. In many ways America is a composite and summation of Western civilization. So then what gods could relate not to one nation or ethnicity within Western civilization but to all of them or to Western civilization as whole? … The faith of Western civilization come from ancient Israel. The Bible consists of the writings of Israel, the psalms of Israel, the chronicles and histories of Israel, the prophecies of Israel, and the gospel of Israel. The spiritual DNA of Western civilization comes from and, in many ways, is the spiritual DNA of ancient Israel. … The gods, or spirits, that have returned to America and Western civilization are the same gods and spirits that seduced ancient Israel in the days of its apostacy. … If a civilization indwelled by Israel’s faith and word should apostacize from that faith, it would become subject to the same gods and spirits of Israel’s apostacy.

ibid, pp. 34 – 35

The dark trinity

I have a feeling that Cahn, coming from the worldview he does, is setting up this principle as a hard-and-fast rule, and I don’t feel he has really established it as such from Scripture. However, I’m open to it as speculation.  Though it’s not, in my opinion, closely argued, his line of reasoning becomes more convincing when we see the gods that he identifies as having returned to America.

He calls them the “dark trinity”:

• Baal (“the lord”): the god of rain in the Ancient Near East, he was often portrayed as riding on a bull and brandishing a thunderbolt. Controlling the rain meant that Baal controlled crops, and hence fertility, wealth, and prosperity. Thus, he was the god of power and wealth, and was a ruler.
• Ishtar/Ashera (Sumerian Inanna): goddess of sex, alehouses, and the occult. Among the Canaanites, Ashera was considered the consort of Baal and “Ashera poles” were the site of orgies.
• Moloch/Molech: The dark god of human sacrifice, particularly child sacrifice. His name means “king.”

Once these gods are identified, we can see that it does not seem so arbitrary that they should be the ones to return. For one thing, they and the God of the Israelites were personal enemies, as it were, battling for control of the same territory, for many centuries. But secondly, these pagan gods come close to being universal.

Baal is your basic male sky god. His name means “lord,” and his essence is basically that of taking power for oneself, rebelling against the Creator. Once we look at him this way, we can see that every pantheon has a Baal. In Ugarit, an ancient Semitic civilization, Baal was understood to be the Creator’s chief administrator over the earth, head of the divine council (credit: Michael Heiser). Baal was actually translated as Zeus in Greek and Jupiter in Rome.

Ishtar, a dangerous female sex goddess, shows up as Inanna in Sumer, one of the most ancient civilizations whose records we can actually read. Cahn spends much of the book delving into Inanna’s characteristics and history, for reasons that will become clear. But, through a process of cultural exchange, she showed up as Ishtar in ancient Babylon (leading to the words Ostara and Easter), Ashera among the Phoenicians (a.k.a. Canaanites), and Aphrodite among the Greeks (Venus among the Romans).

Molech was called Chemosh in Moab. Greek historian Diodorus Siculus translates his name as Kronos (Saturn), the god who devoured his own children. Many many cultures throughout the world have practiced infant sacrifice.

These three gods, then, not only show up by different names in nearly all the cultures of the Ancient Near East right down to Christian times; they not only are the types of entities that show up in nearly every pantheon worldwide, even in the Americas; they also appear to date back to ancient Sumer, which is still a source that is sought by modern neopagans and Hermetic believers. They are not, unfortunately, out of date or obscure. Suddenly, it no longer seems as if they are irrelevant to modern America.

How it went down

Briefly, Cahn argues that cultures (not just America) first let in Baal, who ushers in Ishtar, who ushers in Molech. And he argues that in our culture, this has already happened.

Baal represents the motivation for rebelling against the one true God that seems reasonable. Human beings want prosperity, they want security, they want to do their own thing. They want a god who can reliably make the rain come, the crops grow, the city flourish. They want to have independent, personal power, and not have to humble themselves before or depend upon the Creator. Baal is the god of prosperity, money, and success. Cahn says that America first welcomed Baal. He points to the actual bronze statue of a bull at Wall Street as a literal, though unintentional, idol to Baal, right in the financial center of arguably the most powerful and influential city in our nation.

Once you have Baal, he ushers in his consort, Ishtar. Ishtar is a much more unstable character. As the prostitute goddess, she likes people to engage in sexual chaos. In her instantiation as Inanna, she is emotionally unstable and vengeful, notorious for taking lovers and then killing them (which is why Gilgamesh tried to turn her down). As the patron of the alehouse, she is also the goddess of beer. And she presides over the occult, and with it, drugs. So, Ishtar’s influence began to surge in the 1960s, with sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, accompanied by a rising interest in the occult and a rising sense of rage.  Cahn will have more to say about Ishtar.

Finally, Ishtar ushers in Molech. In the early 70s, after the worship of money and immediately after the Sexual Revolution, American’s highest court legalized the killing of infants. This practice has been defended with religious fervor by its followers ever since. Just as with the Phoenician worshippers of Molech, killing babies has been called not just a necessary evil but a moral good, and opposing this killing has been called a moral evil. Just as when Molech reigned in the Ancient Near East, babies have been killed in their thousands and then in their millions.

We started out just wanting to get ahead, and now here we are, in the darkest place imaginable. But unfortunately, with the gods things can always get worse.

Now, here is where it gets weird

So far, Cahn’s claims have presented themselves to me as insightful, not completely new. Adjusting for his dispensational worldview, what he says makes good sense to anyone who has a passing familiarity with the Old Testament and modern American history. To someone who has had a special interest in the ancient world, they make even more sense. Everything that he has said so far has been hard to argue with, though of course it is still a terrible sight.

Now, however, we are moving into the part of the book that caused me to put Mind: Blown in the title of this post. Cahn spends a good half of the book (pages 115 – 207, out of 240 total) delving into Inanna/Ishtar, and how precisely her characteristics map onto the social changes that have recently been taking place in the United States.

I can’t go into detail about this, but quickly, here are some characteristics of the Sumerian goddess Inanna and her cult. I’ll let you make the applications yourself:

• Inanna had the power to metamorphose and transform: people into animals, men into women and vice versa. (She was obviously not the only old god with this ability.) She liked to blur the boundaries between kinds.
• As a female goddess, she behaved like a fierce male warrior and could also manifest as a young man. Her female followers carried swords. She was known for being bloodthirsty rather than nurturing.
• She could curse human beings by making their men behave like women and their women behave like men.
• But this was sometimes considered a good thing. She had several different kinds of cross-dressing priests, who would curl their hair, tie it up in colorful cloths, dance, and sing in the female dialect.
• In some places, such as in her cult in Turkey, male worshippers would work themselves up into a frenzy and the castrate themselves in her honor. (My note: this may be what the Apostle Paul, who grew up in Tarsus in modern-day Turkey, had in view when he said he wished the Circumcision fanatics would “go the whole way” [Gal. 5:12].)
• Inanna was associated with the rainbow, “stretching herself like a rainbow across the sky.”
• She wanted absolute submission. When spurned or disrespected in any way, she would fly into a rage and seek to destroy the one who had not submitted to her.
• In the ancient world, it was common for gods to be honored with annual festivals. Inanna’s took place in the month of Tammuz, which roughly corresponds to June. It consisted of a large parade, starting at the gate of the city and proceeding to her temple. These parades would feature music, dancing, multicolored cloths and of course her cross-dressing priests and priestesses.

Mind even blown-er

Cahn spends nine chapters (pp. 143 – 172) arguing that the infamous Stonewall riot was, in many ways, the exact night that Ishtar battered down the gates of America. In June 1969 a crowd outside Stonewall, a gay bar in New York City, turned on the police who had raided the place. The police eventually withdrew into the bar, and the crowd, ironically, was now trying to get inside, battering at the doors and even trying to set it on fire. Symbolically, they were trying to get in, just as Inanna famously insisted on being let in to the gates of the underworld. They threw bricks, just as she stood on the brick wall of the city of Uruk to unleash her fury on the whole city because of Gilgamesh.

Cahn argues that New York City is symbolically the gateway of America. As the gay crowd battered at the door of the Stonewall bar, Inanna was simultaneously battering to be let in. As they felt enraged at not being considered mainstream, Inanna too was enraged at, for many centuries, having been driven out.

“If you do not open the gate for me to come in, I shall smash the door and shatter the bolt, I shall smash the doorpost and overturn the doors.”

Myths from Mesopotamia, quoted in ibid, p. 166

Cahn is trying to cover a lot of ground, so he goes over all this at treetop level. I particularly would like to have heard more about the details of the Sumerian sacred calendar, how it relates to the month of Tammuz celebrated by the Israelites, and how its dates in relation to the modern calendar are calculated. Cahn finds significance, for example, in the date June 26, which was the date of the Supreme Court decisions Lawrence vs. Texas (2003), which legalized homosexual behavior; United States vs. Windsor (2013), which overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, and Obergefell vs. Hodges (2015), when the rainbow was projected onto the Empire State Building, Niagara Falls, the castle at Disney World, and the White House, in a clear statement that our nation had declared it allegiance to Inanna. Cahn asserts that June 26 has significance in the commemoration of Inanna’s lover Tammuz, who was ritually mourned every year.

In 1969 the month of Tammuz, the month of Ishtar’s passion, came to its full moon on the weekend that began on June 27 and ended on June 29. It was the weekend of Stonewall. The riots began just before the full moon and continued just after it. The Stonewall riots centered on the full moon and center point of Tammuz.

ibid., p. 170

The day that sealed Stonewall and all that would come from it was June 26, 1969. It was then that deputy police inspector Seymour Pine obtained search warrant number 578. … On the ancient Mesopotamian and biblical calendar, [the warrant] took place on the tenth day of the month of Tammuz. Is there any significance to that day? There is. An ancient Babylonian text reveals it. The tenth of Tammuz is the day given to perform the spell to cause “a man to love a man.”

ibid, p. 171

This does seem really striking at first blush. Note, though, that in the typical manner of esoteric gurus, if the date June 26 doesn’t fall on exactly the beginning of the Stonewall riots, Cahn takes something significant – or that he asserts is significant – that happened on a date near by the riots, and points to that. Why are we considering the obtaining of the warrant to be the event that “sealed” the riots? Because otherwise, the dates don’t work out quite right.

The timing of the Supreme Court decision had nothing to do with the timing of Stonewall … it was determined by the schedule and functioning of the Supreme Court. And yet every event would converge within days of the others and all at the same time of year ordained for such things in the ancient calendar… So the ruling that legalized homosexuality across the nation happened to fall on the anniversary of the day Stonewall was sealed. The mystery had ordained it.

ibid., p. 203

I must say, if Graham Hancock were covering this subject, he would devote several lengthy chapters to the calendar aspect of it. Whole books have probably been written about this. It did make me want to study in more depth ancient Sumeria, with the same terrible fascination with which I have scratched the surface of studying the Aztecs and the Mayas. I’m not super good at the mathematical thinking required to correlate calendars or unpack ancient astronomy, though I do enjoy reading other people’s work.

Not being a dispensationalist, I am less concerned with exact numbers and dates being the fulfillment of very precise prophecies, and more concerned with the general, overall picture of nations turning toward or away from God. I don’t think we need the repeated date of June 26 to match up with the Sumerian calendar perfectly in order to see that America has rejected heterosexuality, and indeed the whole concept of the normal, in a fit of murderous rebellion against the Creator, and that this is entirely consistent with the spirit of this particular goddess.

Nevertheless, I have only named a few striking parallels between the Stonewall riots and the myths and cult of Inanna. Cahn weaves it into a compelling story, and hence the title of this blog post.

Now, about times and seasons I do not need to write you

I’m also a little concerned with the amount of power that Cahn seems to be granting here to Inanna, and to the whole Sumerian/Babylonian sacred calendar. I have no doubt that this ancient entity would prefer to bring back her worship in the month it used to be conducted, around the summer solstice every year. I realize that every day in the Babylonian calendar was considered auspicious or inauspicious for different activities, due to the labyrinthine astrological bureaucracy that the gods had set up. No doubt, the gods would prefer to bring back as much of that headache-inducing system as possible. However, this does not mean that they are always going to get their way. It is not “ordained” in the same sense that the One God ordains things by His decretive will. He is in charge of days, times, and seasons, and of stars and solstices. He is the one who made these beings, before they went so drastically wrong.

Then Daniel praised the God of heaven and said,

“Praise be to the name of God for ever and ever; wisdom and power are His.

He changes times and seasons; he sets up kings and deposes them.

He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to the discerning.

He reveals deep and hidden things; He knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with Him.”

Daniel 2:19 – 22

To his credit, Cahn, after scaring the pants off anyone who is not on board with bringing back full-on Sumerian paganism, gives a nice, clear Gospel presentation at the end of his book. His last chapter, The Other God, points his readers to Yeshua:

Even two thousand years after His coming, even in the modern world, there was still none like Him among the gods. There was none so feared and hated by them. … He was, in the modern world, as much as He had been in the ancient, the only antidote to the gods — the only answer. As it was in the ancient world, so too in the modern — in Him alone was the power to break their chains, pull down their strongholds, nullify their spells and curses, set their captives free.

ibid, p. 232