“I know your works, love, service, faith, and your patience; and as for your works, the last are more than the first. Nevertheless I have a few things against you, because you allow that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, to teach and seduce My servants to commit sexual immorality and eat things sacrificed to idols.”

(Rev 2:19-20 NKJV)

In Revelation 2, Jesus spoke to the church in Thyatira, calling them to deal with a woman in their congregation who had brought elements of the idolatry from the surrounding culture into the church. This is only one of many places in the New Testament where the new church was warned about the dangers of idolatry. A good portion of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church highlighted the idolatrous practices the Corinthian church had yet to rid itself of.

Many of the larger cities in the Roman and Greek world had patron gods. The goddess of Ephesus was Artemis, goddess of the hunt and fertility. The patron goddess of Corinth was Aphrodite, the goddess of love and pleasure. In his book The Church, Edward Yoder commented on this: “The entire social and civic life of society in the ancient Roman world was saturated with idolatry, so that the church had to struggle desperately to keep it out of her ranks.”

We no longer have temples to patron gods in our cities, but the heart of man has not changed in the nearly 2,000 years since the books of 1 Corinthians and Revelation were written. When man does not worship God, he will raise up some other god to worship, whether it is a visible one or not.

What are the patron gods of the culture in which we live? How have they made their way into our churches?