The Bible Says So by Dan McClellan

Author:Dan McClellan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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The Bible Says There Is Only One God

I can still remember the first time I saw my dad cry. It was in 1998, when we watched the Denver Broncos win their first Super Bowl from our living room in Longmont, Colorado. We’d been Broncos fans for as long as I can remember, but we didn’t live in Colorado until we moved from Gaithersburg, Maryland (just outside of Washington, D.C.), to Longmont in the summer of 1993. The anguish in 1987 of watching the Broncos lose 42–10 to the Washington football team was only made more sour by being surrounded by friends and neighbors (and my crush!) who were huge Washington fans. Two years later we’d set the record for the largest point differential in Super Bowl history by losing 55–10 to the San Francisco 49ers. My dad—who, by the way, bears a striking resemblance to John Elway—seemed to take these losses especially personally. The Broncos’ talent for losing big in the Super Bowl hung like a millstone around our necks.

The Broncos weren’t supposed to be contenders in Super Bowl XXXII, played on January 25, 1998. But thanks to John Elway, Shannon Sharpe, Ed McCaffrey, and Terrell Davis, we were in the game. Late in the third quarter, Elway scrambled on a critical third-and-six and leapt headfirst into a collision with three Green Bay Packers defenders that spun him across the first-down line like a rusty thirty-seven-year-old helicopter. This set up a one-yard touchdown run by Terrell Davis two plays later, which put the Broncos ahead going into the fourth quarter and dialed up the emotions in the McClellan household to a rolling boil. When the final whistle blew with the score at 31–24 in Denver’s favor, my dad openly wept.

It was a foregone conclusion that the Broncos would defeat the Atlanta Falcons in the following year’s Super Bowl XXXIII, giving us back-to-back Super Bowl wins. The Simpsons’ potshot against the Broncos at the end of one of the greatest episodes of situation comedy in the history of television (“You Only Move Twice”) was a distant memory. The Broncos were the greatest football team on earth—nay, the only real football team on earth. The Oakland Raiders certainly didn’t qualify as a professional football team. They were nothing. They were less than nothing. Who else could compare? No one. There were the Denver Broncos, and there were no others.

Now, you realize I’m not actually saying I think the Denver Broncos are literally the only NFL team that exists. I’m just using rhetoric to emphasize how committed I am to the Broncos and how much their superiority over other teams means to me. So, when biblical authors say the same exact thing about the God of Israel compared to other gods, why wouldn’t we interpret their rhetoric the same way?

THE MANY GODS OF THE HEBREW BIBLE

If you start carefully reading the Bible from Genesis 1:1, you might run into something a little confusing before you clear the first chapter. Verse 26 says, “And God said, ‘Let us make humanity in our image, after our likeness.

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