I have listened to Josh McDowell in person several times. He had a number of good messages that he presented on college campuses, many years ago. The fanfare for his arrival on campus was unconventional. Big billboards featured the simple message “He’s Coming…” that is all. It was pretty effective. It produced dramatic, unconventional results, and people came.
Let’s think about the way God did his ‘marketing’ in the Old Testament. Effective marketing requires that you target a specific audience. If you target a generic audience it will produce a generic result. To get beyond generic, effective marketing goes through stages.
Name recognition
For marketing to work, you need to get people talking about your brand. God was one of perhaps hundreds of gods known to people of ancient times. By choosing a people, God established name recognition. As the people of Israel became known, God’s notoriety increased.
Using the example of a few names, we can figure out what happens over time with name recognition. In Egyptian culture for instance, religion and worship were chiefly centered on the king and sun-gods. Their society was the center of the world, and in order to have blessings, periodically something had to be done to please their gods, such as Osiris, Iris, and Horus (among others). Name recognition was there. But trust was hit and miss. Engagement fell away as the Egyptians had more and more contact with the outside world – and the predictability of crops and flooding was inconsistent. It is not possible to trust when your god is finicky and capricious. As a result the Egyptian gods have fallen into obscurity, like so many other ancient gods.
Unconventional Trust
Nearly every chapter of the Bible is a study in trust-building. Oxford defines trust as ‘firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.’ Countless stories demonstrate that God is reliable, able, and strong.
How can we build trust with God? In today’s culture, belief in God or having faith is not as common as it once was. Is it possible that our Judaeo-Christian God will go the way of Osiris and Horus? Is it possible that God would ever become an ‘also-ran’ god in the pantheon of gods? It is important to study why faith in God is not as common as it once was. The principle is clear – with the advent of a secular culture, people have chosen not to trust in the things they cannot see, but rather trust things that educators say without question.. When we do question, we are attacked and discouraged from questioning further. It means we become resolved to trust in the thing the secular educators have told us.
Trust does not mean ‘become like a sheep and simply follow’. Trust happens when we ask, cajole, search, and finally – prove that the spoken words are correct and accurate.
Engagement
The difference between God and Horus makes it clear that our God is not going away. The reason is:
- God continues to prove He is real,
- He has an ongoing relationship with us and
- He cares enough to act and do things in our lives with great regularity.
