StarGate: or how to avoid False Gods

For the past couple of years, I’ve been following the Stargate SG1 series on DVD with the goal of developing some sense of continuity for myself concerning the characters and plot thread. I hope soon to use this continuity to better appreciate the direct-to-DVD Stargate movies. I’m almost there, at Season 10.

Throughout the series, and most acutely in this last season, the thread of the story line has been how various alien beings have threatened to annihilate whole planets and communities if they to not fall down and worship the aliens as gods. The latest threat, the Ori, have tried to give their captors “plausible reasons” for capitulating. The Ori have even resorted to causing deadly illness and plague upon the people then coming back and curing the whole lot of them in order to convince them that they are truly to be worshipped.

In several episodes, Dr. Daniel Jackson, the archeologist and contractor for the Air Force in the Stargate Project, has eloquently refuted these claims, stating that an essential part of being human is free will, the ability of an individual to choose for themselves who or what they will follow and to whom they will swear allegiance.

Our God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, respects this attribute of human-kind. God is our Father, the Creator of us all. He is the One who made us and sustains us. And He made us with free will. Scripture attests to God’s respect for human free will. Joshua approaches the people and recounts how they have in the past rejected God and have gone after so many false gods, and they’ve gotten nowhere.

Joshua states to the Israelite people: “If it does not please you to serve the Lord, decide now whom you will serve, the gods your fathers served beyond the river, or the gods of the Amorites in whose country you are dwelling. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” (Joshua 24:17)

Even Jesus, who was with God and is the Word of God made flesh and dwelt among us did not force the rich young man to leave everything and follow Him.

It was not as though the writers of Stargate SG1 were pushing aside any need for God as being One and True. The very idea that these aliens are accused of being false gods begs the question, well what does a – or The – True God look like?

Throughout Salvation History, God’s chosen people have fallen away from worship “in spirit and in truth” to follow the various false gods of the cultures that surrounded them – and all to their own detriment. The Samaritans had been the peoples of the ten northern Tribes of Israel, yet the Assyrians forced them to mingle with the other races they conquered and forced the Israelites to worship their gods. This got ingrained into their collective subconscious that Samaritans would not fraternize with the people of Judah, and vice versae.

When Jesus confronted the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well (John 4), He told her “You worship what you do not understand. We worship what we understand, for salvation is from the Jews.” He brings up her life with five husbands and how the one she was currently with was not her own. Some scholars see this as a reference to the five false gods that the Israelites bowed to during their exile. His conviction that “true worshippers will worship the Father in Spirit and in Truth” states that how one worships the One True God is as important as worshipping this One True God as opposed to false gods.

God is our Father, and as a father, He longs to preside over one family, united in His Son, not scattered across the universe, each doing their own thing.

In the Stargate series, especially Season 10, we see how even the now-freed Jaffa factions cannot unite together against one common foe, so that foe grows more powerful and threatens to take over the universe.

There is an even more menacing foe confronting us as believers, and his power lies in causing dissension among believers so that no one can rally forces against.

God has assured us of victory in Jesus Christ, but if the battle is looking bleak, let us ask ourselves, are we all standing together against a common foe, or are we following false gods?