"God's love is exclusive which means his love for his covenant people demands the eschewing of all idolatry...when the covenant people begin to take on the idolatrous ideas and patterns of lawlessness, the church is progressively destroyed and the society goes with it. This is precisely why God declares in Exodus 20, "you shall have no other gods before me." Neither then is the church at liberty to make covenants with false religions. - there is no 'common word' or 'common brotherhood outside of Christ - there is only covenant faithfulness or idolatry. There is then no middle way. God has emphatically declared that in the age of the church (that is the age of the Messiah) he will, "cut off the names of the idols out of the land" (Zach 13:2). So when the church aligns herself in any way with lawlessness and idolatry she brings herself under judgment.

The two key forms of idolatry found amongst God's people in the time of Jeremiah were (and remain in today's church) syncretism and false prophesy in the name of the God of Scripture. This religious promiscuity among the people of Israel entailed the idea that covenants (agreements and compromises) could be made with false gods, and that the Lord God is not exclusive, but inclusive and pluralistic. In Scripture, this is a form of testing God and provoking him to wrath. God declares through Isaiah, "I am the Lord, that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images" (Is 42:8). The covenant people were forbidden any form of syncretistic worship, covenants and marriages. This requirement for the church of Jesus Christ, the enlarged Israel, is repeated by St. Paul in 2 Corinthians 6:14-18. And the Lord Jesus is no less exacting. We cannot serve two masters (Matt 6:24), and those not for Christ were described as against him (John 14:6), and true love for Christ is clearly predicated on obedience: "If you love me, you will keep my commandments" (John 14:15).

In the modern church, we have people and movements who claim to want to worship a God of love; not a God whose nature includes law, jealousy, exacting justice, judgement, and wrath. This preference has always been the cry of those who would liberalize, sanitize, and domesticate the divine. But the love of which they speak is an abstraction, and their god is an idol: and idea, a universalistic, and promiscuous god; and antinomian image without law, and therefore without grace: without justice and therefore without mercy. This 'progressive' god is evolving and changing as the spirit of the age appoints the creed of time. This is a god of man's making whose being and ways must conform to the shifting sands of popular culture. This god speaks no infallible word, for that word is now spoken by man for the moment. This profane image is a useless idol. The actual god in this theosophy is man. However much cloaked in theological or missiological verbiage, this evolving god is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God and father of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Through the denial of the second commandment, the rejection of the God who name is jealous, great numbers, indeed entire denominations in the Western church have created and worshipped a god of their rebellious imagination.

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Excerpts: Joe Boot, The Mission of God, pg. 543-545