Overview of the situation

That God's Rivals book (McDermott) describes powerful angels, the kind of the rank and power that God set over individual nations and regions, who rebelled (psalm 82) in something analogous to Satan's own rebellion and since have used the law of God (minus the Gospel) as a way to control the people in the respective nations and regions. This is a use of God's law NOT as it really is, but in a twisted, distorted, turned-upside-down way. For instance, instead of worship Jehovah, worship the angel/god (Baal, Moloch, Astarte, etc.); or, worship the divine king or dictator. Usually this all involves human sacrifice (instead of animal sacrifice) in the form of genocide or simple police state murder or wars which feeds the angelic/god realm. Human suffering and human murder as offerings of food to the angelic realm.

I think the difference between these angelic gods on the one hand and pantheons of mythology (Olympian, Teutonic, etc.) on the other is the real angelic gods have real sounding names that echo down from a different place than collective mythic folklore. Baal and Moloch sound evil, Apollo and Athena, or even Wotan and Freya sound like imaginative portrayals of part glorified humanity, part angelic world activity, yet literary even if arising organically from misty pre-history.

When that Roman priest in France whose fellow priest had his head cut off by Muslims stated that Allah was Moloch it sounded true. It had the ring of truth. It was also rare honesty and a going against political-correctness that itself was a going against the religion and power of the angel/god who the Muslims and increasingly the people of Europe worship and are under the power of.

How people get under the power of the angel/gods and their false religions and idols is simply if they give up their Christian faith and teaching, or never had it. There are also gateways that allow the angelic/god powers to enter and control humans. Drugs, sodomy, hedonism, collectivism, worshiping and giving sacrifice to false idols like the planet or the 'noble savage'...

But it is the law of God that is being used and abused by these fallen powers to control mankind (whether Baal or Kim Jung Un). Think of it this way: sin would not exist without the law of God existing. And: that law is the power of sin; and for fallen angelic rulers sin is the power of the distorted law of God they wield. And death is the constant threat and result of sin. This is the dynamic of the entire hellish spectacle. This is how the law of God is not just what the nation of Israel followed, or the Ten Commandments that Christians have as a rule. It is the dark medium we all walk in, and the only solution to the problem and dire situation is what is behind the Gospel. I.e. what the Gospel entails. What the Gospel - good news - is. It is God, the Second Person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ (which means anointed Savior) incarnating as human, in the direct line of fallen Adam, and fulfilling the law (as Adam hadn't) and also taking on Himself the penalty of death for all. The one sacrifice for all time. This defeated the angelic/gods because it destroyed the power of the law they were using and abusing to control humankind. But you have to have faith in Jesus the Savior to be in His Kingdom and to get out of the control of the Kingdom of Darkness.

So as you walk through your life, in the midst of the dark medium that is the power of the twisted and distorted law of God, as it manifests socially from human beings, or collectively at the national level, or religiously from the spiritual realm know that this is the universal situation Christianity describes; and know that it is the Gospel that is the answer to this predicament. This is how you begin to see the reality of what the Gospel is. I.e. there is no neutral ground. You are walking in and under the power of the law which has the power of death over you, wherever you walk. You are in it. No neutral ground.

This is the universal situation, whether in America, Europe, the Middle East, China, Africa, down under to Australia or at the North Pole. Christianity does not describe or represent one religion among many, or one worldview among many; it is reality itself.