Faithful Godly people during their life were not favored because they represented a constant reprimand for the consciousness of the sinners. The majority of them ended their lives by being either stoned or killed in other way by crowd.

The crowd which did not give them the right to live even as to ordinary people, that very populace which lives as sinfully as before, now worships their image and puts them in the place of God.

How is such a turn of events possible?

Because their dedicated life which stood for a reprimand for the sins of the world is removed now finally.

Now when they are dead, when the words of warning and reprimand disappeared, the crowd sends them prayers gladly and asks advises from them. It stands before their dumb pictures and enjoys the silence and peace of its lulled consciousness.

The attempt to avoid an encounter with God through His character and by that itself an unpleasant witnessing of ones own sinfulness and guilt is found in the classical role of the saints to whom the role of mediators between God and man is attributed.

"For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." (1 Timothy 2:5)

However, in traditional Christianity there is whole a bureaucratization of the mediation between God and man in which the mediator does not have a role to fill the difference between what the sinner is and what he should be, but has a function to suppress the awareness of that difference by distorting the idea of what the sinner should become according to his character.

Catholic authorities assert openly:

"If you are afraid of the Father, pray to the Son. And if you are afraid to come before the Son, then pray to Mary, she certainly won't reject you!"

(It is obvious that it is counted on her maternal instinct!)

By such a system the sinner is induced to appeal indirectly to God in the way in which he will not humiliate himself by a total acknowledgment of his sins and his guilt. In such a service the prayer to the saints appeared, that, in a Christian form wrapped, way of service to false gods. We can just imagine how much in human mind the idea of God and His character is distorted when the Object of prayer is sought in one man! It is no wonder that the life of such believers does not differ by character from the life of average unbeliever. When the apostle John kneeled before the sinless angel to bow to him, he was reprimanded for that by the words:

"But he said to me, "Do not do it! I am a fellow servant with you and with your brothers the prophets and of all who keep the words of this book. Worship God!" (Revelation 22:9)

After all, why would man all have the need to pray to dead man at all when he has the alive God? The Scripture says:

"When men tell you to consult mediums and spiritists, who whisper and mutter, should not a people inquire of their God? Why consult the dead on behalf of the living?" (Isaiah 8:19)

To go before man instead before God shows a distrust in God's grace and a lack of will to have chosen God through His character.

In that way the fear from a "direct" encounter with God through His character often reveals an unconscious but willing wish of the man to continue to sin further on.