Counterfeit Gods: When the Empty Promises of Love, Money and Power Let You Down

by Timothy J. Keller

There is a difference between sorrow and despair. Sorrow is pain for which there are sources of consolation. Sorrow comes from losing one good thing among others, so that, if you experience a career reversal, you can find comfort in your family to get you through it. Despair, however, is inconsolable, because it comes from losing an ultimate thing. When you lose the ultimate source of your meaning or hope, there are no alternative sources to turn to. It breaks your spirit.

When most people think of “idols” they have in mind literal statues—or the next pop star anointed by Simon Cowell. Yet while traditional idol worship still occurs in many places of the world, internal idol worship, within the heart, is universal. In Ezekiel 14:3, God says about elders of Israel, “These men have set up their idols in their hearts.” Like us, the elders must have responded to this charge, “Idols? What idols? I don’t see any idols.” God was saying that the human heart takes good things like a successful career, love, material possessions, even family, and turns them into ultimate things.

We think that idols are bad things, but that is almost never the case. The greater the good, the more likely we are to expect that it can satisfy our deepest needs and hopes. Anything can serve as a counterfeit god, especially the very best things in life.

What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.9 A counterfeit god is anything so central and essential to your life that, should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living. An idol has such a controlling position in your heart that you can spend most of your passion and energy, your emotional and financial resources, on it without a second thought. It can be family and children, or career and making money, or achievement and critical acclaim, or saving “face” and social standing. It can be a romantic relationship, peer approval, competence and skill, secure and comfortable circumstances, your beauty or your brains, a great political or social cause, your morality and virtue, or even success in the Christian ministry. When your meaning in life is to fix someone else’s life, we may call it “codependency” but it is really idolatry. An idol is whatever you look at and say, in your heart of hearts, “If I have that, then I’ll feel my life has meaning, then I’ll know I have value, then I’ll feel significant and secure.” There are many ways to describe that kind of relationship to something, but perhaps the best one is worship.

If anything becomes more fundamental than God to your happiness, meaning in life, and identity, then it is an idol.

The living God, who revealed himself both at Mount Sinai and on the Cross, is the only Lord who, if you find him, can truly fulfill you, and, if you fail him, can truly forgive you.

The Inevitability of Idolatry Why is getting your heart’s deepest desire so often a disaster? In the book of Romans, Saint Paul wrote that one of the worst things God can do to someone is to “give them over to the desires of their hearts” (Romans 1:24). Why would the greatest punishment imaginable be to allow someone to achieve their fondest dream? It is because our hearts fashion these desires into idols. In that same chapter, Paul summarized the history of the human race in one sentence: “They worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25). Every human being must live for something. Something must capture our imaginations, our heart’s most fundamental allegiance and hope. But, the Bible tells us, without the intervention of the Holy Spirit, that object will never be God himself.

What Abraham was able to see was that this test was about loving God supremely. In the end the Lord said to him, “Now I know you fear God.” In the Bible, this does not refer so much to being “afraid” of God as to being wholeheartedly committed to him. In Psalm 130:4, for example, we see that “the fear of God” is increased by an experience of God’s grace and forgiveness. What it describes is a loving, joyful awe and wonder before the greatness of God. The Lord is saying, “Now I know that you love me more than anything in the world.” That’s what “the fear of God” means.

From this perspective we see that God’s extremely rough treatment of Abraham was actually merciful. Isaac was a wonderful gift to Abraham, but he was not safe to have and hold until Abraham was willing to put God first. As long as Abraham never had to choose between his son and obedience to God, he could not see that his love was becoming idolatrous. In a similar way, we may not realize how idolatrous our career has become to us, until we are faced with a situation in which telling the truth or acting with integrity would mean a serious blow to our professional advancement. If we are not willing to hurt our career in order to do God’s will, our job will become a counterfeit god.

She must be able to say in her heart, “My desire for completely successful and happy children is selfish. It’s all about my need to feel worthwhile and valuable. If I really knew God’s love— then I could accept less-than-perfect kids and wouldn’t be crushing them. If God’s love meant more to me than my children, I could love my children less selfishly and more truly.” Anna has to put her “Isaacs” on the altar and give God the central place in her life.

The success and love of Anna’s children has been more important to her self-image than the glory and love of God. Though she believes in God with her mind, her heart’s deepest satisfaction comes from hearing a child saying, “Oh, Mother, I owe everything to you!” Tragically, she may never hear the words that she longs for most, because her inordinate need for their approval is pushing away the ones she loves most. She must be willing to put God first, to trust God with her children by letting them fail, and to find her peace in his love and will. She needs to follow Abraham up into the mountains.

Jesus alone makes sense of this story. The only way that God can be both “just” (demanding payment of our debt of sin) and “justifier”24 (providing salvation and grace) is because years later another Father went up another “mount” called Calvary with his firstborn and offered him there for us all. You will never be as great, as secure in God, as courageous, as Abraham became simply by trying hard, but only by believing in the Savior to whom this event points. Only if Jesus lived and died for us can you have a God of infinite love and holiness at once. Then you can be absolutely sure he loves you.

Your Walk into the Mountains Think of the many disappointments and troubles that beset us. Look at them more closely, and you will realize that the most agonizing of them have to do with our own “Isaacs.” In our lives there are always some things that we invest in to get a level of joy and fulfillment that only God can give. The most painful times in our lives are times in which our Isaacs, our idols, are being threatened or removed. When that happens we can respond in two ways. We can opt for bitterness and despair. We will feel entitled to wallow in those feelings, saying, “I’ve worked all my life to get to this place in my career, and now it’s all gone!” or “I’ve slaved my whole life to give that girl a good life, and this is how she repays me!” We may feel at liberty to lie, cheat, take revenge, or throw away our principles in order to get some relief. Or we may simply live in a permanent despondency. Or else, like Abraham, you could take a walk up into the mountains. You could say, “I see that you may be calling me to live my life without something I never thought I could live without. But if I have you, I have the only wealth, health, love, honor, and security I really need and cannot lose.” As many have learned and later taught, you don’t realize Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.

Something is safe for us to maintain in our lives only if it has really stopped being an idol. That can happen only when we are truly willing to live without it, when we truly say from the heart: “Because I have God, I can live without you.”

Sometimes God seems to be killing us when he’s actually saving us.

We can’t know all the reasons that our Father is allowing bad things to happen to us, but like Jesus did, we can trust him in those difficult times. As we look at him and rejoice in what he did for us, we will have the joy and hope necessary—and the freedom from counterfeit gods—to follow the call of God when times seem at their darkest and most difficult.

We maintain the fantasy that if we find our one true soul mate, everything wrong with us will be healed. But when our expectations and hopes reach that magnitude, as Becker says, “the love object is God.” No lover, no human being, is qualified for that role. No one can live up to that. The inevitable result is bitter disillusionment.

The Power of Love Some say that Becker’s cultural analysis is dated. We now live in “the hookup culture,” in which young people have turned sex into something ordinary, casual, and free from commitment. Fewer men and women actually date or have boyfriends and girlfriends. In the interest of gender equality, women have begun to say, “We deserve to have as much fun with our sexuality as guys do.” There is growing peer pressure to engage in sex and not get too emotionally involved.28 Surely, then, our culture is moving away from any hope in “apocalyptic romance.” Once we get over our lingering Puritanism, the argument goes, sex will be no big deal. Don’t bet on it. Laura Sessions Stepp, in her book Unhooked, found that hookups left most young women unsatisfied, though they are unwilling to admit this to their peers. And the enormous stress our culture puts on physical and sexual beauty belies any notion that sex is no big deal. In the 1940s, C. S. Lewis heard from many of his peers in the British academy that sex was nothing but an appetite, like that for food. Once we recognized this, they said, and began to simply have sex whenever we wanted it, people would cease to be “driven mad” by desire for love and sex. Lewis doubted this, and proposed a thought experiment. Suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that i...

The reason for our confusion is that we usually read the Bible as a series of disconnected stories, each with a “moral” for how we should live our lives. It is not. Rather, it comprises a single story, telling us how the human race got into its present condition, and how God through Jesus Christ has come and will come to put things right. In other words, the Bible doesn’t give us a god at the top of a moral ladder saying, “If you try hard to summon up your strength and live right, you can make it up!” Instead, the Bible repeatedly shows us weak people who don’t deserve God’s grace, don’t seek it, and don’t appreciate it even after they have received it. If that is the great biblical story arc into which every individual scriptural narrative fits, then what do we learn from this story? We learn that through all of life there runs a ground note of cosmic disappointment. You are never going to lead a wise life until you understand that. Jacob said, “If I can just get Rachel, everything will be okay.” And he goes to bed with the one who he thinks is Rachel, and literally, the Hebrew says, “in the morning, behold, it was Leah” (Genesis 29:25). One commentator noted about this verse, “This is a miniature of our disillusionment, experienced from Eden onwards.”33 What does that mean? With all due respect to this woman (from whom we have much to learn), it means that no matter what we put our hopes in, in the morning, it is always Leah, never Rachel. Nobody has ever said this bette...

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What happened? In the belly of the fish, Jonah had begun to grasp the idea that all human beings are equally unworthy of God’s love and that therefore all human beings have equal access to God’s grace. But Jonah’s idolatries had reasserted themselves with a vengeance. His apprehension of God’s grace in chapter 2 had been mainly intellectual. It had not penetrated his heart. Jonah stands as a warning that human hearts never change quickly or easily, even when a person is being mentored

Centuries later, someone came who said to his astonished listeners that he was the ultimate Jonah (Matthew 12:39–41). When Jesus Christ came to earth, he was leaving the ultimate comfort zone, in order to come and minister not just to a people who might harm him, but to people who would. And to save them, he would have to do much more than preach, he would have to die for them. While the original Jonah was merely thought to be dead, Jesus actually died and rose again. It was what Jesus called the sign of Jonah (Matthew 12:31).

When I struggle with my idols, I think of Jesus, voluntarily bowing his head into that ultimate storm, taking it on frontally, for me. He sank in that storm of terror so I would not fear any other storm in my life. If he did that for me, then I know my value, confidence, and mission in life all rest in him. Storms here on earth can take away many things, even my physical life, but not my Life.

The ending is brilliant and satisfying. It’s satisfying because we don’t need to wonder whether Jonah repented and saw the light. He must have. How do we know? Well, how else would we know this story, unless Jonah told it to someone? And who would ever tell a story in which he is seen as an evil fool on every page, except a man in whom God’s grace had reached the center of his heart?

However, the Lord cannot be added to a life as one more hedge against failure. He is not one more resource to use to help us achieve our agenda. He is a whole new agenda.

That blessing—the blessing through the Spirit that is ours through Christ—is what Jacob received, and it is the only remedy against idolatry. Only that blessing makes idols unnecessary. As with Jacob, we usually discover this only after a life of “looking for blessing in all the wrong places.” It often takes an experience of crippling weakness for us to finally discover it. That is why so many of the most God-blessed people limp as they dance for joy. For

Henry and Kevin had both lost their jobs because of an unfair action by their bosses, and they came to see me for counseling within a year of each other. Henry forgave his boss and moved on and was doing very well, while Kevin could not move past it; he stayed bitter and cynical, and it affected his future career path. Some people tried to help him by working on his emotions. The more sympathy people showed Kevin, the more he felt justified in his anger and the more his self-pity grew.

Our hearts are like that. We think we’ve learned about grace, set our idols aside, and reached a place where we’re serving God not for what we’re going to get from him but for who he is. There’s a certain sense in which we spend our entire lives thinking we’ve reached the bottom of our hearts and finding it is a false bottom. Mature Christians are not people who have completely hit the bedrock. I do not believe that is possible in this life. Rather, they are people who know how to keep drilling and are getting closer and closer.