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In the late 1980s, Cynthia Heimel wrote, “The minute a person becomes a celebrity is the same minute he/she becomes a monster,” and then gave the names of three well-known Hollywood stars she had known before they became famous. They had been “once perfectly pleasant human beings . . . now they have become supreme beings and their wrath is awful.” She went on to say that under the pressure of fame and celebrity all your character flaws and miseries become twice as bad as they were before.
Abraham was not just exercising “blind faith.” He was not saying, “This is crazy, this is murder, but I’m going to do it anyway.” Instead he was saying, “I know God is both holy and gracious. I don’t know how he is going to be both—but I know he will.”
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.
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.
Sometimes God seems to be killing us when he’s actually saving us. Here he was turning Abraham into a great man—but on the outside it looked like God was being cruel.
and not made for any purpose, how do we instill a sense of significance in our lives? One of the main ways is what Becker called “apocalyptic romance.” We look to sex and romance to give us the transcendence and sense of meaning we used to get from faith in God. Talking about the modern secular person, he wrote:
If you are too afraid of love or too enamored by it, it has assumed godlike power, distorting your perceptions and your life.
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.”
Both the stereotypically male and female idolatries regarding romantic love are dead ends. It is often said that “men use love to get sex, women use sex to get love.”
For Jesus, greed is not only love of money, but excessive anxiety about it.
Money cannot save you from tragedy, or give you control in a chaotic world. Only God can do that.
“Just wash yourself,” then, was a command that was hard because it was so easy. To do it, Naaman had to admit he was helpless and weak and had to receive his salvation as a free gift. If you want God’s grace, all you need is need, all you need is nothing. But that kind of spiritual humility is hard to muster. We come to God saying, “Look at all I’ve done,” or maybe “Look at all I’ve suffered.” God, however, wants us to look to him—to just wash.
Lay your deadly “doing” down Down at Jesus’ feet. Stand in him, in him alone, Gloriously complete.
Idols of power, then, are not only for the powerful. You can pursue power in small, petty ways, by becoming a local neighborhood bully or a low-level bureaucrat who bosses around the few people in his field of authority. Power idolatry is all around us. What is the cure?
What we learn here is that theology matters, that much of our addiction to power and control is due to false conceptions of God. Gods of our own making may allow us to be “masters of our fate.” Sociologist Christian Smith gave the name “moralistic, therapeutic deism”
Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers is filled with case studies that demonstrate how our success is largely the product of our environment.
At the heart of every culture is its main “Hope,” what it tells its members that life is all about.
We should not think that one culture is less idolatrous than the next. Traditional societies tend to make the family unit and the clan into an absolute, ultimate thing. This can lead to honor killings, the treatment of women as chattel, and violence toward gay people. Western, secular cultures make an idol out of individual freedom, and this leads to the breakdown of the family, rampant materialism, careerism, and the idolization of romantic love, physical beauty, and profit.
The motives of Jonah’s heart are finally revealed fully. “I knew it!” he says. “I knew you were a compassionate God, so quick to forgive, so eager to save, so unceasingly patient! I knew I couldn’t trust you! That’s the reason I ran away to begin with! I was afraid that if I got a God like you near these people and they made even a gesture in the direction of repentance you would forgive them. I’ve had it with you! I resign! Just take away my life!” There is no more astonishing speech in the Bible, or perhaps in all of ancient literature. Finally Jonah’s idol was laid bare, revealing his
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Nearly everyone thinks that an all-powerful God of love, patience, and compassion is a good thing. But if, because of your idol, your ultimate good is the power and status of your people, then anything that gets in the way of it is, by definition, bad. When God’s love prevented him from smashing Israel’s enemy, Jonah, because of his idol, was forced to see God’s love as a bad thing. In the end idols can make it possible to call evil good and good evil.111
Jacob’s life had been one long wrestling match to get blessing. He had wrestled with Esau to hear it from his father’s lips. He had wrestled with Laban to find it in Rachel’s face. But it hadn’t worked.
So Jacob won! God said, “You have struggled with God . . . and overcome.” He was victorious because, once he realized the divinity of this mysterious wrestler, he did not flee but rather held on. Jacob finally got the blessing that he had longed for all his life. Soon afterward, Jacob met Esau and his band of men, and to his relief he learned that Esau was coming to greet him in peace and welcome him home. So that feud was ended.
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.
Idolatry is not just a failure to obey God, it is a setting of the whole heart on something besides God. This cannot be remedied only by repenting that you have an idol, or using willpower to try to live differently. Turning from idols is not less than those two things, but it is also far more. “Setting the mind and heart on things above” where “your life is hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:1-3) means appreciation, rejoicing, and resting in what Jesus has done for you.
The man or woman who knows the difference that Newton refers to—the difference between obeying rules of outward conduct rather than setting your heart on Christ as your peace and your life—is on the road to freedom from the counterfeit gods that control us.
