Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters

by Timothy J. Keller

Most people know you can make a god out of money. Most know you can make god out of sex. However, anything in life can serve as an idol, a God-alternative, a counterfeit god.

But counterfeit gods always disappoint, and often destructively so. Is

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.

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.

They had taken a partial truth and made it into an all-encompassing truth, by which everything could be explained and improved. To “stake everything” on human goodness was to put it in the place of God. There are also idols,

“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.

If we are not willing to hurt our career in order to do God’s will, our job will become a counterfeit god.

God saw Abraham’s sacrifice and said, “Now I know that you love me, because you did not withhold your only son from me.” But how much more can we look at his sacrifice on the Cross, and say to God, “Now, we know that you love us. For you did not withhold your son, your only son, whom you love, from us.”

As many have learned and later taught, you don’t realize Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have. Many, if not most, of these counterfeit gods can remain in our lives once we have “demoted” them

We have a phrase to describe someone who has fallen in love: “He worships the ground she walks on.” How destructive this can be when it is literally the case.

“If I have babies and sons, then my husband will come to love me, and then finally my unhappy life will be fixed,” she thought. But instead, every birth pushed her down deeper into a hell of loneliness.

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

When you finally realize this, there are four things you can do. You can blame the things that are disappointing you and try to move on to better ones. That’s the way of continued idolatry and spiritual addiction. The second thing you can do is blame yourself and beat yourself and say, “I have somehow been a failure. I see everybody else is happy. I don’t know why I am not happy. There is something wrong with me.” That’s the way of self-loathing and shame. Third, you can blame the world. You can say, “Curses on the entire opposite sex,” in which case you make yourself hard, cynical, and empty. Lastly, you can, as C. S. Lewis says at the end of his great chapter on hope, reorient the entire focus of your life toward God. He concludes, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world [something supernatural and

Salvation came into the world, not through beautiful Rachel, but through the unwanted one, the unloved one.

underdogs? No, this wonderful gift to Leah meant far more than that. The text says that when the Lord saw that Leah was not loved, he loved her. God was saying, “I am the real bridegroom.

For Jesus, greed is not only love of money, but excessive anxiety about it. He

According to the Bible, idolaters do three things with their idols. They love them, trust them, and obey them.

Luke tells us, “He wanted to see who Jesus was.” Zacchaeus was eager to connect to Jesus. Eager may be too weak a word. His willingness to climb a tree signifies something close to desperation.

“If you live like this, salvation will come to this house.” No, it has come. God’s salvation does not come in response to a changed life. A changed life comes in response to the salvation, offered as a free gift. That

The family is no longer what Christopher Lasch once called a “haven in a heartless world,” a counterbalance to the dog-eat-dog areas of life.58 Instead, the family has become the nursery where the craving for success is first cultivated.

That is, they choose professions not in answer to the question “What job helps people to flourish?” but “What job will help me to flourish?” As a result, there is a high degree of frustration expressed over unfulfilling work.

The slave girl had told Naaman to simply “see the prophet in Israel,” to go directly to the prophet and ask for a cure. This did not fit Naaman’s view of the world.

They believed religion was a form of social control. The operating principle of religion is: If you live a good life, then the gods or God will have to bless you and give you prosperity. It was only natural, then, to assume that the most successful people in a society were those closest to God.

But the God of the Bible is not like that. Naaman is after a tame God, but this is a wild God. Naaman is after a God who can be put into debt, but this is a God of grace, who puts everyone else in his debt. Naaman is after a private God, a God for you and you but not a God for everybody, but this God is the God of everyone, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Now he was being confronted with a God who in his dealings with human beings only operates on the basis of grace. These two go together. No one can control the true God because no one can earn, merit, or achieve their own blessing and salvation.

If you want God’s grace, all you need is need, all you need is nothing.

to relieve her own suffering by making him pay. She did what the entire Bible tells us to do. She did not seek revenge, she trusted God to be the judge of all. She forgave him and became the vehicle for his healing and salvation.

It is the settled tendency of human societies to turn good political causes into counterfeit gods.

One of the signs that an object is functioning as an idol is that fear becomes one of the chief characteristics of life. When we center our lives on the idol, we become dependent on it. If our counterfeit god is threatened in any way, our response is complete panic. We do not say, “What a shame, how difficult,” but rather “This is the end! There’s no hope!”

wrote wisely about this: It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses—say mother love or patriotism—are good, and others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad. . . . There are situations in which it is the duty of a married man to encourage his sexual impulse and of a soldier to encourage the fighting instinct. There are also occasions on which a mother’s love for her own children or a man’s love for his own country have to be suppressed or they will lead

In any culture in which God is largely absent, sex, money, and politics will fill the vacuum for different people. This is the reason that our political discourse is increasingly ideological and polarized.

Power, then, is often born of fear and in turn gives birth to more fear.

The British poet W. E. Henley had a leg amputated as a teenager. Yet he went on to have a career as a critic and author. As a young man Henley defiantly penned the famous “Invictus,” Latin for “unconquered.” It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul. As Niebuhr points out, this is an enormous exaggeration, a view of reality distorted and “infected with the sin of pride.”87 No one wants to minimize the importance of learning to overcome obstacles in one’s life, but Henley’s success would have been impossible had he been born without literary talent, with below-average IQ, or with different parents and social connections.

The dream was a call to humility. Though circumstances often appear to favor tyrants, God will eventually bring them down, whether gradually or dramatically.

Sociologist Christian Smith gave the name “moralistic, therapeutic deism” to the dominant understanding of God he discovered among younger Americans. In his book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, he describes this set of beliefs. God blesses and takes to heaven those who try to live good and decent lives (the “moralistic” belief). The central goal of life is not to sacrifice, or to deny oneself, but to be happy and feel good about yourself (the “therapeutic” belief). Though God exists and created the world, he does not need to be particularly involved in our lives except when there is a problem (that is “deism”).90 This view of God literally makes you master of your fate and captain of your soul. Salvation

To be your own God and live for your own glory and power leads to the most bestial and cruel kind of behavior. Pride makes you a predator, not a person.92 That is what happened to the king.

In the end idols can make it possible to call evil good and good evil.111 Idols distort not only our thinking, but also our feelings.

About idolatry he said, “Though few will own it, nothing is more common.” If we think of our soul as a house, he said, “idols are set up in every room, in every faculty.” We prefer our own wisdom to God’s wisdom, our own desires to God’s will, and our own reputation to God’s honor.

Martin Luther. In his Large Catechism (1529) and in his Treatise on Good Works he wrote that the Ten Commandments begin with a commandment against idolatry. Why does this come first? Because, he argued, the fundamental motivation behind lawbreaking is idolatry.

The secret to change is to identify and dismantle the counterfeit gods of your heart. 117

24). There is no way to challenge idols without doing cultural criticism, and there is no way to do cultural criticism without discerning and challenging idols.

“Your religion is what you do with your solitude.”120 In other words, the true god of your heart is what your thoughts effortlessly go to when there is nothing else demanding your attention. What do you enjoy daydreaming about?

Ask rather, what do you habitually think about to get joy and comfort in the privacy of your heart?

It entails joyful worship, a sense of God’s reality in prayer. Jesus must become more beautiful to your imagination, more attractive to your heart, than your idol. That is what will replace your counterfeit gods. If you uproot the idol and fail to “plant” the love of Christ in its place, the idol will grow back.

Fear-based repentance (“I’d better change or God will get me”) is really self-pity. In fear-based repentance, we don’t learn to hate the sin for itself, and it doesn’t lose its attractive power. We learn only to refrain from it for our own sake. But when we rejoice over God’s sacrificial, suffering love for us—seeing what it cost him to save us from sin—we learn to hate the sin for what it is.

Rejoicing in Christ is also crucial because idols are almost always good things.

asks, What is operating in the place of Jesus Christ as your real, functional salvation and Savior?