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May 30, 2022 - November 7, 2023
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.18
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.
Two Jewish philosophers who knew the Scriptures intimately concluded: “The central . . . principle of the Bible [is] the rejection of idolatry.”19
However, while God’s call had demanded that he give up his other hopes, it had also given him a new one. The prophecy was that the nations of the earth would be blessed through his family, “your offspring” (Genesis 12:7).
The years of agonized waiting had taken their toll, as any couple struggling with infertility can attest. The nearly endless delays refined Abraham’s faith, which was crucially important.
But the question now was—had he been waiting and sacrificing for God, or for the boy? Was God just a means to an end?
reminds us that ancient cultures were not as individualistic as ours. People’s hopes and dreams were never for their own personal success, prosperity, or prominence. Since everyone was part of a family, and no one lived apart from the family, these things were only sought for the entire clan.
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.
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.
Her overcontrol of her children was not only an unwillingness to let God be God in her own life, but also in their lives. Anna could not imagine that God might have a plan for her children’s lives wiser than her own.
People who have never suffered in life have less empathy for others, little knowledge of their own shortcomings and limitations, no endurance in the face of hardship, and unrealistic expectations for life. As the New Testament book of Hebrews tells us, anyone God loves experiences hardship (Hebrews 12:1-8).
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!”
Why? Idols enslave. Isaac’s love and success would have become Abraham’s only identity and joy.
And fail he would have, since no child can bear the full weight of godhood. Abraham’s expectations would have driven him away or twisted and disfigured his spirit.
therefore the final stage of a long journey in which God was turning him from an average man into one of the greatest figures in history. The three great monotheistic faiths of the world today, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, name Abraham as founder. Over one half the people in the human race consider him their spiritual father.
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.
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.
Many, if not most, of these counterfeit gods can remain in our lives once we have “demoted” them below God.
Something is safe for us to maintain in our lives only if it has really stopped being an idol.
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.
The singers are overdependent on being in love. Without a romantic relationship of some kind, even the wrong kind, their lives feel meaningless.
In the same way, we know a good thing has become a counterfeit god when its demands on you exceed proper boundaries.
Making an idol out of love may mean allowing the lover to exploit and abuse you, or it may cause terrible blindness to the pathologies in the relationship. An idolatrous attachment can lead you to break any promise, rationalize any indiscretion, or betray any other allegiance, in order to hold on to it. It may drive you to violate all good and proper boundaries. To practice idolatry is to be a slave.
It has always been possible to make romantic love and marriage into a counterfeit god, but we live in a culture that makes it even easier to mistake love for God, to be swept up by it, and to rest all our hopes for happiness upon it.
Because of Isaac’s favoritism, Esau grew up proud, spoiled, willful, and impulsive, while Jacob grew up cynical and bitter.
Then he beheld the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he must have said to himself, “If I had her, finally, something would be right in my miserable life. If I had her, it would fix things.” All the longings of his heart for meaning and affirmation were fixed on Rachel.
Ernest Becker, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Denial of Death, explained the various ways secular people have dealt with the loss of belief in God. Now that we think we are here by accident 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
He still needed to feel heroic, to know that his life mattered in the scheme of things. . . . He still had to merge himself with some higher, self-absorbing meaning, in trust and gratitude. . . . If he no longer had God, how was he to do this? One of the first ways that occurred to him, as [Otto] Rank saw, was the “romantic solution.” . . . The self-glorification that he needed in his innermost nature he now looked for in the love partner. The love partner becomes the divine ideal within which to fulfill one’s life. All spiritual and moral needs now become focused in one individual. . . . In
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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.
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.
However, Lewis goes on to argue, we are not starving for sex; there is more sex available than ever before. Yet pornography, the equivalent of striptease acts, is now a trillion-dollar industry. Sex and romantic love are therefore not “just an appetite” like food. They are far more meaningful to us than that. Evolutionary biologists explain that this is hardwired into our brains. Christians explain that our capacity for romantic love stems from our being in the image of God (Genesis 1:27-29; Ephesians 5:25-31). Perhaps it can be said that both are true. In any case, romantic love is an object
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Leah.30
We may wonder how Jacob could have been so gullible, but Jacob’s behavior was that of an addict. There are many ways that romantic love can function as a kind of drug to help us escape the reality of our lives. Sally, the beautiful woman who was trapped in abusive relationships, once said to me that “men were my alcohol. Only if I was on a man’s arm could I face life and feel good about myself.”
Jacob. Rachel was not just his wife, but his “savior.”
But the passage does not say, “Leah had weak eyes, but Rachel could see very well.” It says Leah had weak eyes, but Rachel was beautiful. So “weakness” probably meant she was cross-eyed or literally unsightly in some way. The point is clear. Leah was particularly unattractive, and she had to live all of her life in the shadow of her sister, who was absolutely stunning.
But see what this meant for Leah—the daughter whom her father did not want was now a wife whom her husband did not want. “Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah” (Genesis 29:30). She was the girl that nobody wanted. 31
She did to Jacob what Jacob had done to Rachel and what Isaac had done to Esau. She set her heart’s hope on getting Jacob’s love. The last verses here are some of the most plaintive you will find in the Bible.
“This time I will praise the LORD.” So she named him Judah. Then she stopped having children. Genesis 29:31-3532
“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
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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.
“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.
Most people, if they have really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy. I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or
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If you get married as Jacob did, putting the weight of all your deepest hopes and longings on the person you are marrying, you are going to crush him or her with your expectations. It will distort your life and your spouse’s life in a hundred ways. No person, not even the best one, can give your soul all it needs. You are going to think you have gone to bed with Rachel, and you will get up and it will always be Leah. This cosmic disappointment and disillusionment is there in all of life, but we especially feel it in the things upon which we most set our hopes.
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 eternal].”
Jacob is after “apocalyptic sex.”
The failure of romantic love as a solution to human problems is so much a part of modern man’s frustration. . . . No human relationship can bear the burden of godhood. .
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.” As in all stereotypes there is some truth to this, but this story shows that both of these counterfeit gods disappoint.
In our modern culture, there has been a growing awareness that many women are victims of “commitment idolatry.” In a New York Times review of the movie He’s Just Not That Into You, Manohla Dargis laments that Hollywood keeps giving us movies about young women “where female desire now largely seems reserved for shoes, wedding bells, and babies.”
The writer is right to point out that women who have made an idol of romance and a big wedding to Prince Charming become enslaved to their own desires. She advises women to abandon their typical love-idolatries and take up the male version. But, as we have seen, all idolatries enslave.
