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

by Timothy J. Keller

Leah is the one person in this sad story to make some spiritual progress, though this happens only at its very end.

After years of childbearing, however, there’s a breakthrough. When Leah gave birth to her last son, Judah, she said, “This time, I will praise the LORD.” There was a defiance in that claim. It was a different declaration from the ones she had made after the other births. There was no mention of husband or child. It appears that finally, she had taken her heart’s deepest hopes off of her husband and her children, and had put them on the Lord. Jacob and Laban had stolen Leah’s life, but when she gave her heart finally to the Lord, she got her life back.

There's a sermon in here.

God had come to the girl that nobody wanted, the unloved, and made her the ancestral mother of Jesus. Salvation came into the world, not through beautiful Rachel, but through the unwanted one, the unloved one.

This is the God who saves by grace. The gods of moralistic religions favor the successful and the overachievers. They are the ones who climb the moral ladder up to heaven. But the God of the Bible is the one who comes down into this world to accomplish a salvation and give us a grace we could never attain ourselves. He loves the unwanted, the weak and unloved. He is not just a king and we are the subjects; he is not just a shepherd and we are the sheep. He is a husband and we are his spouse. He is ravished with us—even those of us whom no one else notices.

And here is the power to overcome our idolatries. There are many people in the world who have not found a romantic partner, and they need to hear the Lord say, “I am the true Bridegroom.

However, it is not just those without spouses who need to see that God is our ultimate spouse, but those with spouses as well. They need this in order to save their marriage from the crushing weight of their divine expectations. If you marry someone expecting them to be like a god, it is only inevitable that they will disappoint you. It’s not that you should try to love your spouse less, but rather that you should know and love God more. How can we know God’s love so deeply that we release our lovers and spouses from our stifling expectations?

Tracy

When God came to earth in Jesus Christ, he was truly the son of Leah. He became the man nobody wanted. He was born in a manger. He had no beauty that we should desire him (Isaiah 53:2). He came to his own and his own received him not (John 1:11).

The only way to dispossess the heart of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one.

So when she saw a man was interested in her, she would silently say in her heart toward him, “You may turn out to be a great guy, and maybe even my husband, but you cannot ever be my life. Only Christ is my life.” When she began to do this, like Leah, she got her life back.

Ernest Becker wrote that our culture would replace God with sex and romance. Even earlier, Friedrich Nietzsche had a different theory. He wrote that, with the absence of God growing in Western culture, we would replace God with money.

Once you are able to afford to live in a particular neighborhood, send your children to its schools, and participate in its social life, you will find yourself surrounded by quite a number of people who have more money than you. You don’t compare yourself to the rest of the world, you compare yourself to those in your bracket. The human heart always wants to justify itself and this is one of the easiest ways. You say, “I don’t live as well as him or her or them. My means are modest compared to theirs.” You can reason and think like that no matter how lavishly you are living.

When people visit here from other parts of the globe, they are staggered to see the level of materialistic comfort that the majority of Americans have come to view as a necessity.

He had sacrificed everything else in order to get money.

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

“a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” To “consist” of your possessions is to be defined by what you own and consume. The term describes a personal identity based on money. It refers to people who, if they lose their wealth, do not have a “self” left, for their personal worth is based on their financial worth.

“Trusters of money” feel they have control of their lives and are safe and secure because of their wealth.

Yet, even though it is clear that the world is filled with greed and materialism, almost no one thinks it is true of them. They are in denial.

Money is one of the most common counterfeit gods there is. When it takes hold of your heart it blinds you to what is happening, it controls you through your anxieties and lusts, and it brings you to put it ahead of all other things.

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.

Now that his identity and security were rooted in Christ, he had more money than he needed.

counterfeit gods come in clusters, making the idolatry structure of the heart complex. There are “deep idols” within the heart beneath the more concrete and visible “surface idols” that we serve.46

People with the deep idol of power do not mind being unpopular in order to gain influence. People who are most motivated by approval are the opposite—they will gladly lose power and control as long as everyone thinks well of them. Each deep idol—power, approval, comfort, or control—generates a different set of fears and a different set of hopes.

“Surface idols” are things such as money, our spouse, or children, through which our deep idols seek fulfillment. We are often superficial in the analysis of our idol structures. For example, money can be a surface idol that serves to satisfy more foundational impulses. Some people want lots of money as a way to control their world and life. Such people usually don’t spend much money and live very modestly. They keep it all safely saved and invested, so they can feel completely secure in the world. Others want money for access to social circles and to make themselves beautiful and attractive. These people do spend their money on themselves in lavish ways. Other people want money because it gives them so much power over others. In every case, money functions as an idol and yet, because of various deep idols, it results in very different patterns of behavior.

This is why idols cannot be dealt with by simply eliminating surface idols like money or sex. We can look at them and say, “I need to de-emphasize this in my life. I must not let this drive me. I will stop it.” Direct appeals like that won’t work, because the deep idols have to be dealt with at the heart level.

To the degree that you grasp the gospel, money will have no dominion over you. Think on his costly grace until it changes you into a generous people.

Money cannot save you from tragedy, or give you control in a chaotic world. Only God can do that.

Faith in the gospel restructures our motivations, our self-understanding and identity, our view of the world. Behavioral compliance to rules without a complete change of heart will be superficial and fleeting.

He knew that if he had been in that kind of a spiritual relationship with money during the financial crisis, he would have lost all his sense of significance and meaning. 50 But his identity had shifted.

Andrew Carnegie knew that money was an idol in his heart, but he didn’t know how to root it out. It can’t be removed, only replaced. It must be supplanted by the one who, though rich, became poor, so that we might truly be rich.

An “achievement addict” is no different from any other kind of addict.54

One sign that you have made success an idol is the false sense of security it brings.

Another sign that you have made achievement an idol is that it distorts your view of yourself. When your achievements serve as the basis for your very worth as a person, they can lead to an inflated view of your abilities.

If your success is more than just success to you—if it is the measure of your value and worth—then accomplishment in one limited area of life will make you believe you have expertise in all areas. This, of course, leads to all kinds of bad choices and decisions. This distorted view of ourselves is part of the blindness to reality that the Bible says always accompanies idolatry

The main sign that we are into success idolatry, however, is that we find we cannot maintain our self-confidence in life unless we remain at the top of our chosen field.

Winning made me feel like I was somebody. It made me feel pretty. It was like being hooked on a drug. I needed the wins, the applause, in order to have an identity.56

It is also possible for an entire field of professionals to be so enamored of their skills and policies that they treat them as a form of salvation. Do scientists, sociologists, therapists, and politicians admit the limitations of what they can accomplish, or do they make “messianic” claims? There should be a chastened humility about how much any public policy or technological advance can do to solve the problems of the human race.

In his book The Homeless Mind, Peter Berger points out that in traditional cultures, personal worth is measured in terms of “honor.” Honor is given to those who fulfill their assigned role in the community, whether it be as citizen, father, mother, teacher, or ruler. Modern society, however, is individualistic, and bases worth on “dignity.” Dignity means the right of every individual to develop his or her own identity and self, free from any socially assigned role or category.57 Modern society, then, puts great pressure on individuals to prove their worth through personal achievement. It is not enough to be a good citizen or family member. You must win, be on top, to show you are one of the best.

Leprosy in the Bible encompassed a variety of fatal, wasting skin diseases that slowly crippled, disfigured, and finally killed their victims. The word had the resonance in its day that cancer has in ours. Naaman’s body was going through a slow-motion explosion. His body would puff up, his skin and bones would crack, and then they would fall off in stages as he died by inches. Naaman had everything—wealth, athletic prowess, popular acclaim—but under it all he was literally falling apart.

Many people pursue success as a way to overcome the sense that they are somehow “outsiders.” If they attain it, they believe, it will open the doors into the clubs, into the social sets, into relationships with the connected and the influential. Finally, they think, they will be accepted by all the people who really matter.

He thought he could use his success to deal with his problems. Naaman did not understand that there are some things only God can do.

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.

He had just learned that this God is not an extension of culture, but a transformer of culture, not a controllable but a sovereign Lord.

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

From the earliest parts of the Bible, it was understood that God could not forgive without sacrifice. No one who is seriously wronged can “just forgive” the perpetrator. If you have been robbed of money, opportunity, or happiness, you can either make the wrongdoer pay it back or you can forgive. But when you forgive, that means you absorb the loss and the debt. You bear it yourself. All forgiveness, then, is costly.60

The foundation for penal substitutionary atonement

This biblical theme, that forgiveness always requires a suffering servant, finds its climax in Jesus,

an article by Helen Rubin in the magazine Fast Company. Of all the subjects we obsess about . . . success is the one we lie about the most—that success and its cousin money will make us secure, that success and its cousin power will make us important, that success and its cousin fame will make us happy. It’s time to tell the truth: Why are our generation’s smartest, most talented, most successful people flirting with disaster in record numbers? People are using all their means to get money, power, and glory—and then self-destructing. Maybe they didn’t want it in the first place! Or didn’t like what they saw when they finally achieved it.62

The idol of success cannot be just expelled, it must be replaced. The human heart’s desire for a particular valuable object may be conquered, but its need to have some such object is unconquerable.63 How can we break our heart’s fixation on doing “some great thing” in order to heal ourselves of our sense of inadequacy,

All during his ministry, the disciples continually asked Jesus, “When are you going to take power? When are you going to stop fraternizing with simple people? When are you going to start networking and raising money? When will you run for office? When’s the first primary? When’s our first TV special?” Instead, Jesus served humbly and then was tortured and killed.

Just before Europe plunged into World War II, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga wrote, “We live in a world possessed. And we know it.”64 The Nazis claimed to promote deep love of country and people. But somehow as they pursued this thing, “love of country,” their patriotism became demonic and destructive. In the end, Nazism accomplished the very opposite of what it sought—endless shame rather than national honor.

However, his “Reign of Terror” was so horrendously unjust that Robespierre himself was made a scapegoat and guillotined without any trial. “Liberty and equality” are obviously great goods, but again, something went horribly wrong. A noble principle became “possessed,” went insane, and ultimately accomplished the very opposite of the justice the revolutionaries sought.