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Love
Money
Success
Power
In the 1830s, when Alexis de Tocqueville recorded his famous observations on America, he noted a “strange melancholy that haunts the inhabitants . . . in the midst of abundance.”2 Americans believed that prosperity could quench their yearning for happiness, but such a hope was illusory, because, de Tocqueville added, “the incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy [the human] heart.”
What is the cause of this “strange melancholy” that permeates our society even during boom times of frenetic activity, and which turns to outright despair when prosperity diminishes? De Tocqueville says it comes from taking some “incomplete joy of this world” and building your entire life on it. That is the definition of idolatry.
We may not physically kneel before the statue of Aphrodite, but many young women today are driven into depression and eating disorders by an obsessive concern over their body image. We may not actually burn incense to Artemis, but when money and career are raised to cosmic proportions, we perform a kind of child sacrifice, neglecting family and community to achieve a higher place in business and gain more wealth and prestige.
our culture has produced a class of high achievers with “rank-link imbalances.” They have social skills for vertical relationships, for improving their rank with mentors and bosses, but none for genuine bonding in horizontal relationships with spouses, friends, and family.
They had sacrificed everything to the god of success, but it wasn’t enough. In ancient times, the deities were bloodthirsty and hard to appease. They still are.
Money can become a spiritual addiction, and like all addictions it hides its true proportions from its victims. We take more and greater risks to get an ever diminishing satisfaction from the thing we crave, until a breakdown occurs. When we begin to recover, we ask, “What were we thinking? How could we have been so blind?” We wake up like people with a hangover who can hardly remember the night before.
In Ezekiel 14:3, God says about elders of Israel, “These men have set up their idols in their hearts.”
the human heart takes good things like a successful career, love, material possessions, even family, and turns them into ultimate things. Our hearts deify them as the center of our lives, because, we think, they can give us significance and security, safety and fulfillment, if we attain them.6
The Ring is what Professor Tom Shippey calls “a psychic amplifier,” which takes the heart’s fondest desires and magnifies them to idolatrous proportions.7 Some good characters in the book want to liberate slaves, or preserve their people’s land, or visit wrongdoers with just punishment. These are all good objectives. But the Ring makes them willing to do anything to achieve them,
The wearer of the Ring becomes increasingly enslaved and addicted to it, for an idol is something we cannot live without. We must have it, and therefore it drives us to break rules we once honored, to harm others and even ourselves in order to get it. Idols are spiritual addictions that lead to terrible evil, in Tolkien’s novel and real life.
“What do you mean, ‘other gods’?” An answer comes immediately. “You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them. . . .” (Exodus 20:4-5) That includes everything in the world!
The very things upon which these people were building all their happiness turned to dust in their hands because they had built all their happiness upon them. In each case, a good thing among many was turned into a supreme thing, so that its demands overrode all competing values.8 But counterfeit gods always disappoint, and often destructively so.
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
When your meaning in life is to fix someone else’s life, we may call it “co-dependency” 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.
There can also be intellectual idols, often called ideologies. For example, European intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became largely convinced of Rousseau’s view of the innate goodness of human nature, that all of our social problems were the result of poor education and socialization. World War II shattered this illusion. Beatrice Webb, whom many consider the architect of Britain’s modern welfare state, wrote: Somewhere in my diary—1890?—I wrote “I have staked all on the essential goodness of human nature. . . .” [Now thirty-five years later I realize] how
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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.
They love idols, trust idols, and obey idols.
What do we enjoy imagining? What are our fondest dreams? We look to our idols to love us, to provide us with value and a sense of beauty, significance, and worth.
What do we fear the most? What, if we lost it, would make life not worth living? We make “sacrifices” to appease and please our gods, who we believe will protect us. We look to our idols to provide us with a sense of confidence and safety.
What makes us uncontrollably angry, anxious, or despondent? What racks us with a guilt we can’t shake? Idols control us, since we feel we must have them or life is meaningless.
What many people call “psychological problems” are simple issues of idolatry. Perfectionism, workaholism, chronic indecisiveness, the need to control the lives of others—all of these stem from making good things into idols that then drive us into the ground as we try to appease them. Idols dominate our lives.
With the global economy in shambles, many of those idols that we have worshipped for years have come crashing down around us. This is a great opportunity. We are briefly experiencing “disenchantment.” In the old stories, that meant that the spell cast by the evil sorcerer was broken and there was the chance to escape.
The only way to free ourselves from the destructive influence of counterfeit gods is to turn back to the true one. 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.
We never imagine that getting our heart’s deepest desires might be the worst thing that can ever happen to us.
under the pressure of fame and celebrity all your character flaws and miseries become twice as bad as they were before.
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).
Paul summarized the history of the human race in one sentence: “They worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25).
Anna, who was ruining her children’s lives did not “love her children too much,” but rather loved God too little in relationship to them. As a result, her child-gods were crushed under the weight of her expectations.
“The central . . . principle of the Bible [is] the rejection of idolatry.”
God came to Abraham and made him a staggering promise. If he would obey him faithfully, God would bless all the nations of the earth through him and his descendents. For this to happen, however, Abraham had to go. “Leave your country, your people, and your father’s house, and go to the land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1-3). God called Abraham to leave all that was familiar—his friends, most of his family, and everything that he believed meant safety, prosperity, and peace—and go out into the wilderness, uncertain of his destination. He was asked to give up, for God’s sake, nearly all the
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Isaac’s name meant “laughter,” a reference to both his parents’ joy and to their difficulty in believing that God would ever give them what he had promised.
had he been waiting and sacrificing for God, or for the boy? Was God just a means to an end? To whom was Abraham ultimately giving his heart? Did Abraham have the peace, humility, boldness, and unmovable poise that come to those who trust in God rather than in circumstances, public opinion, or their own competence? Had he learned to trust God alone, to love God for himself, not just for what he could get out of God? No, not yet.
birth of Isaac would have been the climax and last chapter of Abraham’s life. His faith had triumphed. Now he could die a happy man, having fulfilled God’s call to him to leave his homeland and wait for a son to be born. But then, to our surprise, Abraham got another call from God. And it could not have been more shocking. Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about. Genesis 22:2 This was the ultimate test. Isaac was now everything to Abraham, as God’s call makes clear.
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remember the ancient law of primogeniture. The oldest son got the majority of the estate and wealth so the family would not lose its place in society.
hopes and dreams of a man and his family rested in the firstborn son.21 The call to give up the firstborn son would be analogous to a surgeon giving up the use of his hands, or of a visual artist losing the use of her eyes.
we can only understand God’s command to Abraham against this cultural background.
because of the Israelites’ sinfulness, the lives of their firstborn are automatically forfeit, though they might be redeemed through r...
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When God brought judgment on Egypt for enslaving the Israelites, his ultimate punishment was taking the lives of their firstborn. Their firstborns’ lives were forfeit, because of the sins of the families and the nation. Why? The firstborn son was the family.
If Abraham had heard a voice sounding like God’s saying, “Get up and kill Sarah,” Abraham would probably never have done it. He would have rightly assumed that he was hallucinating, for God would not ask him to do something that clearly contradicted everything he had ever said about justice and righteousness. But when God stated that his only son’s life was forfeit, that was not an irrational, contradictory statement to him. Notice, God was not asking him to walk over into Isaac’s tent and just murder him. He asked him to make him a burnt offering. He was calling in Abraham’s debt. His son was
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How can God be both holy and just and still graciously fulfill his promise of salvation?” Abraham did not know. But he went. He acted in line with another figure in the Old Testament, Job, who was sent countless afflictions with no explanation.
“He knows what he is doing with me, and when he has tested me, I will come forth as pure gold” (Job 23:10).
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.” If he had not believed that he was in debt to a holy God, he would have been too angry to go. But if he had not also believed that God was a God of grace, he would have been too crushed and hopeless to go. He would have just lain down and died. It was only because he knew God was both holy and loving that he was able to put one foot after
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this test was about loving God supremely.
“Now I know that you love me more than anything in the world.” That’s what “the fear of God” means.
