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

by Timothy J. Keller

The All-seeing God knows the state of every heart. Rather, God was putting Abraham through the furnace, so his love for God could finally “come forth as pure gold.”

God’s extremely rough treatment of Abraham was actually merciful.

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.

give them the freedom to fail. That’s all true, but there is an underlying issue that has to be confronted. She must be able to say in her heart, “My desire for completely successful and happy children is selfish. It’s all about my need to feel worthwhile and valuable. If I really knew God’s love—then I could accept less-than-perfect kids and wouldn’t be crushing them. If God’s love meant more to me than my children, I could love my children less selfishly and more truly.” Anna has to put her “Isaacs” on the altar and give God the central place in her life. 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).

Abraham’s agonizing walk into the mountains was 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. That would have never happened unless God had dealt with the idol of Abraham’s heart.

Many years later, in those same mountains,23 another firstborn son was stretched out on the wood to die. But there on Mount Calvary, when the beloved son of God cried, “My God, my God—why hast thou forsaken me?” there was no voice from heaven announcing deliverance. Instead, God the Father paid the price in silence. Why? The true substitute for Abraham’s son was God’s only Son, Jesus,

We need to find a way to keep from clutching them too tightly, of being enslaved to them. We will never do so by mouthing abstractions about how great God is.

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.” When the magnitude of what he did dawns on us, it makes it possible finally to rest our hearts in him rather than in anything else. 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)

“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.”

you don’t realize Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.

we must not make the mistake of thinking that this story means all we have to do is be willing to part with our idols rather than actually leave them behind.

stopped being an idol. That can happen only when we are truly willing to live without it, when we truly say from the heart: “Because I have God, I can live without you.”

As we look at him and rejoice in what he did for us, we will have the joy and hope necessary—and the freedom from counterfeit gods—to follow the call of God when times seem at their darkest

A World Possessed

Ernest Becker

lost the reality of God, many people will look to romantic love

Nietz...

be money that would re...

political leaders as “messiahs,” our political policies as saving doctrine, and turn our political activism into a kind of religion.

Signs of Political Idolatry

put the kind of hope in their political leaders and policies that once was reserved for God and the work of the gospel. When their political leaders are out of power, they experience a death.

refuse to admit how much agreement they actually have with the other party, and instead focus on the points of disagreement. The points of contention overshadow everything else, and a poisonous environment

opponents are not considered to be simply mistaken, but to be evil.

why do we deify and demonize political causes and ideas? Reinhold Niebuhr answered that, in political idolatry, we make a god out of having power.

The Idolatry of Power

all humans struggle with a sense of being dependent and powerless. The original temptation in the Garden of Eden was to resent the limits God had put on us

and to seek to be “as God” by taking power over our own destiny. We gave in to this temptation and now it is part of our nature.

we desperately seek ways to assure ourselves that we still have power over our own lives...

two ways this works itself out.

nations had corporate “egos,” and just as individuals, national cultures could have both superiority and inferiority complexes.

America’s proud self-image as “the land of the free” blinded most people to their hypocritical racism

Germany’s humiliation after World War I left the whole society eager to prove its power and superiority to the world.

along, idols are good and necessary things that are turned into gods. C. S. Lewis wrote

Turning a Philosophy into an Idol

another form of the “will to power.” You make not your people, but your political philosophy into a saving faith. This happens when politics becomes “ideological.”

any coherent set of ideas about a subject,

limited, partial account of reality that is raised to the level of the final word

believe that their school or party has the real and complete answer to society’s problems.

Above all, ideologies hide from their adherents their ...

failed is communism.

“scientific socialism.”

C. E. M. Joad was a leading British agnostic philosopher who turned back to Christianity after World War II. In his book The Recovery of Belief he wrote:

book by several disillusioned communists and socialists,

entitled The God that Failed.74 The title says it all, describing how a political ideology can make absolute promises and demand total life commitment.

massive financial crisis of 2008-2009, the same disaffection with capitalism may occur

That way we feel that we are the people who can fix things, that everyone opposing us is a fool or evil.

this too blinds us.

reality is much less simplistic.

any culture in which God is largely absent, sex, money, and politics will fill the vacuum