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July 4 - August 25, 2019
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.”3
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.
Why did we completely lose sight of what is right? The Bible’s answer is that the human heart is an “idol factory.
internal idol worship, within the heart, is universal.
God was saying that 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.
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.
A counterfeit god is anything so central and essential to your life that, should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living.
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.
The Bible uses three basic metaphors to describe how people relate to the idols of their hearts. They love idols, trust idols, and obey idols.
God should be our true Savior, but we look to personal achievement or financial prosperity to give us the peace and security we need.
We are controlled by the lord of our lives.
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.
Paul wrote that one of the worst things God can do to someone is to “give them over to the desires of their hearts”
It is because our hearts fashion these desires into idols.
“They worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator”
“The central . . . principle of the Bible [is] the rejection of idolatry.
had he been waiting and sacrificing for God, or for the boy? Was God just a means to an end?
God was not saying you cannot love your son, but that you must not turn a loved one into a counterfeit god.
Old Testament, Job, who was sent countless afflictions with no explanation. Job, however, says about the Lord, “He knows what he is doing with me, and when he has tested me, I will come forth as pure gold” (Job 23:10).22 How did Abraham get
obedience to God’s call? The masterful Hebrew
“I know God is both holy and gracious. I don’t know how he is going to be both—but I know he will.”
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.
This doesn’t mean that God was trying to find out if Abraham loved him.
If God had not intervened, Abraham would have certainly come to love his son more than anything in the world, if he did not already do so. That would have been idolatry, and all idolatry is destructive.
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.
“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.”
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).
must be willing to put God first, to trust God
He would have overindulged him but also become overly angry and cruel, perhaps even violent, when his son disappointed him. Why? Idols enslave.
the practical answer to our own idolatries,
We need to offer them up. 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. We have to know, to be assured, that God so loves, cherishes, and delights in us that we can rest our hearts in him for our significance and security and handle anything that happens in life.
But how much more can we look at his sacrifice on the Cross,
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.
You will never be as great, as secure in God, as courageous, as Abraham became simply by trying hard, but only by believing in the Savior to whom this event points. Only if Jesus lived and died for us can you have a God of infinite love and holiness at once. Then you can be absolutely sure he loves you.
Without a romantic relationship of some kind, even the wrong kind, their lives feel meaningless.
Making an idol out of work may mean that you work until you ruin your health, or you break the laws in order to get ahead.
We look to sex and romance to give us the transcendence and sense of meaning we used to get from faith in God.
I argued that if you are so afraid of love that you cannot have it, you are just as enslaved as if you must have it.
The person who can’t have it will avoid people who would be wonderful partners. The person who must have it will choose partners who are ill-fitting to them or abusive.
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.
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.
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.
we especially feel it in the things upon which we most set our hopes.
When you finally realize this, there are four things you can do.
You can blame the things that are disappointing you and try to mo...
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The second thing you can do is blame yourself and beat yourself and say, “I have...
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Third, you can blame the world.
