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July 4 - August 25, 2019
Above all, ideologies hide from their adherents their dependence on God.
In any culture in which God is largely absent, sex, money, and politics will fill the vacuum for different people.
The only way to deal with all these things is to heal our relationship with God.
Idols of power, then, are not only for the powerful. You can pursue power in small, petty ways, by becoming a local neighborhood bully or a low-level bureaucrat who bosses around the few people in his field of authority. Power idolatry is all around us.
The dream was a call to humility. Though circumstances often appear to favor tyrants, God will eventually bring them down, whether gradually or dramatically.89 Those in power should see that they have not achieved power but have only been given it by God, and that all human power crumbles in the end.
What we learn here is that theology matters, that much of our addiction to power and control is due to false conceptions of God. Gods of our own making may allow us to be “masters of our fate.”
This view of God literally makes you master of your fate and captain of your soul. Salvation and happiness is up to you.
Most of the forces that make us who we are lie in the hand of God.
What was, then, the lesson that God wanted to drive into Nebuchadnezzar’s heart? It was this: “The Most High is sovereign over the kingdoms of men and gives them to anyone he wishes and sets over them the lowliest of men.” This means that anyone who is successful is simply a recipient of God’s unmerited favor. Even the people at the top of the world’s hierarchy of power, wealth, and influence are really “lowliest”—they are no better than anyone else. This is a rudimentary form of the gospel—that what we have is the result of grace, not of our “works” or efforts.
One of the great ironies of sin is that when human beings try to become more than human beings, to be as gods, they fall to become lower than human beings. To be your own God and live for your own glory and power leads to the most bestial and cruel kind of behavior. Pride makes you a predator, not a person.
Today the need for transcendence and meaning has detached itself from anything more important than the individual self and its freedom to be what it chooses.
Traditional societies tend to make the family unit and the clan into an absolute, ultimate thing. This can lead to honor killings, the treatment of women as chattel, and violence toward gay people. Western, secular cultures make an idol out of individual freedom, and this leads to the breakdown of the family, rampant materialism, careerism, and the idolization of romantic love, physical beauty, and profit.
Idolatry functions widely inside religious communities when doctrinal truth is elevated to the position of a false god. This occurs when people rely on the rightness of their doctrine for their standing with God rather than on God himself and his grace.
It is a subtle but deadly mistake. The sign that you have slipped into this form of self-justification is that you become what the book of Proverbs calls a “scoffer.”101 Scoffers always show contempt and disdain for opponents rather than graciousness.
Another form of idolatry within religious communities turns spiritual gifts and ministry success into a counterfeit god.
Another kind of religious idolatry has to do with moral living itself.
So why did he run? The answer is, again, idolatry, but of a very complex kind.
personal idol.
cultural...
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had a religious idol,
It led him to rebel against the very God he was so proud of serving.
But then he said something remarkable about them, that idolaters “forsake their own chesedh.” Chesedh is the Hebrew word for God’s covenantal love, his redeeming, unconditional grace.
What, according to Jonah, blocks the coming of grace into one’s life? It is clinging to idols. Why, then, had Jonah himself so badly missed in his understanding of God’s will and heart? The answer is—his idolatry. His fear of personal failure, his pride in his religion, and his fierce love of his country had coalesced into a deadly idolatrous compound that spiritually blinded him to the grace of God. As a result he did not want to extend that grace to an entire city that needed it. He wanted to see them all dead.
Racial pride and cultural narrowness cannot coexist with the gospel of grace. They are mutually exclusive. One forces the other out.
Paul did not say, “You are breaking the rule against racism,” but rather that Peter was “not acting in line with the gospel
Jonah had been called to go and preach grace to the greatest city in the world, but he hadn’t understood that grace himself. Battered and humbled, he began to realize the truth. Salvation was by grace, and therefore it was available to anyone at all. His cultural idols seem to have been removed as all this dawned on him. And at that, the fish vomited him out. Jonah the prophet had another chance.
Jonah so loathed the Assyrian race that he saw God’s forgiveness of them to be the worst thing that could have happened.
Jonah had begun to grasp the idea that all human beings are equally unworthy of God’s love and that therefore all human beings have equal access to God’s grace.
Jonah stands as a warning that human hearts never change quickly or easily, even when a person is being mentored directly by God.
our hearts is revealed. For example, all Christians say and believe that Christ is their Savior, not their career or their wealth. What Christ thinks of us is what matters, not human approval. That is what we say. But while Jesus is our Savior in principle, other things still maintain functional title to our hearts. Jonah shows us that it is one thing to believe the gospel with our minds, and another to work it deep into our hearts so it affects everything we think, feel, and do. He is still being largely controlled by idolatry.
When God’s love prevented him from smashing Israel’s enemy, Jonah, because of his idol, was forced to see God’s love as a bad thing.
Idolatry distorts our feelings. Just as idols are good things turned into ultimate things, so the desires they generate become paralyzing and overwhelming.
When people say, “I know God forgives me, but I can’t forgive myself,” they mean that they have failed an idol, whose approval is more important to them than God’s.
Idols function like gods in our lives, and so if we make career or parental approval our god and we fail it, then the idol curses us in our hearts for the rest of our lives.
Jesus was the ultimate Jonah.
I think of Jesus, voluntarily bowing his head into that ultimate storm, taking it on frontally, for me. He sank in that storm of terror so I would not fear any other storm in my life.
The question is coming right at us, because you are Jonah and I am Jonah.
Are we, like Jonah, willing to change? If we are, then we must look to the Ultimate Jonah, and to his sign, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Every human being, then, needs blessing. We all need assurance of our unique value from some outside source. The love and admiration of those you most love and admire is above all rewards. We are all looking for this deep admiration, looking for it from our parents, our spouse, and our peers.
As with Jacob, we usually discover this only after a life of “looking for blessing in all the wrong places.”
Martin Luther.
the Ten Commandments begin with a commandment against idolatry. Why does this come first? Because, he argued, the fundamental motivation behind lawbreaking is idolatry.
How can we become increasingly clear-sighted rather than remaining in their power?
One way requires that we look at our imagination.
In other words, the true god of your heart is what your thoughts effortlessly go to when there is nothing else demanding your attention.
Ask rather, what do you habitually think about to get joy and comfort in the privacy of your heart?
Another way to discern your heart’s true love is to look at how you spend your money.
As Saint Paul has written, if God and his grace is the thing in the world you love most, you will give your money away to ministry, charity, and the poor in astonishing amounts (2 Corinthians 8:7-9).
A third way to discern idols works best for those who have professed a faith in God.
what is your real, daily functional salvation? What are you really living for, what is your real—not your professed—god? A good way to discern this is how you respond to unanswered prayers and frustrated hopes.
