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

by Timothy J. Keller

There is a difference between sorrow and despair. Sorrow is pain for which there are sources of consolation. Sorrow comes from losing one good thing among others, so that, if you experience a career reversal, you can find comfort in your family to get you through it. Despair, however, is inconsolable, because it comes from losing an ultimate thing. When you lose the ultimate source of your meaning or hope, there are no alternative sources to turn to. It breaks your spirit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

we know a good thing has become a counterfeit god when its demands on you exceed proper boundaries.

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. Making an idol out of love may mean allowing the lover to exploit and abuse you, or it may cause terrible blindness to the pathologies in the relationship. An idolatrous attachment can lead you to break any promise, rationalize any indiscretion, or betray any other allegiance, in order to hold on to it. It may drive you to violate all good and proper boundaries.

He still needed to feel heroic, to know that his life mattered in the scheme of things. . . . He still had to merge himself with some higher, self-absorbing meaning, in trust and gratitude. . . . If he no longer had God, how was he to do this? One of the first ways that occurred to him, as [Otto] Rank saw, was the “romantic solution.” . . . The self-glorification that he needed in his innermost nature he now looked for in the love partner. The love partner becomes the divine ideal within which to fulfill one’s life. All spiritual and moral needs now become focused in one individual. . . . In one word, the love object is God. . . . Man reached for a “thou” when the world-view of the great religious community overseen by God died....26 After all, what is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to the position of God? We want redemption—nothing less.27

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. If you are too afraid of love or too enamored by it, it has assumed godlike power, distorting your perceptions and your life.

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.

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.

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

Just as we serve earthly kings and magistrates, so we “sell our souls” to our idols. Because we look to them for our significance (love) and security (trust) we have to have them, and therefore we are driven to serve and, essentially, obey them. When Jesus says that we “serve” money, he uses a word that means the solemn, covenantal service rendered to a king.

Zacchaeus knew that when he made this offer. His heart had been affected. Since he knew salvation was not through the law, but through grace, he did not aim to live by only fulfilling the letter of the law. He wanted to go beyond it.

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.

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.

Naaman and the Syrian king believed that religion in Israel functioned the way it worked in virtually all nations at that time, and in many nations today. They believed religion was a form of social control. The operating principle of religion is: If you live a good life, then the gods or God will have to bless you and give you prosperity. It was only natural, then, to assume that the most successful people in a society were those closest to God. They would be the ones who could get whatever they wanted from God. That is why traditional religion always expects that the gods will be working through the successful, not the outsider and the failures. That is why Naaman went directly to the king.

The God of Israel is not on a leash, he cannot be bought or appeased. The gods of religion can be controlled. If we offer them hard work and devotion, then they are beholden to us. However, the God of Israel cannot be approached like that. Whatever he gives us is a gift of grace.

“Just wash yourself,” then, was a command that was hard because it was so easy. To do it, Naaman had to admit he was helpless and weak and had to receive his salvation as a free gift. If you want God’s grace, all you need is need, all you need is nothing. But that kind of spiritual humility is hard to muster.

Dutch-Canadian philosopher Al Wolters taught that in the biblical view of things, the main problem in life is sin, and the only solution is God and his grace. The alternative to this view is to identify something besides sin as the main problem with the world and something besides God as the main remedy. That demonizes something that is not completely bad, and makes an idol out of something that cannot be the ultimate good.

idols are good and necessary things that are turned into gods.

We are the product of three things—genetics, environment, and our personal choices—but two of these three factors we have no power over. We are not nearly as responsible for our success as our popular views of God and reality lead us to think.

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.92

An idol is something that we look to for things that only God can give.

The motives of Jonah’s heart are finally revealed fully. “I knew it!” he says. “I knew you were a compassionate God, so quick to forgive, so eager to save, so unceasingly patient! I knew I couldn’t trust you! That’s the reason I ran away to begin with! I was afraid that if I got a God like you near these people and they made even a gesture in the direction of repentance you would forgive them. I’ve had it with you! I resign! Just take away my life!” There is no more astonishing speech in the Bible, or perhaps in all of ancient literature. Finally Jonah’s idol was laid bare, revealing his abhorrence of this race and nation.

When idolatry is mapped onto the future—when our idols are threatened—it leads to paralyzing fear and anxiety. When it is mapped onto the past—when we fail our idols—it leads to irremediable guilt. When idolatry is mapped onto the present life—when our idols are blocked or removed by circumstances—it roils us with anger and despair.112

idolatry is always the reason we ever do anything wrong.

We never break the other commandments without breaking the first one.

A third way to discern idols works best for those who have professed a faith in God. You may regularly go to a place of worship. You may have a full, devout set of doctrinal beliefs. You may be trying very hard to believe and obey God. However, 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. If you ask for something that you don’t get, you may become sad and disappointed. Then you go on. Hey, life’s not over. Those are not your functional masters. But when you pray and work for something and you don’t get it and you respond with explosive anger or deep despair, then you may have found your real god. Like Jonah, you become angry enough to die.

Idolatry is not just a failure to obey God, it is a setting of the whole heart on something besides God.

Rejoicing and repentance must go together. Repentance without rejoicing will lead to despair. Rejoicing without repentance is shallow and will only provide passing inspiration instead of deep change.

Fear-based repentance makes us hate ourselves. Joy-based repentance makes us hate the sin.

The great pastor and hymn-writer John Newton once wrote about this struggle: If I may speak my own experience, I find that to keep my eye simply on Christ, as my peace and my life, is by far the hardest part of my calling. . . . It seems easier to deny self in a thousand instances of outward conduct, than in its ceaseless endeavors to act as a principle of righteousness and power.124 The man or woman who knows the difference that Newton refers to—the difference between obeying rules of outward conduct rather than setting your heart on Christ as your peace and your life—is on the road to freedom from the counterfeit gods that control us.

119 Here is a brief list of idol categories. The list may help us see the broad scope of idolatry in order to better recognize our own: Theological idols—Doctrinal errors that produce such distorted views of God that we end up worshipping a false god. Sexual idols—Addictions such as pornography and fetishisms that promise but don’t deliver a sense of intimacy and acceptance; ideals of physical beauty in yourself and/or your partner; romantic idealism. Magic/ritual idols—Witchcraft and the occult. All idolatry is in the end a form of magic that seeks to rebel against the order of transcendent reality rather than submitting to it in love and wisdom. Political/economic idols—Ideologies of the left, right, and libertarian that absolutize some aspect of political order and make it the solution. Deifying or demonizing free markets, for example. Racial/national idols—Racism, militarism, nationalism, or ethnic pride that turns bitter or oppressive. Relational idols—Dysfunctional family systems of codependency; “fatal attractions”; living your life through your children. Religious idols—Moralism and legalism; idolatry of success and gifts; religion as a pretext for abuse of power. Philosophical idols—Systems of thought that make some created thing the problem with life (instead of sin) and some human product or enterprise the solution to our problems (instead of God’s grace). Cultural idols—Radical individualism, as in the West, that makes an idol out of individual happiness at the...