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July 14 - July 29, 2019
“the incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy [the human] heart.”
taking some “incomplete joy of this world” and building your entire life on it. That is the definition of idolatry.
Our contemporary society is not fundamentally different from these ancient ones. Each culture is dominated by its own set of idols.
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.
Idols are spiritual addictions that lead to terrible evil, in Tolkien’s novel and real life.
Anything can be an idol, and everything has been an idol.
Most people know you can make a god out of money. Most know you can make god out of sex. However, anything in life can serve as an idol, a God-alternative, a counterfeit god.
As a result, their bodies are more broken and their reputations more sullied than if they had been willing to be good rather than great.
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
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
anything can be a god that rules and serves as a deity in the heart of a person or in the life of a people. For example, physical beauty is a pleasant thing, but if you “deify” it, if you make it the most important thing in a person’s life or a culture’s life, then you have Aphrodite, not just beauty.
If anything becomes more fundamental than God to your happiness, meaning in life, and identity, then it is an idol.
There are idols everywhere.
how people relate to the idols of their hearts. They love idols, trust idols, and obey idols.11
Whatever controls us is our lord. The person who seeks power is controlled by power. The person who seeks acceptance is controlled by the people he or she wants to please. We do not control ourselves. We are controlled by the lord of our lives.15
The way forward, out of despair, is to discern the idols of our hearts and our culture. But that will not be enough. The only way to free ourselves from the destructive influence of counterfeit gods is to turn back to the true one. The living God,
We never imagine that getting our heart’s deepest desires might be the worst thing that can ever happen to us.
because our hearts fashion these desires into idols.
Every human being must live for something. Something must capture our imaginations, our heart’s most fundamental allegiance and hope. But, the Bible tells us, without the intervention of the Holy Spirit, that object will never be God himself.
The woman, 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.
He now had all he had ever wanted. Then God asked him to give it all up.
He was asked to give up, for God’s sake, nearly all the worldly hopes and things that a human heart desires.
But the question now was—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?
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.
God was not saying you cannot love your son, but that you must not turn a loved one into a counterfeit god.
Abraham thought the command made no sense at all, and contradicted everything else God had ever said, yet he followed the command.
in ancient times, all the hopes and dreams of a man and his family rested in the firstborn son.
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.
The firstborn son was the family.
So when God told the Israelites that the firstborn’s life belonged to him unless ransomed, he was saying in the most vivid way possible in those cultures that every family on earth owed a debt to eternal justice—the debt of sin.
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 going to die for the sins of the family.
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 another up that mountain.
for now I know that you fear God,
What Abraham was able to see was that this test was about loving God supremely.
“Now I know you fear God.”
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.
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.”
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.
She must be willing to put God first, to trust God with her children by letting them fail,
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 true substitute for Abraham’s son was God’s only Son, Jesus, who died to bear our punishment.
Here, then, is the practical answer to our own idolatries, to the “Isaacs” in our lives, which are not spiritually safe to have and hold. 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.
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.
Think of the many disappointments and troubles that beset us. Look at them more closely, and you will realize that the most agonizing of them have to do with our own “Isaacs.”
As many have learned and later taught, you don’t realize Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.
Something is safe for us to maintain in our lives only if it has really 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.”
