American Idolatry, Part II: The Idol Factory

I wanted to continue my series on idolatry with looking into where it all comes from. If you missed the first one, check it out here.

Have you ever read the Old Testament and wondered “What is up with these guys and idols???”

Every time you turn a page, there is some fresh new idolatry; God shows His mercy, love and power, everything is OK for a while, and then suddenly we are back to putting up idols of Baal in the Temple, and sacrificing children to Molech.

I have often been baffled by how people who know God could get sucked into bowing down before an idol: I mean, where’s the draw there? What possible motivation could they have for doing that? I think we can understand the grumbling and lack of faith in God, the allure of power, the temptation of sexual sin… but bowing down to an idol?

I think to understand the motivation for worshiping idols we have to understand what an idol or false god really is at its core: Self- worship.

• Satan authored it: The Bible gives us a glimpse into the heart of Satan, the introduction of the first rebellion against God:

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! [how] art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.“

Satan worshiped himself in the place of God and wanted all others to worship him as well.

• Satan introduced it: Just go back to the Garden of Eden to see where human idolatry begins: Satan tempts Eve to do what? Not to make an idol and burn incense to it, but to believe that God was withholding from her what would make her happy, and to go and get it for herself.

• Satan encourages it: God seeks and secures our worship through revealing Himself; He is deserving of worship, and it is the right response to knowing who He is. Satan is completely unworthy of worship, so revealing himself simply doesn’t work. Instead, he appeals to what we WANT: we bow to his power by bowing to our own desires. He knows the truth of the Bible, that the heart is “Desperately wicked”. John Calvin said rightly of the human heart: 

“Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.”

Listen to the words of a professing Satanist:

“The first and second chapter of the Book of Lucifer in the Satanic Bible expands on this idea greatly. God is a symbol of homocentricity and all of its errors, to accept Satan instead of God is to accept the self, and to be truly honest about the subjective state of reality that we all live in.”      

Satan appealed to this with:

• Idols and false gods in the OT- The reason Israelites bowed the knee to false gods was because they represented cravings of their own hearts! Just pick the sin you want, there’s a god to go along with it. Want more money? Go worship Mammon! Need more sexual satisfaction? Check out Molech! Are you barren and need help with fertility? Ashtoreth is ready to help.

• The temptation of Christ: What did Satan have to gain with tempting Jesus in the wilderness? WORSHIP. How did he try to get it? He appealed to things that he knew Jesus desired. “You are hungry: if you worship me you can eat.” Jesus is the ONLY one who has ever endured temptation without worshiping self.

• The American Dream: We are brainwashed by our society to think that this is something noble, admirable, that it is what sets us apart from the rest of the world, and we never stop to weigh it against the Bible. We bow down and worship things that were never meant to have preeminence in our lives, and then wonder why we are miserable as so-called followers of Christ!

I remember one day while I was working in GA selling roofing jobs, I walked into the home of an Indian family. The first thing I saw when I entered the house was a small alcove cut into the wall with an idol of Ganesh the elephant god, with incense burning to him. I asked the owner about it, and he said: “Oh yes, Ganesh is the god of success! We worship him, and look at our family: I have a good job, nice cars, my children do well in school, and I have more money than I have ever had in my life.”

My next appointment was with his American neighbor, and I mentioned the idol to him. He laughed, and told me how funny those foreigners were with the crazy things they worshiped. What he failed to understand, sitting in his million dollar house with a two car garage filled with TWO brand new BMW’s, was that they worshiped exactly the same things. The American didn’t burn incense, but he sacrificed his time, talent, and energy to have what he desired above everything else. He had built his altar.

I said in the first post that worship is acknowledgment: worship is a heart reaction to someone/something’s perceived worth. In the next few posts, I want to go in depth and attack the roots of the 3 heart desires that fuel idolatry, and expose them as worthless next to the One who deserves our worship in every facet of our lives: Jesus Christ!

Have you made plans yet for the Summit? Check out www.BCWE.org, hope to see you there!