Idols Abandon in the End

Some Tim Keller wisdom from, Encounters with Jesus: Unexpected Answers to Life’s Biggest Questions , pages 28–30:

Everybody has got to live for something, but Jesus is arguing that, if he is not that thing, it will fail you.

First, it will enslave you. Whatever that thing is, you will tell yourself that you have to have it or there is no tomorrow. That means that if anything threatens it, you will become inordinately scared; if anyone blocks it, you will become inordinately angry; and if you fail to achieve it, you will never be able to forgive yourself.

But second, if you do achieve it, it will fail to deliver the fulfillment you expected.

Let me give you an eloquent contemporary expression of what Jesus is saying. Nobody put this better than the American writer and intellectual David Foster Wallace. He got to the top of his profession. He was an award-winning, best-selling postmodern novelist known around the world for his fierce and boundary-pushing storytelling. He once wrote a sentence that was more than a thousand words long. And, tragically, he committed suicide. But a few years before that, he gave a now-famous commencement speech at Kenyon College. He said to the graduating class,

"Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god . . . to worship . . . is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before [your loved ones] finally plant you. . . . Worship power, and you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they are evil or sinful; it is that they’re unconscious. They are default settings."

Wallace was by no means a religious person, but he understood that everyone worships, everyone trusts in something for their salvation, everyone bases their lives on something that requires faith. A couple of years after giving that speech, Wallace killed himself. And this non-religious man’s parting words to us are pretty terrifying: “Something will eat you alive.”

Because even though you might never call it worship, you can be absolutely sure you are worshiping and you are seeking. And Jesus says, unless you’re worshiping me, unless I’m the center of your life, unless you’re trying to get your spiritual thirst quenched through me and not through these other things, unless you see that the solution must come inside rather than just pass by outside, then whatever you worship will abandon you in the end.

HT: Tony Reinke, Already Not Yet

A Built In Reflex

"Peter Kreeft, a philosopher, puts it this way" 'The opposite of theism is not atheism, it's idolatry.' In other words everyone is going to worship a god. We were created to be worshipers  as birds were created to fly and rivers were created to flow. It's what we do. The question for you is who or what will be the object of your worship..."

"...When you subtract the religious language, worship is the built in human reflex to put your hope in something or someone and then chase after it. You hold something up and then give your life to pursuing it. If you live in this world, then sooner or later you grow some assumptions concerning what your life is all about, what you should really be going after. And when you begin to align your life with that pursuit, then, whether you realize it or not, you are worshiping."

       - Kyle Idleman,  Gods At War: Defeating the Idols That Battle For Your Heart. pages 58-59

Do It Yourself Idolatry

"Remember your commandments.

First: no other gods.

Second: no making other gods to worship.

The profound wisdom of that second commandment is that anything in the world can be hammered into an idol, and therefore can be a false god, if misplaced at the top spot of our affections It's DIY idolatry: choose from our handy assortment of gods, mix and match, create your own....

...Anything at all can become an idol once it becomes a substitute for God in our lives."

    - Kyle Idleman,  Gods At War: Defeating the Idols That Battle For Your Heart. pages 25-26

Gods at War

Anyone who has read this blog for any length of time should easily be able to determine that one of the themes I am very interested in right now is idolatry - How discovering, understanding and confronting the idols we (I, you) worship is a major key to spiritual freedom and victory over sin. No one breaks any of the other 8 commandments until they first break numbers 1 and 2. This was a major theme in Mark Driscoll's book which I recently reviewed, and it came up in Keller's book on Galatians.

I was intrigued and excited when I heard that Kyle Idleman's new book dealt with this message.  His first book, Not A Fan: Becoming a Completely Committed Follower of Jesus, was a bestseller and one of the best books I read back in 2011. I'm now reading the new one, Gods At War: Defeating the Idols That Battle For Your Heart. What's it about? From the back cover:

"..there are false gods at war within each of us, and they battle fore the place of glory and control in our lives. What keeps us from truly following Jesus is that our hearts are pursuing something or someone else. Behind the sin you're struggling with, the discouragement you're dealing with, the lack of purpsoe you're living with is a false god that is winning the war for your heart."

Expect a lot of quotes to be posted.

Any Basic Thing....

"....Paul is saying that any basic 'thing' - money, sex, mountains, and so on- can be worshiped, treated as a god, and become the basis of your religion. And whatever it is that we worship, we will be enslaved by..."

"..If we treat that are not gods as though they are, we become slaves to them spiritually."

"...Without the gospel, we must be under the slavery of an idol."

"... If anything, the idolatry and slavery of religion is more dangerous than the idolatry and slavery of irreligion, because it is less obvious. The irreligious person knows he is far away from God, but the religious person does not."

         - Timothy Keller, Galatians For You, pages 104 - 105

The Age-Old Battle: No Third Option

I'll be posting some quotes this coming week from a 2007 paper by Tim Keller entitled "Talking About Idolatry in a Postmodern Age."  It begins:

When I first began reading through the Bible I looked for some unifying themes. I concluded that there are many and that if we make just one theme the theme (such as ‘covenant’ or ‘kingdom’) we run the danger of reductionism. However, one of the main ways to read the Bible is as the ages-long struggle between true faith and idolatry. In the beginning, human beings were made to worship and serve God, and to rule over all created things in God’s name (Gen 1:26­–28). Paul understands humanity’s original sin as an act of idolatry: “They exchanged the glory of the immortal God...and worshipped and served created things rather than the creator”(Rom 1:21–25). Instead of living for God, we began to live for ourselves, or our work, or for material goods. We reversed the original intended order. And when we began to worship and serve created things, paradoxically, the created things came to rule over us. Instead of being God’s vice-regents, ruling over creation, now creation masters us. We are now subject to decay and disease and disaster. The final proof of this is death itself. We live for our own glory by toiling in the dust, but eventually we return to the dust—the dust “wins” (Gen 3:17–19). We live to make a name for ourselves but our names are forgotten. Here in the beginning of the Bible we learn that idolatry means slavery and death.

Wow!This is a really profound way to see a unified them for the whole Bible. He goes on to say:

The Ten Commandments' first two and most basic laws (one-fifth of all God's law to humankind) are against idolatry. Exodus does not envision any third option between true faith and idolatry. We will either worship the uncreated God or we will worship some created thing (an idol). There is no possibility of our worshipping nothing. The classic New Testament text is Romans 1:18-25. This extensive passage on idolatry is often seen as only referring to the pagan Gentiles, but instead we should recognize it as an analysis of what sin is and how it works. Verse 21 tells us that the reason we turn to idols is because we want to control our lives, though we know that we owe God everything. “Though they knew God, they neither glorified God nor gave thanks to him.” Verse 25 tells us the strategy for control—taking created things and setting our hearts on them and building our lives around them. Since we need to worship something, because of how we are created, we cannot eliminate God without creating God-substitutes. Verses 21 and 25 tell us the two results of idolatry:

1) Deception—"their thinking became futile and their hearts were darkened,"and
2) Slavery—"they worshipped and served" created things.

Whatever we worship we will serve, for worship and service are always inextricably bound together. We are “covenantal” beings. We enter into covenant service with whatever most captures our imagination and heart. It ensnares us. So every human personality, community, thought-form, and culture will be based on some ultimate concern or some ultimate allegiance—either to God or to some God-substitute. Individually, we will ultimately look either to God or to success, romance, family, status, popularity, beauty or something else to make us feel personally significant and secure, and to guide our choices. Culturally we will ultimately look to either God or to the free market, the state, the elites, the will of the people, science and technology, military might, human reason, racial pride, or something else to make us corporately significant and secure, and to guide our choices.

More tomorrow.

Your Idols Do Not Love You

“Little children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21) Quote below is from a great piece by Justin Buzzard .   I'm quoting it in full because it is so well said and so necessary for me (and you) to hear.

Everyone has to live for something and if that something isn’t the one true God, it will be a false God–an idol.

An idol is anything more important to you than God. Therefore, you can turn even very good things into idols. You can turn a good thing like family, success, acceptance, money, your plans, etc. into a god thing–into something you worship and place at the center of your life.

This is what sin is. Sin is building your life and meaning on anything (even a good thing) more than God.

Do you know the idols you’re prone to worship? At our church we talk about 4 root idols that we tend to attach our lives to.

CONTROL. You know you have a control idol if your greatest nightmare is uncertainty.
APPROVAL. You know you have an approval idol if your greatest nightmare is rejection.
COMFORT. You know you have a comfort idol if your greatest nightmare is stress/demands.
POWER. You know you have a power idol if your greatest nightmare is humiliation.

Here’s what you need to know about your idol: That idol that you love, it doesn’t love you back. False gods don’t love you. Idols don’t keep their promises. Anything you worship and build your life on other than God will suck the life out of you and destroy you.

A relationship with Jesus starts when you identify and turn from your idols. Notice what Jesus was always doing with people during his ministry–he was constantly identifying and challenging people’s idols, calling them to turn from their false objects of worship in order to follow and worship him.

I’m convinced that the reason there is so much shallow Christianity in our culture is because many people never displace the idolatry in their lives with Jesus, but instead simply bring in Jesus as an “add on” to their life, keeping their idolatry firmly in the center.

Americans think freedom is found in casting off all restraint and being masters of our own lives. What we are blind to is the reality that everybody has a master. We all worship something and whatever we worship is our master. Idols make bad masters. They enslave. Until you identify the idols in your life you will feel enslaved, tired, and unhappy and you won’t know why. You will feel this way until you discover the only master who can set  you free: Jesus. Jesus is the one master who will love you even when you fail him. Your idols don’t do that. Jesus is the one master who loved you when you were at your worst and who reigns over your life with perfect wisdom, power, and goodness. He’s the one master you can trust. Only he can give you freedom.