Idolatry: The Problem and the Cure

When I think of the word “idolatry” the first thing that comes to mind is some sort of strange, cultish religious ritual that most of us would have no interest in participating in. But in Romans 1, a very common text used to explain idolatry, Paul paints a much different picture.

“Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.” -Romans 1:24-25

Other Bible translations say that the Romans worshiped and served “created things rather than the Creator.” In other words, an idol is anything that we put in place of God. Based on this definition, idolatry doesn’t just apply to weird, cultish rituals. Anything can become an idol.

The Problem with Idolatry

The most basic example of idolatry in the Bible is when the Israelites create the infamous golden calf and begin worshiping it. Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, where they were slaves, and took them on a journey together to the Promised Land. On the way, Moses went to Mount Sinai to hear from God. While he was gone the Israelites came to Aaron, Moses’s second in command, and this is what they asked of him:

“ ‘Up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him…’ ” -Exodus 32:1-2

After this the Israelites gathered all of their gold, melted it down, and created the golden calf. It’s easy to focus on the golden calf (and we often do) but it doesn’t matter what the Israelites decided to make. The problem was that they wanted a different God to trust in, so they made one. That is textbook idolatry.

If I create a golden calf and start worshiping it, that’s not the calf’s fault. It’s my fault. Idolatry is primarily about us over-valuing something. It’s very easy to look at our idol and think, “What a terrible idol!” We do this because it keeps us from having to deal with our real heart issue: we are worshiping God’s creation, not of God.

Good Things Make Great Idols

Nothing is automatically an idol. Instead, we make it an idol when we put it in place of God. This goes for our homes, our jobs, our families, and loads of other blessings that God gives us. This does not mean that God doesn’t want us to enjoy the blessings he gives us. He absolutely does! The problem comes when we are too easily satisfied by these blessings and no longer see the need to rejoice in God.

Do your favorite things in life bring you closer to God or further away?

Many people have a hard time grasping the Christian faith because they think that being a Christian means rejecting the things that they enjoy in order to follow God (who currently is not bring them any joy). Naturally, this leads many to believe that God is anti-joy and that their life as a Christian would be less joyful than it is currently. It’s important to realize that the problem with our sinful human condition is not that we enjoy life too much, it’s that apart from God we can’t experience the fullness of joy in the first place.

” Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ” -Philippians 3:7-8

Paul is saying that whatever good things he had going before aren’t worth comparing to “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus [his] Lord.” Paul isn’t turning from joy to follow Christ, he’s turning to Christ for true, lasting joy. If we enjoy the blessings of God more than we enjoy God (the blesser) we aren’t only doing it wrong…we are missing out! God is better than his blessings.

The Cure: Delight in God

Jesus accomplished our salvation with joy in mind (Hebrew 12:2). He was not on a mission to suck the joy out of our lives so that we could tidy ourselves up for God. He was on a mission to give us his righteousness so that we could be blameless before God. These are profoundly different things. When we pursue idols in search of joy, we can’t just un-joy ourselves out of idolatry. We need to satisfy our search for joy with Christ.

Take your family, for example. Jesus said that if we love our families more than we love him we aren’t worthy of him (Matthew 10: 37). If we read that and think, “Wow, I love my mom too much,” we’re missing the point. Jesus knows how much we love our family members, that’s why this is such a powerful statement. He’s not instructing us to love our families less. He’s showing us how much love he deserves by comparing our love for him with one of our deepest, most life-shaping loves: our family. It is possible for us to idolize a great thing like family, which is why Jesus clearly cautions us not to do it. But we should never try to fix this by loving our families less. We won’t be able to love our families the way God intended unless our love for them is rooted in a deeper love for Jesus.

It’s tempting to believing that the greatest way to pursue joy is to live for ourselves, or other people, places, or things–but the truth is: it’s far better to live for the God who created them. When our ultimate joy is found in God then we can begin to enjoy his blessings instead of worshiping them.

Other helpful thoughts

“A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous.” -C.S. Lewis

“God can’t give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.” -C.S. Lewis

“The heart’s desire for an ultimate object may be conquered, but it’s desire to have some object is unconquerable. The only way to dispossess the heart of an old affection is through the expulsive power of a new one.” -Thomas Chalmers