Dan 4:34 At the end of the days I, Nebuchadnezzar,
lifted my eyes to heaven, and my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most
High, and praised and honored him who lives forever, for his dominion is an
everlasting dominion, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation; Dan
4:35 all the inhabitants of the earth
are accounted as nothing, and he does according to his will among the host of
heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or
say to him, "What have you done?"
We all know that we were created to honor God and to love
him supremely and find all that he is to be our fulfillment in life. Idolatry is putting anything before our worship
and love for the Lord. Idolatry was
rampant in the OT and God deals with it as much as anything and that was this
that led to Israel’s downfall as much as any other sin. Often the commentators speak of how the
Babylonian captivity cured Israel of idolatry once and for all.
If we think of idolatry in general terms that might be so as
they no longer overtly worshipped gods other than Yahweh. But if we think of idolatry as putting your
own desires above the Lord then we find idolatry to be a sin that all struggle
with as did the Jews of Jesus’s day. I
think of the Pharisee who prayed in a self-righteous way, boasting that he wasn’t
as bad as the poor tax collector next to him and went home as sinful and
unjustified as he came.
His main problem was that he had a view of God that was skewed. He thought that the God he worshipped was the
kind of God that would gladly accept his miserable works as good enough to get
on God’s good side. Because he had in a
sense redefined God he committed idolatry and he did so to his own damnation.
Thus defined, we see that idolatry is rampant today and this
is true even in many churches and hearts of saints. We can illustrate this by the example of the
young man who writes a love letter to a young woman he loves. In it he describes her beautiful blond hair
and lovely blue eyes and all the things about her that he loves. But the problem is that she is a brunette
with brown eyes and he is describing someone who isn’t anything like the woman
he supposedly loves. We all know that
this woman would not find this to be acceptable. It is like him saying I love you but I wish you looked like your sister!
It is very easy to fall into this trap when it comes to God
and this is why theology is of the utmost importance. Many people read the Bible not so they can
get to know God and find out all the reasons he is to be loved and worshipped
but to find something helpful for some problem they are going through or how to
succeed in life or some such self-centered thing. Very often we come to the Scriptures with preconceived
notions that we hold to and have no plans of letting go of regardless of what
we find in the Bible.
This is especially problematic when it comes to how we
understand God. How many people do you know
who refuse to acknowledge that God is sovereign over all things or that he is a
holy God who will punish sin eternally in Hell?
Instead they want to think of God as a loving softy who only wants us
to be happy, wealthy, healthy and successful. So they ignore those attributes of God that they don’t like and
concentrate on the ones they like and necessarily make up ones that don’t
exist. Like the man in our example, they
extol things about God that are not true or are so one sided that they end up
describing some other god; the one that exists in their minds. This is idolatry.
These thoughts came to me as I am preaching through 2 Cor. 1
and in particular where it describes God as the God of all comfort. The Lord comforts us by the truth of the
gospel and by explaining to us why afflictions come and our duty in them and
that being in Christ will one day bring them to an end; in others words
primarily through thinking through truth.
If we refuse to acknowledge that God sends trials for our
good and that they are part of the Christian’s duty in life to endure hardships
as a good soldier of Jesus Christ and instead we spend all our time praying for
him to take them away and are discontent and bitter when he doesn’t then we
have reformulated God into something he is not.
We have made him there for us and not us there for him; we have rejected
his sovereign rule over all things and have rejected his explanation and commit
idolatry. We say we love him but when he
tells us what pleases him we have no desire to prove our love by obeying.
Properly responding to affliction by being faithful and
patient in a God honoring way is worshipping God as he is. And therefore, responding to affliction in an
unbiblical way is to worship the God of our imagination. We have looked at God’s picture as seen in
the Bible and we don’t like what we see and so we “tweak” God to make him a
little more to our liking. And then we
go to church and sing praises to him while all along thinking about his “sister”
so to speak.
I know that we will spend our entire lives studying God’s
attributes and trying to better understand what he “looks” like and we will
always have a somewhat defective understanding until we stand before him some
day. But to deliberately reject what is
plainly taught in the Bible is a dangerous game because God doesn’t change; he
is what he is and we had better get used to it because he is righteous and we
are not. If there is something about God
that is uncomfortable to us then we have a problem and we need to ask God to
give us a love for who he is not for who we wish he was.
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