It never feels like the right time to bring up idolatry.
Sorry to bother you, but would you like to hear about ways you might be a spectacular disappointment to God?
Even so the topic has been on my mind a lot lately and what is writing if not sharing your intrusive thoughts with a wider audience?
Idolatry is on my mind because we live in tumultuous times and tumult breeds fear. Fear makes people behave in surprising ways. People compromise their values when they are afraid. Some deeply held convictions become hard and sharp. Others are discarded. Old friends become enemies and surprising alliances are forged. People I love and trust—and a great many strangers—have done these and similar things recently.
The language and logic of idolatry helps me make sense of it.
Some Definitions
Some definitions will be helpful before we go further. Technically and narrowly, “idolatry” is the worship of any god besides the God of the Bible. An “idol” is the physical representation of a god, usually in the form of a statue. The first and second commandments (Deuteronomy 5:7-22) reflect the connection between gods and idols. Don’t worship any gods in addition to me, says the first. The second elaborates: Seriously, guys. You can make an idol out of anything. Don’t.
Metaphorically, idolatry can be synonymous with love or devotion. We idolize coaches, older siblings and first cousins, spiritual leaders or celebrities when they embody something we admire or desire. It’s common in Christian circles to hear these two definitions—the technical and the metaphorical—combined so that idolatry comes to mean loving something or someone more than you love God. This definition is rhetorically powerful and can be pastorally helpful.
But the Hebrew Bible doesn’t offer a motive (i.e., love) for idolatry. Instead, it tells stories about how the people of God behave and we are left to deduce a motive from their behavior. Based on their behavior, I’m convinced that the heart of idolatry is not love but fear.
And in the Bible, idols are physical representations of other gods. That means idolatry isn't loving something or someone more than God. It's worshiping additional gods out of fear. Fear of what? Fear that God can’t provide something you need, and so what you need in addition to God is other gods to fill in the gaps.
To put it another way, in the Old Testament idolatry isn’t rejecting God outright. It’s diversifying your deity portfolio against an uncertain future. Idolatry is hedging your bets.
Hedging Our Bets
The Israelites didn't worship the Baals and Astheroth because they loved those deities. The deities were terrors. Israel didn’t love the music or the preaching at the Asteroth worship services. Those services involved monstrous sacrifices, such as tossing your own children into flames. It wasn’t love that compelled their worship. It was fear—fear of famine and infertile flocks. The Midianites (for example) had grain and sheep galore. And they worshiped idols. So Israel decided to trust God for the things they knew God could be trusted for (like grace and salvation). For other things, the nation hedged its bets.
When I put myself in their shoes, I can understand the impulse. The second time God tells the Israelites, Don’t worship any gods in addition to me, is forty years after he liberated them from slavery in Egypt (Deuteronomy 5). He is preparing them to live lives they had never lived. They are children of emancipated slaves about to govern themselves. They are aging nomads taking up residence in cities, life-long shepherds taking responsibility for vineyards and orchards. What do they know? Not much. And God is asking them to trust that he is sufficient to meet needs they had never seen him meet before.
Can the God of the desert be the God of the city? Can the God who sends manna and quail also send spring rains and summer sun and the optimal conditions at harvest? You can imagine why they might be tempted to diversify their deity portfolio. We’ve never been here before. We’ve never seen God do exactly what we need him to do. As good as he’s been, is one god enough?
Idolatry grows in the soil of fear. Tumult, economic insecurity, cultural uncertainty, and sudden changes in a way of life all make for rich compost. That’s why our generation, like theirs, is ripe for idolatry.
This is where the logic and language of idolatry helps me today. It makes me empathetic when I see other Christians make a final desperate snatch for state support or economic security or social clout because I know they don’t love those things more than they love God. They are afraid. And fear is the heart of idolatry. It’s good for my own soul, too, when I think about how we’ve never been here before and we’ve never seen God do exactly what we need him to do and I have to ask myself the question every person of faith has to answer, again and again:
As good as he’s been, is one God enough?
ICYMI: Reading the Bible in Three Dimensions
There are three dimensions in play when we read the Bible—all the time, whether we realize it or not. The more aware of them we become, and the more we engage them together, the better we can navigate the cross-cultural experience of reading the Bible.
We're making a podcast this week with tools for our congregation on how to engage with 1-2 Kings. What appropriate timing for this to drop!
I feel like current generations are looking around thinking, "What has this God of yours done for me lately that I should believe him over my own gut instinct?" Yet they are subconsciously aware that they are neither qualified nor equipped to be masters of their own destiny. Hence the plague of anxiety and depression. "Hedging their bets" is a helpful metaphor.
I really appreciate your focus on idolatry. So easy to think that if we attend church every Sunday to praise and worship our God, we have no other gods back home we can entertain during the rest of the week. After a 176 page report on human sexuality, my denomination is in the process of splitting over the issue of gay marriage. Instead we should have had a 176 page report on idolatry in our church and culture. That is the issue much more damaging to the mission of our church. Our idolatries are so pervasive because they are so difficult to pin down and call out. They disguise themselves as so many”good things.” Do you have suggestions of ways to identify them?