One Factory Still Hard at Work: The Idol Factory

One good thing about the global pandemic is that we are forced to face the reality of what we count on for our sense of well-being.  And it has revealed how fickle all these things that we have counted on truly are. 

Here is what I mean. 

Take a hard working husband/father who deals with a lot of stress with their job.  Bosses, deadlines, obnoxious co-workers.  And then he gets home and there are needs he feels pressure to provide for, emotionally, financially, relationally, etc. 

Under normal circumstances he is pretty frazzled and just a few small pushes away from snapping at those around him.  One bad external event from entering a spiral of depression and anxiety. 

Until recently he counted on his weekly basketball games at the Y and an evening at the bar with his friends to open up the pressure valve a bit and decompress the building up stress.  They were so important to him, that any disruption of that pattern would always be directly tied to problems at home and work.  They were what he was counting on for balance and peace. 

But these were all just "things" without any real permanence.  Circumstances could always temporarily eliminate them from his calendar, and now they were completely taken away.  Look at your local police docket.  You shouldn't be surprised to see the growth of reported domestic violence over the last few months. 

Playing basketball at the Y, going out with friends, whatever it is you do to blow off steam, are not inherrently bad things.  But this pandemic does pull back the curtain and reveal our heart.  If something is "taken" from you and it causes your to become angry, bitter, engative, to have your personality deeply impacted, it reveals that you were not internally healthy or whole, but had become reliant on a crutch that had become your source of well-being and hope.

To put it more Biblically, what we are talking about is idolatry. 

They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.- Romans 1:25

Everything in this world, even good things, like, family, friends, food, etc, are finite and imperfect.  When they become the essence of what keeps us content and at peace, they are an idol.  And idol that will only take from you and never give back the hope and peace you are truly in need of. 

John Calvin said this about our condition, "the human heart is a perpetual idol factory"  And I once heard that expanded to the concept by saying, "The human heart is a perpetual idol factory AND IT NEVER IDLES IN CREATING IDOLS"

Why are we perpetually making idols for ourselves.  Because we are desperate for hope.  And time after time we place our hope in things that can never truly satisfy.  But instead of saying, maybe I need to dig deeper, we just throw away with contempt that which we had hoped in and try to fill that void with a new fancy thing that surely won't let us down in the same way.

We throw away relationships, jobs, friendships, homes, gifts, etc in a constant turnover in a desperate attempt to finally find the thing that sticks.  And sometimes we do find something that lasts for a long time.  But we can never forget that in a moment, it is something that can be taken.  Even if we think we finally have found that "thing" that will make us feel peace and contentment, a snap of a finger it can be ripped from us. 

Paul points out to us in Romans the simple truth of our condition.  There is one thing that is eternal, perfect, complete and a source of lasting hope and peace.  God, the creator of the good things that bless us.  But we too often celebrate the gift and not the maker and giver of the gift.

If your child makes you a handmade card for mothers day this coming weekend.  Which do you prefer, the card, or your child?

Of course you prefer your child!

But everyday we say God my happiness is not in you, but only in this object, this person, this thing.  And if I don't have it, I will throw a fit.  Because it is the only thing holding it all together for me.

Until we can say like the author of Lamentations,

I say to myself, "The LORD is my portion; therefore I will wait for him."- Lamentations 3:24

Then we will never find perfect peace.  As long as we say God, I will be happy as long as you protect this, give me that, change these circumstances....as long as there is anything we count on to do for us what God made us to only perfectly experience through Him, then we have set ourselves up for pain and heartache.

And if we go to our graves with our hope in anything else, the idol you have put your hopes in will not save you.  It is a thing, it is not God. 

Only God saves, gives hope, grants peace, shows purpose.  And this He does for eternity. 

Who Do You Think Jesus Is?

One of the neatest toys from childhood is Mr Potato Head.  A simple little toy with hundreds of options.  When I was a kid my favorite thing was to make the potato head into a creature straight from a nightmare...Eyes where the arms go, arms out of the eyes, nose on top of the head.  It just wasn't as fun to just make him look normal.

That attitude of remaking everything to suit our own needs/desires is a pretty common one.  We try to remake our spouses, our friends, our jobs, our kids, etc.  Too often we don't want to accept things and people the way they are, we want to remold them after our own images. 

And this attitude influences our relationship with God.

God and Jesus have been through quite a makeover the past few decades.  Amazingly the makeover has less to do with God Himself, and more with culture.  The God of scripture has always stood over cultural trends and eras, but lately it would appear that an "evolving" society is tired of a God who draws us to Himself and out of our selves, but instead is looking for a god that will follow and affirm where we have already decided to go.

I was recently reading an article about someone's problems with the bible and church.  An actual statement was that the bible needs to be updated and revised to be more in alignment with our new society.  This is the sort of god that is no longer an "embarrassment" to those with more nuanced and modern sensibilities.  It is a god that is a fancy designer handbag to wear as a philosophical accessory.

The response by orthodox believers and the church has sadly been unhelpful.  It's not that they don't try to speak truth when issues arise, but that they are spending all their time running from fire to fire desperately trying to put it out, without ever addressing the problem of what is starting all of these fires.

¹⁵ “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
¹⁶ Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
                  Matthew 16:15-16

At the heart of all of these debates is that we are not asking and answering the fundamental question....Who IS Jesus. 

When Jesus becomes nothing more than an accessory to add and remove depending on our current whims, than we can manipulate him to fit into any box we desire.  Don't like what he has to say about sin, pop out that interchangeable part and pop in some "love" instead.  Worried that his statements about sex and marriage are too antiquated, pop that out, pop in some affirming philosophical mumbo jumbo that makes you feel better. 

If the answer to the question of who do we say He is, is that He is the Messiah, then all of that changes radically.  The son of the Living God, the King of Creation, the Risen Messiah, is not some childish toy that we manipulate and adapt to be more appealing to our current thought processes.  Instead of demanding He adhere to our standards, we are forced to recognize that it is us that must adhere to His.

Timothy Keller wrote that if the God we are following seems to always agree with how we feel, then we are not following God at all, just an idealized idolatrous image of ourselves.  If Jesus is the Messiah, than there is a implied correlating truth;  You are NOT the messiah.  This means that our own opinions and thoughts on a matter should be held skeptically.  The goal is not finding a way to shoe horn God's opinion into alignment with our own, but to be willing to submit our thinking to His Truth. 

As long as we do not address this fundamental issue, "Who IS Jesus??", we will always be putting out fires.  Should we speak truth in the face of falsehood?  Sure.  But if we do not address the heart of the matter, there will always be another fire to put out.