God created humans as his vice kings and queens, with the special, royal purpose of worshiping, resembling, reflecting, and glorifying their Maker. This seems to be David’s point in Psalm 8:5-8, a poetic parallel to the Gen. 1:26-28 creation account:
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. 6 You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, 7 all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, 8 the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
Part of the
implication seems to be that God hard-wired us to worship. Yet, once sin
entered the world, like with all aspects of human life, this one was twisted
for evil. Consider how Paul describes mankind’s sinful twisting of this bent
toward worship in Romans 1:21-23:
For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
If we judge both by the space given in Scripture to combatting the worship of other gods in place of the true God and the fact that the first three of the Ten Commandments deal with this topic in one way or the other, idolatry is not something that only ancient or third world cultures practice. It is common to all humans. After all, it is not only the worship of statues and images of other gods, it is the worship and trusting in anything above God.
When we grasp that idolatry is such an important topic in the Bible, we come to see just how important it is that we give it attention and how important The New City Catechism’s question and answer #17 is: “What is idolatry? Answer: Idolatry is trusting in created things rather than the Creator for our hope and happiness, significance and security.”
Here we make at least three discoveries.
To begin, as someone has helpfully said, “God disaproves just as much of an idol in the heart as he does an idol in the hand.” In other words, the terminology of “trusting” lets us know that idolatry can take place as a matter of the heart (Ezek. 14:3), even when no actual physical idol is in view. In fact, one author of centuries ago rightly explained that our heart is “a perpetual factory of idols.” Once we grasp this, we come to see that idolatry can be (and is) a widespread problem. In fact, it is at the heart of sin (see Rom. 1:21-23 above).
Next, we see that idolatry is our displacing God with anything or anyone else as the object of our ultimate trust (“trusting in created things rather than the Creator”).
Finally, we discover what it is humans tend to trust other gods for in the place of God. We trust other gods for a future that brings blessing and flourishing (“hope”), for the possibility that we can find pleasure in the place of our pain (“happiness”), for the fulfillment of our desire that our years on this earth would matter and make a difference (“significance”) and for the assurance we will ultimately experience a full life, rather than destruction (security).
With this explanation we can now understand why the Bible speaks of it so much. It is at the heart of all sin and therefore at the core of why Jesus died and was raised in the place of sinners—that their sinful idolatry could be forgiven, and they could be transformed into true God worshipers (Rom. 13:14; Eph. 4:22-24). We also discover why John would end his first letter with an exhortation to avoid it. Evidently the apostle thought it important and prevalent enough to make it the last word to his reader, perhaps so they would remember it. He wrote (1 John 5:21 NLT): “Dear children, keep away from anything that might take God’s place in your hearts.”
These are good words for all of us to remember and to practice by Christ’s grace.
Joyfully Keeping Away From God-Substitutes With You,
Tom
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