The Truth About Idols

Note: I wrote this earlier this summer, but never got around to posting it until now. Hopefully there will be more to come soon as well :)

Whenever I hear the word “idols,” I think about the idols that the Bible describes.  The ones that were gold or wood statues that the people would bow down to and worship.  In my head I get this picture of this flashy, trophy looking thing that people look silly bowing down to.  Since I don’t worship anything like that, I always thought that idols weren’t an issue for me. Boy was I wrong.

God always has a funny way of putting things into your life right when you need them or when they correspond to something else.  As God was beginning to reveal different idols I had in my life, I began a study called No Other Gods: Confronting Our Modern-Day Idols.

I learned that idols aren’t just those statues that were worshiped in the Bible.  They are anything that we put before God. Richard Keyes said “An idol can be a physical object, a property, a person, an activity, a role, an institution, a hope, an image, an idea, a pleasure, a hero—anything that can substitute for God.”

That’s a lot of different things.  There are also things in that list that are good. I always just assumed that idols had to be bad things since they were taking the place of God.  But is a person, a hope, or a pleasure necessarily a bad thing? No. Keyes says, “Idolatry may not involve explicit denials of God’s existence or character. It may well come in the form of an overattachement to something that is, in itself, perfectly good.”

So that awesome hope you have in something for the future, the great new friend you made, the fun sport of volleyball: all of those things are perfectly good.  What turns them into idols is when we get attached to them and let them take the place of God in our lives.

I began to realize that I did that (and still do) with a lot of things in my life. The great new friendship I was building, based around our love of Jesus, was an idol because I easily put it before God.  The sport I had played competitively for 8 years of my life, was an idol because I was playing for reasons other than to glorify God (more on volleyball in another blog). My hopes for the future God has for me were an idol because I was thinking too much about how things could end up instead of going to God and letting Him take control.

I got attached to those things without even realizing that I was letting them be more important than God in my life.  That’s the scary thing. I wasn’t worshipping a statue and saying that God didn’t exist.  I was worshipping God. And I was worshipping God through these things. I just let them be more important than Him. They had a part of the worship of my heart instead of it being fully God’s.

We’re human. We’re always going to be facing idols in our life.  As our lives change, the idols in them will change as well. But we have to be cautious in recognizing them.  It isn’t always the things we think are ‘bad.’  It can be perfectly good and healthy things.  The attachment and devotion we give to them over God is what makes them an idol.  I pray that we start to recognize the idols in our lives that have taken hold of parts of heart and surrender them to Him.  The only way we can get rid of them is by giving them over to Him and letting Him fill our hearts fully instead.