Dr. Ron Sumners
May 24, 2009
What shape is an idol?
I worship Ganesa, god of worldly wisdom, patron of shopkeepers. He is in the shape of a little fat man with an elephant’s head; he is made of stone and has two small rubies for eyes. What shape do you worship?
I worship a Mercedes convertible. All my days I give it offerings of oil, gasoline and polish. Hours of my time are devoted to its ritual; and it brings me luck in all my undertakings; and it establishes me among my fellows as a success in life. What model is your god?
I worship my beautiful house. Long and loving meditation have I spent on it; the chairs contrast with the rug, the curtains harmonize with the woodwork, all of it is perfection and holy. The ash trays and coasters are in exactly the right places, and should some blasphemer drop ashes on the floor or leave a water mark on the coffee table, they receive my righteous indignation. I live only for the service of my house. The mortgage payment takes all my paycheck, but my house rewards me with the envy of my brothers and especially my sisters. They rise up and call my house blessed. Let my children profane the holiness of my house with dirt and noise; I drive them out of doors. What is your idol? Is it your house, your car, your clothes or your job?
I worship my golf game, I dedicate my Sabbaths to her...I worship my bridge game - Sorry pastor I can’t go on church visitation tonight, I have bridge club...I worship my comfort; after all I have earned it?...I worship my church; I want to tell you we have $150,000 in a building fund. We are the most wonderful loving fellowship in town. I worship my family...let me show you pictures of the kids..I worship myself...
What shape is your idol?
The first carvers of idols were perhaps devout and innocent men. Anthropologists have a fashion of talking as if religion originated in mumbo jumbo, in blind fears and blind, unconscious desires; as if men set up elaborate rituals and made strange sacrifices without ever actually thinking about the nature of their gods.
The inventors of idols must have had morals seething with the idea of God. Creator, helper, destroyer, he was all around them; the trees whispered and the animals cried aloud of him; the life-giving sun and death-dealing thunder spoke of the Most High. What was he like? How could he be put into words? They had no words; only comparisons. His strength was as an elephant, his knowledge like a hawk’s keen eyes, and his sudden anger like the crocodile striking. All these were forms of him and symbols of him. So, they made images of their thoughts.
So simply and innocently, perhaps, the idols may have begun; the elephant-headed, hawk-headed, crocodile-jawed, the man shapes with too many arms or too many teeth or even too much beauty to be merely mortal. The idol makers were trying to say what they thought about the nature of God. They were inventing what we call, theory.
Unfortunately, the idols did not stay innocent long. There is an important distinction to be made between idol maker and idol worshipper. An old Hebrew legend declares that Abraham was once an idol maker, and that was how he came to understand that idols are things made with hands and no true God.
But for many the idol itself becomes holy in itself. The crucifix, the plaster image, the saint’s relic or miraculous medal and even the Bible itself may become themselves things considered holy and magical. Worse yet, the god confined in an image is a shrunken and powerless god. Because you have limited your concept of God to a man shape on a carved crucifix, you may be in danger of inferring that you are free to ignore him when you can’t see him.
The essence of idolatry is its attempt to control and enslave the deity. If the idol has power over man, so has man power over the idol; he can bribe it, he can drive a bargain with it, by certain rituals and sacrifices he can compel it to grant his wishes. Or so, at least, the idolater thinks. For an idol is not just an image, of one shape or another, meant to represent a deity. An idol is a material object, by the proper manipulation of which a man may get what he wants out of life.
Only, of course, he can’t. The universe is not made that way; there is no such power in any material object; be it a lump of clay or a Mercedes Benz. Sacrifice as much as you please, cajole and flatter as you please, beat your disobedient idol with a big stick if you please; the thing still won’t give you what you want. In consequence, all idolatrous cultures tend to get nastier and nastier. If a small bribe doesn’t succeed, men raise the ante; they offer more. The idol will not respond to a dance of virgins with flowers? Very well, let’s try a dance of warriors mutilating themselves with knives. You have cut off a lock of your hair and laid it before the idol, yet life is still dark? Try cutting your first born’s throat and offering him. Nor does the idol’s continued silence teach you better sense, if you’re a natural born idolater.
All Mesopotamia wallowed in this nastiness whom God spoke to the Hebrews and said, “Thou shalt make unto thyself no graven images.”
How effective was the commandment? It was very effective in one way: it completely destroyed the graphic arts of the Jews. For the past 3,000 years the Jews have accomplished much with music and literature, but have done almost nothing with sculpture and painting.
What shape is an idol?
Need it be a man or a beast shape? May it not be any possible shape men can desire; anything from your job to a mink coat; as long as you look to it for your salvation? The rigid Hebrew rule kept you from ornamenting your house, but it never kept you from worshipping your house.
An idol is worshipped, not for its shape, but for its imagined power. The scribes and Pharisees did not succeed in stopping idolatry; they only changed its vocabulary.
Most of us modern Christian idolaters worship gadgets instead of images. We will be happy if only we can buy the new television or CD player.
Does it matter which of our toys we make into a god? What matters is that it is still a material object on which we rely to bring us happiness. Idolatry’s name in 2009 is materialism. As long as we hope to be saved by the work of our own hands, we remain idolaters and the Second Commandment applies to us literally. What shape is your idol? Whatever men have made; they worship. There are men who worship modern plumbing and hope to redeem the Third World with the flush toilet!
All sins, theologians tell us, are only symptoms of the one all-inclusive sin of self-worship. Why should I prefer to worship a small and limited idol rather than a great and universal God? Perhaps because I can own the idol, but no one can own God. The great and universal God loves all men alike. If I worship my Cadillac it confers glory upon me alone, not on lesser breeds without Cadillacs. Mrs. Jones’ perfectly decorated house gratifies Mrs. Jones because Mrs. Smith, who lives next door, hasn’t got it.
The tragedy is that we really know better. We know happiness is a spiritual state, not to be achieved by piling up wealth or seizing power for two thousand years we have been listening to preachers tell us that; and we have never failed to nod our heads in agreement. Of course, we know better than to worship idols!
If only men could live by what they know!
But men, Paul said, are creatures corrupted by original sin, living by the law in their members rather than the law of their minds; creatures who obey emotion and appetite and habit far more often than they obey knowledge. In the very act of appealing to Christ, we relapse into our habitual idolatry. We must return to Christianity, yes; but why? Because it is true or do we believe that Christianity will protect our treasures? Do we really believe that true belief in God means renouncing this life and all of its treasures? Christianity was not meant to save the world for us; it was meant to save us from the world!
Unlike Buddhists and Hindus, Christians have usually held that the good things of this life are good indeed, that all enjoyment is a foreshadowing of our ultimate enjoyment of God. Our earthly loves and joys are meant to lead us to Christ, and we may certainly ask the Christ in whom we believe to preserve them for us. Yet this is very different from using Christ without believing in Him; from making Christian doctrine into a propaganda weapon, a pep talk for good old materialism. We must return to Christianity in order to preserve the things we value. But, we cannot return to Christianity at all unless the thing we value above all is Christ. If we are receiving religion only in order to defend our own works, from the American Constitution down to the famous American apple pie, we are in effect asking Christ to save our idol for us.
Thus, we can’t automatically shed our idolatry just by going to church. Certainly, we will progress to a more accepted idolatry, but idolatry none-the-less. We have fallen into the last and most subtle trap; we bow down to wood and stone, in the shape of a church building. Through regular attendance, through financial contributions, through raising the minister’s salary and redecorating the altar and improving the choir and encouraging foreign missions, I expect to be saved. To put it bluntly, we have forgotten that the church itself is not God.
When the church becomes an idol, a thing mysteriously holy and powerful in itself, then the goal of religion becomes getting people to church; no matter why they go or what they get out of it. Rope them with Bingo, or aerobics or convenient Friday night worship or whatever painless come-on to get them to cross the threshold.
Idolatry lies not in the idol but in the worshiper. It is an attitude that governs his whole life. The house devours the housewife, the office rots the executive with ulcers, the canned entertainment leave us incapable of entertaining ourselves. We feel that if bombs ever destroy our elaborate gadget prison it will mean “the end of civilization”, yet not so long ago Americans faced a wilderness with nothing but their two hands, a long rifle and an ax.
The real horror of idols is not merely that they give us nothing, but that they take away from us what we have. By the act of imagining power in the fetish we rob ourselves, and the Holy Spirit within us of that power. The more we look to material objects for help, the less we can help ourselves or ask help from the grace of God. If we are to be saved, it will not be by wood, however well carved and polished; or by machines, however efficient; or by social planning, however ingenious.
If we are to be saved, it must be by the one power that is built into a man at his beginning and that he does not have to make with his hands…the power of the Holy Spirit, which is God. Oh, my friend, what shape is your idol?
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