What have our Idols ever done for Us?

September 1, 2020

In this edited extract from his forthcoming 'Here Are Your Gods!', Chris Wright challenges us to consider why we put so much hope in fallible people, fallen ideas, and sinful structures.

False gods fail. That is their only truth. Since the task of mission involves the exposure of false gods, it is worth exploring in more detail some dimensions of this failure. For although false gods never fail to fail, it seems humans never fail to forget. Some of the accusations that the Bible lays against idolatry include the following:

Idols deprive God of his proper glory. When human beings attribute to other gods the gifts, powers, or functions that belong to the one living God, then God is deprived of the honor that is due to his name alone. The whole creation exists for the glory of the Creator, and in rendering praise to God alone creation (including humanity) experiences its own true blessing and good. This is the meaning of the jealousy of Yahweh in the Old Testament. It is God’s proper protection of God’s own identity and transcendent uniqueness. “I am the Lord; that is my name! I will not yield my glory to another or my praise to idols” (Is 42:8).

Accordingly, the psalmist, having denounced all the gods of the nations as nothings (in Ps 96:5), issues the universal summons:

Ascribe to the Lord, all you families of nations, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.
Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name; bring an offering and come into his courts. 
Worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness; tremble before him, all the earth. (Ps 96:7-9 bold intended to emphasize the implied contrast)

This is not an invitation to the nations to make room for Yahweh among the pantheon of their own gods and give him some shared respect. The psalmist is not inviting the nations to move their gods along the shelf a little to make room for Yahweh among their number. No, this is a call for the radical displacement of all other gods before the sole, unique, transcendent God-ness of Yahweh, such that all honor, glory, worship, and praise goes to him, as it rightfully should. As long as other gods are worshiped, the living God is to that extent denied what is rightfully his—the total worship of his total creation. This is what makes the struggle with idolatry a major dimension of the mission of God, in which he commands our cooperation.

Idols distort the image of God in human beings. Since idolatry diminishes the glory of God, and since humans are made in the image of God, it follows that idolatry is also detrimental to the very essence of our humanity. As the Shorter Catechism of the Westminster Confession reminds us, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” To refuse to glorify God, and even worse, to exchange “the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles” (Rom 1:23), is to frustrate the purpose of our very existence. Idolatry is radical self-harm.

It is also radically, terribly ironic. In trying to be as God (in the original temptation and rebellion), we have ended up becoming less human. The principle is affirmed in several places in the Bible that you become like the object of your worship (e.g., Ps 115:8; Is 41:24; 44:9). If you worship that which is not God, you reduce the image of God in yourself. If you worship that which is not even human, you reduce your humanity still further.

So, Isaiah 44 holds before us very starkly the irony (or parody) of the one creature on earth that was made in the image of the living God (a human being) worshiping something that is merely a lifeless image of himself. 

The blacksmith takes a tool and works with it in the coals; he shapes an idol with hammers, he forges it with the might of his arm. He gets hungry and loses his strength; he drinks no water and grows faint. The carpenter measures with a line and makes an outline with a marker; he roughs it out with chisels and marks it with compasses. He shapes it in human form, human form in all its glory, that it may dwell in a shrine. (Is 44:12-13 emphasis added)

The words in bold are surely the climax of the prophet’s satire. “Human form in all its glory” speaks of the human privilege of being made in the image of God. Yet here is a man worshiping as a god something that is nothing but an image of himself, the product of human skill and effort. The lifeless image of the living man languishes inside a little hut, while the living image of the living God is walking around outside, oblivious to the irony of his actions.

There is comparable (though perhaps more polite) irony also in Paul’s argument with the Greek intelligentsia in Athens. Few cultures have equaled ancient Greece in exalting the human spirit, human art, literature, philosophy—even the human physical form. Yet in the process they had lost the very God in whose image all these wonderful dimensions of humanity have their source. Is it not absurd, Paul challenges them, to imagine that the one who is the origin of all this human glory needs to be housed and fed by human hands?

The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. . . . Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. (Acts 17:24-25, 29)

The psalms similarly play on the contrast between the work of God’s hands and the work of human hands. Human beings, like all the rest of creation, are the work of God’s hands (Ps 138:8; 139:13-15). Yet we, unique among God’s creatures, have been made “ruler over the works of your hands” (Ps 8:6). When one thinks about that in the light of contemplating the vastness of the heavens, which are also “the work of your fingers,” it is astonishing (Ps 8:3). What a travesty it is when humans, who themselves are the work of God’s hands and were made to rule the rest of the works of God’s hands, choose instead to worship the work of their own hands (Ps 115:4). Without doubt, idolatry distorts, demeans, and diminishes our humanity.

Idols are profoundly disappointing. In a polytheistic universe, you cannot expect all the gods to please all the people all the time. So disappointment with the gods is part of the lottery of life. Spread your bets among the gods, then. You win some, you lose some. The assumption that some of the gods will disappoint you some of the time is actually built into such a worldview and becomes inevitable when the conflicts of the nations are seen as mirroring the conflicts of the gods. Defeated nations have defeated gods. Threatened nations should face the likelihood of their gods failing them too. Best not to trust the same old gods too long. Switch to the gods of the winning side and avoid disappointment. The gods compete for human loyalty, because, as in all competition, there are going to be losers.

This is precisely the assumption that seemed gloatingly self- evident to the Assyrian commander swaggering below the walls of  besieged Jerusalem.

Do not listen to Hezekiah, for he is misleading you when he says, “The Lord will deliver us.” Has the god of any nation ever delivered his land from the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of  Sepharvaim, Hena and Ivvah? Have they rescued Samaria from my hand? Who of all the gods of these countries has been able to save his land from me? How then can the Lord deliver Jerusalem from my hand? (2 Kings 18:32-35)

In other words, reasoned the Assyrian, Yahweh would turn out to be as big a disappointment to the people of Judah as the gods of the other nations had been to the Assyrians. From where he stood, that seemed a solid, predictable bet. You just can’t trust these lesser gods, you see. Give them up while you can. Join the winners.

Hezekiah and Isaiah, however, had a rather different perspective on events. On the one hand, Hezekiah knew that the reason the other gods had disappointed the nations that trusted in them was that “they were not gods [or not God] but only wood and stone, fashioned by human hands” (2 Kings 19:18). On the other hand, Isaiah knew that Assyria’s victories, far from proving the superiority of Assyrian gods, were actually planned and controlled by Yahweh all along, and would very soon be reversed in the fires of his judgment (2 Kings 19:25-28). No wonder, then, that the same prophet ridiculed Judah for turning away from the only source of protection that would not disappoint it to the armies, horses, and gods of the Egyptians, who were notoriously untrustworthy and undoubtedly would disappoint them.

Woe . . . to those . . . who go down to Egypt without consulting me; who look for help to Pharaoh’s protection, to Egypt’s shade for refuge. But Pharaoh’s protection will be to your shame, Egypt’s shade will bring you disgrace. . . . But the Egyptians are mere mortals and not God; their horses are flesh and not spirit. (Is 30:1-3; 31:3; see Jer 2:36-37) 

Given, then, that the gods of the nations were a disappointing failure even to the nations who worshiped them, and given that Yahweh alone was the living God who could be trusted not to fail, it was doubly tragic that Israel should even think of exchanging the one for the other. There is something grossly unnatural about it, as Jeremiah observes in shocked disbelief. The pagan nations stay obstinately loyal to the gods they have, even though they do not exist, while Israel swaps the only living God it knows for such nonentities!

“Has a nation ever changed its gods? (Yet they are not gods at all.)
But my people have exchanged their glorious God for worthless idols.
Be appalled at this, you heavens, and shudder with great horror,” declares the Lord.
“My people have committed two sins:
They have forsaken me, the spring of living water,
and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” (Jer 2:11-13)

How could anyone abandon a guaranteed source of life for a guaranteed source of disappointment? Yet that is what Israel has done, in forsaking its spring of living water for a leaking cistern. “Broken cisterns that can hold no water” are a powerful image of disappointment, futility, and wasted effort.

The Lord himself then chides Israel for the ungrateful futility of its folly. Drawing from the ancient tradition of Deuteronomy 32:37-38, Jeremiah depicts just how perverse Israel has become, in first turning away from Yahweh to worship despicable gods and then brazenly turning around and expecting Yahweh to save it when the multiple gods of its own manufacture utterly fail to deliver.

They say to wood, “You are my father,” and to stone, “You gave me birth.”
They have turned their backs to me and not their faces; yet when they are in trouble,
they say, “Come and save us!”
Where then are the gods you made for yourselves?
Let them come if they can save you when you are in trouble!
For you, Judah, have as many gods as you have towns. (Jer 2:27-28 emphasis added)

Kings, armies, horses, treaties, riches, natural resources—all these things are not really gods and are unable to bear the weight of trust we put in them. However, what makes them into gods is that we insist on believing the spurious promises they make (or that we implicitly attribute to them). We keep on paying the enormous sacrifices they demand for our loyalty. We keep on hoping against hope that they will not let us down. But of course, they always do in the end. Idolatry is wasted effort and dashed hopes.

The worship of false gods is the fellowship of futility, the grand delusion whose only destiny is disappointment.

So when an editorial in a British national newspaper once concluded its sad analysis of a society in which two children could callously murder a toddler with the words “All our gods have failed,” it doubtless intended the words only as a figure of speech. Sadly, such a metaphorical cry of despair also precisely captures the spiritual truth. Those things we thought could deliver us from evil, and in which we invested great amounts of intellectual, financial, and emotional capital in the hope that they would deliver us, have instead spectacularly disappointed us.

When will we ever learn?