Idols

Deuteronomy 5:7,  "You shall have no other gods before me."

  When most of us think of sin, I believe we think of lying, cheating, stealing, inhumane treatment of others, murder, and all sorts of gross sexual sins.  God hates sin of all kinds, but, as we read the Old Testament, we find over and over one kind of sin which angers Him more than all the others, and it is not one of the above.

   Listen to how angry God is with His chosen people in II Kings 21:12-15,  "Therefore, this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: I am going to bring such disaster on Jerusalem and Judah that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle.  I will stretch out over Jerusalem the measuring line used against Samaria and the plumb line used against the house of Ahab.  I will wipe out Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down.  I will forsake the remnant of my inheritance and hand them over to their enemies.  They will be looted and plundered by all their foes, because they have done evil in my eyes and have provoked me to anger from the day their forefathers came out of Egypt until this day."

   What sin has so greatly provoked God?  The sin of idolatry.  II Kings 17:15-16, "They rejected his [God's] decrees and the covenant he had made with their fathers and the warnings he had given them.  They followed worthless idols and themselves became worthless.  They imitated the nations around them although the Lord had ordered them, 'Do not do as they do,' and they did the things the Lord had forbidden them to do.  They forsook all the commands of the Lord their God and made for themselves two idols cast in the shape of calves, and an Asherah pole.  They bowed down to all the starry hosts, and they worshiped Baal."

   The first commandment is this:  "You shall have no others gods before me."  When Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, He replied,  "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind."  God wants to have first place in each of our lives.

   We may think that, as long as we don't make little statues to worship, we are not guilty of idolatry.  But anything that is more important to us than God is an idol.  People worship money, power, fame, beauty, athletic prowess, material possessions, even other people--perhaps a parent or a spouse or a child.

   We would do well to ask ourselves periodically,  "If God told us He was going to take away everything in our lives but one thing, and He would allow us to choose the one thing we would keep, what would that one thing be?  If that one thing is anything other than our relationship with God, that thing has become an idol for us.

Pray with me these words of William Cowper's,  "The dearest idol I have known, whate'er that idol be, help me to tear it from thy throne, and worship only thee."   Amen.