Why We Worship Idols Instead of God
God’s Agenda
“Preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct” (1 Peter 1:13–15).
God’s agenda for our lives is for us to be holy, just as he is holy. This holiness is the fruit of what we think or trust and what we desire or worship. We’ve seen that sinful behavior and negative emotions arise when we believe lies about God instead of trusting God’s Word. So Peter tells us to “prepare [our] minds for action.” We’re to fill our minds with truth and battle with our unbelieving thoughts. Peter also tells us not to “conform to the passions” we had when in our “former ignorance” (see also 1 Peter 2:11). The other thing going on in our hearts is that we desire, worship, and treasure. We sin because we desire or worship idols instead of worshipping God.
We Desire or Worship Idols Instead of Worshipping God
We don’t often think of ourselves as worshipping idols because we think of idols in terms of statues and shrines. But God tells the leaders of Israel that they “have taken their idols into their hearts” (Ezek. 14:3). We shouldn’t look down on the Israelites for worshipping idols. We should instead see a mirror of our own hearts.
You Can Change
Tim Chester
You Can Change is a practical, interactive, and solidly biblical book designed to help Christians in all stages of life to find victory over sin by focusing on what God has already done in us.
John Calvin says, “Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.”1 God says, “My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.” As a result, they “go after other gods to [their] own harm” and “to their own shame” (Jer. 2:13; 7:6, 19). An idol is anything we look to instead of God for living water. Our double sin is, first, rejecting the truth of God’s greatness and goodness and, second, placing our affections elsewhere.
A god is whatever we expect to provide all good and in which we take refuge in all distress. . . . Whatever you set your heart on and put your trust in, that, I tell you, is your true god. (Martin Luther)2
Idolatry may not involve explicit denials of God’s existence or character. It may well come in the form of an over-attachment to something that is, in itself, perfectly good. . . . 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. (Richard Keyes)3
Our idols are those things we count on to give our lives meaning. They are the things of which we say, “I need this to make me happy,” or “If I don’t have this my life is worthless and meaningless.” (Tim Keller)4
The New Testament way of talking about idolatry is “sinful desires.” Literally, it is “the lusts of the flesh.” “Lusts” here is not just sexual desire, but all sinful desire. And “flesh” is not talking about our bodies, but about our sinful natures—the bias toward sin that we have from birth. Paul describes “covetousness” or greed as “idolatry” (Col. 3:5). Your idol is whatever you’re greedy for. It may be money, approval, sex, or power. David Powlison says, “If ‘idolatry’ is the characteristic and summary Old Testament word for our drift from God, then ‘desires’ is the characteristic and summary New Testament word for the same drift. Both are shorthand for the problem of human beings.”5 In other words, “sinful desires of the flesh” is another way of talking about the idols of the heart. Tim Stafford says:
The “flesh”—that is, our lives without God—urgently desires many things. It wants power. It wants pleasure. It wants wealth. It wants status and admiration. None of these is wrong in itself. And nothing would be wrong with liking these things. But desire, or lust, is more than liking. It is the will to possess. Lust turns good things into objects of worship. And that is why lust, or covetousness, is so closely linked to another biblical word: idolatry. What we lust for we worship. We may joke about our lusts, but our behavior shows a more fundamental allegiance. We look to our idols to give us what we need—to make our lives rich and purposeful.6
“For where your treasure is,” says Jesus, “there your heart will be also” (Matt. 6:21). Whatever you treasure most is the thing that has your heart and controls your life. The process is described well by our English word captivated. We’re made captive by our desires. Our hearts are captured. We confuse free-willed with self-willed. We think we’re free when we break away from God, but we become enslaved by our own sinful desires. “Whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved” (2 Peter 2:19). “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money” (Matt. 6:24). We serve whatever our hearts desire most. If that desire is for God and his glory, then God is our master. But if our desire is, for example, for money, then money is our master, and that’s idolatry.
God’s agenda for our lives is for us to be holy, just as he is holy.
“When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate” (Gen. 3:6). “Good . . . delight . . . desired.” Eve thought the fruit could give her more than God, and so she desired the fruit. That desire controlled her heart and determined her behavior. This was true of the first sin, and it’s true of all subsequent sin. “Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:14–15). Sin begins with desire. We’re not sinners because we commit sinful acts. We commit sinful acts because we’re sinners, born with a bias to sin, enslaved by our sinful desires. That’s why we can’t change ourselves simply by changing our behavior. We need God to change us by renewing our hearts and giving us new desires.
Every sin begins in the heart with a sinful desire. “God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen” (Rom. 1:24–25). We’ve seen how sin arises because we exchange the truth about God for a lie. Now we see that sin also arises because God gives us over to the sinful desires of our hearts. It arises when we worship or desire created things rather than the Creator. Our double problem is that we believe lies rather than believing God and worship idols rather than worshipping God.
Desire is at the helm of our lives. It determines our behavior. We always do what we want to do. The question is, which of our desires is strongest at any given moment? An alcoholic may desire or want a drink but refrains from having one. It looks as if he’s not doing what he wants. But what has happened is that another desire (perhaps the desire to avoid shame or losing his family) has trumped the desire for a drink. He’s still doing what he wants; it’s just that the desire for a drink is no longer his biggest desire.7 We excuse ourselves by thinking that we want to be good but are the victims of other factors (circumstances, history, biology, ill health, and so on). But the Bible’s radical view of sin tells us that we are responsible. We always do what we want to do.
But this also gives us hope. In Romans 7, Paul describes someone who says, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing” (Rom. 7:19). At first sight this might seem to contradict what we’ve been saying. Here is someone who doesn’t do what he wants to do. But the reason he doesn’t follow his good desires is that his sinful desires are stronger and therefore controlling (Rom. 1:24–26; 7:23–25). The answer is, says Paul, the Holy Spirit and the new desires he gives: Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. . . .
Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God. You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. (Rom. 8:5, 8–9, NIV)
This understanding humbles us, but it also gives us hope for change. We are changed by faith as we look upon the glory of God and so find him more desirable than anything sin might offer. By faith and through the Spirit, the desire for God trumps the desire for sin.
Notes:
- John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Vol. 1, trans. F. L. Battles, ed. J. T. McNeil (Philadelphia: Westminster/SCM, 1961), 1.11.8.
- Paraphrased from Martin Luther on the first commandment, in The Larger Catechism, Part 1.
- Cited in Os Guinness and John Seel, No God but God (Chicago: Moody Press, 1992), 33.
- Tim Keller, Church of the Redeemer, Apprenticeship Manual, Unit 2.4.
- David Powlison, “Idols of the Heart and ‘Vanity Fair,’” Journal of Biblical Counseling, 13.2. (Winter 1995), 36.
- Tim Stafford, “Serious about Lust,” Journal of Biblical Counseling, 13:3 (Spring 1995), 5.
- This argument is from Jonathan Edwards, “The Freedom of the Will,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2 vols. (Ball, Arnold & Co., 1840), 1:1.2.
This article is adapted from You Can Change: God’s Transforming Power for Our Sinful Behavior and Negative Emotions by Tim Chester.
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