Suppose you found a friend carving a small statue out of a piece of wood. “What are you going to do with that?†you ask. “I’m going to worship it,†he says. “I’ve got a nice spot in my bedroom where I can kneel down and ask it for things.†Or imagine people on a suburban street pooling their wedding rings and other jewelry to make a statue they can put in the park. They plan to kill animals and leave the meat out in front of the statue. To moderns, idolatry is as weird as cannibalism; we’re not tempted to try it. But since a great part of the Old Testament is concerned with idolatry, we need to get some idea of what people saw in it—and why God condemned it. “They have forsaken me and made this a place of foreign gods.â€Â Jeremiah 19:4 Mixing Religions In Jeremiah’s… read more
Idolatry
Hosea begins with a love story; a painful, personal love story, the prophet’s very own. Hosea had married a woman who acted like a prostitute. Yet the more she went out on him, the more Hosea loved her. He gave her everything a good wife deserved: his love, his home, his name, his reputation. She responded by sleeping around with other men. He warned her, he pleaded with her, he punished her. She humiliated him until he wanted to cry, yet still he clung to her. Why did Hosea begin with his personal life? Because God had expressly told him to relate it to another, more tragic love story: the painful love of God for his people. God could have simply declared, “Israel is like a wife to me, an adulterous wife.†Instead, he used Hosea to act out the treachery in real life and to show in living color… read more
Idolatry, Why The Big Fuss? A few months ago before a test I saw a classmate holding the cross that hung around his neck and was praying in preparation for the test. Later I e-mailed him asking if he was a Christian and if it was OK with him to add his e-mail to my “Christian forwards/messages†list. He replied to my e-mail saying that he was not a Christian: he simply had the cross for “good luckâ€. “And God spoke all these words: ‘I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. ‘You shall have no other gods before me. ‘You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD… read more