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.”  Jeremiah 19:4 Mixing Religions In Jeremiah’s…    read more