The Enslaving Power of Idols

“If we try to make something finite fill the place that only God can fill, we will try to extract an unrealistic level of meaning from that idol. When it does not work, it invites us only to try harder. It should not surprise us in a deeply idolatrous society that books on codependency and addiction form a growth industry. People feel enslaved to substances, to unwanted behavior, and to each other. These idols have promised life, but are death-dealing, anti-human, and constricting. It seems to be exactly this role-reversal that the Psalmist has in mind when in discussing idolatry he writes, ‘Those who make them will be like them and so will all who trust in them’ (Psalm 115:8). The idol begins as a means to power, enabling us to control, but then overpowers, controlling us.”

~Richard Keyes, “The Idol Factory” in No God But God: Breaking with the Idols of Our Age, Os Guiness & John Seel, eds. (Chicago, Ill.: Moody Press, 1992), 45.

We Become What We Worship

“What people revere, they resemble, either for ruin or restoration.”

~ G. K. Beale, We Become What We Worship: A Biblical Theology of Idolatry (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2008), 16.

A World Without God

“The modern secular world—the world which tries to remove God from his all-creating, all-sustaining, all-defining, all-governing place—has no choice but to make itself god and to create its own morality. In other words, when man abandons God and his self-revelation as the source of what is objectively true and right and beautiful, the next highest court of appeal is man himself.

If God is not the measure of what is true and right and beautiful, then I am and you are. And since we—the god called ‘you,’ and the god called ‘me’—may not agree, the result will be: Might makes right. And everything in education, and media, and politics in this God-evicting world becomes a battle for power. Not a quest for objective truth and right and beauty, since there isn’t any, but a power-struggle. Because the one who has the power, in a world without God, defines reality. Defines what is true. Defines what is right. Defines what is beautiful. And there is no court of appeal in heaven for the weak. Man is god. And the powerful man is god-Almighty—the maker of the truth, the inventor of what is right, and the definer of what is beautiful. And the bloodiest century in the history of the world—the twentieth century with its Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini and Milosevic and Pot and Amin and Mao and Sung and Hussein and the abortion industry—prove it with horrifying evidence.”

~ John Piper, “Abortion and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil“

The Essence of Sin & the Essence of Salvation

“The essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man. Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be. Man claims prerogatives which belong to God alone; God accepts penalties whcih belong to man alone.”

~ John Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove, Ill., InterVarsity Press, 1986), 160.

The Essence of the Fall & the Ancient Origins of Modern Secularism

“The essence of the fall of Eve and Adam—and all of us in Adam—is the supreme pleasure we have in being independent, and deciding for ourselves what is true and right and beautiful, rather than finding supreme pleasure in God as the fountain of all that is true and right and beautiful. The essence of the fall is preferring to be god rather than enjoy God.

So the modern secular world is very old. It puts on new clothes from century to century, and we call it by different names. Recently: modernism, existentialism, secular humanism, postmodernism. But there is a common root they all share: God is dethroned, and the next highest court of appeal for truth and right and beauty is man—little, finite, fallible, mortal man.”

~ John Piper, “Abortion and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil“

Neopagan Spirituality

Carl E. Braaten describes a form of neopaganism that sounds alarmingly like a lot of the therapeutic spirituality that has taken such a firm hold on much of modern evangelicalism. He writes:

Neopaganism is spiritual religion attuned to the ‘Zeitgeist.’ It has no use for the concrete historical elements of the biblical gospel. It has no need of the church and the external word (verbatum externum), turning instead to pure immediacy and inwardness in which each individual personally acquires knowledge of God out of the depths of his or her own experience. People of this type care solely for their own spiritual journeys through life, and while they believe in an emerging universal fellowship in the spirit of love, the reality of the church as an elect communion of saints and sacred things is alien to their thinking. They do not understand the doctrines of the gospel to be true statements about events that have happened once and for all, but see them as symbols of eternal truths reflecting ever-recurring processes of life in the presence of God. History itself is nothing but a resource of symbols to stimulate certain moods and feelings according to each person’s private fancy. Worship means getting together in small groups of kindred spirits to hear one another’s stories.

~ “The Gospel in a Neopagan Culture” in Either/Or: The Gospel or Neopaganism (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 1995), 19-20.

Stewardship as Our Sacrifice of Worship

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect (Romans 12:1-2).

“Because we have limited resources (time, energy, money), we must allocate those things to what we consider most important or glorious to us and in so doing make sacrifices for our functional god. Whatever we hold in the position of highest glory is by definition our god(s). Practically, worship is making sacrifices for what we are living to glorify.”

~ Mark Driscoll & Gerry Bresheares, Vintage Jesus (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2008), 166.

Thinking of Ourselves & God

Reflecting on our rebellion against God and the idolatry of self from Romans 1:18-32, Karl Barth makes this profound statement:

Thinking of ourselves what can be thought only of God, we are unable to think of Him more highly than we think of ourselves. Being to ourselves what God ought to be to us, He is no more to us than we are to ourselves.

~ The Epistle to the Romans (London, England: Oxford University Press, 1968), 45.