This is the air we breathe in America. . . and the gospel calls it into question.
Tag Archives: idolatry
The Constructions Are Different: Thinking About Saving Faith and Idolatrous Faith
Faith is Not Merely Cognitive
Our trusting only in Jesus and not trusting in other things is deeper than our mental calculations. John Piper is very helpful on this point. Faith is so intertwined with the affections. Believing is treasuring and delighting in an object, both for the pleasure the object possesses and for the pleasure the object brings (and these are not so neatly divided).
Faith in the Gospel
Piper construction in God is the Gospel articulates an important point. The gospel would not be good if it were not for God. God is the gospel. Forgiveness of sins, escape from wrath, eternity in the new cosmos—all these things are good benefits that would be empty if it were not GOD himself whom we “get” in the gospel.
How Do We Think About Idolatry?
Now, how does Piper’s construction add up with the idolatry construction within the gospel-centered movement (GCM)? The idolatry construction does not make the idol and the pseudo-savior the same thing (because it never is).
If my idol were the approval of man then the savior that accomplishes that idol is something different, such as, the refusal to disagree with people (i.e., spineless compromise). I would put my faith in compromise because of the pleasure it brings in procuring man’s approval.
Saving Faith Is Different . . .
The Savior in whom I put my faith is also the God to whom I am saved. Jesus, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, is both the means and the end. I trust in Jesus for the pleasure he possesses and for the benefits he brings. The pleasure that he possesses is not different from the pleasure he brings. For what he brings is fellowship with his person all in all—the triune God.
Still thinking . . .
The Epitome of Folk Religion
But we will do everything that we have vowed, make offerings to the queen of heaven and pour out drink offerings to her, as we did, both we and our fathers, our kings and our officials, in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. For then we had plenty of food, and prospered, and saw no disaster. But since we left off making offerings to the queen of heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have lacked everything and have been consumed by the sword and by famine.” And the women said, “When we made offerings to the queen of heaven and poured out drink offerings to her, was it without our husbands’ approval that we made cakes for her bearing her image and poured out drink offerings to her?” (Jeremiah 44:17-19 ESV)
The people of Judah do not get it. Jeremiah has been pouring himself out in warning them of coming judgment. They have forsaken the God who created them and called them his own. How hideous. We can’t get this picture. We don’t know what it means for our creation to replace devotion to us for headlong affection for that which does not satisfy. It is atrocious. It deserves wrath of a kind that we cannot fathom.
And here is the people’s logic: “Hey, when we worshiped the queen of heaven we had enough food to eat and weren’t threatened at all. Therefore, in order to have enough food to eat and not be threatened at all, then we must worship the queen of heaven.”
We are prone to revert to his mentality often. It is a human thing. We are dumbly pragmatic. The people of Judah should have looked beyond the transient logic of their current situation and instead listened to God’s Word. But that is exactly what they did not do. Over and over the Book of Jeremiah tells us that they did not listen, very reminiscent of Deuteronomy (Jer 6:10; 7:13, 26-27; 13:11; 16:12; 17:23, etc.; cf. esp. Deut. 28). The calling is to hear the word of God despite what our immediate circumstances may look like. This is what faith is.
And in order to have that, it takes a certain kind of heart (Jer. 31:33; Deut. 30:6).
Gospel Over Guidance: What the Qur’an Does Not Address
Love for God is genuine only when God is a means to nothing else but God. Righteous acts are righteous only when they are done out of a love for righteousness and not as a means to anything else.
The Qur’an is not an adoring, worshipping love letter about God. It is a guide for what behavior will increase your chances of avoiding hell and earning heaven… Islam never addresses the root of man’s sin, that we have substituted some other delight for the place in our hearts only God should have…
Righteousness is only pleasing to God when you do righteousness solely out of love for him and righteousness itself. Good deeds can be wicked in the eyes of God if done for the purpose of merit or as a means to an end. Of course, merit, salvation, and reward form the entire foundation on which Islam is built.
The gospel teaches that what we have lost is the love of God, and that God can only be restored to us by giving himself back to us freely in Christ. The gospel offers God back to us, at no cost to us. In light of the beauty of God that we see in the gospel, the love in our hearts for him will naturally grow. As 1 John 4:19 says, “We love Him because He first loved us.”
J.D. Greear, Breaking the Islam Code, 97
‘Nor Did It Come Into My Mind’
‘Cut off your hair and cast it away; raise a lamentation on the bare heights, for the LORD has rejected and forsaken the generation of his wrath.’
“For the sons of Judah have done evil in my sight, declares the LORD. They have set their detestable things in the house that is called by my name, to defile it. And they have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind.” (Jeremiah 7:29-31)
The LORD’s judgment on Judah is inevitable. They have done evil in his sight. Detestable things, he says. They have defiled the holiness of his presence. They came together and decided to build some high places. The laid the foundation, cut the stones, and constructed this tower of sorts to serve one purpose–burn their sons and daughters. They didn’t snap their fingers and this thing just came to be. This calf didn’t pop out of the fire, either. They labored. They spent time. They poured out their sweat and energy.
How sick do you have to be? I just wonder that at some point, maybe at least on one day, a crew member asked his foreman, “So we’re going to burn our children right here? Should it be a little wider? You think this stone is durable enough?”
The atrocity that this is cannot be fully told. God was about to unleash his wrath. He was going to pour out his anger on individuals that he owned in his sovereignty. He was going to judge individuals for evil that he has the power to stop them from committing. And yet, notice what he says about their malicious activity–”which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind.”
He never told Judah to do that. This was their evil. Matter of fact, this evil did not even come into the mind of God. What does that mean? I think it is an anthropomorphism. It is the emphatic way that the LORD is saying that he is not the author of this evil. It never even crossed his mind.
QUESTION: how does that work? ANSWER: I don’t really know.
I don’t know how that works but I know that it does. God is sovereign in such a way and man left alone is in bondage to sin in such a way that man can commit evil for which he is morally culpable and of which God can say “nor did it come into my mind.”
Assuming the Authority and Calling Good What Is Not: How Humans Become Their Own gods
Genesis gives us the in-your-face picture of God’s authority. He is the one in the beginning and only from Him does everything else come. He is the Creator who can rightly affirm that all that He has made is good. This is repeated over and over in the narrative. “God saw that it was good.” That is God’s Word on His creation. It is the declaration of His authority. He made it and saw it was good. Who else was there to make such a judgment? He owned that position as well. He was the only One who had the power to create and He was the only One who had the knowledge and authority to see it as good and declare it so.
God created Adam and Eve and he put them in the Garden under His authority. In chapter three is where we find the temptation and fall. The prohibition of 2:17, “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat,” is the test of whether they will submit to God’s authority. In agreement with Goldsworthy, nothing in the text should make us think that the fruit of the tree itself possessed some magical quality that gives the knowledge of good and evil to whoever eats it. Do not be distracted by a picture of a shiny apple hanging from a naughty tree. The issue is authority. God clearly said “freely enjoy all of these, do not eat this one.” There is the good and evil—obey God or turn against Him.
We see this in the text. For the first time since the repetition in chapters 1-2, someone saw that something was good. However, the someone was not God, and the something was not good. The creature saw what God prohibited to be good. This is a clear, definite denial of God’s authoritative judgment and goodness. Adam and Eve became their own ‘gods’ and saw and called for themselves what was good. This is the Fall.
Hypocrisy as A Wrong Kind of Evangelism
The ultimate manifestation of hypocrisy is to withhold the heart of God from desperate people, all the while pretending to extend it.
Richard Ganz, “Shutting Up the Kingdom” in Table Talk, Oct 2009, 15
Damn the Moab and Babylon in Us: A Plea to Worship Jesus Christ
Jeremiah is speaking judgment against the enemies of Israel in 46-51. Mingled in this word of God’s wrath against the nations is the hope of salvation for Judah and Israel, and a future restoration of the nations themselves (48:47; 49:6, 39).
We should take note of the LORD’s indictment of these nations. The theme of His charge against them has implications and we can’t be unreceptive here. The heart of Moab’s sin was that “he magnified himself against the LORD” (48:26, 42). To Babylon, God says:
Behold, I am against you, O proud one, declares the Lord GOD of hosts, for your day has come, the time when I will punish you. The proud one shall stumble and fall, with none to raise him up… (50:31f)
This stretches beyond the Book of Jeremiah and the transgressions of Moab and Babylon. This is a theme in the Bible. The pride of man is stupid and it will get you damned forever if you do not repent. Pride is our rebellion. It is our refusal to worship the one true God in order to worship ourselves. Or it is the refusal to truly worship the one true God because we want to worship ourselves too!
This is an epidemic not just for those apart from Christ, but for all humans, for me and you. We are fallen creatures. Only those who are part of the New Covenant have been given the eyes to see and a heart to repent. And repent is what we must do, everyday. We are not wired to wake up every morning and worship the Jesus Christ who died for us. It is much easier for us to move like Moab, to spend our days like Babylon, no matter how much ‘Christian stuff’ we throw into the mix.
My plea for us is that we awake and see that the Moab and Babylon in us was damned at the cross of Jesus. We repent of our ‘old man propensity’ in that way. That in Jesus we are free to not worship ourselves anymore, but instead to truly worship the one true God, forever. That we see Jesus and marvel at His supremacy and grace to make prideful rebels His own. He died for us to make us stop worshiping our-crappy-selves, so that we could worship Him who is infinitely better! Jesus Christ is better! Worship Him! O the glories of God and surpassing joy found in Him!
“Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the LORD, our Maker!” (Psalms 95:6)
Rescue Me From the Wicked: I Mean, I Don’t Want To Live Like This World Is My Home
“Arise, O LORD! Confront him, subdue him! Deliver my soul from the wicked by your sword, from men by your hand, O LORD, from men of the world whose portion is in this life. You fill their womb with treasure; they are satisfied with children, and they leave their abundance to their infants.
As for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness; when I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness.”
(Psalms 17:13-15)
We are still in the same vein of the three previous psalms when we come to this Prayer of David in 17. The end is gripping. The prayer is for deliverance from the wicked. He begins in verse 13 with a plea to be rescued from the wicked by the LORD’s sword. Such graphic language makes me envision the wicked as zombies with vampire fangs hunting down the righteous. Notice the explanation in verse 14. Rescue me from the wicked, that is, “from men of this world whose portion is in this life.” He elaborates further, men of this world who have good things, who are blessed with children, who leave an inheritance to their progeny.
Wait. These are good and noble things. But now the comparison sweeps in with an “As for me…”
He says, “As for me, I am different from them in that I will behold your face in righteousness. When I awake, that is, when I am resurrected (like in 16:9-11), I shall be satisfied with your likeness. My portion is in you and it will have no end.” Our deliverance is not isolated to the Devil and demons, but to these good things that make us fat and numb to the greater reality that awaits us. O that we would know the evil of seeking our portion in this life! How it scoffs at the promise of God in its hellish unbelief! As for me, by grace!, as for me… I will see You. I will behold You and be satisfied.
Father, please rescue us from this wickedness. For by the grace of Jesus Christ, You are our portion forever. Amen.
Michael Scott, The Office, and the Evil in Our Hearts
What can we learn from Michael Scott?
My greatest social oversight in college was that I did not watch the NBC comedy The Office. Over the past month the show has become a humorous discovery for Melissa and I. We have watched dozens of past episodes, as well as trying to keep up with the current season. We laugh aloud all throughout the 20 minute shows. The more we watch, the funnier. There is something about the character personalities and interactions that is just fun. The boss of the Scranton branch of the small paper company, Dunder Mifflin, is a man named Michael Scott. His character is the hub of the comedy. His work ethic is near to none. The viewers wonder how his branch is successful, and how in the world he got his position!
But Michael is a nice guy. He cares for his employees. And it is very obvious that he wants them to care for him. He really wants them to like him. In each episode, in one way or another, Michael vies for their approval. He really seeks to be popular. This paper company boss is portrayed to be a very naive, spotlight-seeking man. And it is portrayed in a way that he is liked, pitied, and object of cheerful laughter. He is not power-hungry and grumpy, he is not foaming at the mouth as an inconsiderate monster.
My assessment of his character’s condition is not ugly in its manifestation. But I think it is a most atrocious situation that puts Michael Scott at a level of vanity so high we couldn’t see it with a telescope. He is a self-worshiper. He is a self-evangelist. It should not fool us that the best method of self-propagation is generosity. Be nice to people so that they will like you. That doesn’t look as evil as it is. Michael Scott is willing to nearly do anything to make his employees like worship him. So much so that he is sad when he thinks he has lost face, happiest when he is complimented.
Michael Scott is a vain man. He is an idolater. A prideful man. A self-worshiper.
Michael Scott is the clearest picture of who we are, who I am. And that is nothing to laugh at. As a matter of fact, I want the Michael Scott in me to die. I don’t want to be the that way. That is not gospel. The approval God has of me, through Jesus Christ, in spite of me, is enough. That is enough. If the only Sovereign of the universe declares me righteous by the blood of His Son, then why would I care about any other opinion?!
Yes. Jesus Christ is enough.
