God Made in Man's Image
Scripture Reading: Numbers 3; Psalm 50
In his commentary on Galatians, Luther famously said, “The human heart is an idol factory.” Calvin later echoed Luther writing, “Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.” I don’t believe we can underestimate how prone we are to idolatry.
Once while traveling in a rural area in India, we came across a young man and his family along side the road. The young man had a goat strung up by his hind legs from a tree. Its throat had been cut and blood was pooling on the ground beneath it. One of the men that was with me asked him what he was doing. He answered, “It is for the crops.”
What he was saying is that he killed the goat as a sacrifice to the gods in hopes that they would help him have a good harvest.
On another visit, I went to the home of a man who had become a Christian. He wanted me to baptize him. When we entered the home, the pastor I was with and the new Christian went around the house gathering up idols. These were mostly trinkets – dried corn, a shell from somewhere, a small woven basket – but they all had some ties to a god or gods. They put them in a burlap sack tied the top and carried it out of the house. When we got to the small lake where the baptism was to take place, the man put a large rock in the sack and tossed it out into the middle of the lake where it sank into oblivion.
These are obvious idols. In the west our idols aren’t as quickly or easily identified. They can be our wealth, our family, our homes, or a myriad of other things we accumulate that slowly usurp God’s place and role in our lives.
In Psalm 50:21, God declares, “You thought that I was one like yourself…”
Yes, we can even become an idol to ourselves. We can recast God in our own image. We imagine that our thoughts are His thoughts, and our ways are His ways. We believe He believes the things we believe. Our moral standards become His. This is idol worship at its worst. It is the worship of self disused as the worship of God.
Be aware. Your heart is good at making idols. Keep a bat (spiritually speaking) and smash them as they roll off the assembly line.
