Idolatry Exposed

We have written before in these pages about how crisis is revelatory. When the pressure is on, the cracks are exposed.

When I was a teacher, I would sometimes see our athletes become discouraged after their team faced a tough opponent. I would tell them that it’s actually a good thing when your weaknesses are exposed by strong competition. When you compete with a weak opponent, your weaknesses are concealed, and it’s harder to recognize what’s broken in your strategy and training and skills. Although it’s disheartening to get embarrassed on the field, that kind of outcome gives the coaches and players plenty of information about how to help the team improve.

Just so, God uses life circumstances to expose our weaknesses, particularly our idols. We see how impotent they are, how helpless they are to provide the kind of protection and provision we can get only from God. It is a kindness that God exposes the impotence and fragility of our idols.

We saw just such an exposure this week in the outrage in Washington, when rioters swarmed the Capitol and briefly occupied the building, while Congressmen and staffers huddled in terror in locked down offices.

We’ve seen attacks like that on our nation’s capital before, but not with the waving of American flags.

And Confederate flags.

And, most distressing, flags bearing the name of Christ.

It was a humiliating moment for all of us. As Americans, we saw an assault on the very process that has distinguished us as the oldest democracy in the world.

As Christians, we were dismayed to see that people proudly bearing the name of Christ were among the offenders.

But before we go finger-wagging at the philistines who mobbed the Capitol, let’s step back for a moment and consider what we’ve seen.

What we saw Wednesday was the exposure of our idolatry as a nation.

I say “our” idolatry because some of the response has been every bit as idolatrous as the initial offense. Some commentators have borrowed the language of liturgy to express their outrage, using words like “sacred” to describe the public spaces the protestors occupied, as if the Capitol building were a cathedral.

The idolatry on display in the assault: Rioters were violent because they felt that their idol – their sacred ideology, their cult of personality – was being violated. Their zeal overwhelmed their commitment to the democratic process, and they resorted to violence.

The idolatry on display in response: Many more were outraged because their own idols had also been violated – our sacred democratic process, the time-honored norms of behavior in a participatory democracy, the hallowed halls of our national government. 

It is as human to worship as it is bird-like to sing, dog-like to bark, duck-like to quack. Humans are worshiping creatures. If we do not worship the One True God – who made us and loves us and wants to bring us back from our exile – then we will worship some good thing in the world He created: a great man or woman, an ideology, a tradition, a cause, even our families or ministries.

And when we turn our worshiping gaze away from God to any created thing, we see idolatry’s warping effect.

In Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol, it was greed that warped the affections and sensibilities of the young Ebenezer Scrooge, ruining all his relationships and sentencing him to a lonely, bitter old age.

In real life, it was a mother’s love taken to idolatrous proportions that prompted a Texas woman to hire a hit man to take out her daughter’s cheer-leading rival.

From the outside – as we look at Scrooge, at the Texas mother, at the rioters in Washington – we can clearly see how short-sighted pursuit of a good thing (financial security, mother’s love, love of country) can pervert normal reasoning and create a moral monster.

But things look different from the inside, when our own idols are in the picture. John Calvin famously observed that the human heart is a veritable factory of idols. Our broken nature constantly prompts us to convert – and pervert – something in this life into an idol. And just in case our wicked hearts run out of ideas, our culture is more than ready to step in with its own suggestions.

So what did we see this week in Washington?

We saw our own wicked hearts on display. We saw what happens when men – even men and women naming Christ – turn their worshiping hearts away from God to idols.

But we are no position to pass judgment on their idolatry. There is not much difference between the obvious idolatry of the rioters and the more respectable forms of idolatry that tempt me; it is a difference of degree and not kind. I too am a born idolater.

And we saw the name of Christ blasphemed. We know that God doesn’t wring His hands over public relations fiascos the way we do, but there is no question that our rapidly secularizing nation was given another reason to dismiss Christians and Christianity and even Christ as an offensive and irrelevant relic from our nation’s past.

So how do we respond to this week’s outrage? Sure, there are political and legal ramifications to what happened, and we pray that all of those who are responsible for the outrage will be held accountable.

But for my part, I see a glimpse of the terrifying warping effect of idolatry, and I see what kind of man I can be if I let idols rule my heart. And I am called to bitter tears of repentance for my own sin, for the sins of the church, for the sins of our nation.    

Persevere,
Paul Pyle
Discipleship Pastor

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