On
Faith and Idolatry
July
22, 2022
One of the
gravest sins Hebrew Scripture condemns is the sin of idolatry. It is one of the
two primary sins of the Israelites (economic and social injustice being the
other) that cause Yahweh to abandon both Hebrew kingdoms, Israel and Judah, to
the Gentile empires of Assyria and Babylon. That, at least, is how Hebrew
Scripture tells the story. The condemnation of idolatry appears often in the
books of the prophets. Here’s a verse from the prophet Hosea that presents the
evil of idolatry quite clearly:
The more I called
them,
The more they went from me;
They kept sacrificing to the Baals,
and offering incense to idols.
Hosea 11:2.
We see in this passage just what
ancient Israel thought idolatry was, or at least what the ancient Hebrew
prophet thought it was. Hosea presents this verse as being the words of Yahweh,
the only god of the Hebrew people. That’s who the “me” in this verse is. Baal
(singular) was the chief god of the native Canaanites, the people whose land
the Hebrews occupied and took over (at least as the Old Testament tells the
story). Throughout the Old Testament we repeatedly hear of the Hebrew people
worshipping not their god Yahweh but rather Baal and the other gods and
goddesses of Canaanite religion. “Baal” became the term used to designate most
any god the people were worshipping other than Yahweh. In Hebrew Scripture
idolatry mostly means that worshipping of other gods. It can also mean
worshipping physical representations of the gods of other peoples. In Hebrew
Scripture Yahweh so demands that the Israelites worship only him that he allows
Gentiles to destroy both Hebrew kingdoms, Israel by the Assyrians in 722 BCE
and Judah by the Babylonians in 536 BCE.
Today of course,
no one worships Baal or any other Canaanite god or goddess. So does that mean
that idolatry has no meaning for us today? Of course not. Today the word
idolatry has a meaning similar to if not perfectly identical with its meaning
in Hebrew scripture. But to understand what idolatry is today we have to start
with a particular understanding of what faith is.[1]
Faith, in this way of understanding it, is not holding a certain set of
beliefs. It is rather having an “ultimate concern.” To have faith in something
or someone is to have that something or someone be more important to you than
anything else. Be something to which you will subordinate everything else. Your
ultimate concern is that in which you have faith. Perhaps a quick review of a
story from the Old Testament that many of us find disturbing will make the
notion of an ultimate concern clearer.
At Genesis
22:1-19 we find a story that has three main characters, Abraham, his son Isaac,
and God. In the story God commands Abraham to take Isaac to a certain place and
there to make him a burnt offering to God. In other words, God has commanded
Abraham to kill his son Isaac and burn his body as a sacrifice to God. Abraham
sets out to do it. Of course, he doesn’t tell Isaac what he really intends to
do. He just gathers wood to burn and fire to set it ablaze and sets off with
Isaac for the place God will show him. When Isaac asks where the lamb is for
the burnt offering, Abraham says God will provide the lamb. When they reach the
place for the sacrifice, Abraham binds Isaac and puts him on the wood as the
sacrifice. He takes his knife and reaches out to kill his son. Whereupon God
intervenes, tells Abraham not to harm the boy, and provides a ram for the
sacrifice in place of Isaac.
Everyone I know
who has read this story has been horrified by it, as indeed I have been myself.
I have a son, and I would never, under any circumstance, do to him what Abraham
did to Isaac, much less the more it seems Abraham would have done had God not
intervened. We think, how could the great patriarch Abraham, progenitor of both
the Jewish and the Arab people, do such a thing? Kill his son? Really? We all
say no. We make excuses like the God I know, love, and seek to serve would
never order anyone to do such a thing, as indeed I am convinced God never
would. Kill my son as a sacrifice to God or for any other reason? No! Never!
So how could Abraham
be prepared to do it, as he certainly appears to be in this story? The answer
is, God was Abraham’s ultimate concern. Abraham subordinated everything in his
life to his God. He even subordinated his son and the evil of what we would
call murder to God. If God said do it, Abraham would do it. Nothing was more
important to him than God. God truly was Abraham’s ultimate concern. That’s why
he was quite prepared to kill his own son if that was what God told him to do.[2]
If faith is
having an ultimate concern, what then is idolatry? It is to make something that
is not truly ultimate your ultimate concern. It is, in other words, to make
something other than God your ultimate concern, for only God is truly ultimate.
People do that all the time. A great many Americans make their nation their
ultimate concern. They take their identity from their nation. They expect a
kind of salvation from it, for they believe that it will provide them with
everything they need. They will even kill and die for their nation if their
nation commands them to do it. Not kill in the sense of what we call murder
perhaps, but certainly in their country’s military. Other Americans make what
we take to be success as their ultimate concern. Ignoring all other aspects of
their life, they will work themselves to death in order to achieve it. They
subordinate everything else to their drive to achieve what their society tells
them is success. They will sacrifice their health, their relationship with
their family, and everything else to that drive, to that ultimate concern. And
I think we have to be honest here. For most of us, isn’t our family our
ultimate concern? I believe that my family is my ultimate concern. I would do
for them what I would not do for anyone else. I would die for them if their
survival required my death. Nothing is more important to me than they are.
In all these
instances a person has made something that is not ultimate their ultimate
concern. In other words, in each of these cases a person has committed
idolatry. An idol is that which a person has made ultimate for themselves that
is not truly ultimate. They have made something that just isn’t God their god.
Idolatry is not worshipping Allah or Yahweh rather than God because Allah and
Yahweh are God. It is making something finite, limited, human your god rather
than the true God.
Idolatry
certainly can give life meaning. The nation and service to it give meaning to
the life of the super patriot. Subordinating everything to the drive for
success gives meaning of a sort to the social and economic climber’s life. My
family gives meaning to my life. Yet all of those things and a great many more
that people make ultimate in their lives are the Baals of our world today. They
are false gods. We so often make one of them our ultimate concern, but they are
not ultimate. Only God is ultimate. Only God is above and beyond everything
else while still being present in and for everything else. Perhaps calling God
ultimate is not how you usually speak of God. Fine. It’s not the way I usually
speak of God either. Nonetheless, ultimate is probably God’s defining
characteristic. Nothing else is ultimate the way God is.
And here’s the
thing about the false gods that we make our ultimate concern. Any idol, any
false god, will inevitably fail us. Our nation makes a fascist its president.
It gets bogged down in an unwinnable and illegal war of aggression. It fails to
care for its people most in need of care. In one or more of these things the
nation has failed the person who has made it their ultimate concern. Social and
material success fails those committed to it all the time too. Our social
climber who has made success their ultimate concern will almost certainly find
that the kind of success they have sought is not the panacea they thought it
would be. It might satisfy the body, but it impoverishes the spirit. Nothing is
ever enough. Many people whose lives have been about social and economic
success become alcoholics or drug addicts. Their marriages fail. Far too many
of them die believing that they have wasted their lives living for things that
do not really matter while neglecting the things that do. Families fail us too.
Children do things their parents are convinced are harmful to themselves or
others. Relations are severed over important or inconsequential things.
Families break up, and family members become alienated from each other. All of
these ultimate concerns that are not ultimate can and nearly invariably will
fail us. Idols always fail us.
Only that which
is truly ultimate never fails us, and only God is truly ultimate. God never
fails us because we stand always and forever in God’s grace. God never fails us
because God is always close at hand to support, comfort, or challenge us as we
have need. God never abandons us. God never tires of us. God doesn’t decide God
loves someone else, for God already loves everyone. God doesn’t get too busy to
pay attention to us. God doesn’t make bad decisions that harm us or anyone else.
God is never alienated from us, and we are never alienated from God. God is our
rock. Solid. Always present. Always there for us to hold onto. God is always
there as love, love far beyond our understanding, calling us to respond to God’s
love with love of God, others, and ourselves. God is the only truly ultimate.
So what is your
ultimate concern? In whom or what do you have faith? To whom or to what do you
entrust your life? These are not always easy questions to answer. Sometimes it
is hard for us to be honest with ourselves. All of us people of faith, I think,
want our answer to be God. Yet every time I try to convince myself that God is
my ultimate concern I’m brought up a bit short. I have to ask myself: OK, but
what about your family? Aren’t they really your ultimate concern? It’s not that
I worship my family. I don’t think they’re divine. But, like I said above, they’re
the ones for whom I would sacrifice everything. Would I sacrifice everything
for God the way Abraham was prepared to do? I want the answer to be yes, but I
have to be honest. It disturbs me some that I can’t say unequivocally, “Yes,
God is my ultimate concern,” but, honestly, I don’t think I can.
So am I lost? Are
you if you can’t truly say it either? I don’t think so. When I can’t make God
my ultimate concern I remember that God is a God of universal, unconditional
grace. Perhaps I sin when I don’t make God my ultimate concern. But I always
remember these words from Second Corinthians, where we read that God “reconciled
us to himself through Christ…that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world
to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.” 2 Corinthians
5:18b-19a. And I remember the Bible verse that is more important to me than any
other:
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels,
nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor
depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love
of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:38-39.
So is God my
ultimate concern? Do I have absolute, unconditional faith and trust in God? I’d
love to answer yes, but I don’t think I can. Is God your ultimate concern? If
not, or if you’re not sure, know that God understands. God forgives even before
we ask for forgiveness. For that great grace let all the people say, “Thanks be
to God!”
[1] This
analysis comes from the great twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich and
more particularly from his book Dynamics of Faith. That book, by the
way, is the one that thirty years ago first made it possible for me to be a committed
Christian.
[2]
The nineteenth century Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard wrote a book
titled Fear and Trembling about this story. In that book he argues that
Abraham was fully justified in what he did and was prepared to do to Isaac.
Kierkegaard’s point was that true faith demands that kind of commitment. He
didn’t use the term ultimate concern, but Tillich stands very much if the
Kierkegaard’s tradition.
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