Sept 3 - Psalm 16:4

Those who chase after other gods

will be filled with sorrow.

Psalm 16:4

I shouldn’t doubt God’s wisdom. I especially shouldn’t doubt God’s commands. Nevertheless, I have a least favorite commandment.

           

It’s not one that you might imagine. It’s not some sin I’m aching to avoid. Rather, I just don’t see the point in it.

In the second commandment, God tells Moses and us, “"Do not make idols of any kind … You must never worship or bow down to them …” (Ex 20:4-5).

Now, let me backpedal a little from a first overstatement. I do see some point in this command. It would be silly to make clay frogs and say, “This represents the Lord God Almighty.” Other ancient religions did this.

It would be sillier still to proclaim that the God who made heaven and earth lived in objects made by human hands. (Paul chastised the Athenians about this in Acts 17:22-28)

With that said, however, I’ve never seen many truly faithful Christians picking out a favorite tree or a stuffed frog or a used Buick and imagining that God’s presence dwelled therein.

And yet we do it all the time.

How often have you heard a Christian say, “Well, I don’t envision God as a ________”? And we take some aspect of God described in the Bible, and we say, I don’t agree with that?

Have you ever done that?

•      Have you ever said, I view God as loving, but I could never conceive of him as angry. (And yet fourteen times, scripture specifically says: “the anger of the Lord was kindled.”)
•      Have you ever said, “my God is forgiving, but it sounds so harsh to call him a judge.” (And yet the New Testament is filled with the promise that God will “judge the living and the dead.”)
•      Have you ever heard anyone say, I could never believe in a God who sends people to hell. (First, God’s whole purpose is to invite people to heaven – not cast his children into hell! Nevertheless, hell is an undeniable destination as told repeatedly through the Biblical story.) 

The question is: Have you ever done that?

The answer is: When we do, we’ve made an idol.

It’s not an idol made with human hands. Nevertheless, it’s a false picture of God, forming in our minds. We are creating images of the Lord that are different from what scripture tells us that he really is.

We’d never be so blasphemous as to say, “God is in this clay frog.” And yet we regularly put the Lord in a box – loving but not judging, for example – and proudly tell others of the limited way in which we view him.

God is not the-God-of-the-box.

He’s infinitely bigger.

If you ever pause to think about this commandment, remember this advice: “Any depiction of God that makes our Lord seem smaller is probably false!”

In Christ’s Love,

a guy who doesn’t chase after other gods,

(but has to occasionally chase

misconceptions out of his own head)