- Flee from Idolatry

IDOLATRY IS OF ALL SINS THE MOST HATEFUL to God because it is in essence a defamation of the divine character. It holds a low opinion of God, and when it advertises that opinion, it is guilty of circulating an evil rumor about the Majesty in the heavens. Thus it slanders the Deity. No wonder God hates it.
We should beware of the comfortable habit of assuming that idolatry is found only in heathen lands and that civilized people are free from it. This is an error and results from pride and superficial thinking. The truth is that idolatry is found wherever mankind is found. Whoever entertains an unworthy conception of God is throwing his or her heart wide open to the sin of idolatry. Let that person go on to personalize his or her low mental image of the Deity and pray to it, and he or she has become an idolater—and this is regardless of his or her nominal profession of Christianity.
It is vitally important that we think soundly about God. Since He is the foundation of all our religious beliefs, it follows that if we err in our ideas of God, we will go astray on everything else.
The false gods of mankind have been and are many—almost as many as the worshipers themselves. It would require a good-size book just to list the gods that have received a name and been worshiped at sometime somewhere in the world. For sheer depravity the obscene phallic gods of the ancients were probably the lowest. Near to them and not far up on the scale came the scarab, the serpent, the bull and a whole menagerie of birds, four-footed beasts and creeping things. Paul says plainly that such degraded worship sprang from vain imaginations and darkened hearts resulting from the rejection of the knowledge of God.
Higher up the ladder came the nobler gods of the high-thinking philosophers and religionists of Greece, Persia and India. These represented the finest thinking about God by serious truth-seekers, but they fell short of the true God because they originated in the minds of fallen men and did not have the advantage of God’s self-revelation to purify and correct their concepts. Their worship was and is idolatry.
It would be consoling to believe that such error is a thing of the past, that it belongs to the childhood of the race and to times and places long ago and far removed. But I wonder whether we would be justified in such a conclusion.
Where shall we classify the many current gods? What about the glorified chairman of the board of the American businessman? Or the story-telling, back-slapping god of some of the service clubs? Or the broad-shouldered, ruddy-faced god who hears the prayers of pugilists bent on mayhem and money? Then there is the dreamy-eyed god of the unregenerate poet. This god is cozy and aesthetic and likes to fellowship with anybody who thinks high thoughts and believes in social equality.
Two other modern gods might be mentioned, different from each other in character and yet much alike in that they are both false gods. One is the tricky, unscrupulous god of the superstitious. He is the god of the chain-letter brigade and of all those who practice white magic. Though he is a cheap, class-D god, he still has many devotees in the United States. The other is the unwieldy, brain-heavy god of the unconverted theologian. He is known only to the intellectually elite, shows marked partiality to the learned and hobnobs exclusively with men possessing many degrees.
The Scriptures are the only trustworthy revelation of God, and we depart from them at our own peril. Nature tells us something about Him but not enough to save us from drawing erroneous conclusions about Him. What we can learn from nature must be completed and corrected by the Scriptures if we would escape wrong and unworthy concepts of God.
The heavens declare Thy glory, Lord!
In every star Thy wisdom shines;
But when our eyes behold Thy Word,
We read Thy name in fairer lines.
Of course the final revelation of God is Christ. “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” “He is the image of the invisible God the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.” To know and follow Christ is to be saved from all forms of idolatry.