Notes on the Nature of Sin, Part Three

The Progress of Idolatry. 

First, idols attract us with a promise. “If you live for me and serve me, you’ll get what you’re ultimately after in life – happiness, success, significance, approval.”  So the immanent work idol promises the glory of success, security, power.  The fitness idol promises beauty, approval.  The money idol promises ultimate security, power. 

However, the idols’ promises are conditional: idols require sacrifice, service, work.  You’ll only get what the idol promises if you live for it.  You must pay the price the idol demands.  So, idolatry always generates tons of stuff you “must do” to get the life offered.  Secular idolaters experience these as “compulsions” or addictions.  For example, “I must work 80 hours this week, I must be with this person, I must have this sexual experience, I must exercise this much, eat this much…”  Religious idolaters experience these as “commands,” behaviors or feelings you must do in order to satisfy the god/religion/authority figures.  “I must share the gospel 5 times this week, must pray 30 minutes, never taste alchohol, be a leader in the church, meditate this way, complete this ritual..” 

Idolatry generates lusts of all kinds.  Lust is disordered desire; desire ‘out of bounds’ and desire ‘out of balance’ (Allender).

And idolatry is by nature legalistic; the salvation is offers is always only “by works.”

As the idol is served, the idol enslaves its worshipper. Though initially idolatry makes you feel like you’re in control, the longer you serve it the more your come under its control.  You find that your idol requires more and more sacrifice for fewer results. “An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula” (Lewis).  You keep “enlarging the very void you’re trying to fill” (Plantinga). This bondage leads to intense frustration, anger, pain, a sense of meaninglessness, as well as awful consequences in your own life.  Yet, even though life is unraveling, pride often keeps people going: “I will make this work!”

Keller points out that because idolatry is built on lies, our idols generate “delusional fields” in which our thinking and reasoning becomes deeply distorted and detached (to varying degrees) from reality.  Idolatry leads us to engage in all kinds of rationalizations, willful blindness, and avoiding/tampering with evidence.

In the end your life becomes a deeply distorted charicature of real human life as it was created to be lived. You always resemble what you worship (Jerram Barrs).  If you spend your life worshipping work you’re “all business.”  If you spend your life worshipping sex you wind up a “dirty old man, a perv.”  Someone who lives for money is a “miser.”  Idols turn us, literally, into a joke. But idols don’t only destroy us; they destroy the ones we love, our relationships; and depending on which idols we choose to serve, they can destroy our health, our finances, our careers, our minds, our emotions, our will.

Idols lie, curse and kill.

Idolatry is the sin beneath all our other sins.

Idolatry breaks the first commandment (have no other gods before me) and the greatest commandment (love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength); and breaking these central commands leads us to break others. 

Finally, idolatry breaks our hearts and the heart of God who made us for himself.

Changing Idol-Sets.

Idols are obviously destructive and many people become aware of this during the course of their lives, especially when some catastrophe hits as a result of idolatry.  For example, a sex or substance addict eventually gets fired and ends up bankrupt and divorced. He is tasting the bitter fruits of his sin.  He may see that his idolatry or addiction is ruining his life and may attempt to ‘turn over a new leaf’ and change.  However, it is very common for a person in this situation merely to choose another set of idols for which to live.  The idolater may exchange his alcohol/comfort idols for religion/control idols (his ‘bad’ idols for ‘good’ ones).  The reverse often happens as well: the religious idolater experiences some tragedy and embraces sex or substance idols for the comfort and escape they offer.  (In The Simpsons’ Movie, when the town panics everyone in the church runs into the bar and everyone in the bar runs into church!).  This is essentially what you see the younger brother and older brother doing in the parable in Luke 15.  The younger brother, presumably, has been living at home working for dad, doing the right thing.  He’s doing his religious/relational duty.  He then punts this relationship and becomes the rebellious prodigal.  His return causes the righteous older brother to rebel against the father, leave the house, humiliate his dad, makes insulting demands, just like the younger brother had done. 

Another way to put this: there’s something like a “righteous” vs. “rebellious” or “legalism” vs “license” dialectic movement to our sin.  We tend to go from one pole to the other, but all in the mode of idolatry and alienation from God.  In the south it’s very common to go from one pole to the other throughout life: growing up you’re religious, during the teenage/college years you’re rebellious, during early adulthood you’re religious again, during mid-life you’re rebellious, and the last phase is often religious. The tragedy is that so many do not truly ever repent of their idolatry and turn from their religion/rebellion idols to worship and serve the true God. 

Of course, it’s possible and quite common for these two different idol sets to co-exist in someone’s life at the same time; for us to be “righteous/legalistic” in one area of life (our public, church life) and “rebellious” in another area of life (our private life, our sex life, etc).  This produces the “double-life syndrome,” which is especially common among church pastors and leaders.