Tag Archives: idolatry

Richard Sibbes, The Backsliding Sinner, 4.4

05 Wednesday Jan 2022

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The esteem of God and the esteem of the creature are in “balance”: what esteem we have for one is esteem we do not place upon the other. In the definition of idolatry which explains an esteem of the creature as the basis for our security and trust also contains a corollary: to that same extent, we denigrate God:

In what measure and degree we apprehend God aright to be the all-sufficient true God, in that measure we cast away all false confidence whatsoever.

We are finite creatures with finite love and faith. When we bestow faith upon the creature, that is faith we do not bestow upon God:

The more or less we conceive of God as we should do, so the more or less we disclaim confidence in the creature. Those who in their affections of joy, love, affiance, and delight, are taken up too much with the creature, say what they will, profess to all the world by their practice that they know not God. By the contrary, those who know and apprehend him in his greatness and goodness as he should be apprehended, in that proportion they withdraw their affections from the creature and all things else. 

He then provides an illustration, based upon a balance with two scales. As one sides goes up, the other side necessarily goes down:

It is with the soul in this case as with a balance. If the one scale be drawn down by a weight put in it, the other is lifted up. So where God weighs down in the soul, all other things are light; and where other things prevail, there God is set light. 

I think that this underscores a problem with our sanctification, our discipleship, our living for God. We begin with a natural inclination toward the creature: it seems more real, more tangible. We have a personal sense of control. Perhaps that is why Jesus uses money as the opposite to God: you can serve one or the other. Money gives one the ability to command the creature. 

Then we learn such trust in the creature is idolatrous, so we take our hands off of the creature, but we don’t lay hold of God. We for a moment will say we do not trust the creature, but we do not place that trust wholeheartedly upon God. That leaves us unstable; then, too easily we return to the creature. 

There is a scene where one is dangling from a rope. The hero says let go of the rope and take my hand. It is as we let go of the rope and then do not grab for the hero. Trusting in our strength we return to the rope and are no better off, and likely much worse for the effort. 

That which is taken from the creature, they find in God. And this is the reason why the world so malign good and sound Christians. They think, when God gets, that they lose a feather, as we say, some of their strength. 

Surely so it is; for when a Christian turns to God and becomes sound, he comes to have a mean esteem of that which formerly was great in his sight. His judgment is otherwise, as we see here, Asshur, horses, idols, and all, they esteem nothing of them. Horses and the like are good, useful, and necessary to serve God’s providence in the use of means; not to trust in, or make co-ordinate with God. 

Richard Sibbes, The Backsliding Sinner 4.1

28 Tuesday Dec 2021

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In the fourth sermon, Sibbes continues his examination of the nature of the prayer of repentance. He summarizes his previous points as follows:

The Holy Ghost therefore doth prescribe them, together with prayer and thanksgiving, reformation. ‘Asshur shall not save us; we will not ride upon horses; neither will we say any more to the works of our hands, Ye are our gods: for in thee the fatherless findeth mercy.’ So that here you have reformation joined with prayer and praise. Whence we observed divers things: that without reformation our prayers are abominable; that in repentance there must be reformation of our special sin; which here they do. 

He now adds a further observation, “In reformation, we must go not only to the outward delinquencies, but to the spring of them, which is some breach of the first table.”

Here is the point: All sin, whether adultery, robbery, murder, et cetera, must trace its origin to a rebellion against God. When the relationship toward God is amiss, our relationship to the creation likewise suffers

The root of all sin, is the deficiency of obedience to some command of the first table. When confidence is not pitched aright in God, or when it is misapplied, and misfastened to the creature: when the soul sets up somewhat for a stay and prop unto it, which it should not do, this is a spiritual and subtle sin, and must be repented of,

He then explains that “the spring head” of sin is “false confidence.” This false confidence in the creature is idolatry. And we are “naturally prone to idolatry.”

He explains two species of idolatry:

1. By attributing to the creature that which is proper to God only, investing it with God’s properties; or,

2. By worshipping the true God in a false manner.

A great deal of the sermon then concerns whether images may be used in the worship of God and whether the worship (even under a different term) of angels or saints is permitted. Being a devout Puritan, Sibbes has no room for images or prayers directed to angels or saints. 

There is an interesting aside in his argument concerning a national religion. Sibbes rightly says, “Religion, though it cannot be forced.” He then says that the nation should train the child in the proper means of religion; which seems incoherent. If true religion can only be the product of faith and repentance, as opposed to outward behavior divorced from sincere faith and repentance; then religion cannot be forced it very nature. This is a point on which I disagree with the heavenly doctor.

Sibbes then takes up the idol set up in the heart, what one loves or fears is god

But this is not all; we must know that there be other idols than the idols which we make with our hands. Besides these religious idols, there be secular idols in the world, such as men set up to themselves in their own hearts. Whatsoever takes up the heart most, which they attribute more to than to God, that is their idol, their god. A man’s love, a man’s fear, is his god. 

Having made the proposition, he then illustrates the point:

If a man fear greatness rather than God, that he had rather displease God than any great person, they are his idols for the time. ‘The fear of a man brings a snare,’ Prov. 29:25, saith the wise man. And those who get the favour of any in place, sacrifice therefore their credit, profession, religion, and souls, it is gross idolatry; dangerous to the party, and dangerous to themselves. It was the ruin of Herod to have that applause given to him, and taken by him, ‘The voice of God, and not of man,’ Acts 12:22. So for any to be blown up with flatterers, that lift them up above their due measure, it is an exceeding wrong to them, prejudiceth their comfort, and will prove ill in the conclusion; indeed, treason against their souls.

This trusting in the creature always debases the man. We are created to have only God as our God: not the opinion of other human beings, or the accumulation of stones and metal. And so we become debased because we become what we worship:

So there is a baser sort of idolaters, who sacrifice their credit and state, whatsoever is good within them, their whole powers, to their base and filthy pleasures. Thus man is degenerate since his fall, that he makes that his god which is meaner than himself. Man, that was ordained for everlasting happiness and communion with God, is now brought to place his happiness and contentment in base pleasures. Whereas it is with the soul of man for good or ill, as it applies itself to that which is greater or meaner than itself. If it apply itself to confidence and affiance in God, then it is better. For it is the happiness of the soul to have communion with the Spring of goodness, as David speaks, ‘It is good for me to draw near to God,’ &c., Ps. 73:28. When we suffer the soul to cleave in affiance to earthly things, it grows in some measure to the nature of the things adhered to. When we love the world and earthly things, we are earthly. 

Only God can free us from idolatry:

Till the Spirit of God touch the soul, as the loadstone doth the heavy iron, drawing it up, as it were, it will cleave to the creature, to baser things than itself, and so makes the creature an idol, which is the common idolatry of these times.

And finally, the various idols made by different people are based in the temperament of the idolator:

Some make favour, as the ambitious person; some their pleasures, as baser persons of meaner condition; and some riches. Every man as their temper and as their temptations are.

Finally, the creature will make a god will prove our ruin; the idol rather than saving us, ruins us:

Now, it is not enough to be sound in religion one way in the main; but we must be sound every way, without any touch of idolatry. In a special manner the apostle calls the ‘covetous man an idolater,’ Eph. 5:5, because he makes riches his castle, thinking to carry anything with his wealth. But his riches oftentimes prove his ruin; for whatsoever a man loves more than God, God will make it his bane and ruin; at least, be sure to take it away, if God mean to save the party. Therefore, here they say, ‘Asshur shall not save us; we will not ride upon horses; neither will we say any more to the works of our hands, Ye are our gods.’

The pattern of biblical judgment

05 Friday Jun 2020

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Biblical judgment follows a consistent pattern: we judged on the basis of our idol 

Consider the plagues of Egypt. The Pharaoh orders the death of infant boys; one by one they are cast into the river, the Nile, that great god of Egypt. The Nile brings life in the desert: their water, their food, their safety are all bound up in that great god.

But when God sets his eyes upon Egypt, it is the Nile that fails. The blood of the boys wells and the river is blood. The life of Egypt has become a gushing artery of death. The Nile has been killed and kills in turn.

The sun was a great god, the source of life. And so, God in his turns, kills the sun. The sky grows dark at day.

The Pharaoh himself is the issue of the sun. The Pharaoh’s firstborn boy is likewise a god and the son of a god. Rather than turn their worship to the true Creator, the Egyptians gave their praise to the boy in his turn.

And so the Pharaoh who brought death to the son of his slaves finds death in his own home. 

There is a pattern here, the idol matches the judgment. One the type, the other the antitype. 

Our idols fail precisely in their promise. They promise life, but deliver death. 

The judgment need not be the end. When God first struck the Nile, the plea was for Egypt to turn. When God brought night and day, the proof was the Sun was no god. But persistence in rebellion is its own curse. And finally, the child of a lie, the promise which could not deliver, the god who is no God will fail. 

Chained to an idol

30 Thursday Apr 2020

Posted by in Ante-Nicene, Idolatry, Uncategorized

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For that wicked reptile monster, by his enchantments, enslaves and plagues men even till now; inflicting, as seems to me, such barbarous vengeance on them as those who are said to bind the captives to corpses till they rot together. This wicked tyrant and serpent, accordingly, binding fast with the miserable chain of superstition whomsoever he can draw to his side from their birth, to stones, and stocks, and images, and such like idols, may with truth be said to have taken and buried living men with those dead idols, till both suffer corruption together.

Therefore (for the seducer is one and the same) he that at the beginning brought Eve down to death, now brings thither the rest of mankind.

Clement of Alexandria, “Exhortation to the Heathen,” in Fathers of the Second Century: Hermas, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus, and Clement of Alexandria (Entire), ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, vol. 2, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1885), 173.

This quotation is interesting on a few grounds. First, it contains a source for the not-uncommon image used in sermons particular on Romans 7:24 (who will deliver me from this body of death). But I note that even Clement didn’t have a definite source of the story beyond the indefinite “they say” (legousin, in the original).

Second, it is a striking description of the danger and evil of idolatry: “to have taken and buried living men with those dead idols, till both suffer corruption together.” To have an idol is to be shackled to an idol.

A similar image is used of addictions in our day, which is appropriate seeing addiction is another way to understand magic and idolatry. It is to be chained to, buried with.

Our desire to subvert the text

02 Thursday Apr 2020

Posted by in Bibliology, Scripture, Uncategorized

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In his essay, “God and the Bible,” in the volume The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures Peter F. Jensen, responds to proposition that the Scripture is a word about God. Or, he quotes Brunner, “The spoken word is an indirect revelation when it bears witness to the real revelation: Jesus Christ, the personal self-manifestation of God, Emmanuel.” To respond to this challenge, states the issue as whether the “classical position” that the words of Scripture are the word of God; or, is there a way in which we can, by means of the Spirit, come to Christ effectively bypassing the words in the book?

There is a profound temptation here to want not some words but a person. Indeed, when phrased in that way, the “classical position” sounds foolish and misguided. I will not recount his argument here, which is well-structured and persuasive. He effectively demonstrates that there is no gospel without holding fast to the “classical position.” I cannot do that argument justice without simply repeating what he wrote.

What do wish to underscore here is the nature of the temptation to go-around the text. The desire to go around the text seems to have two roots as referenced by Jensen. First, there is the matter of idolatry; an argument which he traces to Tyndale. Second, he locates the movement in a desire for autonomy.

Jensen notes that our forebearers sought for “godliness” by means of obedience (see page 494), while we moderns speak of “spirituality”. But a desire for “spirituality” can easily become a guise for autonomy. We are dependent creatures who must have a clear rule to be obedient. “ A human life lived without the rule of God would be like a game of tennis without a net.” (495).

But I would like to venture an observation on idolatry and the textual nature of Christianity. Idolatry is a desire for a god whom we can control; an object of technology and desire. The god created is a god whom conforms to my desire.

I am in place one. My desire is place two; but reality is place three. I use the god of my idolatry to coerce reality to conform to my present desire.

When one claims a spirituality which supersedes the text and goes-around the text, and does not need the text; then my desires will become the “prompting of the Spirit.” Getting what I want will be the will of Christ. It is the strategy which underlies so much doctrinal change (as if a vote of some denominational leaders had the power to rewrite the Bible).

Words are a brake on hazy thinking and deceitful desires. I am well-aware of the strategies to subvert a text and to torture words into saying what I like. That is it’s own conversation.

And yes, there can be difficult questions. But so little of the trouble in life comes from the difficult questions about the Bible.  The “you can make it say whatever you want” dodge is written by people who have no idea what the text says. That is merely a dodge for one who wants to ignore the text.

The words of the text stand athwart our desire to create our own god.  We have to play deceitfully with the words to justify our own deceitful desires. A “modern” stance which simply seeks a make-believe Jesus on the basis of a “Spirit” which is remarkably consistently with my personal inclinations at the moment (sometimes this shows up when a Christian embarks on a path of disobedience and justifies it on the basis that he feels “peace about it.”)

The pattern laid out in Scripture, from Adam on, is God speaks and we obey. Our obedience is bound up with both our knowledge of God and our love of God. Paul, in Romans writes of the “obedience of faith.” But, “such a piety of obedience clashes deeply with our Western contemporaries to promote human autonomy as the highest aspiration.” (493). And hence, the desire to subvert the text.

As for the entire book, highly recommended. This is a remarkably comprehensive work on the authority of Scripture at over 1200 pages; Jensen providing one of the many essays. Please do not confuse any limitations in my writing with the very fine work done by Jensen in his essay.

Study Guide: Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment 10.5

15 Tuesday Aug 2017

Posted by in Jeremiah Burroughs, Study Guide, Uncategorized

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Contentment Fits us for Mercy

1 What relationship does Burroughs draw from receiving mercy from God and contentment?

 

2 Burroughs makes multiple analogies help illustrate God’s actions. Recount them and explain how they apply.

 

3 When we are discontent, what must we believe about God’s power? Goodness? Wisdom? Strength?

 

4  When we are discontent, are we seeking what God has provided for us, or what we have determined we deserve?

 

5  Read James 1:2-4. What does God here intend for those who fall into trials?

 

6 Read Romans 5:1-5. What does God intend for those who fall into trials?

 

7  Read 2 Corinthians 1:8-9. What does God intend for those fall into trials?

 

8  When we are discontent in a trial, what do we seek?

 

9  Look again at Burroughs’ definition of contentment?

 

10 Contentment is a willingness to receive what God has to give us.

 

11  All temptation preys upon discontentment: We are in a circumstance. We face X, but we desire Y. We are not content with what we have at present. Temptation comes along and offers to us Y, at the cost of disobeying God. The temptation takes place in the distance between what we have and what we want.

 

You                           Current Reality

 

You                                                                 What you desire

 

You may become angry, covetous, deceitful, slanderous, envying, lustful, stealing, et cetera to get what you want. At one level, discontentment is a desire to sin and a desire to not be satisfied with what God has provided.

This relates to idoltary as follows:

An idol is a thing which use to get what we want. Israel prayed to Baal because they thought Baal could make them rich, et cetera. When we throw a fit and demand that God give us what we want because we want it, we are treating God as a servant, as an idol.  In such a circumstance, what can God give to us?

This is how idolatry functioned in Old Testament. The fundamental problem with the Israelites in the Old Testament was that they reserved for themselves the prerogative to determine what they needed and when they needed it, instead of trusting the Lord. The self-oriented hearts of the Israelites then looked to the world (the neighbors in their midst) and followed their lead in blowing to gods that were not God in order to satisfy the lusts of their self-exalting hearts. When this is comprehended, it portrays the terrible irony of Israelite false worship. When the Israelites followed the lead of their neighbors and bowed before blocks of wood, that act of false worship underlined their desire for autonomy and, in an ironic way, was an exultation of themselves even more than of the idol. The idol itself was incidental; (in our world it could be a pornographic picture, a spouse as the particular object of codependency, or an overprotective mother’s controlling fear attached specifically to her children) the self-exalting heart was the problems, which remains the problem today.

The main problem sinful people have is not idols of the heart per se. The main problem certainly involves idols and is rooted in the heart, but the idols are manifestations of the deeper problem. The heart problems is self-exultation, and idols are two or three steps removed. A self-exalting heart that grasps after autonomy is the Grand Unifying Theory (GUT) that unites all idols. Even though idols change from culture to culture and from individual to individual within a culture, the fundamental problem of humanity has not changed since Genesis 3: sinful people want – more than anything in the whole world – to be God.

Heath Lambert, The Biblical Counseling Movement After Adams (Wheaton: Crossway, 2012), 148. Considering this: how can one who is insistent upon God bowing to his will expect anything from God.

12  Read Psalm 131 and explain how the psalmist is at peace. How does this relate to contentment and temptation?

When the godly are burdened and afflicted that way and the wicked are hardened and go unpunished and God sits in wait for them as if the affairs of this world were of no concern to him, what can be said but that he appears to be doing one thing but is doing another and does not wish to reveal that he is the Judge until he knows the time is right? Now, if we want to know why, we will be left in confusion. Consequently, we must conclude that God’s judgments are secret and astonishing and surpass human understanding and that our minds fail us, but that we must revere God’s secrets, which are not known to us even as we confess that he is just despite the fact we find what he does strange. Moreover,

John Calvin. Sermons on Job, Volume 2: Chapters 15-31 (Kindle Locations 7559-7564). The Banner of Truth Trust.

Luther on Idolatry

11 Thursday May 2017

Posted by in Biblical Counseling, Martin Luther, Theology of Biblical Counseling, Uncategorized

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Idolatry does not consist merely of erecting an image and praying to it, but it is primarily a matter of the heart, which fixes its gaze upon other things and seeks help and consolation from creatures, saints, or devils. It neither cares for God nor expects good things from God sufficiently to trust that God wants to help, nor does it believe that whatever good it encounters comes from God.

Kirsi I. Stjerna, “The Large Catechism of Dr. Martin Luther,” in Word and Faith, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand, Kirsi I. Stjerna, and Timothy J. Wengert, vol. 2, The Annotated Luther (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015), 302–303.

Book Review: Identity and Idolatry The image of God and its inversion

13 Wednesday Apr 2016

Posted by in Book Review, Culture, Idolatry, imago dei, Thesis, Uncategorized

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Identity and Idolatry
The image of God and its inversion
Richard Lints
172 page IVP, 2015

In the first chapter, Lints makes clear that this discussion about the imago Dei will not concern “human nature”, but rather is an “account about how life is lived as reflections of God and as reflected in our communal contexts” (24). “The imago Dei captures this transitory reality – as an image is contingent upon the object for its identity, so the imago Dei is contingent upon God for its identity” (29).

In this respect, Lints’ thesis matches closely with the aphorism of Beale’s title, “We Become What We Worship.”

Chapter 2, “A Strange Bridge” works out the concept of “image” in some detail. The last paragraph of the chapter has this wonderful sentence, “Image bearers are not intrinsically idolatrous though they are doxologically fragile” (42).

The next two chapters begin to work the biblical text in greater detail as it concerns “image.” Being made as the image of God, we are hardwired, if you will to reflect: “Humans are made in such a way as to yearn for something beyond themselves that grants them significance, most notably the God who made them as his image” (62).

This thread will be developed in the second half of the book, when Lints turns to the question of
idolatry.

There is profound irony in idolatry. Human beings will become conformed to what we worship — we are built to worship and reflect (which are aspects of the same process). Now an idol is an image created by human desire coupled with the promise of fulfillment:

It was because the fragility of the human heart disposed it to yearn for security on its own terms. This disposition was made all the more dangerous when it was underwritten with the power to create gods in their own imagination. This points at the reality that idolatry was not in the first instance a cognitive error (believing in other gods) but a fallacy of the heart (yearning for control) (86).

It is a god who can be controlled and made fulfill and meet the human desire: and yet, that desire cannot be met by the idol, because the cannot do anything. And since those who make idols “become like them” (Ps. 115:8; interesting that Lints does not interact with this verse and only once makes mention of the Psalm; however, the concept is everywhere present in his discussion of idolatry), the idol worshipper becomes captivated by and transformed in unfulfilled desire:

Paul is insistent that idols will not deliver on their promises. Instead they create consuming passions in which there is deliverance. This inverted state is surprising from one angle-how foolish humans are to suppose they can have a god on their own terms. And yet the inversion produces an entirely predictable consequence — abandoning God results in an identity crisis wherein one’s safety and significance become endlessly fragile (111).
Chapter 7, “The rise of suspicion: the religious criticism of religion” is a brilliant summation of 19th philosophy its critique of Christianity — a critique which still plays in the broader culture. I am honestly amazed at Lints ability to aptly and fairly summarize Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche in such a small space.I have lectured on these most of these men and know who hard they are to summarize in any cogent and fair manner.

The final chapter is good solid advice for Christians.

There are enormous gaps in my discussion of this book — because I want you to buy it and use it.