Idols on the Altar and Images in the Pulpit
by Cindy Bryan
Introduction
This article is the result of my first serious consideration of the faltering of the Protestant Church. Re-writing it now, I realize how much the study of idolatry brought me to the emergent conversation today.
There’s so much I don’t know- so much I need to learn in order to expand the message and meaning of these ideas. The vastness of what I don’t know became so daunting, in fact, that I put the entire project away for quite some time. Not surprisingly it was my new church family here on the net who encouraged me to bring it back out. (Thanks, Robby. I think.)
In the summer of 1994 my husband, Keith, and I began the process of building a house—contracting and doing much of the work ourselves. After almost a year of unending backaches and everything-else-aches, little to no sleep, and constant worry over sticking to the budget, we moved in.
It was June when we discovered the leak. We had nicked the kitchen drain pipe with a floor nail, and it had been slowly leaking for three months. The first sign of trouble was a warping hardwood floor. When the plumber discovered the source of the leak (read: ripped out the wall behind the sink), he said that the sheet-rock behind the cabinets was crumbly, and water was running down the wall beneath the house. (Note: I could go on and on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth that followed, but in deference to the greater message, I refrain.)
One morning soon afterwards, I woke from a vivid dream. My father and I were walking through his home, the house where I grew up. The walls and ceiling were crumbling and falling in due to an interior leak. The dream, clearly reminiscent of our situation, wasn't hard to imagine under the circumstances. But, as soon as I said aloud to Keith, "I dreamed that my father's house was falling down," I felt with intense clarity that the dream was really about my Heavenly Father's “house,” the Church.
Uncertain what to do in this unfamiliar territory, I began to pray earnestly for direction from God. Why would He give me such a dream? Was it really from Him? (I was still emotionally and physically exhausted, after all.) My request was answered with a stunning flash of two clear, but puzzling words. “Idols and images.”
I dove into a study that wholly consumed me for two years. I was haunted by a verse which repeatedly drew my attention: "Say this to him, 'This is what the Lord says: I will overthrow what I have built and uproot what I have planted throughout the land'" (Jer. 45:4 NIV).
As a result of the two most intense years of my spiritual life thus far, I can say without hesitation that I believe that when God looks at the Church today (specifically the Church in the U.S.), most of our worship looks the same to Him as the idolatrous worship of Israel prior to exile. And, just as I was afraid that the plumbing leak would permanently damage my home, I am today fearful of the implications for the Church- that our walls are crumbling within, still just out of most people’s sight.
Before explaining my conclusions (see Idols, part 1), I want to tell you how I arrived at them. I began by learning everything I could about the idolatry of the ancient Israelites. This part of the article may be repetitious for many of you. If so, please bear with me. Until I fully understood the past, I wasn’t able to hear what God was saying in the present.
The Promised Land
When God desired to separate for Himself a people out of the polytheistic postdiluvian world, He called one man, Abram, to leave his home in Mesopotamia; to leave his culture; to leave his idols. It was within this venue of separation, even alienation, that God revealed Himself in Canaan as El Elyon- Most High God (see Melchizedek- Gen. 14:1-20).
Six centuries later the people were called back to Canaan out of Egypt—fulfilling the ancient promise. We know, of course, that the Promised Land came with a condition. Having been freed by Yahweh, the people were to free the land, and thereby themselves, from idols.
What did the Promised Land mean to Israel in practical terms? For starters, it meant the disappearance of the manna and quail on which an entire generation of Israelites had become dependent. It meant an end to the pillar of fire and smoke—the physical presence of God that they had seen and followed for 40 years. It meant that their sandals and clothes bean to wear out (Neh. 9:19-21). It meant battle after bloody battle.
“When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you— and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods, and the LORD'S anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire. For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession (Deut. 7:1-6 NIV).”
The thing is, God didn’t say to kill the Canaanite warriors. He said to kill all of them- including the farmers who knew how to work the land. Can’t you imagine the arguments? “Who will teach us to grow food?” “What good are all these houses if we don’t have anything to eat?” “Where did God go?” “Why should we believe He is still with us?” “What’s so great about this so-called Promised Land?”
That’s just speculation, of course. What we do know is that many Canaanites were allowed to remain and, over time, the Israelites and Canaanites co-existed in the land.
“When Israel became strong, they pressed the Canaanites into forced labor but never drove them out completely (Judges 1:28 NIV.)”
“After that whole generation had been gathered to their fathers, another generation grew up, who knew neither the LORD nor what he had done for Israel. Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD and served the Baals. They forsook the LORD, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of Egypt. They followed and worshiped various gods of the peoples around them. They provoked the LORD to anger because they forsook him and served Baal and the Ashtoreths (Judges 2:10-13 NIV).”
Who Makes it Rain?
It’s unclear how much of Abraham’s singular faith in God was retained by the Israelites through their four hundred years of slavery in Egypt. It is clear (evidenced by the golden calf) that they were familiar with, if not engaging in, the polytheism of Egypt before they crossed the Jordan into Canaan.*
The Canaanites primarily worshiped Baal and his consort/sister, Ashtoreth. Baal’s “mother and father,” Asherah and El, were also prevalent. The Baal/Ashtoreth religion had similar counterparts in Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. Baal worshippers believed that there was a vital relationship between the gods and the productivity of the land.
The story is told that Mot, god of drought, death and famine, fights with and kills Baal, god of fertility and rain. Baal goes to the underworld from which he is eventually rescued/resurrected by Ashtoreth. This cyclical tale represents the passing of the seasons: Baal rules during the rainy winter months and Mot rules during the summer season of drought. Worshippers believed that re-enacting the drama with ritual mourning for the death of Baal and fertility rites for his resurrection would inspire the god’s blessing of fertility.
In arid countries, rain means life. When it rained during growing season, the land and people prospered. When there was drought, they perished. The Canaanite fertility rituals were religious, but for them they were also “good business.” There were craftsmen who specialized in making idols. Homes had built-in nooks where household idols were displayed. Their lives revolved around their gods.
You’d think that God’s people would have known that if He could make water come from a rock in the desert (Ex. 17:6), He could make it rain in proper season. Yet over and over again they offered sacrifices to the Baals and Ashtoreth alongside their sacrifices to God. The idols were insurance—in case God didn't come through.
After centuries of Israel's idolatry, Elijah the Tishbite hosted a dramatic showdown against the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel (1Ki. 18:18-46). The question at hand was, Who makes it rain? God proved Himself mightily on that mountain, but the nation was so deeply entrenched in idolatry, it made little difference.God sent more prophets to warn His people, echoing Moses’ words, “The LORD will scatter you among the peoples, and only a few of you will survive among the nations to which the LORD will drive you (Deut. 4:27 NIV).” The people ignored the warnings time after time, year after year, generation after generation. They mistook God’s patience and mercy for permission or indifference.
Finally, Jeremiah spoke for God in the final days of the Kingdom of Judah, "I brought you into a fertile land to eat its fruit and rich produce. But you came and defiled my land and made my inheritance detestable. My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water" (Jer. 2:7,13 NIV).
*Note: Canaan was the son of Ham, grandson of Noah.
** “Canaan was the father of Sidon his firstborn, and of the Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, Girgashites, Hivites, Arkites, Sinites, Arvadites, Zemarites and Hamathites (Gen 10:15-18 NIV).” The previously cited passage from Deut. 7:1 lists the peoples of the region, which roughly corresponds to the sons of Canaan who settled in the region. For simplicity’s sake, in this article, “Canaan” and “Canaaanites" will refer to the entire region and its occupants, prior to the arrival of the Israelites.**Gen. 9 gives the account of Ham’s sin against Noah and Noah’s subsequent curse upon Canaan and his descendents, ie: to be enslaved by the descendents of Shem. Abraham was of the lineage of Shem.
Israel, Canaan, and the Church
I’ll be honest with you. The subject of idolatry used to bore me. I’d think, “Yeah, yeah, we’re not supposed to worship money and power. Could we move on to something relevant?” I would’ve fit in perfectly with the ancient Israelites as they half listened to the commands time after time: “You shall have no other gods, blah blah blah, (their eyelids growing heavy in the warm Mediterranean air) not make for yourself an idol, blah blah blah...” ....zzzzzz.
The land of Canaan was the fulfillment of a promise to Israel. It was a sanctuary, a home where they could live in (relative) safety and freedom. Most of all, it was the means by which God set apart His people for the salvation of the world. In some ways, the Church is for believers what Canaan was for Israel—a community for fellowship, worship, and God’s chosen instrument for delivering the gospel to the world.
Have you ever walked, like me, day after day, past a growing spider web in your home, never seeing it until it one day wraps around your head and sends you into a spastic fit of flailing arms and collisions with furniture? Israel couldn’t see the strange and grotesque statues in their own living rooms and in front of their outstretched hands.
We do it too, you know. The Church mirrors ancient Israel's brazen idolatry and callous disobedience. And, just like them, we often don't even realize it. When we occasionally walk head first into our idols, we may spin around wildly, trying to throw them off. My observation is that we’re pretty ineffective at getting rid of them for good. They come right back, just like that spider web. Maybe they take on a different shape, or appear in another corner of the room, but they come back.
Idols on the Altar
It‘s part of our nature to worship. Our culture tends to ask “Do we worship?” when the real question should be, “What/whom do we worship?” Even people who swear they’re irreligious end up worshiping their own lack of religion.
Our idols take on lots of shapes. We learn to worship them from society, from friends, from family, and from Church. And even though the forms they take today are vastly different from the idols of 3000 years ago, what we hope to gain from them is eerily similar. They called it fertility. We call it money. Status. Comfort. Beauty. Power. Tradition. Whatever we equate with happiness and well-being is fertility. We know all this. The hard part is refocusing our eyes to see the cobwebs.
Worship, as originally prescribed by God (Ex. 35- Lev. 9) usually includes several common elements. The most frequently used Old Testament word for worship means to bow down—a humbling of oneself before God. Most of us don’t physically bow before God very often, anymore. I personally think we’d do well to spend more time on the floor before God, but even if we don’t, an attitude of humility is necessary for true worship. He is big, and we are small. If we don’t get that, we haven’t even begun to worship.
Sacrifice was the most obvious element of OT worship. The sacrificial death of Jesus fulfilled the requirement for blood sacrifice, but we’re still called to give sacrificially of ourselves- and our possessions- to God. Praise and service are other vital elements of worship.
Ancient idolatry involved activities like drunkenness, ecstatic dancing, male and female shrine prostitution, self mutilation, and even child sacrifice. These specific rituals differed from the worship of God, but look carefully at what they represented. The Baal followers humbled themselves before their gods, sacrificed to them, served them, and praised them. It was worship in every sense.
I like to approach contemporary idolatry backwards. Instead of first listing the potential idols in our lives, I prefer to begin with questions that help to identify elements of worship. The questions are addressed to “you” in order to make them as personal as possible, but not to imply that I don’t ask them of myself. In fact, I’ve chosen these specific questions because they’ve been the most helpful to me in identifying my own idols.
1. What do you speak highly- or most often- about?
2. What dominates your thoughts?
3. What do you spend your money on?
4. What do you spend your time doing?
5. What do you make sacrifices in order to have or do?
6. What do you hope for?
7. What do you plan to fall back on, in case God doesn’t come through in some matter?
8. What did your parents trust and talk the most about when you were growing up?
9. Do you ever seek the opinions of people (in person or in print) before seeking God?
10. What is the one thing you can’t live without?
Obviously all the things we hope for and spend money on aren’t idols. But if we see patterns in our thinking and behavior that correlate with the elements of worship, then we have to consider that there could be an idol there.
Images in the Pulpit
There’s a subtle difference between idols and images. I think we’re clear on what an idol is: anything we excessively (or obsessively) praise, hope for, dream of, sacrifice to—worship, other than God. Images are also focal points for worship, but the object of worship, at least initially, is God.
The best known Biblical image is the golden calf of Exodus. Aaron's intentions were good. The people needed to see God in a tangible form. Before Moses went away, they believed that God was with them. In Moses' absence, the hearts and faith of the people were giving way to fear. The calf was a familiar pagan image from Egypt. Aaron meant to show the people that God had not abandoned them. And, it worked—at first. The people held a festival to celebrate Yahweh, but then they fell into the old familiar rituals of Egyptian idol worship.
We, too, are easily distracted by the beauty of images, confused into thinking that blessings actually come from the image rather than God. That’s the problem with images. Though they’re designed to enhance our worship of God, we can become distracted by their beauty. We may even end up worshiping the image.
Still, we need visual evidence that God hasn't abandoned us. It's part of our nature, and God knows that. He provides for that need with the written Word, in answered prayers, miracles, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and even in God Himself becoming flesh and blood. But, like the Israelites, we are often not satisfied to wait for God's provision of the tangible.
We may think we can only worship or learn under the leadership of one particular person, like Moses. Or we feel uncertain of the future so we demand that our leaders, like Aaron, come up with some evidence of God's blessing. What’s a leader to do? He or she is likely to try to meet the requirements of an image, perhaps even coming to think of himself as imperative to the spiritual lives of the people. Or he may respond to our desperate cries by building us a calf in the form of a ledger, building, or church growth strategy. We have something to look at, so we're happy. And we soon forget to worship God at all, focusing instead on the images that we have made, sacrificing our money, time, and energy to them. We like the looks of what we have created, and we celebrate "to the Lord" just like the Israelites did in the desert.
Much like the children of Israel mimicked the lives of the Canaanite peoples, the Church in the United States mimics the methods of our society at large. We don't like to admit it, but many churches today resemble stock-holder owned businesses far more than they resemble the first Church. We have board meetings; we consult bankers; we take out large loans; we buy and sell real estate. We take so much pride in our buildings and in the size of our programs that we often forget that those things were only supposed to be the means by which to serve God. We begin to exist for the sake of maintaining our existence and then cry out in fear when God doesn't bless our plans to build bigger buildings and establish larger programs. We are confused about the source of our blessings and the object of our worship.
BTW, Grace recently blogged on Temples and Shrines. Be sure to check out what she has to say.
What’s That Mooing Sound?
It takes money to run the church. The second chapter of Acts describes how the first believers provided for the needs of their community by voluntarily selling their possessions and sharing with one another. Today we generally follow the tradition of the tithe which dates back to sometime before Abraham. As the ancient tithe provided for the needs of the Levites (priests) and the upkeep of the temple, our offerings provide for the salaries of our pastors and staff, the upkeep of our buildings and programs, and for those who are in need. Simple, right?. HA! You and I know it isn’t simple at all.
I’ll start with two questions we can definitively answer: 1. What kinds of sacrifices please God most? Obedience (I Sam. 15:22) ; a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart (Ps. 51:16-17); the prayers of the upright (Pro. 15:8). 2. What kinds of sacrifices are despised by God? The sacrifices of the wicked (Pro. 15:8); those made alongside sacrifices to idols (Amos 5:21-27).
God’s faithfulness can’t be measured in terms of short term prosperity. Listen to what the people told Jeremiah:
Jer. 44:16-18: “We will not listen to the message you have spoken to us in the name of the LORD! We will certainly do everything we said we would: We will burn incense to the Queen of Heaven and will pour out drink offerings to her just as we and our fathers, our kings and our officials did in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. At that time we had plenty of food and were well off and suffered no harm. But ever since we stopped burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have had nothing and have been perishing by sword and famine.”
They refused to see the big picture- to accept that God’s blessings were bigger and more far reaching than their immediate prosperity. You can hear the arrogance in their voices as they rejected Jeremiah’s message. Can we draw any parallels to the Church today? I think so. Widespread arrogance and refusal to change our ways is easy to see. What about the assumption that we’re doing the right thing based on short term prosperity? There are plenty of North American churches rolling in cash these days. Is that a sure sign of God’s blessings? Or could it be an illusion that’s throwing us farther off course and more deeply entrenched in our idolatry?
Why do we give to the church? It’s a deeply personal question. Do we give in order to be blessed, as if God’s an idol whose blessings can be bought? Do we do it out of obedience and love? Do we do it because we want to see our church prosper? And when the offering comes in, when the budget soars, when we have something big, new, shiny and beautiful to look at, what is the focus of our celebration? My personal, and albeit jaded, observation is that we celebrate the golden calf and not God. Why do we celebrate money? And how is it that we’ve become so blind to the whole matter?
Look at the story of the first tabernacle:
After receiving instructions for the tabernacle, “Moses said to the whole Israelite community, “This is what the LORD has commanded: From what you have, take an offering for the LORD. Everyone who is willing is to bring to the LORD an offering…” Ex. 35:4-5
“Then the whole Israelite community withdrew from Moses’ presence, and everyone who was willing and whose heart moved him came and brought an offering to the LORD for the work on the Tent of Meeting, for all its service, and for the sacred garments.” Ex. 25:20-21
“…And the people continued to bring freewill offerings morning after morning. So all the skilled craftsmen who were doing all the work on the sanctuary left their work and said to Moses, ‘The people are bringing more than enough for doing the work the LORD commanded to be done.’
Then Moses gave an order and they sent this word throughout the camp: ‘No man or woman is to make anything else as an offering for the sanctuary.’ And so the people were restrained from bringing more, because what they already had was more than enough to do all the work.”Ex. 36:3-7
That’s all. The people were asked—once—to bring freewill offerings. They did bring offerings- lots and lots of them. And when it got to be too much, Moses told them to stop! Here’s the question I’ve been asking for nearly 10 years. Have you ever heard of a church telling the people to stop bringing offerings because they already had enough? (If your answer is yes, please let me know— you’ll be the first!) Why doesn’t this happen? Is it because we don’t offer freely, or because we think bigger is always better? Both? Neither? Did you detect even a hint of concern on Moses’ part that the if he turned away offerings, people wouldn’t give next time there was need? All of our justifications for depending on money fade away in the shadow of Moses’ faithfulness with the tabernacle.
Did you notice what the Israelites did when the offering was in? Nothing. They did nothing. No celebration over the huge offering. No congratulatory speeches. No certificates of giving. Nothing. And I haven’t found reference (correct me if I’m wrong) of any special celebrations or dedication ceremonies after the completion of the tabernacle. When it was done, Moses walked out, and the glory of the Lord descended upon the tent. The closest thing to a celebration is when the people saw the glory of the Lord, shouted for joy then fell facedown (Lev. 9:24). Not so much a party as sheer terror.
Contrast that with what we do. Stewardship campaigns. Signed promissory notes for giving. Sermons pressuring church-goers to be generous. Celebrations when the offering is in—complete with self congratulatory speeches and even applause. Conversely, there’s frustration or even anger when the offering is small. What are we celebrating? Is it God, or is it the calf? And when the money doesn’t come in, has God failed us, or were we looking to the wrong god for our blessings to begin with?
Remnant
Israel was removed from the Promised Land because of her relentless idolatry. The glory of the Lord departed from the Temple, the Temple was brought to ruin, and the people were scattered throughout the nations. The warning signs had been there for centuries, but Israel wouldn’t heed them. Just as He promised, God allowed all but a remnant of His people to be destroyed.
Within a few hundred years of Jesus’ birth and death, the Church became just as enmeshed in idolatry as her Jewish forefathers. Many believed that pieces of the bones and possessions of the Messiah and apostles had supernatural power. They bought, stole, collected them, wore them as jewelry, and prayed over them. Leaders of the Church were given the absolute authority of Christ over the people, and the positions of highest Church leadership were often awarded to the wealthy and powerful.
Though the face of idolatry has changed over the centuries, our natural bent to it hasn’t. Paul taught the Corinthians from the sins of Israel, “Now these things occurred as examples to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did. Do not be idolaters, as some of them were; as it is written: ‘The people sat down to eat and drink and got up to engage in pagan revelry’” (1 Cor. 10:6-7).
I dreamed (see Idols part 1) that the walls of my fathers house were crumbling because of an internal leak. Recall Jeremiah’s prophecy. "I brought you into a fertile land to eat its fruit and rich produce. But you came and defiled my land and made my inheritance detestable. My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water" (Jer. 2:7,13 NIV).
The Church in the United States has certainly been given a rich and fertile home. I believe that we’ve also dug (built) our own cisterns (churches)- that are broken, causing the living water to leak out and the walls to crumble. The maintenance of the organization takes so much energy, many of us haven’t even noticed that our cisterns are empty.
Earlier I wrote: “God sent more prophets to warn His people, echoing Moses’ words, ‘The LORD will scatter you among the peoples, and only a few of you will survive among the nations to which the LORD will drive you (Deut. 4:27 NIV).’ The people ignored the warnings time after time, year after year, generation after generation.” Haven’t we also mistaken God’s patience for permission? We assume that more money and more people are proof of God’s blessing, just like they assumed that peace and fertility were evidence of blessings from Asherah.
As God preserved a remnant of Israel from which to bring the Messiah, He will certainly continue to preserve the Church to prepare the way for His second coming. But, I believe that a time of purging has begun in Christ’s Church. A time when less of God’s people feel bound to the institution of the Church. A time when many of the faithful are walking away from the golden calves of the Church, in order to seek out the true glory of the Lord—even if it that means camping around a dusty handmade tent in the middle of nowhere. They long to see His glory, shout for joy, and fall facedown in the sand. A blog called Dying Church speaks to this movement. In Quitting the Ice Cream Store, Darryl writes:
“We need to be careful how we define church. Here is a list of what some people are quitting:
Church buildings
Sitting in rows
Worship as an event led from up front
Preaching as lectures
Programmatic expressions of church
Professional clergy
Internally focused budgets
“Whatever you think of these - and not all of them are bad - these are not the church. In other words, it's possible to give all of these up and still be every bit as faithful a follower of Jesus Christ. “In fact, I'll go further: none of these describe the church that existed in the book of Acts.”
I encourage you to go to Dying Church and read more of this and other posts, especially, Staying at the ice cream store.
As for the haunting prophecy, "Say this to him, 'This is what the Lord says: I will overthrow what I have built and uproot what I have planted throughout the land'" (Jer. 45:4 NIV), I don’t know, but it sounds to me like a description of what’s happening to the Church in the U.S. and around the world.
I have not received a unique revelation for the Church. There’s nothing special about quoting the OT prophets. I do think God sensitized me to idolatry that my myopic eyes might not have readily seen those years ago. What I’m also realizing is that God has opened the mouths of a lot of people from all over; and, though most of them are far more eloquent and knowledgeable than I, many of them speak a message similar to what I’ve written here.
I’m personally encouraged to have entered into relationship/conversation with some of those voices who strengthen my heart and given me something solid to hope for. Admittedly, talk of the Church moving away from the church still frightens me. Even from the depths of disillusionment, my humanity craves predictability. But, greater yet is the fear that my words will remain just words, and that I’ll remain just a frightened disciple who never finds the courage to step out and follow Jesus across the water (or out of Mesopotamia—pick your metaphor), whatever that may mean.
For now, all I know to do is to keep my eyes focused on Christ, be ever vigilant about ridding my heart of idols, and seek community with others who are on the same journey.
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