Is idol worship still a thing?
I would argue that it is, and very much so. I brought it up at the end of a marketplace conversion with a young man named Hiram, who I’m sure would say that the worship of idols is just a relic of the past.
Hiram isn’t alone, and if we believe that idol worship is no longer with us, then we would be correct in saying the Bible, too, is just an irrelevant relic of the past, because it has much to say about the sin and danger of idolatry. It may be the reason why 1 John seems to end so abruptly with the command “Dear children, keep yourselves from idols.” It is timeless advice, meant for all believers down through history.
What makes idol worship so bad is that it allows us to fool ourselves into thinking we can define God for ourselves, rather than to accept that God alone has the right to self-identify Himself and who we are in relation to Him.
Idolatry isn’t limited to the worship of statues or other images. It includes the images we create in our thoughts as we “imagine” who God is and who we are. It is present in secular society as people who have rejected God’s revelation of Himself in the Bible try to come up with alternatives such as the kinds of ideas Hiram told me. For his part, Hiram has a very Eastern image of God in which the Creator is part of the creation, making all of us “God” and taking away any independent thought God might have in favor of the consensus of the collective.
Idolatry also creeps into our churches in many forms. An easy example would be the “What Would Jesus Do” movement which puts the burden of defining who God is and what God would think on ourselves rather than on God and His Word. Better to ask What DID Jesus Do, and base our understanding of Christ on His teachings and actions as revealed to us in the pages of the Scriptures. Before his advice to avoid idols, John wrote that to know and follow Jesus is the way to truly know God as He reveals Himself to us: “We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true. And we are in him who is true by being in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.”
And in order to know and follow Jesus, we need to actually read the Bible. If we are willing to dig deep and get past the sound bites of skeptics, we will discover that the Bible is completely relevant and anything but a relic of the past, and that reading and studying it is the best step we can take toward avoiding the sin of idolatry.
Thanks, Hiram, for allowing me to record our conversation. It can be seen at https://youtu.be/THRT8miuMcg
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