More Gods Than You Can Shake A Stick At

Me? Worship idols? We don’t have to strip naked and bow by the light of the full moon before a painted rock to be an idol-worshipper. All we have to do is worship something less than God–us, for example.

The nice thing about our gods is they want nothing from us. They never challenge us. They tell us to do only what we want to do.  I remember seeing an album cover on a record by the late Keith Green. It shows a great crowd of people hunkered down, bent low before an idol, Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image (cf. Daniel chapter three). They look like a field of mushrooms. But standing amidst the mushrooms are three trees–Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego—who refuse to bow before the false god.

You know why we bow before false gods? Because they bow to us! They demand nothing of us. They tell us to do only what we want to do. If our god is Ambition, he doesn’t ask us whether we’re paying attention to the kids who are growing up so fast. Instead, he asks, “How many people did you impress today? Did you climb another rung on the ladder of success?” That’s what we want to know because that’s what we want to do. The reason our idols only tell us to do what we want to do is because they’re really just projections of ourselves. We make these little gods in our own image. That way we can control them.

Jesus is different. He won’t be controlled or manipulated. He doesn’t bow before us. No, he’s like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. He stands tall before us, taller than us, taller than our idols. And He’s not afraid to tell us to do something in this world, to be something in this world—something that will truly make us stand out from the crowd. He tells us to love. He says, “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34).