Spiritual Idolatry Part One: From Joy

My favorite Bible verse is just a one-line parable that Jesus told. He said: “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matthew 13:44).

Knowing God is such a worthy pursuit and prize, that once we experience but a little of Him, we are willing to give up anything that hinders us from finding more.

The well-known words of Paul on this subject could never be quoted enough: “But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ, and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death; in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus. Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3: 7-14).

The truth is, the human heart was made with an insatiable, addictive nature. We were meant to worship and be satisfied by an infinite God. Therefore anything less we find a greater pleasure in than Him will not fulfill us on a fundamental level. One of my favorite authors, Blaise Pascal, was one of the first philosophers to put words to this now well known idea: “There once was in man a true happiness of which now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present. But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.”

These are simple but vague concepts that are easy to misunderstand and mis-apply. In order to understand what it means to find fulfillment in God in a healthy way that isn’t legalistic or Gnostic, it is helpful to examine the language God uses most frequently when He speaks about our idolatry. The Old and New Testament writers use the analogy of adultery, something that prevalent in our world and easy to understand, as a way of explaining what idolatry is. The Bible uses the language of sexual unfaithfulness to explain the gravity of the offense when we turn to created things instead of the Creator for our purpose, fulfillment, comfort, or identity. One of the common themes the writers used to describe our response to God is the duel archetypes of the harlot, and lady wisdom. And we’ll look at these characters in Scripture in the next post.

Blaise Pascal, Pascal’s Pensees, trans. W.F. Trotter (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), 113