Finally, one day, when his father was out of the shop, Abram smashed all the idols with an axe, leaving only the largest one standing. Placing the axe in the idol's hand, he waited for his father's return. Terah, outraged, asked him who did it. Abram responded, "It seems the largest one destroyed the others in his anger," to which Terah replied, "That is foolish, we know that these idols neither move nor destroy." Abram's departure from his father's house soon followed.
Although the historicity of this story is roughly on par with the fable that George Washington cut down his father's cherry tree, it illustrates what the prophet Jeremiah asserts in his tirades against Judah. In Jeremiah 10:3 he says,
A tree from the forest is cut down
and worked with an axe by the hands of a craftsman.
They decorate it with silver and gold;
they fasten it with hammer and nails so that it cannot move.
Not only are these idols made by human hands, but they are unable to even stand up on their own unless their human makers nail their feet to the ground! He continues to tell Israel, "Do not be afraid of them, for they cannot do evil, neither is it in them to do good." (10:5)
But the Lord is the true God;
he is the living God and the everlasting King
At his wrate the earth quakes
and the nations cannot endure his indignation. (10:10)
Israel's idolatry went beyond the foreign gods and man-made idols. Even the temple, the locus of God's presence among his people, had become an idol to them.
God did not bring his glory into the temple because he needed to be served by human hands, but as a grace to his covenant people. Israel instead saw the temple as a lucky rabbit's foot in battle and "Get out of Jail Free" card for their unrepentant sins. In this we see the sinfulness of all mankind: We seek to make gods for our own desires. Rather than dwell in the rich revelation and covenant love of the one true God, we make gods for ourselves, distort how God has revealed himself to us, and manipulate grace—to our destruction.
Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, "We are delivered!"—only to go on doing all these abominations?
But thanks be to God, who has given us victory through our Lord, Christ Jesus. In Christ the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. In Christ we have been given all the inheritance of the Kingdom of Light. God has offered restoration to the communion with God that man had before the Fall. It is pure foolishness to create gods of our own hands or to manipulate the revelation of the one true God. The destruction of those who do so is as sure as the destruction of the temple was in Jeremiah's day.
1 comment:
So true. And in our post-temple religiosity, we do the same thing with prayer. Prayer is our rabbit's foot. Since our bodies are now the temple and we can commune with the living God at any moment, we are potentially more at risk to pervert the gift of prayer into our "Get out of Jail Free" card than the Israelites were with the temple, because of the mere convenience of prayer. The Israelites still had to actually go to the temple and make sacrifices--quite an effort. All we do is throw up a half-hearted or panicky prayer. The New Covenant of Grace might seem to make "religion" easier. It's like saying "Get me out Jail for free please," instead of having to travel all around the board and then land on the right square. But in reality,it could be argued that the New Covenant makes true spirituality more difficult because it doesn't have certain guides built into it. Those who truly pray, know that the actual discipline of sincere prayer is perhaps much more difficult than a walk to the temple might have been. Still, I wonder if we would think more about our sins if we had to go to a temple to confess them instead mumbling while dozing off to dreamland.
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