Isaiah 41:1-10; 44:6-20 (Immerse Prophets pp. 126, 134, 135)
“Idols”
September 20, 2020 – Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
I’ve never watched a full episode of “American Idol.” But that show demonstrates that the word “idol” has lost its negative connotations. Even good Christian people may talk about their “idols,” meaning people they admire. We might talk about our idols being people like Billy Graham or Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr. or Corrie Ten Boom. We might also identify someone like Harriet Tubman or Bryan Stevenson for their sacrificial work to free slaves and bring racial justice to our country.
With that idea of “idols” as role models in our minds, we are a bit unprepared to engage the prophets’ condemnation of the literal idols which tempted and ensnared the people of Israel. We read Isaiah’s detailed descriptions of idols being molded from metal or carved from wood and say, “That’s not us!” Only “primitive” cultures are superstitious enough to imagine a material object has supernatural power.
In our text today, Isaiah’s sarcastic attacks on idol making are found in the midst of a larger story. This week’s reading included the narrative of how the Assyrian threat to Jerusalem was thwarted by God in the time of king Hezekiah. The king of Assyria’s chief of staff shouted to the people of Jerusalem that all the gods of the nations around them have not protected them. What makes them think their God, the Lord, is any better? But God did save them from the Assyrians, unlike all the other gods whose people were conquered.
Israel’s God compared to other gods is a major theme of Isaiah which crosses over into a new section of the prophecy. Envoys from Babylon visited Jerusalem. Hezekiah showed them all the treasures of his kingdom. Isaiah told him that meant Babylonians would one day come back and take it all.
I confess that, as our country and world seem to careen more and more toward disaster from climate change, civil unrest, and plain human meanness, I have a little of Hezekiah’s old man’s weariness in me. On page 123 in Prophets, Isaiah chapter 39, he says “At least there will be peace and security in my lifetime.” Or as I might say, “At least the worst of it won’t happen in my lifetime.” But I’m not really sure that’s true. In any case, it’s a lousy attitude toward a world our children and grandchildren will inherit.
Comparing God with other gods continues then in a pointed discussion of idols, in what many have identified as the second main section of Isaiah. After focusing on the contemporary situation in relation to Assyria, Isaiah changes perspective on page 123, traditional chapter 40. He turns to a time when the prophecy about the Babylonian conquest was fulfilled. Jerusalem has been captured and destroyed. Many of the Jewish people are in exile in Babylon. What then of their God compared to other gods? Was He just as powerless before the new threat as all those idols?
That sweet “Comfort, comfort my people,” which begins the new section has been set to music beautifully by Handel and by a 17th century hymn in our hymnal. God declares His readiness to forgive His people, show Himself to them, and bring them home. In the process, though, God wants to make plain just who it is that is saving them. On the next couple of pages, the rest of chapter 40, God constantly invites us to compare Him with other supposed gods and saviors and to see that none of them measure up.
Specifically, on the top of page 125, chapter 40 verse 18, Isaiah asks, “To whom can you compare God?” and then
What image can you find to resemble him?
Can he be compared to an idol formed in a mold,
overlaid with gold, and decorated with silver chains?
Or if people are too poor for that,
they might at least choose wood that won’t decay
and a skilled craftsman
to carve an image that won’t fall down?
We hear that mocking tone show up again in the passages I chose for today. I find amusing the idea that idol makers were concerned about fastening them in place, nailing them down so they won’t fall over. It reminds me of the idol of the Philistine god Dagon in I Samuel 5. It kept falling on its face in the presence of the Ark of the Covenant. One would think the least a god could do would be to stand up on its own.
As I said, we have a little trouble translating the prophet’s warning about metal and wood idols to our own times. Not that a little reflection doesn’t pretty quickly call to mind material objects which inspire devotion. In our men’s Zoom session Friday, Craig told about a family of four sitting in a restaurant while all four of them focused individually on their smart phones instead of talking together. Even the most reluctant of us is probably more devoted to images on screens during these times than we would like to be.
Of course there are other material possessions with which we may be obsessed, whether it’s a house we are remodeling, a garden we tend every day, the motorhome we camp in, or a classic car we keep carefully polished and safely garaged in bad weather. Yet as much attention as we give smart phones and burnished wood floors, they are not quite gods to most of us; not to most people, I imagine. We are not praying to them and asking them to save us. Nor are we bringing them praise and sacrifice.
No, the idols of our time are different from the carved and smelted idols which Isaiah has so much fun with. But there is a clue to the nature of the idols which tempt you and me in Isaiah’s mockery. Look at that long account of idol manufacture on pages 134 and 135, Isaiah 44, starting with verse 9. There’s just a bit about a blacksmith getting tired and hungry making a sharp cutting tool, and then a long description of a wood-carver using tools like that to form an idol.
Isaiah even steps back to the acquisition of the raw material for an idol, the cutting of a selected, even carefully grown, tree to obtain just the right wood. The sarcasm moves in at the bottom of 134, verse 15. That same wood used to craft an idol is burned in a fire for cooking supper. Why would anyone think, Isaiah asks, that the material one burns for warmth and food preparation is worth more than that? He says,
The person who made the idol never stops to reflect,
“Why, it’s just a block of wood!
I burned half of it for heat
and used it to bake my bread and roast my meat.
How can the rest of it be a god?
Should I bow down to worship a piece of wood?
As Christian believers we often say that we are focused on God who is Spirit and on spiritual things. So we may think that the problem of idols is that they are physical objects. As long as we keep ourselves from worshipping material things, then our faith will be pure and holy and pleasing to God.
That’s why a group of Christians early in our history came out against images, against icons. They were known as iconoclasts “icon smashers.” And Protestant reformers in England and elsewhere smashed stained glass windows and toppled statues of saints and even of Jesus from their niches in cathedrals. You can see those shelves sitting bare today. It was all in the conviction that physical representation of spiritual things is wrong.
Yet worship of physical things is not quite the fundamental nature of idolatry. Look at what the idol maker says to his handiwork at the top of page 135, verse 17: “Rescue me! You are my god!” Or look at what Isaiah says about the craftsman in the middle of the page, verse 20, “He trusts something that cannot help him at all.” The point is not so much that the idol is a physical object, but that the one who worships an idol is trusting his salvation to something he made himself.
Idols can be metal or wood, even printed circuits and LEDs, but the heart and soul of what it means to be an idol is to be a creation of human beings rather than the true God who created human beings. Instead of trusting God to save me, I trust what I have made to save me. In other words, I imagine that by making an idol I can save myself. The NRSV translation of part of verse 17 is, “and he cannot save himself or say, ‘Is not this thing in my right hand a fraud?’” Idolatry is trying to save yourself by crafting your own salvation.
That’s why I would suggest that the Christian era has turned the sin of idolatry on its head and why we have such a difficult time identifying our own idols. It’s not just about worshipping physical objects. In fact, though there have been those who disagreed, like those statue-smashing reformers, the great Christian tradition has been that something changed when God Himself began to have an image.
In the Old Testament one gets the impression that it offends God not just to make images of other gods, but even to make an image of God Himself. Jews and Muslims today still understand things that way. They don’t paint paintings or carve statues of God. But Christians paint and carve and mold images of Jesus whom we believe is God all the time. What changed? God became visible. God took on a body. God came down into this world and let human beings look at His face. To make a beautiful image of that face is no longer blasphemy, but glorious praise of the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us.
Yes, it would still be idolatry to take a statue of Jesus or an image of a saint or this cross I wear around my neck and say to that object, “Save me!” as if that thing itself could offer one salvation. But as I’ve been trying to say, our idolatry today is usually sneakier than that. When God became physical, our idols became spiritual.
What I mean is that idols are still things we fashion for ourselves in the conceit and delusion that we can make our own salvation. But what is different is that the idols we craft today are not the work of our hands, but of our minds and hearts. Instead of some strange and ugly stone god in a little shrine in a corner of our house, we place strange and ugly ideas which have nothing to do with the true God in the corners of our consciousness.
Our idols are more likely to be concepts and ideals we take for granted because everyone else around us does. An idol can be a political ideology or a conspiracy theory. It can be a national identity or a party membership. An idol might be a plan for handling our money which we never examine in light of what God asks of us. It might be the attitude I take toward immigrants without really paying attention to what the Bible says about them. We make idols out of standards of behavior in relation to things like flags, or presidents, or historical monuments. When we imagine those ideas, those concepts, those standards are what’s going to save us, save our country, save our world, then non-physical objects turn into idols.
Christians have our own very Christian idols of the heart and mind. It might be my taste in worship music. It could be some very rigid interpretation of a Bible passage. I’ve seen people make an idol out of a form of church government or a certain kind of worship liturgy. What makes those ideas idols is that they become elevated to a saving role in our lives. If we think we haven’t got a church unless it sings this way or is run that way; if we imagine God condemns everyone who does not read the Bible like we do; if we think the only brand of true Christianity looks like the one we’ve made, then we are no longer worshipping God, but only an idol which is not going to be able to save us.
That’s why C. S. Lewis so brilliantly observed that even our ideas about God can be idols. In thinking about how his ideas of God were changed by the death of his wife, he wrote, “My idea of God is a not divine idea. It has to be shattered from time to time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence?”
One of the great blessings of reading the prophets together is that they often do a very good job of smashing our half-baked, shoddily-made notions about God. And as Lewis so painfully experienced, difficult times of life even more shatter our sometimes childish and silly ideas regarding our Lord, showing us that they were only idols after all.
As Jesus taught and spoke in parables, He worked at toppling idolatrous notions about God. That’s going on in the parable we heard today from Matthew 20. We think we understand how God is fair and just. Then we hear how all the laborers in the vineyard got the same wage, no matter how long they worked. The idol of what we thought we knew about God gets tipped over as the weight of His grace and mercy overbalances everything.
Just like the people of Israel in Isaiah’s time, we need to unfasten the idols we’ve nailed down. Let them fall over and be replaced with true and holy images and ideas of God and His salvation for us. As Erasmus, another great Christian mocker of idols, in the form of so-called “relics,” said, we need to keep going back to the authentic image of God in Jesus Christ and remember that only He can save us. He saved us by dying on the Cross and rising from the dead. Let the idols fall.
We might think we are also called, like the prophets, to go out and do a little iconoclasm of our own, to knock over or smash a few idols that other people cherish. But let me encourage us to look again at how Isaiah does it and then hear a story from the early colonization of North America.
Isaiah does not just make fun of idols. He constantly sets up alongside them the truth about the God who truly saves. At the top of page 134, chapter 44 verse 7, God says, like He does in Revelation 1, “I am the First and the Last; there is no other God. Then just after our text at the bottom of 135, the end of chapter 44, God tells His people:
I have swept away your sins like a cloud.
I have scattered your offenses like the morning mist.
Oh, return to me,
for I have paid the price to set you free.
And then the prophet proclaims:
Sing, O heavens, for the Lord has done this wonderful thing.
Shout for joy, O depths of the earth!
Break into song,
O mountains and forests and every tree!
For the Lord has redeemed Jacob
and is glorified in Israel.
Isaiah mocked idols, but His primary work was to glorify and hold up God as the true and saving Lord for people to see. The way to knock idols over is just like it was in that Philistine temple, to set up against them the great work of the true and living God.
You’ve probably heard of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. The Gulf of California is also named the Sea of Cortés after him. His story is a pretty ugly tale of conquest and murder of native peoples in what we now call Latin America. But as he killed Aztecs and others for gold and land, Cortés thought he might also convert and Christianize some of them. So in the Yucatan Peninsula it’s recorded that in one town he decided to take away the native’s idols and put up crosses in their place.
In a critical history not long after Cortés,[1] a Dominican priest named Bartolomé de las Casas wrote that the removal of idols and replacement with crosses was foolish. The practical reality was that it’s not that easy to get people to change their minds. He wrote, “not a single person can willfully or enthusiastically abandon belief in something he has held for so many years to be the true god, a god received along with his mother’s milk and taught to him by his elders…”
Then de las Casas adds a brilliant insight of which I think Isaiah would approve. An Aztec would not abandon an idol, “without first understanding that that which is being given to him [in the form of the cross] and replacing his previous god, is in fact the True God.” To replace an idol with a cross, those natives needed to know and meet the saving God who died on that Cross and rose again to give them much more than their idols could give them, eternal life and peace.
If you and I feel called to a prophetic vocation of mocking idols and calling those around us to pull them down and put the Cross of Christ in their place, let us also be about the even more important vocation of sharing the good news of what we are asking them to embrace: the Suffering Servant God who is Jesus of the Cross before He is King of glory and power. Isaiah has much to say about that Servant Lord in what we’ll read this week.
Let’s give people the real Jesus who talked about equal mercy for all. Let’s give people the authentic Christ who taught us to love our enemies. Let’s remind ourselves that our true Lord did not care about winning, but He did care about the Truth. Let’s follow the genuine Jesus who called us to come and die rather than to go and dominate. Let’s invite our friends and loved ones to embrace the Lord who can save them when they cannot possibly save themselves.
Let all our idols fall over. May our merciful Lord give us grace to recognize them and let them tumble. He is more than able to save us and keep us from falling with them.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2020 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.