Friday Soul Food

There’s a reason the first three commandments establish God as the one true God. If He’s not, we succumb to idolatry with disastrous results. Andy Crouch starts Playing God with a simple sentence, “Power is a gift.” From this starting point, he explores fruitful, image bearing power and the abuse of power as a journalist, sociologist, biblical scholar, and thought leader. Crouch has garnered many rave reviews. I’ll let you visit these links and concentrate on my favorite chapter: Idolatry. (All quotes are Crouch’s unless otherwise noted.)

Chapter four opens with,
“The real news about power–the new news, if you will, the news we haven’t yet heard or have largely forgotten–is the good news about power: Power is meant for image bearing, and image bearing is meant for flourishing. But to understand just how good this news is, we also must understand the old and sad news about power’s distortion.

The worst distortions of power will also be creative and relational–albeit in a distorted way. Ultimately, violence and domination, which we tend to think of as the worst abuses of power, are actually symptoms of its abuse. They are signs of a deeper sickness, a sickness that strikes at the heart of our deepest created goodness. And the biblical words for that sickness are idolatry and injustice.”

He then goes on to write perhaps the best definition and explanation of idolatry that I have ever read–and I’ve read lots. My near compulsion to understand this topic emerges from the many experiences I’ve had walking with men and women who succumb to the lie offered by idolatry–always with tragic ramifications.

Crouch writes, “The first move of all idolatry is from good to great–more precisely, from created goodness to unrealistic greatness. We start with a good created thing, but then we ask it to be great. We seek not to enjoy the created good’s own proper goodness, within it’s intended limits, but to use it to free us from the limits and usher us into an elevated kind of life. We invest it with our deepest hopes and look to it to address our deepest fears. Initially, all idols seem to deliver exactly this escape from mere goodness into transcendent greatness.”

But of course, in the end, they always fail and take us down with them. For as Psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover wrote, “Idols ask for more and more while giving less and less, until eventually, they demand everything and give nothing.” And it’s in that broken place that many finally come to understand the addictive power and abject emptiness of the idol to which they have devoted their time, money, and energy.

“Every idol imitates that life apart from God is within reach, within our grasp, available for control.” Isn’t this what provoked Adam and Eve to reject God’s good boundaries? Isn’t this what often “inspires” us, thousands of years later, to grasp at the vapor which trails the illusive idol, turning our backs toward God in the process? “Every idol demands a separation and differentiation from the Creator. In the serpent’s world, there is no room for life or godliness with God and for God; only without God and against God.”

We were created for worship. When we fail to worship the one true God, we will turn to other lesser gods and offer our creative energies to them. Andrew Comiskey writes in the Living Waters’ Guidebook, “Humanity tends to create its own gods and goddesses. One furtively seeks security in another. He/she exchanges the glory of the immortal God for images made in the form of mortal man. What results is the domination of misdirected desire and the relational brokenness that follows.”

Idols consume us in a slow and agonizing death, a sort of cancer of the soul. And along the way, we become transformed into their image, rather than into the image of God (much like Gollum in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy).

The chapter ends with a searing condemnation of idolatry which the church and everyone in it would do well to study:

“The idol, originally invested with all the human hopes for power, ends up robbing human beings of their power. And in the end, idolatry does not only rob images bearers, the culmination of creation, of their dignity; it robs the whole creation of its goodness…. [The idol god] ultimately becomes less than what it was meant to be, dragging image bearers down with in into a dull ditch of disappointment…. Idolatry is the true failure of power.”

Grab the book. We need to pay attention to what Crouch has to say.

InterVarsity Press, available through IVP or Amazon

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