Good evening beautiful ladies
First and foremost I hope y’all are blessed and are continually seeking the face of God through bible reading and prayer???
The topic which I will be delving into today is idol worship, hence the title. There is so much to discuss regarding this topic, but I will only be going through a minute segment of this vast subject. So you could say we are only visualising the tip of the iceberg in this post, with regards to idolisation.
There have been many a time when I have read the bible and thought to myself “Oh how could the children of Israel be sooo disobedient? How could they commit such a sin against God? What blasphemy”!!! But usually what always happened next was, God would speak to my heart revealing to me that I pretty much did the same thing, just in a dissimilar way. Just because I don’t physically carry along an idol with me to church, but rather hold onto idols within my mind, doesn’t justify my actions, or make it ‘sort of ok’. Sin is sin, period. And sometimes we find that, because we go about carrying out a particular sin differently from our brother or sister, we develop a ‘holier than thou’ attitude. I will now go onto try to explain myself further.
The scripture passage from which my topic of discussion is taken from is 2 kings 21:1-9. I believe that verses 4, 5 and 7 emphasis the point I’m trying to make. Let’s just have a look at verse 7 for a moment. ‘He took the carved Asherah pole he had made and put it in the temple, of which the LORD had said to David and to his son Solomon, “In this temple and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, I will put my Name forever’. Please just use this point in time to take this verse in, YES re-read it, swallow the words, disgust em, and meditate on em… So the dude (King Manasseh) built his own idol, and brought it into Gods HOLY TEMPLE!!! A place where Yahweh said His name would be honoured! How could Manasseh do such a thing? How could he commit such an obscene act?? This would be like someone bringing a buddha statue into the church service, placing it on the ground and without further delay, bowing down to it!!! I’m not too sure why this illustration comes to mind. But ah well I’m sure you’ve caught my drift by now!
But would it surprise you that some of us do the exact same thing? We carry out the same obscene acts which Manasseh did. And it is actually pretty easy for us to do so, and turn such a sin into a habitual habit. Now to clear things up, let us define what an idol is, and what it is to idolise something. We can also go through some scripture to give us more clarity. The Oxford dictionary states an idol is 1) An image or representation of a god used as an object of worship. 2) A person or thing that is greatly admired, loved or revered. So from these definitions we can see that an idol is not only a physical object, but an idol can be a person, or our own personal representation of a god. The oxford dictionary also describes acts of idolatry as 1) The worship of idols, and 2) extreme admiration, love, or reverence for something or someone. So we can see that anything which we love or worship more than God is in fact an idol. This means that literally ANYTHING can be an idol!
The bible specifically says in Exodus 20:3 ‘You shall have no other gods before Me’. I know that many people may think of idols, only as items made from wood and stone as it describes in certain scripture passages like, Deuteronomy 4:28 and Leviticus 26:1. But we have our ‘modern day idols’ as I like to call it. Things like TV, social media, money, work, OURSELVES etc etc etc. 1 John 5:21 (NLT) warns us that we should keep away from anything that may take Gods place in our hearts. God is a jealous God (Exodus 34:14) and He desires to spend quality time with us. He also desires for us to want our relationship with Him to deepen and develop. The problem is, when we have idols we tend to spend most of our time focusing on that thing or person. For example with regards to a human idol, instead of trying to live a life seeking to please God, you try with all your strength to please another human being. We end up devoting so much of our time and energy towards the item which we value so much, it usually becomes the centre of our lives. In reality we cannot have two people or items at the centre of our attention, naturally our life will revolve around one more than the other. As the bible says in Matthew 6:24 ‘You cannot serve two masters’.
So you may be asking, what has all we’ve just discussed, got to do with bringing idols into Gods temple? Well need I remind you of the times your mind (mine included) wonders off during church service? ‘These people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far away’ Matthew 15:8. Whilst the pastor is giving the sermon we find ourselves thinking about that guy at work who we’re so obsessed with. We begin to think about spending quality time with him, thinking of how he could make us happy. Or on the other hand we end up thinking about our favourite TV programme, and what is going to happen in the next episode. We can end up thinking about how great an actor/actress is, and what it would be like meeting them in person. Your mind can also wonder to work (this happens to me often), we begin to worry and stress over workload and dreadful shift patterns, having to work with a difficult colleague, and how we need to make more money. We basically magnify the situation (‘work’ in this case), making it appear bigger than God, when in fact there is no one greater, bigger or mightier than our God. Let us just bear in mind, that all this is taking place within the house of God (church), whilst the man or woman of God is speaking words directly from the heavenly Father. (Well I’d hope they are words from God, unless you attend a place where there are false teachers). So we can see that idols within our minds are just as vile as idols visible for the human eye to see. So just like king Manasseh we too can commit our obscene acts of idolatry, but glory be to God, because once we confess our sins, He is just and faithful to forgive 1 John 1:9.
Finally to end this topic of discussion I’d like to leave you with a side note. Our bodies belong to the Lord, our bodies are the Lord’s temple, the place where His glory dwells (1 Corinthians 3:16 and 1 Corinthians 6:19). So idol worship within Gods place of worship, just doesn’t stop within the four walls of a church building. Idol worship takes place within our minds, and it can easily become a nasty daily habit, which one most deal with head on. As the word of God says ‘we must crucify the flesh daily’. Galatians 5:24 says we should nail our fleshly passions and desires to the cross, which in this case we are speaking of, is the human desire to put other things before God. Denying our fleshly desires is not something we should do once in a while, it is a DAILY requirement. We must deny ourselves daily and take up our cross and follow Christ (Luke 9:23).
Overcoming these shrines set up in our minds is not something that we can resolve ourselves overnight. We need the Holy Spirit to help us overcome our battle of idol worship, as well as admitting and confessing to God that it is a sin we struggle with. As this is a long post, I shall look into doing a follow up post, on how to overcome idolatry, sometime in the future God willing.
Anyway my beautiful, powerful and wonderfully made women, ladies and girls, I can only hope and pray this post was informative for you, but also a blessing at the same time. Enjoy your evening.
God bless
From the godly lady
Xxx