IDOLATRY AND SELF-GLORY ~ EXCHANGING THE GLORY OF THE CREATOR FOR THE CREATED ~ EXPOSING HYPOCRISY ~ Part 13

 

The hypocrisy of false religion and idolatry has pervaded the pages of Scripture and the history of man from the beginning of time. We first saw it in Cain’s offering and insistence on approaching God his own way. We saw it in the rebellion at Babel. But it didn’t stop there, as we shall see. Forcing the people to scatter to fulfill His will for the redemptive history of man continued to expand the witness of who He is throughout the earth. However, false ideologies that had been picked up went along for the ride as well.

 

We are looking at false religious systems that add man-made rules and rituals—burdens heaped upon its adherents teaching that obedience to these rules and rituals can make one right with God. We’re also looking at the heart of man who has this innate need to worship something. While it is the nature for a Christian to worship God, it is also the nature of unredeemed man to worship self. When it comes to worship, man is always acting in belief that leads to obedience or unbelief that leads to disobedience. All throughout Scripture we see true worship tied to obedience.

 

At the tower of Babel, the people stubbornly refused to budge in their rebellion against God. They wanted to stay. God wanted them to go. The motives behind their building projects were to build for themselves a city and a tower whose top would reach into heaven and to make a name for themselves, lest they be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth (as God had commanded). (Genesis 11:4)

 

Just one chapter later in Genesis 12, we meet a man by the name of Abram. God’s call to Abram was: Go forth from your country and from your relatives and from your father’s house, to the land which I will show you; and I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great; and so you shall be a blessing and I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed. The contrast to the peoples at Babel in Genesis 12:4 is not to be missed. So Abram went forth as the Lord had spoken to him. Just like Abel, a heart of true worship is manifested in obedience.

 

Created for God’s pleasure, Colossians 1:16 says we were created by Him and for Him. But we were not created because He needed us. If man was never created, He would still be the unchanging God satisfied with His own eternal existence. God needs nothing. As a personal Being, it gives God pleasure to have other beings He can have a genuine relationship with. It is logical to think that God could not create another being equal to Himself. To do so, He would not be the one true God. Anything created by God is lesser than He. We understand that as human beings who have been made in God’s image and have the ability to create in our own capacity.

 

Man was made a spiritual being—he was made for worship. He was created to worship God.  Worshipping God is ascribing to God the absolute worth that He alone deserves. Worship is to give honor, homage, reverence, respect, adoration, praise, or glory to a superior being. To refuse to worship God does not lessen the call of God on all creation to do so. To refuse to worship God is to heap judgment upon men who turn from Him. All men will worship someone or something. It would stand to reason that if God is who He says He is, then He deserves all our worship alone. God has revealed Himself to us through His Word, and we either believe it by faith (and act accordingly in obedience) or we choose not to believe it (acting in disbelief and disobedience). Worship of false idols is to give the glory due to God alone to another.

 

Idolatry is the worship of something other than God. It always involves unbelief in God’s Word and belief in the lies we tell ourselves. We either worship the god of self or the one true and living God who has made His name known to us. We either live to glorify the god of self or we live to glorify the true God. Worshipping at the altar of the god of self is idolatry in its simplest form. We are compelled to worship God when with the eyes of faith, we see Him for who He is and realize our very existence is dependent upon Him. Worshipping the god of self stems from some deep desire or impulse that arises which I believe I cannot live without. It is tied to wanting glory for myself in some way. Got Questions.org says: A god is what we run to when we need validation, help, or encouragement because we believe it has the power to give us what we need. The god of self is manifest in willfulness, pride, disobedience, ostentation, defiance, intemperance, and generally wanting one’s own way.

 

Adam and Eve believed God’s Word was not sufficient; they believed they knew better than God and desired more than what He offered them. Cain also believed he knew what was best for him and offered God a sacrifice other than what God had prescribed. Abel’s offering was by faith, but Cain’s was not.

 

As Christians we live in bodies of flesh with spirits that are free to be obedient to Christ in all things. But we wrestle with the temptations of our flesh to want what we want and to do things our own way. How often have you heard someone who professes to believe in the inerrant Word of God but then says something like this: “I believe in God, but I don’t believe THAT!” Or “I don’t believe everything in the Bible.” Or “Well, that’s your opinion, everyone interprets Scripture differently!” Paul says in 2 Corinthians 10:5—We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God. He could have said, “We are destroying the god of self.” It is normal for believers to wrestle with the hard truths of Scripture as we learn more about Him. When we begin to pick and choose exalting our opinions over God’s infinite wisdom, however, we begin to erect a throne upon which we can sit and from where we can rule our own lives.

 

The interesting thing about this idolatry of self is the subtle and insidious ways it slithers into the church when she rejects her status of separate. Longing to be more like the world, she believes the lie that only when the world likes her will she be able to reach the world for Christ. Some examples of this cult worship of self are cleverly disguised in the prosperity gospel, the ‘God is only love and grace’ gospel, the social justice gospel, the self-help gospel, the faith plus anything gospel, just to name a few. When we want to live in the world and live like the world, we will begin to buy the lies the world tells.

 

The three lusts at the core of the idolatry of self are seen in 1 John 2:16—For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. Idolatry focuses on me, here and now. True worship focuses on God and the eternal.

 

God chose Abram (Abraham), a Gentile, to be the ancestor of the Jewish people before there ever was a Jewish people. Abraham had Isaac, who bore Jacob, who had twelve sons which became the twelve tribes of Israel. One of Jacob’s sons was Joseph whose brothers sold him into slavery in Egypt. This is how the Israelites find themselves in Egypt and having had been delivered out of Egypt are wandering in the wilderness in our next story. They are on their way to the land which God had promised them. (I once had a dear woman begin coming to Bible study one summer. At the time, she had little knowledge of the Bible. Several months later she was excited to purchase her first nativity set and set it up in her home only to angrily begin to repackage it for return shortly after opening it. Why? “Because they forgot to include a figurine of Moses!”) So for anyone who might question, how did the Jews find themselves in Egypt, it helps to give even a brief timeline of people and events for context.

 

We are in Exodus 32:1-6. The children of Israel had been in bondage in Egypt for over two hundred years. The one true God was known in Egypt. God called Moses to deliver His people. I can imagine living in Egypt, to some degree, as a believer. I liken it somewhat to my prison experience. Never have I known a time in my life when there was such a dire need to stay immersed in God’s Word, in prayer, and in likeminded fellowship, however I could get it. Even though God had done many miraculous signs through Moses to prove the existence and power of God and to help the Israelites believe, it was obvious that their time in the world had begun to wear on them. In Exodus 3:13 Moses says to God: “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, “The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name? what shall I say to them?”

 

God delivered the children of Israel out of Egypt with a mighty hand using His servant, Moses. With a renewed belief in the God of their fathers, they march through the Red Sea on dry land with the Egyptian army at their heels only to watch them all drown as they safely pass through. Can we even imagine? We would think that memorial in our minds would last us a lifetime! Why, we would never come down from that mountaintop experience, right? At least more than a few months, right? Sadly, we are more like the children of Israel than we would ever want to admit.

 

God, through Moses, leads them to an actual mountain (not just a mountaintop-experience), within three months to receive His Law. (Beginning in Exodus 19:1-40:38, the children stayed at Sinai, camping in front of the mountain there for 11 months.) Have you ever thought of the fact that God delivered them from the bondage of slavery to give them His own Law to follow? A question to think through, for sure.

 

Soon after arriving at Sinai, Moses was called up the mountain to meet with God. It was at that time that God drew Israel into a close relationship with Himself and established them as a nation under the government of God. Moses descended the mountain and met with the elders repeating the divine message from God. In agreement, all the people answered the charge: “All that the Lord hath spoken we will do.” This was Israel entering into a solemn covenant with God, pledging their allegiance to Him as their ruler and submitting to His authority in all things.

 

Again, Moses went back up to the mountaintop to meet with God where he was told that God was preparing to meet with the people to give them His Law. It would be a time they would always associate with the utmost reverence and awe. Moses was to sanctify the people for two days in preparation for God’s arrival. On the third day, the Lord was to come down in the sight of all the people upon Mount Sinai. In humility, the two days were to be focused on fasting and prayer that their hearts may be cleansed from sin. Moses put up a barrier around the mountain so that neither man nor beast would breach the area closest to the mountain lest they touch it and die instantaneously. This established a proper approach to a holy God.

 

On the third day, the summit of the mountain was covered with a thick, dark cloud, encircling it with a shroud of terrifying mystery. The sound of a trumpet was heard alerting the people that it was time to gather together to meet with God. At once, flashes of lightning and peals of thunder burst forth from the heavens. The glory of the Lord was like a fire that devoured the magnificent mountain towering over them. The people shook with fear and fell upon their faces before the Lord. Even Moses exclaimed, “I exceedingly fear and quake.” (Hebrews 12:21)

 

And then…silence. The earth was still. Out of the darkness, as the Lord stood upon the mount surrounded by an entourage of angels, He made known His Law. (See Deuteronomy 33:2,3) This awesome God—Judge, lawgiver, and compassionate guardian over His people, said, “I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”

 

We must note that the law that was spoken was not at this time exclusively for the benefit of the Hebrews. They were to be the guardians and keepers of His Law, held as a sacred trust for the benefit of the whole world. In the Ten Commandments, or the Decalogue (from deca=ten and logos=word), covered the duty of man to God and to his fellow man based on the fundamental principle of love. The ten commandments can be summarized by just two as Jesus pointed out in Mark 12: (1) ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ (2) ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’

The people were overwhelmed with terror. As one can only imagine today, we would say that their hearts had to have been beating out of their chests. We all know those moments when we have been so terrorized that we feel as though we will die of heart failure on the spot. They knew their sin like never before, had no doubt as to their guilt, and that they were standing in the presence of holiness. Their response was to shrink back from the mountain in fear and awe. “You speak to us, Moses, or we will surely die!” Moses responds, “Don’t be afraid; God has come in order to test you, and in order that the fear of Him will stay with you, SO THAT you may not sin.” The people, however, remained at a distance, but Moses drew near where God was.