Tiny Idols, Our Image

Little children, guard yourselves from idols.
1 John 5:21

We can imagine that Folly’s house is full of tiny idols. Statues great and small litter her home, representing the things we love and cling to that hinder our complete worship of God.

If this were so, these idols would not only line the shelves on walls, they would be stacked in darkened corners, buried in root cellars and boxed above the head in attic rooms: the relics and totems that defined our affections and drove our basest instincts to protect them at all costs.

Anything that is absolutized without God becomes an idol, subject to collapse with a propensity to oppress others. In other words, when we only focus inward and gaze at ourselves, someone outside of us must be the ideal and someone must be less than that ideal.

As we search through the idols that litter Folly’s house, it’s inevitable that we will find one that looks just like us. The idols we set up tend to look an awful lot like us and, if we’re generous, like our tribe who con-forms to our likeness. If left unchecked by God’s ever-searching Spirit, the secular lie of self-esteem can lead us to self-adoring, self-absorbed circles and become a cultural shackle that binds us. We use and dis-card the less than ideal and reduce them to mere utilitarian purposes, as pawns to serve the world I’ve created in which “my will be done” is the rallying cry—history tells these tales in every age and era.

How, in our present age, do we break these chains that drag us kicking and screaming back to Folly’s Apollyon?

We break the chains the bind us when we esteem the One in whose image we are made. The shackles fall when we cease attempts to make others over in our image. We find freedom when we respect the intentional design of a transcendent Creator who has uniquely made His entire creation for His own kingdom purpose. This interrupts the destructive cycle of pain that our idols inflict and minimizes their influence over ourselves, our families, and our communities.

To paraphrase C. S. Lewis: Our idols will cease to be devils when they cease to be gods.[1]

[1]See C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: HarperOne, 2017), 8.