Third, it is a deficient and substandard form of worship. Fourth,
idolatry makes God jealous, preventing us from receiving the full benefits of
His love, grace, and salvation. We continue: Idolatry is not limited to
man-made statuettes and figurines. Colossians 3:5 says that covetousness is
idolatry, and in the absence of the fruit of repentance, will be judged
accordingly. ‘Covetousness’ is condemned in the 10th and final commandment,
too. It means to be greedy, to eagerly desire something that legitimately
belongs to another. A good example is David ‘coveting’ Uriah’s wife Bathsheba,
or Ahab coveting Naboth’s vineyard.
Remember that often times the ‘idol’ is not evil in itself.
Mountains, trees, rivers, gold, silver, clay, are morally neutral. It is when
we put a higher value of these things or any thing above God Himself - and make
them an object of worship - then idolatry kicks in. In other words, if your
focus, life, and devotion is on anything else beside the living God, you are in
danger of idolatry. Even though today we don’t face gods with such names as
Baal, Chemosh, Molech, and the like as they did in the time of the Bible, we
still face the same issues that ancient Israel did. Pride is to worship the
false gods of sin and self. Covetousness worships the false god of money and
materialism. Sensuality worships of false god of pleasure. John wonderfully
summarises these normal human idols in I John 2:15-17:
Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. 16
If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.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. 17 And the world passeth away,
and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever
The three pitfalls include:
1. Lust of the flesh;
2. Lust of the eye;
3. The pride of life
When indulged, they are the
false gods that compete with the living God. Eve learned the hard way that
letting these imposters get in the way of her walk with the true God, was a
ticket to death itself. In Genesis 3:6, these three gods came before the Lord.
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food (lust of the flesh), and
that it was pleasant to the eyes (lust of the eyes), and a tree to be desired
to make one wise (pride of life), she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat,
and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. The end result was
death itself. Romans 6:23f echoes this sentence: the wages of sin is death.
Wisdom decrees we avoid idolatry like the bubonic plague. As John concludes his
epistle of I John, he says in the very last verse 21: Little children, keep
yourselves from idols. Amen.
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