In last month’s piece about the Ten Commandments, we noted in particular that the one that comes first is that we are to have no other gods than God: ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:2-3).
Its no.1 position in the list makes it clear that this commandment is foundational. We ignore it at our peril, yet, time and time again, we do. Our ingrained tendency is to create something or someone to worship, whatever it may be, as long as it’s not God. We then look to this idol—our substitute god—for our identity, security, well-being and worth.
You may recall the image John Calvin used was that our hearts are like factories pumping out idols 24/7, doing everything they can to avoid our having to turn to the living God. Instead of giving our lives to God our creator, we give them over to the gods we have created. Having done so, we accord these substitute gods worth by giving them our time, attention and money.
The way this normally works is quite subtle, happening over time without our even being aware. This is important to notice because it’s not as if we’re all going round worshipping—giving worth to—something or someone that is obviously not God. Instead, the idolatrous behaviour emerges gradually.
As individuals, all sorts of things can slip into first place in our lives, becoming the one thing around which we order everything else. For example, it could be our career: how successful we are in terms of the position we achieve, the recognition we receive, the material rewards we accrue. Or it could be where we live: what part of the country or town we can afford to live in; what type of home we have. Or the car we drive. Or where we go on holiday. Or the clubs we join.
The list is endless.
Nowadays, our online lives, too, can function as our substitute gods: for example, the number of people liking our photos on Instagram, or how many ‘friends’ we have on Facebook.
In and of themselves, these things are not necessarily bad. Quite the opposite, most of the things we turn into our substitute gods are in fact good things. That’s why it’s so hard to notice their steady ascendancy to the top spot in our lives—each individual decision along the way can seem perfectly reasonable.
The problem comes when they cease to occupy their proper place and instead are elevated to the number one spot that things begin to go awry. Against the flux and uncertainties of life, we start, little by little, to look to them for our identity, security, well-being and worth. Our reaction, when one of them is threatened, is revealingly disproportionate. For example, if we think we’re going to lose our job, we feel excessively worried. It’s not just our income that we risk losing but our status and reputation, too—the very things that have actually been giving us our sense of identity and self-worth.
Without our realising, to ward off these risks, we gain the reputation of being workaholics, giving all the hours we can to our career at the expense of our family, our friends and even our own health. In 2018/19, 23.5 million working days were lost to work-related ill health according to government statistics. Or, to take another example, we buy the car we’ve always set our hearts on—the phrase itself is revealing—which we really can’t afford and our personal debt spirals further out of control. In 2019, as a nation we hold £85bn of debt in loans, credit cards, hire purchase agreements, overdrafts and arrears (ONS); our total household debt as a nation is forecast to reach £2.24 trillion by 2023/24.
These substitute gods don’t just function at an individual level. As most of our desires derive from what we see others desiring, they also operate at the group level, all the way up to the level of the nation state and beyond. Churches are just as vulnerable as any other human organisation to substitute something else for God. It can be the church building itself with its architectural grandeur, or the church’s reputation and standing in the community. It can be the excellence of its worship (and that applies to any style of worship, traditional or modern), the quality of the preaching, even its ministry to the poor and marginalised. Again, many if not most of these things are good things in and of themselves. The problem occurs when they become the most important thing around which everything else is to be relegated.
Likewise, just as at an individual level, once something has achieved top position in the life of the group—staying with the example of church—if its position is threatened and less money is allocated to it, then those for whom this particular aspect of the church’s activity has become pre-eminent will feel threatened. The desire to protect these good things, but which were never meant to occupy the no.1 position, can be deeply rooted.
Our tendency to create substitute gods, both individually and as a group, is, of course, totally understandable. If we’re honest with ourselves, most of the time it’s extremely hard to trust God for our identity, security, well-being and worth. We can’t see God, and His activity in the present is normally only revealed after the event—often many years later. So it’s much easier to turn to those things which we can see, touch, quantify, measure in the here and now (money, of course, being pre-eminent amongst these) and look to them instead for our core needs. Thereby—and this is what underpins so much of our preferring substitute gods to God—we lure ourselves into thinking that we’re in control, that ultimately the agency in making everything as we would like it to be resides with us.
But it doesn’t. The Scriptures teach us that the ultimate agency rests with God. We are not our own saviour, God is. Ultimately, and hence the absolute importance of the first commandment, our sense of identity, security, well-being and worth are only healthily rooted when they are grounded in God. Not in the out-of-balance soil we’ve fertilised with our own misjudged priorities.
This is profoundly good news since we’re not up to the task of being God and the things we turn into our substitute gods cannot fulfil our desires. They will always disappoint us, and when they do, we replace them with another substitute god. We move house. We buy a better car. Or go on holiday somewhere exclusive. In the process, we take countless things that are good in themselves—our work, our relationships, our churches—and mess them up.
So what are we to do? Firstly, we need to recognise this tendency to idolatry, to create and give worth to substitute gods. If we don’t see that we do this—both at an individual level and at the level of the group—then we won’t understand that we have a problem at all.
Once understood to be a problem both at the personal and group level, then we’re ready to turn in the right direction. To join those going out, as it were, into the wilderness to the river Jordan to see John the Baptiser, the Forerunner of Christ.
By our baptism (or renewal of our baptismal vows at Easter), we make/renew our commitment to turn to Christ and make God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit our one and only God. In other words, we need to repent.
But that’s not the end of the story, just as it wasn’t for those who went out into the wilderness to be baptised by John. No, for just as we can turn everything that is good into an idol, so, too, can we turn God into an idol. That’s next month’s topic.