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You must not worship the Lord your God in their way, because in worshipping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things the Lord hates.
- Deuteronomy 12:31
There is an apocryphal story about Abram as a young man living in his father’s (Terah) home. Terah made his living as an idol maker and seller. One day, Abram was appointed to watch over the idol shop, a task he loathed because he did not believe the idols had any power. So he took an ax and chopped up every idol but one. Into this idol’s hand he put the ax. When Terah returned to find his shop a wreck, Abram explained to him that the idols got into an argument over who could claim a sacrificed offering. The idol holding the ax simply won the argument by destroying the other idols. Terah knew this was a cockamamie story and that Abram was to blame. But, he couldn’t accuse Abram, because to do so would be to admit that idols are powerless.
Idols are indeed powerless, except in one disastrous way. They misplace worship due only to God onto something else. Even more insidious is when an idol of God Himself is made, not to replace God, but to attempt to capture God in a limited and finite way. This is the danger Christians face today. We know full well the problems in worshipping other false gods and making good things like family and hard-work our idols. What we are less careful about is how we might take an incomplete idea we have of God and make that into an idol. The idols of today are in the mind. They are ideals we put in the place of God. We pursue and dedicate ourselves to that ideal, fooled into thinking we are pursuing and worshiping God himself.
In Deuteronomy 12 God’s people are about to take possession of the promised land. God warns them to not take the ideas of worship of foreign gods and make these ideas their own. In other words, if the worship of Baal requires temple prostitutes in order to make the rain come, don’t think that temple prostitutes will cause Yahweh to send rain. God warns his people to not create false and incomplete ideas of worshipping God from the practices and ideals of the prevalent culture, and practice these things thinking in so doing they are worshipping God. Any attempt, says Deuteronomy, to use a temple prostitute to worship the God of Israel, for example, will be detestable to the God of Israel.
I read these verses from Deuteronomy on the day after the storming of the capitol building in Washington DC. I’m quite sure most of us condemn violence of any sort, in any protest. Yet what was deeply disturbing to me about this particular protest was the prevalence of “Christian” symbolism—of signs with bible verses, and religious testimony of protestors, capped with the blasphemous prayer offered from the Senate floor asking God to bless their ‘revolution.’ What we saw that day was idolatry on full display. The same idolatry condemned in Deuteronomy 12.
Christian Nationalism is on the rise. It is the secularizing of the faith (so I really don’t like to even call it ‘Christian’). It is the attempt to make holy the pursuit of political power. Power and its pursuit is not a biblical ideal. It is an ideal of our prevalent culture. When Christians chase after it, even in pursuit of their constitutional rights, they are practicing a secular liturgy. This might even be permissible except for when it is linked inexorably to the Christian faith. When Christians claim their protests and war on culture and political pursuits are ‘for Christ’ they are worshipping God in the manner the world worships its idols. The Lord finds this detestable. It is idolatry. And like the idols in Terah’s shop, the only good idol is a smashed one.
~ Pastor Joel