Day 209.
The idols of the nations are silver and gold,
the work of human hands.
They have mouths, but do not speak;
they have eyes, but do not see;
they have ears, but do not hear,
nor is there any breath in their mouths.
Those who make them become like them,
so do all who trust in them! (Psalm 135:15-18 ESV)
I used to think that ancient idols in the form of statues was so ridiculous. How could anyone carve an image and then start worshiping it? Then I learned that this is not the full story. The images were carved to represent the deities the people worshiped. The bible speaks about them simply as the carved images because there is no deity behind it. In the worship of God, no images were allowed to represent Him. So what is this all about? The idea of an idol is worshiping a god that you want to exist. It has to do with imagine what you think god ought to be or ought to do and worshiping this god. And this is something that cultures, including ours, still do. We imagine what god is like and how he ought to respond to us and we worship it. But in the end, any imagined god is no god at all and those who worship him become blind and deaf to the God who is real. They are so tuned in to their imagined god that the Bible and God’s Word gets filtered out. That is the affect of idols. Because the God of the Bible bears little if any resemblance to what they expect god to be like, they cannot hear.
So, what do you imagine God to be like?
