Idol-Crushing Imagination
May 19, 2010
This week I had the unfortunate experience of searching for a particular magazine at four different stores, all to no avail. The process reminded me that there is perhaps no more concentrated collection of our culture’s idols than the magazine rack. You know as well as I do what these idols are, so there is no need to feign shock that the magazines filling the “Men’s Interest” section were primarily donned by women with unrealistic bodies in highly impractical outfits.
What struck me most as I perused the stand for my desired periodical was the obvious work these magazines put into capturing the “interest” of human beings, whether they be 10-year old girls crushing on Justin Bieber or a late-50′s couple concerned about their financial security. If there is one thing capitalism has perfected in America, it is marketing, and if there is one thing marketers want to do, it is to capture our imagination with what they have to sell.
This is significant for us to understand if we are to make headway in fighting the idolatry that such marketing invites. Consider this insight from Tim Keller:
“Idolatry is not just a failure to obey God, it is a setting of the whole heart on something besides God. This cannot be remedied only by repenting that you have an idol, or using willpower to try to live differently. Turning from idols is not less than those two things, but it is also far more. ‘Setting your mind and hearts on things above’ where ‘your life is hid with Christ in God’ (Colossians 3:1-3) means appreciating, rejoicing, and resting in what Jesus has done for you. It entails joyful worship, a sense of God’s reality in prayer. Jesus must become more beautiful to your imagination, more attractive to your heart, than your idol. That is what will replace your counterfeit gods. If you uproot the idol and fail to ‘plant’ the love of Christ in its place, the idol will grow back” (Counterfeit Gods, p. 171-2).
We find a scriptural example of this in the way Isaiah prophesied to God’s people about their idolatry. Knowing that the Israelites were enthralled by the splendor of their various idols, God spoke through Isaiah to both denigrate the value of these gods and to excite their imaginations regarding his own glory. The false objects of worship “are empty wind” (Isaiah 41:28), “profitable for nothing” (44:10), “a lie” (44:20).
Israel’s God, however, is everything we could imagine wanting in a God. He is so intimate and gentle that he is likened to a shepherd who “will gather the lambs in his arms” and “will carry them in his bosom” (Isaiah 40:11). Yet he is as majestic and transcendent as he is caring. “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand?” (Isaiah 40:12) To YHWH, “the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales; behold, he takes up the coastlands like fine dust” (Isaiah 40:15). “It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in; who brings princes to nothing, and makes the rulers of the earth as emptiness” (Isaiah 40:22-23).
If we are to rise above the small, transient (and often good) things our hearts turns into idols, we must be captivated in our imaginations by who God is and what he has accomplished for us. As one of our core values states, we must remain “awed by the glory of God and the mercy of the gospel.” This requires consistent exposure to God’s revelation of himself in scripture and pleading for his enablement to both taste and see that he is ultimately good. With such an enthrallment of heart, no glossy cover can turn us to the right or to the left.
Pursuing this awe with you,
Pastor Chris