More on idolatry (pun sorta intended)
For those of you who read the main posts, I blogged the other day about idolatry and Roy Moore, and a discussion with BiblePimp
ensued. I thought I’d bring it out to the main page, because it’s
taking up lots of space, and I haven’t blogged here in a few days.
TheBiblePimp (whose web page I cannot access, and whose e-mail didn’t go through) notes the following: I believe if you were honest about it, you would agree that there is no conclusive proof that idolatry is occurring there. Unless you have the proof of their hearts and minds? 🙂
But I do have the evidence of their mouths and bodies, and that’s as
good as we can get, in some sense. Specifically, I refer to two
news reports.
On 21 August, the New York Times reported the following:
supporters, and on Wednesday hundreds streamed into Montgomery to
chant, kneel, pray and cry on the steps of the state’s highest court,
shouting out the Almighty’s name and at times lying on their bellies to
block passers-by.
“This is not about a monument,” the Rev. Mahoney bellowed. “This is about resisting tyranny.”
“Amen,” the crowd boomed.
Gene Chapman, the man who walked the 700 miles from Austin, Tex., said,
“This is a culture war.” Then Mr. Chapman added, in a thin voice:
“I’d go to jail. Happily.”
On top of the long walk, he has been on a 10-day hunger strike.
On Wednesday evening, the police took away more than 15 people, some of
them elderly, after they refused to leave the monument’s side when the
building closed.
And on 22 August, we learn the further information that,
defeated. Some had planned to kneel in front of the monument and block
whoever tried to move it.
“We were ready to lay down our lives,” Janet Spear, who came from Birmingham, said.
I am willing to admit that not all the people doing the Ten
Commandments thing are involved in idolatry. But at least some
component of them are, as the above seems to indicate. As Christ
said in the Sermon on the Mount, “by their fruit you shall know them.”
But idols are those things which displace or get in the way of
God. And they are more insidious when they are not golden calves
to bow down to. Probably most of us religious people (including
myself) have engaged in idolatry at some point, when we let something
in our life — a job, a relationship, a treasured home, the Bible, or a
symbol of religion in the public sphere — get in our way of putting
God first.
How am I so sure about these people? Because their devotion to
the two-and-a-half-ton piece of granite is such that they will risk
their health or even lives for it. Yes, they realize it’s a
symbol, but the very fact that they will do this for a symbol points out that they have confused a symbol with God.
What does God require of us? It’s not unceasing attention to
legalism (which again, can indicate idolatry). As Christ noted in
Matthew “…You tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the
weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith….You blind
guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!” Or as
the Hebrew prophet Micah noted about 700 years earlier, “What does the
LORD require of you but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk
humbly with your God?”
If we put half the energy into doing those things that we all put into
the “culture war,” I daresay the world would be a much better place to
live.
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