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.
Ecto blogging software
7 September 2003 at 3:43 pm.
Greetings Nate 🙂
Sorry that email attempt didn’t go through, I filled in the comment information as tongue-in-cheek since I was commenting on a bible reference. I usually don’t post email address to avoid spam harvesters. I’ll send you a personal email to avoid the spammers if you would like to email me directly. Sorry about the unobvious attempt at humor 🙂
I have to agree that the people who are protesting are a bit misguided in the battle that they are fighting.
The essential message of the 10 commandments was directed to the jews who were freed in Exodus. It was part of their covenant with God for freeing them. It layed down the law for them to follow so as to be ‘free of sin’ and enabled a relationship with God for them. There were many other rules and ritual sacrifices for the people to follow in order to ‘stay clean’ and be in ‘good standing’ with God. If any of the rules were broken, the penalty was usually death in order to convey the holiness of the rules in maintaining God’s relations.
The New Testament changed the standing of the people. God sent the Christ to free the jews from the law and to avail His grace to the gentiles(non-jews for those not familiar with the term). Thus, the gentiles were never required to follow the 10 commandments. This is not to say that one should *not* follow them as a suggestion, just that its [the law] importance to salvation is eliminated. Christ’s sacrifice wipes out the need to suffer the penalty of death for sin. Thus was the purpose of the ritual sacrifices, to ‘clean the sin’ of the jewish people.
So to conclude this somewhat long post… 🙂
The 10 commandments do not equal salvation. In the grand scheme of things God intended to let them fall by the wayside. The people should let the monument go and stop wasting their energy.
The references are as follows:
In Exodus 34:10-28 God made a covenant with the jews and laid out the laws to follow for their salvation at the time. But if you look at John 3:16-18 you can see that belief in and acceptance (and receipt) of the Christ Jesus is the path to salvation.
So to reiterate, yes the poeple are misguided, but not idolators. They view the event as a direct attack on the word of God. They are attempting to show their devotion to God by defending the word of God through protesting the monument’s removal. Until its removal, I would risk to speculate that those people would only think about the monument in passing.
I believe that they feel internally, if they do not protest, then they would have to question their devotion to God’s word. For to let a monument of God’s word be forcably removed without a single protest would reveal that no one cared about the word of God. It is easy to judge people but difficult to empathize with their actions. You have to look deeper than black-and-white (no pun intended).
However, strip away the monument of the 10 commandments and the essential message of the bible is far from diminished.