Early one August morning a man walked out into the tepid Atlantic waters. The low cloud cover merged horizonlessly into the ocean; in the pre-dawn dimness the man felt enveloped in a gray, damp, warm cocoon of nature. Low tide on a flat, shallow beach afforded him enough distance from the shoreline civilization that he could, if but briefly, experience the isolation of the sea. The man stood waist-deep in the water, leaning back slightly against the slow outward tide and the salt air breeze. He sensed only a murkiness of sight and sound, yet the movement of air and water testified to a presence of power and energy. The man considered how easily one could worship the created rather than the Creator, and then he prayed.
In this article, I am going to make the unlikely apologetic move of explaining why idolatry makes sense. No, I do not recommend idolatry, but I do want us to understand that it isn’t abject madness. Idolatry in the context of ancient Israel made perfect sense, and the Israelites incorporated idolatry into their worship. In so doing they violated their own needs for religious exclusivity, and they suffered accordingly. We do not have classical idolatry as a major issue in our day, and I don’t think that anyone of our body who struggles with the exclusivity issue would extend their scope to include an idolater if one did come among us. We might have some doubts or questions at times as to just how much we need to know to delineate gospel truth, but no one would find themselves so open as to include a worshiper of a lifeless image.
What’s the point, then, in including a rationale of idolatry in our series? I would cite a general and a specific reason. The general reason is that when we investigate the development of religious thought of any kind, we can better evaluate our position relative to other religious perspectives. Specifically, the case of idolatry provides an excellent contextual example of the way in which similar competing religious traditions (for so the Jews considered them) could be justified and incorporated into their worship. Today it is the variety of orthodox Christian denominations that can look similar to our form of worship, using largely the same vocabulary and forms of worship.
Isn’t Isaiah 44 clear and pointed?
Let’s look at our primary text for this article, Isaiah 44:9-20. Isaiah recounts with disbelief how a man cuts down a tree, uses some of the wood to grill his meat, fashions an idol from the remainder of the wood, and then worships the idol. “Is there not a lie in his right hand?” gasps the prophet (v. 20), scarcely able to believe what he has observed. The account takes the idolatry at face value, challenging us to believe people could be so naive, so primitive as to worship an object of their own artifice. The depiction of the idolater is not flattering. Adapting a phrase from Mark Twain, it is as if Isaiah wrote, “in matters of intellect, the difference between the idolater and the idol is not spacious.”1
Idolaters weren’t thick-browed primitives, however, despite the hubris of modern humanity to depict any prior civilization as mentally lacking, unsophisticated, and naive. Shall we say that the ancient Mediterranean world was intellectually wanting? Egypt? Greece? Rome? Assyria? Babylon? Advanced cultures all, full of art and invention. Ancient civilizations, far from being primitive and ignorant, were sophisticated seekers of religion. They differ from the modern world only in accumulated technology, not inherent civility or mental prowess. Idolatry existed alongside the monotheism that Isaiah preached.
People who lived in relatively non-technological societies also had much more intimate contact with nature than we do today. Their sensitivity to the power of nature was not dulled by technologies that made flight ordinary, turned night into day, stopped rivers, and eliminated plagues.2Today we live so isolated from nature that we often aren’t even aware of our distance from it. We have climate control, 24-hour schedules, worldwide instantaneous communication. We can go for weeks without seeing birds by day or the stars at night. We don’t know where our food comes from. Living with nature and using its bounties had a reality in ancient times that escapes us “civilized moderns.”
The ancients had sophisticated intelligence, a close contact with nature, and the same human passions as we do. How did idolatry develop from this? We will see that idolatry really isn’t very unbelievable at all; it’s just another extension of natural human thinking. That’s what Isaiah was really preaching against.
How idolatry arises
As did the man in the opening vignette of this article, people have always observed power, energy, motion, and vastness in the natural world. The first step to idolatry is observation, specifically the awareness of the powers and regulative activities of nature. Observation, however, can also be the first step to appreciation of Deity as creator (Rom. 1:19,20; Psa. 19:1-6). Observation itself is neither idolatry nor faith; what we do with our observation makes the difference between worship and idolatry.
What powers do people observe in nature? Ocean waves and flowing rivers, weather features, volcanoes, earthquakes, migration and other animal instinct behavior, plant growth, the expanse of the firmament, reproduction, and seasonal changes might cover most of the list (consider God’s witness to Job in chapters 38-40). All these activities of nature inform observant minds that some power greater than themselves exists around them.
Continuing the exploration
When one observes power in the natural world, it would be natural to want to have some personal connection to the power. Questions such as “How can I identify with this power? How can I make it part of my life?” would arise in the observer’s mind, especially in the past. When we today see the power of nature, we don’t covet it, as we have much of our own. Who needs the wind and the birds when you’ve got a 747? It does change our perspective. Societies in contact with nature would value nature’s powers much more than we do. People would observe forces far beyond human capabilities, forces that they depended on for life, forces that completely dominated their existence. They had meager ability to counter the forces of nature, so they had great incentive to want to get in on the power, to identify with it, to have a possibility of altering it for one’s good through worship of the God responsible for it.
The next step is the desire to identify with or participate in the power; we can call this personalization.
A critical step
Once a person has observed nature, categorized the great powers and decided he or she “wants in,” the next step is “How do I get in?” This becomes a watershed question, because the first two steps are equally the pathway to faith as idolatry. Now we have come to the fork in the road, with a signpost that identifies the two ways of “faith” and “idolatry.” What is at stake is how we decide to seek identification with the powers around us. Will one seek the Creator or the created?
The need for the concrete
Faith deals with the abstract and the ambiguous, but human nature desires the tangible and defined. In the great faith discourse in Hebrews we read that Moses endured by “seeing him who is invisible” (Heb. 11:27). This oxymoron perfectly describes the mind of faith: it sees the unseen. In contrast, the mind of flesh desires to make seen the unseen, to remove the ambiguity, to make it tangible and concrete. Thus, the next step to idolatry is concretization: making a concrete representation of the power.
A tangible depiction of an unseen power seemed appropriate. An incipient idolater could proclaim that a “depiction of the harvest” was merely a tribute to the god who made the seasons and gave power to the plants to grow and mature. But human nature quickly focuses on the tangible, and then the problems begin.
We have a Bible illustration of how human nature perverts even God’s blessings: the bronze serpent (Num. 21:9). It was the tool Moses used to heal the plague upon Israel when they sinned by becoming impatient with God. God sent fiery serpents, but when the people of Israel looked upon the bronze serpent, they received healing. What became of the bronze serpent? Did the people take it merely as a token or representation of God’s great mercy? No, it eventually took on a life of its own. It became the object of worship, so much so that Hezekiah had to destroy it (2 Kings 18:4)! Because it was tangible, identifying with it was easy. Mercy is intangible; a bronze serpent is for real. In their desire for concretization, Israel lost the truth about mercy and forgiveness.
The need for something tangible — something visible, and concrete — turned the bronze serpent from a healer to a destroyer. It took on a life of its own and it became an object of worship. The attribution of power had made the fatal shift from Creator to created. The image became the means of access to the power itself: no symbol, no power. With this step, ritualization has occurred. Ultimately, belief in the tangible became the operative norm — not that the image itself had inherent power, but that it was the access to the power it represented.
The process concludes
Thus, finally we have true idolatry: ritual worship of inanimate objects. Power observed became power desired. Power desired became power represented in concrete images. The images then became objects of worship in their own right. Power had fully shifted from the God of creation to the tangible representation of some aspect of the Creator’s power. Now we have idolatry in the sense of Isaiah 44. The carver didn’t worship the wood per se. He wasn’t so stupid as to think the wood had power. He was following the human process of trying vainly to access the power of nature by making a representation of it. As bad as this is, however, the history of idolatry gets much worse.
Human attributes accrue
Two more steps remain to explain the evils of idolatry: self-determination and immorality. We can use the golden calf incident (Exodus 32). With Moses apparently gone, the congregation lacked authoritative leadership and direction. They knew that they needed direction, and they chose to access it by building a golden calf, an image of some power they sensed. It, of course, lacked inherent power; therefore it became an ideal vehicle for self-determination. The Israelites were bent on returning to Egypt, so they made an image that would easily fit their own projections. They could hoist the image to their shoulders, and like the planchette on a Ouija board, “magically” direct their course back to Egypt. “The calf leads us back to Egypt,” they would say, with the calf going nowhere but where they carried it! An inanimate object makes a perfect medium for self-determination. You can make it do what you want.
The other human attribute is the projection of fleshly vices into the object of worship. People easily decided that to have fertility, the ritual worship must include fornication. To have a great harvest, you had to have a great feast. To have the power on your side in war, you sacrificed humans. People simply enacted the attributes they desired, projecting upon the inanimate image the desires of their flesh. Rituals became orgies and who was going to dare stop this? Didn’t it make perfect sense to ensure fertility and plentiful harvests by celebrating those activities with sex and food? And why not have an orgy even if your business is just getting back to Egypt? (Exod. 32:6,18).
The ultimate human projection upon idols came in the characters of the idols themselves. The idols came to stand for individual deities with human characteristics, including anger, vengeance, and lust, hence the human and semi-human forms of idols (Psa. 135:15-18). Appeasement became necessary, and ritual worship became the obvious way to appease an irascible God. People projected their worst characteristics onto blocks of wood and stone, both to revel in the debauchery and to satisfy the false deities with ritual human and animal sacrifice. What began as an observance of nature’s power descended into projecting the basest of human characteristics onto images of wood and stone.
The sequence in summary
The path to idolatry in the sense of psychosocial steps, not necessarily as a historical model, is summarized below (compare Paul’s derision of idolatry in Romans 1:20-27):
- Observance of power in nature.
- Desire to identify with that power.
- Desire to access that power.
- Making material representations of that power.
- Developing a ritual to access the power.
- The images, having been ritualized, take on a life of their own.
- Images become idols, inanimate objects that readily absorb human projections.
- The idols take on human characteristics.
- Ritual worship comes to include debauchery.
- Debauchery being fun, the idols become gods who demanded such behavior for their ritual appeasement.
Reasonable, but inexcusable!
Did Ancient Israel incorporate idolatry?
Of course they did; they had a huge exclusivity problem vis-à-vis idolatry. However, we need to put into context their lapses into idolatry. They lived under the terms of the old covenant, the Mosaic ritual system. Let’s remind ourselves how easy it was for them to fail to distinguish idolatry from Mosaic worship. Both relied heavily on sacrifices, special days, feasts, material objects that represented God, sacred places, and a priesthood. However, the prophets and historians of Israel weren’t buying any excuses; they only saw the bottom line, that idolatry meant worshiping another God.3They saw what lay behind the innocuous images, and they decried the abominable debauchery and reprehensibly immoral behavior that often accompanied idolatry. The prophets repeatedly warned against intrusions of idolatry; the warning of Isaiah 44 is hardly unique. Idols found their way into the temple (2 Chron. 33:7), as well as on the high places. Clearly, even the sophisticated monotheistic Israelite culture could look at an idolatrous worship scheme and regard it as compatible with the Mosaic program.
Can we guess some rationalizations that the Israelites used in order to accept Baal or some totem in their midst? Religious discussion in Old Testament times might have sounded like this:
“Baal, YHWH, what’s the difference? There’s only one God, regardless of what we call him. It doesn’t make any difference what people call God as long as they’re sincere in their worship.”
“The idol represents the powers of nature and detracts not from our worship of YHWH.”
“Who are we to say that YHWH is the only God? What if I was born in Assyria? I’d just worship whatever God I grew up with. We can’t claim to have the only avenue to God.”
“It is inconceivable that God should give us such great capability for sexual pleasure as a means of reproduction if he didn’t intend it also for ritual use.”
“I know some idol worshippers who are just as good people, if not better, than anyone in our city. They’re always nice, they wouldn’t hurt anyone, and they give to widows and the poor.”
Does this have any bearing on today’s ecclesia? Idolaters don’t have much of a presence on the contemporary religious map, and even if a formally idolatrous organization were to appear in town, we wouldn’t likely consider them of “like precious faith.” Dispensing for now with the various applications of idolatry in the sense of the false gods of money, career, belongings, status, etc. — which are important exhortations but don’t bear directly on the question of exclusivity — we can still learn something. We learn that idolatry as a process led Israel to rationalize religious practices that ultimately destroyed their relationship to the one true God. Unless we can step into passages such as Isaiah 44 and see that fleshly rationalization, not primitive stupidity, created the idol, we will miss much of the dangers of false religion in our generation. A contemporary Christadelphian who doesn’t see much of a difference between the Truth and orthodox Christianity differs little from a non-discriminating Israelite who felt at ease with idol worship.
Ancient Israel had something very special: the revelation of a living God. Surrounding nations lived in the same creation and wanted to access the same God because they saw His power manifested in the natural world that surrounded them. They had forms of worship that seemed close enough to fit into the scheme of Israel’s religion. Because the Israelites didn’t know their own religion well enough, another one looked just the same.
Is spiritual Israel listening to the sad tale of idolatry?
(Next: Christianity and mythology, and other concluding ideas on the exclusivity issue.)
- From a caustic essay criticizing James Fenimore Cooper’s writing, especially his characterization of Indians. Twain wrote, “…in matters of intellect, the difference between a Cooper Indian and the Indian that stands in front of the cigar-shop is not spacious.” “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”, in The Essays and Sketches of Mark Twain. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1995.
- Perhaps it was not until Rome, with its vast public works systems, that any society had some measure of control against the vagaries of nature.
- Joshua 23:6-8; 24:23; 1 Kings 18:18; 2 Chronicles 28:2,3; Jeremiah 5:19; Amos 8:14; and Micah 1:7.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One