After writing last week about how idolatry is essentially a failure to see beyond things themselves, that we fixate on created things, loving and valuing them without recognizing that they point us toward God, someone asked how to let things be meaningful without turning them into idols. I thought that this would make a good follow-up discussion but it will take two weeks to develop. First, I want to encourage us to think about the process of changing our perspectives, how we see things, and then we will consider how prayer and contemplation help us do this.
For all of us, the type of idolatry I described is inevitable. We can do little but start with the world so obviously right before us. Our attention is focused on creation before we see anything of the “hidden” God who made it. Only slowly do we start recognizing God in and though all that has been created. Our unavoidable idolatrous way of looking at things is really bad news if we believe that God is impatient with our sinfulness and ready to strike us down immediately for all errors. However, I would suggest that God expects and understands that we all begin in idolatry, although God lovingly reveals himself so that we need not stay there. God knows even better than we what a long journey stretches before us.
Even those of us raised as Christians begin in idolatry. We easily make idols of our churches, our doctrines, and even our faith. We first “see” and focus on our religion rather than God. Legalism is the Idolizing of morality and obedience instead of seeing how these are pathways to God. We can turn any of our spiritual practices and good works into idols, which means that they become ends in themselves. We see what appears to be our goodness rather than the goodness of God in us. We do not understand that everything is a grace, and that without Christ we can do nothing (John 15:5). All spiritual arrogance, from believing in the “rightness” of my church, the correctness of my faith, and my distain for “sinners” is a sign of spiritual idolatry, which is due to spiritual immaturity.
Our journey toward maturity necessitates unlearning our first impulse to make idols. To understand how we can leave idolatry, we also must stop thinking that there are only two options, two choices, that all is an either-or, and start to see the many degrees of spiritual progress. With regard to idols, things are not either idols or not idols, as much as both idols and images of God to us, to whatever degree we have grown in grace. While it is useful to describe the issue as perceiving things as either idols or bearing the image of God, in practice we do both more or less all the time. The question is how much we have moved from idolizing things to seeing God in and though all things. The change will not occur in one instant, but is far more gradual as we let go of our idol fixation.
Therefore, the question is not “is this an idol” but “how much is this an idol” and “how much do I focus on this instead of God?” My progress in seeing God in everything will occur over time, and even what seems like an enormous revelation may turn out later to be a small step. But all the small steps are important. If we remain in either-or thinking we are more likely to imagine that valuing created things makes them idols, and that we must reject them entirely in order to love God. This is a God-against-the-world perspective. Loving God by loving his creation is simply a broader application of the principle of loving God by loving our neighbor. It cannot be love God or one’s neighbor, but God in and through the neighbor.
Another example of this process is how we all make an idol of ourselves, not seeing God as coming to us in our own lives, but clinging to an image of ourselves as we imagine ourselves to be. Jesus’ call to die to ourselves is to let go of this idol we have created, the person we think we are. God will reveal himself, as he does in all creation, through our own created self. We love the self we created rather than the self God created. The process of dying to self is a long journey with many hills to climb. Any one who thinks he or she has fully died to self is unfortunately unaware of how much false self there is.
This is why, before moving on to how prayer and contemplation are the means of this transformation, we need to know how prevalent our idol making tendency is. We need to know that in everyday practice idolatry is a matter of degree, and that we move imperfectly and gradually toward seeing God in everything. Idols rarely disappear suddenly, but shrink to reveal more of God. Rejecting the created world, as some misguided believers try to do, will not make us love God more. Distancing ourselves from creation will not bring us closer to the Creator any more than hating the children will help us love the Father.
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