The Folly Of Idolatry
THE FOLLY OF IDOLATRY
ROMANS 1:22-25
In the human quest for God, something went tragically wrong.
We have already mentioned Paul’s excursion into God’s revelation in creation at Lystra. He also touched on the theme before a much more intellectual audience at Athens (Acts 17:22-31), and a remark reported by Luke from that address has significance here. God, Paul maintained to the philosophers, set people in a context of order and purpose, “that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him” (Acts 17:27).
In the quest, something went awry. In arrogance and selfishness humanity sought a deity to tame and to serve them, instead of a Being to whom they could give themselves in worship and surrender. We made God in our own image, as the psalmist chided: “You thought that I was one like yourself” (Psalm 50:21). The beauty of Greek art could not conceal the fact that the lovely statues of Apollo, Zeus and Athene were only Greeks as the Greeks saw themselves in their moments of self-exaltation, while the myths and legends which surrounded them told of caprice, sensuality, cruelty and pride.
Idols were the result of this perversion in the human quest for God, and they revealed the point Paul makes, the human self-willed misreading of the evidence which God had set before us. And idols were everywhere. It is difficult for modern Christians to grasp the pervasive nature of the paganism with which our spiritual ancestors had to deal. Many pages in Tertullian reveal vividly the practical difficulties which at every turn confronted Christians in the ancient world. “Why, even the streets and the market-places,” he writes, “the baths and the taverns and our very dwelling-places, are not altogether free from idols. Satan and his angels have filled the whole world.”
It was worse than this. Conscientious Christians had to absent themselves from public festivals. They opened with pagan adoration and sacrifice to an idol. Their membership of a trade guild, and in consequence their commercial standing and goodwill, involved the awkwardness of “sitting at meat in the idol’s temple.” Even their shopping raised the problem of meat which had been sacrificed to idols. And still worse, people become like the object of their worship, especially if it is a projection of their own evil. This is the sense of the climax in 1:25.
Meditation We shall be like him.