Part of it he takes and warms himself; he kindles a fire and bakes bread. Then he makes a god and worships it, makes it a carved image and bows down before it.
A man cuts down a tree, and uses part of it for fuel, and the other part he turns into an idol. He does not see the absurdity of this, of using the same source material for consumable fuel and also for worship-worthy carvings. He is blind and undiscerning.
There’s something ironic and stinging about this, and I suspect it’s because we do the same thing with nearly every false idol we worship. Take money. Part of the money we make we use to purchase food to consume, to pay for the banal aspects of our life. Then we turn around and worship both the money we have and the money other people have, when it’s simply a means to purchase what we need. Broken toilet parts, and food. It’s the ultimate of utilitarian. And yet, our worship makes money bloated, and have to carry so much more than it can reasonably be expected to. Money isn’t the source of happiness, any more than carved wood can serve as a god. We, like the carver, are blind to the mundane but critical role money plays, rather than the bloated, worshipped one.
I suspect the same irony shows up in all of our false idols, that they all have humble but critical roles in our lives. We’ve laid upon them too many false expectations, which means we worship the idol, instead of being grateful for the fuel for cooking and heating. What about the idols of power, stardom, self-determination, success? This morning, I’m thinking about the more mundane origins or purposes of these things to see if I can strip away the false-idol worshipping.
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