It is possible to make God into an idol when we worship our ideas of God rather than committing ourselves to an active relationship with the living Jesus.

Idolatry is the First Sin

Idolatry is the first sin. It is the sin that begins every other sin. Idolatry means we treat something, or someone, that isn’t God as if it or they are God.

This is the sin of Adam and Eve when they decided to ignore the command of God and eat the forbidden fruit. It is the sin of Abraham when he did not argue with God but was willing to sacrifice Isaac. It was the sins of Israel when they worshipped the Golden Calf in the wilderness. It was the sins of the pagans who carved statues of wood and stone and sacrificed to them. It is the sins of those who worship celebrity, who lust after supermodels, and of those who put their faith in prime ministers or presidents.

Idolatry is pervasive, insidious, and destructive. It sneaks in by the back door as we worship money, sex, war, and power. Our devotion to overpaid sports people, the jealous seeking after more and more money, the wars that we fight, the unthinking hours in front of the TV, the corruption of sex for the sake of sex, and our fixation with success, are all acts of worship that we offer to idols.

It is so unbelievably easy to fall into idolatry because we make our own idols, and we make them in our image. This is the difference between living as the imago dei (image of God) or seeking to become sicut deus (like God).

But there is a worse form of idolatry. One much more harmful and destructive. It is when we turn God into an idol.

Turning God into an Idol

We turn God into an idol when we stop worshipping God and instead start worshipping our ideas about God. This is easy to do. It begins when we start to think that we know and understand God completely. That we have the answers to all the questions and we do not exercise the important theological virtue of humility.

Our knowledge of God, beliefs about God, and the way that we talk and act in relation to God, must all be a response to revelation. Specifically, God’s self-revelation to us in Jesus. We are unable to know God other than through Jesus. It is only in and through Jesus that we can know God. Everything else is at best a shadow and not the actual living God who caused all things to exist and who died for our salvation.

Thinking we know things about God without being dependent on revelation is a form of idolatry. We know God because God revealed God’s self to us through Christ. We know about Jesus through the direct revelation of the Holy Spirit at work in our lives, and the general revelation of scripture, interpreted through the traditions and teachings of the Christian Church over the last two thousand years. All of our traditions, all of our doctrines, and all of our beliefs, are all only and entirely dependent on the revelation of Jesus and as such are all only able to partially contain the truth of who God is.

We Want to Control God

Any time we say “God is…” or “God thinks…” we need to be really careful where that idea came from. We need to be sure that it is rooted in the revelation of Jesus and is not merely a reflection of our own thinking.

Even when reading scripture, we need to be clear in our understanding that the words of the Bible are words about God, they are not God themselves. They are inspired by God, they are not the literal words of God. They are always interpreted, and thus every time we read the Bible we must make space for the Holy Spirit and understand that our reading is always interpretation and thus is always limited.

R. F. Kuang, in her novel Babel, reminds us that translation is always an act of betrayal because it leaves behind more than it brings forward. As such, even our very best translations of the Bible are always only partial. We know only in part.

It is easy to turn God into an idol. It makes life easier for us when God is thinks like us, or acts like a more perfect version of us. It is easier to be certain than it is to live within the theological humility which takes revelation seriously. We need to be subject to Christ, and not to our own ideas. Our beliefs, doctrines, and traditions, and are all a way of responding to revelation, but they are not revelation themselves. They are the map, they are not the terrain.

Be careful to avoid the idolatry of God. It is always easier to start than stop, because once you have turned God into an idol, it is very difficult to notice it and start to undo it.

The nature of idolatry is to make ourselves the centre of the story, and in the case of the idolatry of God, this is always ultimately destructive and the root of all our sin.

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