"Arguably the most fundamental distinction in all reality is presented to us in the opening verses of the Bible. It is the distinction between the Creator God and everything else that exists anywhere. God along is uncreated, self-existent, noncontingent. God's being depends on nothing else outside God's own self. All other reality, by contrast, is created by God and therefore is dependent on God for existence and sustenance. The creation is contingent on God. It cannot and would not exist without God. God did and could exist without it. This essential ontological duality between two orders of being (the created order and the uncreated God) is foundational to the biblical worldview.At the root, then, of all idolatry is human rejection of the Godness of God and the finality of God's moral authority. The fruit of that basic rebellion is to be seen in the many other ways in which idolatry blurs the distinction between God and creation, to the detriment of both.
Idolatry dethrones God and enthrones creation. Idolatry is the attempt to limit, reduce, and control God by refusing his authority, constraining or manipulating his power to act, having him available to serve our interests. At the same time, paradoxically, idolatry exalts things within the created order (whether natural objects in the heavens or on earth, or created spirits, or the products of our own hands or imaginations). Creation is then credited with a potency that belongs only to God; it is sacralized, worshiped and treated as that from which ultimate meaning can be derived. A great reversal happens: God, who should be worshiped, become an object to be used; creation, which is for our use and blessing, becomes the object of our worship."
- Dr. Christopher Wright, The Mission of God, taken from pages 163, 164 and 165
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