The Living God Confronts Idolatry - Part 6

They say to a tree, ‘You are my father,’
and to a stone, ‘You gave me birth.’
For they have turned their back to me,
and not their face.
But in the time of their trouble they say,
‘Arise and save us!’
But where are your gods that you made for yourself?
Let them arise, if they can save you, in your time of trouble;
for as many as your cities are your gods, O Judah.
-Jeremiah 2:27-28

Kings, armies, horses, treaties, riches, natural resources - all these things are not really gods and are unbable to bear the weight of trust we put in them. However, what makes them into gods is that we insist on believing the spurious promises they make (or that we implicitly attribute to them). We keep on paying the enormous sacrifices they demand for our loyalty. And we keep on hoping against hope that they will not let us donw. But of course, they always do in the end. Idolatry is wasted effort and dashed hopes. The worship of false gods is the fellowship of futility, the grand delusion whose only destiny is disappointment.

So when the editorial in a British national newspaper once ended its sad analysis of a society in which two children could callously murder a toddler with the words "All our gods have failed," it doubtless intended the words only as a figure of speech. Sadly, such a metaphorical cry of despair also precisely captures the spiritual truth. Those things that we thought could deliever us from evil and in which we invested great amounts of intellectual, financial and emotional capital in the hope that they would deliever us, have instead spectacularly disappointed us. When will we ever learn?

-Christopher Wright, The Mission of God, p. 176