Reducing God

We can see that happening in Exodus. Right after the Ten Commandments were given, the Israelites made a golden calf while Moses was up on the mountain talking to God. It was the first example of the slippery slope of idolatry. Their golden calf wasn’t a violation of the first commandment; the text implies that they were worshiping the God who brought them out of Egypt. But all they knew about deities was in terms of material objects, so in order to honor God’s power, they crafted a bull, or a calf.

What’s so wrong with that? Why can’t we have little picture or statue to help us remember what God is like? Because shrinking Him a little bit in order to worship Him more concretely is going to fall short. It will always devalue Him. The Israelites’ bull may have represented God’s power, but it missed His holiness and purity, as evidenced by the immoral revelry that characterized their worship. The reason God tells us not to make idols is because they reduce Him. It’s kind of like making a model of the redwoods with toothpicks and glue.

No matter how sincere we are, any idol, image, or representation of God is going to fall short and miss something of His character. Because God is infinite and incomprehensibly majestic, our images are always automatically reductionist. They don’t measure up.

We may not have a problem with carved and molten statues like ancient people did, but we do have our images. Some of them might surprise us.

For example, we take the most central room of our homes, arrange all the couches and chairs, build a pedestal, and put our idol in the center and turn it on. Then we ask it to tell us how to think, what values to have, what to buy, how to look, and what to drive. We swallow any image of how to live life to the fullest. We’ll find lots of keys to fulfillment: sex, money, power — it’s all there. The priesthood of the media serves us well. We get sucked into our idolatry. Then we’re surprised why our ethics and behavior are about the same between evangelicals and the rest of American society. It’s obvious, isn’t it? We’re being fed by the same idols.