Jeremiah 10:1-11:23, Colossians 3:18-4:18, Psalms 78:56-72, Proverbs 24:28-29
Today is the 8th day of October welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I’m Brian it’s great to be here with you today as we continue the journey through the week and, yeah, first full week of the month. And we’re for journeying through it and making our way toward the back half. So, let’s dive in. We are reading from the New Living Translation this week. Jeremiah chapters 10 and 11 today.
Commentary:
Alright. So, as we move through the prophetic books, and we happen to be in one right now called Jeremiah, we see this term, and this is a term we’ve been seeing throughout the Scriptures but it’s pretty…pretty much inescapable in the books of the prophets and that term is idolatry. So, idolatry is a term that permeates the Bible, but the way that it’s described in the Scriptures is something we’re a little less familiar with, right? So, quoting Jeremiah here. “They cut down a tree and a craftsman carves an idol and they decorate it with gold and silver and then fasten it securely with a hammer a nail, so it won’t fall over. Their gods are like helpless scarecrows in a cucumber field. They can’t speak and need to be carried because they can’t walk.” So, we can look at that and know that in most of our cultures this is not a practice that we’re normally used to seeing or around or are tempted to be involved in. Although idol worship, certainly, even as described in the Bible here, still exists on earth today. But we can look at this and say, “well I don’t do any of that stuff. So, yeah, I can see why God would be calling his people away from that kind of useless behavior. But it’s I don’t practice idolatry.” But if we think of idolatry as the giving of ourselves in some way in worship towards something that we believe is promising us some kind of fulfillment or life then we realize that idolatry is still in the world and is still in the cultures. It just looks different. Like, we look at this example of an artisan kinda creatin…crafting an idol. But then we need to look at what has been crafted for us to live in that we think gives us safety, called a house or a home or an apartment. Or we look at our car. We can look at anything that has been made that we are thinking that if we could attain that thing than our lives would be fulfilled then we can see that we get pulled in all kinds of directions. We can…we could say that the culture itself that is very marketing driven that is continually throwing products and services into our face with the promise of some kind of fulfillment in some sort of way, that we are being pulled. And I’m not saying marketing is a bad thing. It’s how our culture works. And I’m not saying that the products and services that are being marketed are a bad thing. It depends on where our hearts are going. If we start obsessing about achieving that promotion, if start obsessing about a bigger home because we need to keep up, if we start obsessing about these things and studying and researching and planning and giving ourselves over to the pursuit of something outside of God, then we…as Ecclesiastes told us, we are chasing the wind. And, so, we see God coming up against idolatry in the worship of false gods continually, especially in the prophets, but we see that it’s because His people have broken covenant with Him and gone to pursue something else. That’s all so called adultery and it is called that in the Scriptures as well, a spiritual form of adultery, idolatry, giving yourself to someone else expecting some kind of life, some kind of exchange that only God can provide. I’ve used an example in the past of like a stuffed animal because I’ve had stuffed animals in my life for a long time with my children. And…and, you know, some of you are in the same boat, like you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you’re kid starts talking to a stuffed animal, and they can love these animal, and they can love…they can pretend and everything, but if your kid starts elevating this certain stuffed animal, like it takes the prominent place in bed, it’s like always sat up and they start talking to this thing, not just pretending but they talk to this thing and they stop talking to you as their parent and they start telling the stuffed animal to tell you things, you starting you got a problem. Like your kid is giving themselves to something that is not even alive and is not even real. And, so, you become troubled and the further that goes the more troubled you would be. And this is in so many ways what God is saying. “You keep tracking to give yourself to something that you made or that you had made for you and you’re giving yourself to this thing ignoring the fact that you are already in covenant with the most-high God. There is nowhere else to go. Everything else is lesser and you are worshiping lesser things thinking that they can do the job of the most-high God in your life and they can’t. And, so, you are being led to destruction. And I’m telling you, stop, come home, return to me, don’t do this, it will destroy you.” This is fundamentally what we’re talking about when we’re talking about idolatry. And once we kind of unpack it to this point, we can see that lots of things can be idolatrous behaviors in our lives as we examine where our hearts are being pulled. In what direction are our hearts being drawn away? Because if we are being drawn away, like “God’s not gonna come through. So, I’m gonna come through and I’m gonna go get this thing and I’m gonna have this fashioned, I’m gonna make this and then it’s gonna make my life better”, yeah then that’s dangerous territory. We are hopelessly and helplessly dependent upon the most-high God, whether we like it or not. And just acknowledging it is really what He’s looking for, that we acknowledge, that we remain intimate in the covenant that we have entered into as His followers. And, so, let’s think about that. Certainly examine our own hearts and lives today, but also have this kind of awareness and understanding as we hear these terms brought up over and over and over in the books of prophecy.
Prayer:
Father we invite You into that. We don’t want to be involved in idolatry. And we can very easily say, like as described in the Bible, we’re not involved in that kind of idolatry. But idolatry, like everything else, isn’t just an outward expression, it is what is…it is an outward expression of what is inside of us. And we can see that we can be seduced and pulled away in all sorts of ways. And, so, come Holy Spirit when we do find ourselves pulled in all kinds of directions. Make us aware, help us to open our eyes and see what’s happening and where that road will lead. We ask this in the mighty and precious name of Jesus. Amen.
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