We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
What Is an Idol?
We all believe lies about God that have caused us to mistrust him and therefore to look elsewhere for life. This is what an idol is. It’s anything we try to use to fill what only God can fill.
God never intended anyone or anything other than Jesus Christ to meet our core need for unsurpassable worth and absolute security. So when we try to meet these most central needs with something-or-someone other than God, that something-or-someone becomes an idol.
Idols always fail. They leave us with profound experiences of disappointment, frustration, hopelessness, and a host of other painful emotions. We try a wide variety of tactics to numb these painful emotions (alcohol, drugs, pornography, food, etc), or we distract ourselves from them (work, television, movies, sports, politics, etc). But distractions are only momentary and the Novocain of the idols eventually wears off.
A common idol we face today is related to “the American Dream.” Many ‘get life’ from what they achieve, what they possess, or whom they impress, which leads them to work eighty hours per week, sacrificing family and friends in the process of climbing arbitrary ladders.
Others chase peak experiences, believing that the next risk-taking adventure, the next experience of falling in love, the next lurid sexual experience, or the next drug-induced high will make them feel fully alive.
Christians tend to have a distinct set of religious idols. By this I don’t mean golden calves, statues, or shrines. Instead, some religious people have tried to find their ultimate worth and security in special rituals. Others have adopted righteous behaviors as a way to try and feel loved by God. And still others make an idol out of their tribe, making it superior to others because of their distinctive beliefs.
These are all forms of idolatry. God has established our worth, has accepted us into his family, and has secured us in his great love. Yet many fail to dwell in that love, fail to experience that security, and struggle to believe the worth they genuinely have. So with great hustle, and futility, they try to establish all of these things on their own.
—Adapted from Benefit of the Doubt, pages 63-65
Related Reading
Do You Need to Starve a Little?
Sarah (Rosenau) Korf via Compfight Here’s a challenging reflection on Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent by Kurt Willems. He notes that Lent is a season where we choose to starve ourselves of our little idols in order to join Jesus in the desert, and he lists several benefits of this particular kind of…
The Good News That’s Really “Good”
Often we view our relationship with God in terms of a legal contract. For instance, people often ask questions about salvation in this way. They see God as the judge, we are defendants, and salvation is about staying out of prison. With this perspective, questions about salvation and the Gospel—which means “good news”—are about the…
Drum Roll Please: Greg’s Final Critique of Bart Ehrman’s Article
This is the ninth and final of several videos Greg put together to refute Bart Ehrman’s claims published in the article What Do We Really Know About Jesus? Thanks for hanging in there for this last one. I know it was a long wait, but the holidays got inordinately busy for Greg. In this segment, Greg talks…
Sermon Clip: Waking from Oz
In this unique sermon clip, Greg Boyd explains to us his “Theory of OZ” based on the movie Wizard of Oz. In the movie Wizard of Oz, the characters are all looking for something they think they need. As Christians, we do the same. Whether it’s a new job, a marriage, a lack of a…
Video Q&A: Faith and the Historical Jesus
Greg is trying something new in order to answer more of your questions. He’s going to be taping himself addressing your questions with no polish of any kind: raw and unedited. You’ll notice in this first one that he’s pretty low in the frame of the camera, and we’ll be tweaking this as we go,…
Faith in the Midst of the Storm
This last weekend Greg was in Michigan preaching at Mars Hill. If you’d like to download the audio of the sermon click here. Greg continues his thoughts on faith and doubt in this sermon, focusing on the gospel account of Jesus walking on the water. What does it mean to have faith?