You wouldn’t think it would be very easy to construct a god, but as it turns out it is one of the simplest things we humans can do.
In ancient days they would take a piece of wood, stone, or some precious metal and fashion into some sort of image. Usually, these images represented one of the various gods of the pantheon of gods that had been passed down to them from preceding generations. If you were very wealthy, you could fashion an exquisite god and even build for him (or her) a temple for all to see the god that came from your hands (or the hands of the craftsman that you hired to do the job for you). If you didn’t have such extensive means, you would take pretty much whatever was at your disposal and fabricate something in front of which you could bow down and show your allegiance. In either case, (and all the various levels of economic means in between), the gods who were a fabrication of someone’s own hand all had one thing in common: they were inanimate objects with no inherent life.
Times have really not changed that much when it comes to fabricating gods. Today’s very wealthy are able to make or purchase some of the most extreme examples of gods ever conceived throughout the brief history of humankind. Often these take the form of million dollar cars, multi-million dollar homes, airplanes, yachts, priceless works of art, trophy wives, extended youth, sports teams, businesses, and many more options. Some of these were built by the hands of the current owners, some were purchased, and some were passed down from previous generations. If you are not so wealthy, you are not excluded from this god-building exercise, your gods are just a little less expensive, but they are as controlling as any other god. You might make a god of a cheaper car, your lawn, your family, your meager position, a relationship that you have been pursuing, your sexuality and lust, your fantasy sports team, and the list goes on. We are all, everyone one of us, adept at building gods.
I think it all started back in the garden, to be perfectly honest. When Eve (and Adam, let’s not just blame this on a woman), looked at the tree and decided it was “desired to make one wise” she started the process of looking to something other than God for the source of wisdom. Before the fall, God, wisdom incarnate, was there walking with them in the garden after having given them a beautiful and functional creation to see what humanity would make of it. But when the chance came to find wisdom on our own, we abandoned God, and ever since have been turning creation into dead gods.
Do you realize that anything we put our hands to, anything we decide to create, is ultimately the product of death? To make a table, we have to kill a tree. To make a coat, we have to kill an animal. To build a house, we must clear a field of all living things, often supplanting that which has made the field a home, so that we can put up a structure composed completely of dead and inanimate matter. And should we choose to make something even more exotic, like a Bugatti for instance, the story is no different, there is no life within that object at all. Our act of creating is a dead end act.
Contrast this to God’s act of creating. He brings life to everything he puts his hand to. He took raw elements and created plants and animals from them. He took gases and fire producing a star whose radiation brings life to the plant materials. He took dirt and fabricated humanity. And within all of these things he created, he placed the ability to procreate and bring forth more life. His creation is not a dead end, rather it is life-giving.
All of this comes to mind when I read Psalm 115:8, which says, “Those who make them become like them, so do all who trust in them.” In other words, when we fabricate gods of our own, trusting in them or trusting in those gods others have created, we die. Not immediately, no, but we begin to die. If you remember the story of Pinocchio where the wooden boy becomes a real boy, then you will know what this is like, only in reverse. What was life within us slowly becomes lifeless as we worship the gods of our own imagination. It may not happen all at once, but it will happen. The joy slowly leaves us, our creativity eventually diminishes, and our heart becomes hardened. We turn to stone, or wood, or metal, and end up living our lives by going through the motions, never fully realizing life’s true joy.
I realize that when people usually speak of worshipping idols they speak about how the idols don’t satisfy the needs we have, and such a conclusion is an important one. But I think the fact that idols have the power, and it is truly their only power, to turn us into stone is a much more important conclusion to draw. Filling our lives with wrong things can be easily changed, but who of us has the power to resurrect ourselves from the dead?
According to the psalmist, when we worship God he blesses us with life. This is exactly, I believe, what Jesus meant when he said he came to bring us life, both abundant and eternal. When we worship the true God he kills the death that lies within us, brings to us new life, and starts the process of rebuilding us in his image, the God who is alive, not in the image of the dead gods we build. Therein lies hope, even for those of us who have spent most of our lives becoming like the dead gods we have created.
