Parting Words for God's People
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
<<PRAY>>
Last wk, 13-20
<<READ 5:13-21>>
WHY does John end the letter like this? Does it seem to come out of nowhere?
What even is an idol? And how much of a threat is it really, to you and me?
some people think of an idol as a statue or a painting used in religious devotion - like an ancient temple
illust . Artemis of Ephesians in Acts 17, 19 - ancient wonders of the world
illust . Golden calf in Exod
others imagine celebrities, whose status as influencers or pop stars almost effortlessly SEDUCES your affections and attention
The call away from idols to the true God is central to the Scriptures. Paul:
9 For they themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, 10 and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come.
“Little children, keep yourselves from idols” turns out to be a very appropriate closing to the letter. But how?
Q. How should the children of God keep themselves from idols?
If we’re going to take John’s parting words seriously, we need to figure a few things out about idols, beginning with our first of three points:
I. Realize the Danger of Idols
I. Realize the Danger of Idols
An idol is a false god, or a false version of the TRUE God.
4 “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
This is one of the most important passages in all of Scripture.
You may remember that when asked what the greatest commandment was, Jesus said that this is the first and greatest commandment. Dt 6:4-5. And then he says,
31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
One chapter earlier, in Deuteronomy 5, the LORD gives the 10 Commandments, beginning with:
You shall have no other gods before me ; and
You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them.
In order to understand the nature and danger of idols, we have to start here. An idol is anything that we treat in a way that violates these commandments.
When the LORD says, “you shall have no other gods before me.” The Hebrew text literally says, “no other gods shall be yours in front of my face.” The LORD’s presence is everywhere. David in Psalm 139 says,
7 Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? 8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
You cannot have another god without it being before Him.
So look at 1 John 5:20-21 again <<READ 20-21>>
Jesus is eternal life; every alternative is death. So keep yourselves, he says, from idols.
In this light, we can see that John has spent the entire letter reminding us of the true God in contrast to those who would sell you a counterfeit.
John’s summary:
23 And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.
FALSE version of the TRUE God.
Looking at the rest of Scripture, we find that idols come in forms we might not expect. The first kind of idol is a FALSE version of the TRUE God.
In Exodus 32-33, for example, after the LORD has delivered Israel from Egypt, parted the Red Sea, given them water from the rock and bread from heaven, and they’ve heard the ten commandments,
Moses goes up on Mount Sinai, and that’s when the Israelites fashion a golden calf. What you may not have noticed is that Aaron says “These are your gods who led you out of Egypt, let’s have a festival to the LORD!”
Something similar happens in 1 Kings, after Solomon dies. King Jeroboam installs golden calves at Bethel and Dan, and tells the Israelites to go worship the LORD there.
It is always idolatry to try to worship the true God in ways He has condemned. As Jesus Himself said in Luke 10:16, “The one who rejects me rejects him who sent me.” And here, in 1 John 2:23,
23 No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also.
And yet, modern Judaism and Islam claim to worship the God of Abraham while rejecting Jesus. Their gods are golden calves with God’s name written on them.
A subtler version of this idol is found in many churches. A great bronze image of Jesus, hanging in agony on a crucifix in a place of worship, is a false version of Jesus.
There is a place for artistry and beauty in how we construct our church, but there is no place for images in worship; there is a place for picture books and other visual aids for instruction. But not in worship. Instantly, it becomes a snare. A picture cannot convey God’s attributes - it cannot show His holiness, or eternity, or glory, so a picture or statue called “God” is always a lie.
FALSE GODS
One step further than worshiping a false version of God is worshiping a false god.
In 1 Samuel 5, When the Philistines took the Ark of the Covenant in battle, they put it in their temple to the false god Dagon, and they went to bed thinking they now had Israel’s god on their side. But God refuses to be set among the gods of the nations, even as their head. The next morning, they opened the temple door to find the statue of Dagon facedown before the Ark.
They picked him up, set him back in place, did their priestly things, and the next morning, they opened the door, and Dagon had fallen yet again. And this time, his head and hands were lying on the temple threshold, cut off the statue.
God refuses to be set among other gods because - whether they’re statues, or angels or demons or other spiritual beings, or anything else at all - nothing in all creation can be compared to Him. He alone is the uncreated One.
The modern religion of pluralism does the same, telling you that Jesus is fine, you do you, but all religions are basically the same.
ABSTRACT IDOL
So, we’ve seen the idolatries of the false version of the LORD, and the false gods, the third kind of idol is more abstract. An abstract idol is a thing or an idea that demands or tempts us to reject God’s place as King.
ILLUST: One of my friends in college wanted to call herself a Christian, she said, but she didn’t see why God had to be more important than other things. She asked me, why couldn’t she go to church, and be a Christian, and still have other priorities that were just as high? God was important, she said, but why not have Him at the same level as family, and career, and her own happiness, and other important things?
Over the years, I’ve seen and struggled with abstract idols, but this is the only time I’ve heard someone put it so explicitly and honestly.
She had tried to put God in a temple with other gods just as surely as the Philistines thought they had.
How do we answer her question, though? If you put God on the same level as your own family, or career, or ambition, or happiness, you have demoted Him. He’s no longer King of kings. And you’ve deformed Him. He’s no longer the God who has revealed Himself.
My friend had misunderstood what God is and what He deserves. He is not one thing in a life full of things; He is the light by which all things must be seen, because He made all things and they are what He has said they are.
SECULAR IDOL
A secular idol is like an abstract idol, but it’s usually bigger than your family or ambitions. It demands that the LORD keep His place in submission. It often says you can keep your God, but you must keep Him in your heart, in your home, in your own business. But you must bow your knee to the gods of our culture.
This month, it’s on display everywhere as people rush to bow down and pay homage to modern LORDSHIP SEXUALITY, and says you can keep your Jesus, as long as you also fly a rainbow flag. Either reject what God has said about marriage, gender, sex, family, or keep your mouth shut.
But we don’t have to look far to see secular idols creeping into evangelical churches, too. Any ideology that demands acceptance either alongside or above God is an idol.
ILLUST: In the first centuries of the Church, as Christianity spread through the Roman Empire, persecution waxed and waned, sometimes locally and sometimes empire-wide. Around AD 112, the Roman governor Pliny the Younger wrote back and forth to the Emperor Trajan about how to deal with Christians. Neither Pliny nor Trajan cares much what Christians believe about Roman religion, as long as they do what the government says and pour out a little wine or burn a little incense to the gods.
This is a secular political idol. And it’s not just in ancient empires and modern Communist states. Members of any political party or none can be tempted by it.
And this is what makes it dangerous.
All of these idols have a few things in common: They demand or evoke the trust, devotion, obedience, and service that belong to God alone. They violate God’s right to these things, like violating a marriage or a covenant.
In the Bible, idolatry is often compared to unfaithfulness to a husband or a King.
5 For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name; and the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer, the God of the whole earth he is called.
So, when Israel is threatened by foreign empires, and they start turning to Egypt and Assyria for help instead of trusting in God, in Isaiah 31 and Jeremiah 2, the LORD says that going to them is forsaking Him - it’s political idolatry.
Realize the danger here. Idolatry is dangerous because it trades the God who IS eternal life for something else (which always without exception leads to eternal death). It is evil because it steals what BELONGS to God by right, and gives it away.
Idolatry is so dangerous that the apostle Paul says that we must run away from it in 1 Cor 10:14. The only other sins that he says this about are sexual immorality, in 1 Cor 6:18, and greed, in 1 Tim 6:10-11.
Paul actually tells us that coveting or greed is a type of idolatry in Colossians 3:5. And Jesus says this about the danger of money as an idol:
24 “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.
Have you started to notice similarities between different kinds of idolatry?
They are served, loved, trusted, obeyed. Worshiped.
What else do you notice that’s dangerous about idols?
Idols are everywhere - not only in places that look religious. Often, we take a good thing and turn it into a god.
IRAs and Index Funds, or having enough friends, live music, cars, relationships
But idols are everywhere in more ways than one - how about that glowing sculpture you brought in your pocket? Screens - TVs, computers, tablets, phones - have become so ubiquitous that we can’t imagine life without them.
Idols are tenacious - Calvin quote [Institutes 1.11.8]
“man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols…”
Often, even when God puts the idol down like Dagon, we pick it back up.
ILLUST: Mowing down dandelions - blowing the seeds everywhere, & many of them just get pushed down, an hour later they pop back up. More sprout the next day. Like mowing the lawn, a war with many battles
Idols are deceptive - They fool us because we are so good at fooling ourselves.
II. Recognize the Deception of Idols
II. Recognize the Deception of Idols
John says, “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.” If we realize the danger of idols, then we can look out for the lies that always seem to hook us. Little children, we who are born again are not immune to the temptations to idolatry.
In 21st c. USA, most Christians aren’t constantly bombarded by temptations to bow down in front of a statue or a painting, although some are. But all of us are tempted to devote ourselves to other kinds of idols.
What can help us to recognize them? An idol:
Demands or draws us to devotion; Demotes or deforms the LORD; Dims our eyes and deafens us to God’s truth
Demands or draws us to devotion
Like a celebrity’s Instagram page, or a professional athlete’s highlight reel, an idol might tell you to bow down, or it might just try to seduce your affections.
Sometimes, we don’t recognize the deception until we’ve already put God on hold for the sake of the idol.
ILLUST: In the city of Jericho, Jesus woke Zaccheus up from the idolatry of ambition, power, and money. Luke 19:
Chief tax collector, rich - betrayed God and His people for money -
Worked for Romans, only way to make money was to gouge your own people for as much as possible
Short guy, ran ahead of the crowd, climbed sycamore tree so he could see. Jesus walked up, looked up, called up to Z - “Hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.”
And those simple words broke through all of it - Z promised to give half of all he had to the poor, to restore four times what he had taken from anyone he had defrauded. And Jesus said, “Salvation has come to this house today.”
Z no longer served money.
Demotes or deforms the LORD
Puts him in a pantheon
Changes His nature and denies the Gospel
Makes Him look like you want (golden calf again)
Dims our eyes and deafens us to God’s truth
15 The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of human hands. 16 They have mouths, but do not speak; they have eyes, but do not see; 17 they have ears, but do not hear, nor is there any breath in their mouths. 18 Those who make them become like them, so do all who trust in them.
Like when you turn the lights off to watch a movie, can’t see anything. Or like trying to see out the window at night when the lights are on inside
Like tinnitus. Don’t even realize what you can’t hear
How certain idols do this
Note how idolatries spread thru people - Solomon ensnared by his idolatrous wives (the wisest man in Israel’s history was vulnerable, esp. when old and surrounded by so many idolaters)
When a good thing demands what belongs to God, how should we respond?
Would you sin to get this thing? Would you sin to keep it?
III. Return to God
III. Return to God
Remember the truth from v20 <<READ v20>>
Reassure your heart - <<READ 3:19-24>>
Repent and Wreck that idol (Like Israel was commanded to.
Like Zaccheus, like the sinful woman in Simon’s house, like the early Christians burned their magic books in Acts
Naaman - 2 Kings 5
Commander of Syria’s armies, great and important - leper (kids, do you know what it means to be a leper?)
Little Israelite girl told him about the prophet of the LORD - “He would cure him.”
Naaman sends a letter to the king of Israel along with a gift - terrifying him
Elisha, the prophet sends for him. Does not come out to meet this terrifying enemy military commander, just sends a servant - “Go wash in the Jordan 7 times.”
Naaman - angry E didn’t come out to meet him and wave his hand over him to heal him instead. Angry re: puny river. Turned to leave, servants convinced to do what Elisha said - and was clean.
Went to Elisha, said, “Behold, I know that there is no God in all the earth but in Israel.” And finally awake from all his idolatry - including his idolatry of himself - promises never to worship anyone but the LORD.
Take Refuge in His promises
APPLY:
Note how parents can help their kids
By example, by honestly sharing your struggles
How to resist effectively
Scorched earth approach to idolatries - See an idol, cut it down. Don’t wait for it to get its tentacles around you.
KEEP yourselves -
Transition to the Table