Introduction

The working assumption behind this series of addresses is that all human beings live with a corrupt image of who God is as a Father. This problem of idolatry has not only been true of my own personal experience and in ministry but is clearly laid out in scripture.

Here is what happened when Paul visited Athens, “Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols….The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. 26 And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, 27 that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, 28 for “‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.””(Acts 17:16, 24-31). Uniquely in the history of religion and philosophy the resurrection of Jesus has revealed that God is the sort of Father that raises the dead.

But it is not only the Gentile nations who had distorted the image of God as Father. ““As a thief is shamed when caught, so the house of Israel shall be shamed: they, their kings, their officials, their priests, and their prophets, who say to a tree, ‘You are my father,’ and to a stone, ‘You gave me birth.’ For they have turned their back to me, and not their face. But in the time of their trouble they say, ‘Arise and save us!’” (Jer 2:26-27)

Idols are in all cultures, even the atheist makes an idol out of their supposed intellectual competency, and idols are in many ways the deepest operation of the human heart. The Lord warned Ezekiel, ““Son of man, these men have taken their idols into their hearts, and set the stumbling block of their iniquity before their faces.”” (Ezek 14:3), idols are stubborn and incredibly resistant to removal, “Ephraim is joined to idols; leave him alone.” (Hos 4:17). John Calvin famously said, “man’s nature is a perpetual factory of idols.” Since idols obviously were never created by God, their power and presence has only one possible explanation, they owe their origin to the work of the devil.

The Father of Lies

In dealing with the Jews of his day who were devoted to the Law of God and especially the first of the Ten Commandments, ““You shall have no other gods before me.”” (Ex 20:3), Jesus shocked them by saying, “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” (John 8:44). Christ’s hearers would have been familiar with Old Testament passages like Isaiah 44 where the Lord attacks the folly of idol worship; “The poor, deluded fool…trusts something that can’t help him at all. Yet he cannot bring himself to ask, “Is this idol that I’m holding in my hand a lie?”” (v.20), or Psalm 24, “Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place? 4 The one who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not trust in an idol or swear by a false god.” (vv.3-4), and Amos 2:4, “Thus says the LORD: “For three transgressions of Judah, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment, because they have rejected the law of the LORD, and have not kept his statutes, but their lies have led them astray, those after which their fathers walked.” If idols are lies and Satan is the father of lies then Satan is the father of idolatry.

The Father Idol

The fall of Satan is a tragic story which begins some time before the creation of humanity. Whilst the testimony of scripture is somewhat veiled about the origin of the devil the following seems clear. The book of Job relates two instances when “when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them.” (1:6; 2:1). These “sons of God” are angelic powers, for the Lord later interrogates Job by saying, ““Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth…and all the sons of God shouted for joy” (Job 38:4, 7). If, as Jesus has said, Satan is the father of evil people and of lies, it must be the case that the devil was an angelic son who aspired to fatherhood in his own right. Where God is a true Father Satan is a false father, an anti-Father. The first sin was that a of a spiritual son in the heavenly world who wanted to ascend above the Father who created him.

This seems implied by a difficult passage in Isaiah which starts not with an earthly but a heavenly scene; ““How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low!13 You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of the north;14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’” (Isa 14:12-14). In this passage to be like the Most High is to be the Ruler of all but ruled by no one, not even by God. The New Testament illuminates the sin which must have been in the heart of the devil so that God cast him out of heaven.

Paul says of Jesus, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.” (Col 1:15-16). These “thrones…dominions…rulers…authorities” created through and for the Son of God are not earthly powers but spiritual presences in the heavenly places (Eph 3:10; 6:12). Whereas the devil was ambitious to be like God in ruling the heavenly host by his own power the desire of the one true Son was always to image God as a Father (James 3:14-15 cf. 2 Cor 4:4).  As Jesus said, ““The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works.”” (John 14:10). The one essential characteristic of sonship abandoned by the devil and his followers is submission to a higher authority, ultimately the authority of the Father. Paul reminds the Ephesians of the terrible state they were in before they came to Christ, “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— 3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.” (Eph 2:1-3). This following of the ways of the devil began with the temptation in the Garden of Eden.

 

 

The Idol in the Garden

Adam and Eve had everything they needed in Eden, but they lacked the very thing highlighted by God’s word of warning. ““You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”” (Gen 2:16-17). Humans were blessed by the Lord and freely given sovereignty over all that he had made, but made a “little lower than God/angels”, they had no blessing to rule over death (Gen 1:26-28; Ps 8:6-8). The original image of God in man had no power to abolish the possibility of dying. Sometimes people raise the question, “How would Adam and Eve know what death meant anyway; since they had never seen anything die?” This is a fair question, but it forgets one thing. The Lord had already pronounced the sentence of death upon Satan and his angels. In his parable of the sheep and the goats Jesus prophesies about God’s verdict on the day of judgment; ““Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”” (Matt 25:46). And the book of Revelation calls this punishment, “the lake of fire….the second death” (20:14). By the time Satan tempted Eve in Eden he was a dead son (cf. Luke 15:24). The grief in God’s heart when he spoke to Adam about the real possibility of death must have conveyed to the man that whatever death meant it was something indescribably horrible.

Whilst the Genesis doesn’t teach this directly, Paul’s preaching to the pagans in Athens, “‘we are indeed his offspring’” implies that as created in the image of God humans beings are his children (Acts 17:28). Even more forcefully, in his genealogy of Jesus in chapter 3 Luke calls Adam “the son of God” (Luke 3:38). Whilst Adam and Eve already possessed incredible glory, dignity and majesty in being created in the likeness of God, what was at stake in their response to the satanic temptation was their status as God’s children.

When the serpent spoke to Eve with the words, ““You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”” he was stating that the Father and Creator of all is a liar (Gen 3:1, 4-5). Satan accused God of not being a God of Truth and upheld himself as the one who was true. Of course nothing could be further from the real truth. Eve however believed the lies of the devil, and set in train a sequence of events that is present in all idol worship. In Paul’s unforgettable words, “they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.” (Rom 1:25). To worship what is false rather than him who is truth is to lose the blessing of the revelation knowledge of the “one true God” which is “eternal life” (John 17:3).

Satan had promised an ascent and elevation to a spiritual status where humanity would need no Father, immediately they sinned however Adam and Eve experienced a horrible sensation they had never experienced before. They “knew that they were naked.” and tried to cover themselves over, and “hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” (Gen 3:7, 8). Shame is a terrible experience and central to the lost human condition. Paul says, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23). Shame is a sense of the loss of the glory of God, and even more severely, shame is a sense of the loss of having the glory of God as your Father. It is not essentially shameful to be poor, weak, sick, friendless, rejected by other people/your community; the one and only truly shameful thing is not to have God as your Father, to be cut off from the revelation knowledge that God is Father. The prospect of existing forever without God as your Father is what we call hell. There is of course one way out of this condition. If shame is the result of refusing to submit to God as a true son then perfect submission can save us (Deut 21:18-21; Luke 15:11-32). This is what Jesus does on our behalf.

The Ascension of a True Son to the Father

The devil had Adam and Eve try to ascend/rise up to the status of God by disobedience, but Jesus will be exalted to the right hand of God through the true submission of sonship. Paul puts it like this in Philippians 2, “Christ Jesus,6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a tservant,3 being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him athe name that is above every name,” (vv.5-9).

Whereas Adam and Eve believed that they could escape the suffering of death by listening to the voice of the devil Jesus would be raised up to heaven because he suffered according to the will of God (Mark 14:36). This comes in a striking way in the prophecy of Isaiah. Three times in this book the expression “high and lifted up” is used. First of the vision of the Lord of glory “high and lifted up” that Isaiah saw in the temple, then late in Isaiah when God describes himself as, “the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.”” (6:1; 57:15). The Most High God promises to be close to the lowly, a promise perfectly fulfilled in the case of the Servant of the Lord described in Isaiah, we know this servant is Jesus. “Behold, my servant shall act wisely; he shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted….because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors.” (Is 52:13; 53:12).  In other words the submissive Son of God (in his humanity) is raised up to a place of equality with his Father. This is wonderful revelation of the truth of God’s Fatherhood but it is all based on what happened to Jesus in our place on the cross in his dealings with the great sin of idolatry.

Psalm 115 says this, “Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. 5 They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see. 6 They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell. 7   They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk; and they do not make a sound in their throat. 8 Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them.” (Ps 115:4-8). In the terrible judgement of God idol worshippers becomes like the idols they worship, blind, deaf, and dumb to true spiritual realities. Because an idol worshipper is someone who has forsaken the true God the Lord warns repeatedly that he will forsake those who forsake him (Deut 31:16-17; 2 Chronicles 12:5; 2 Chronicles 15:2; 2 Chronicles 24:20). To save us all from the sin of idolatry the faithful Son of God must bear the punishment of an idolater on the cross.

When Jesus cries out in dreadful anguish; ““My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”” he was plunged into the state of a worshipper of false gods, spiritually blind, deaf and dumb to the truth of God as his Father (Mark 15:34). In “becoming sin” for us the one true Son is cut off from the reality of the Father’s love (2 Cor 5:21). Thanks be to God this condition could not last. Paul tells us that “Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father,” (Rom 6:4). He has been “seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, 21 far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come.” (Eph 1:18-20). The mystery of Jesus exaltation to heaven can be discovered in his own words to Mary Magdalene outside of the empty tomb; “Jesus said to her, “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”” (John 20:17).

Satan wanted to ascend to the heights of heaven and deceived Adam and Eve into following him on the path of self-worship. But Jesus was lifted up into heaven on clouds of glory by the power and presence of God because his one and only true desire was to bring glory to his Father (Acts 1:9).

Given to Ascend with Jesus

I know almost nothing about the spirituality of the Church in Myanmar but I can share some things about the spiritual immaturity of the Church in Australia. I was in conversation with a friend of mine who is an Orthodox priest recently and he was mentioning how often people like to speak about and pray to “Jesus”, rather than addressing God the Father. It’s easy to relate to Jesus as a buddy, friend and brother who in his humanity is close to us, which is of course true (Rom 8:29). But how could we possibly have an intimate relationship with the Son of God and a more distant one with his Father? This represents a spiritual confusion of the deepest sort.

The Argentine preacher Juan Carlos Ortiz famously said Jesus is no longer “the bearded sandaled one of the Gospels” but the Lord of glory. It is one thing to connect with the Jesus of the Gospels but today we deal with the ascended Son of God. One of my favourite scriptures is John 1:18; in the English Standard Version this reads, “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”. But in the New Living Translation it says, “No one has ever seen God. But the unique One, who is himself God, is near to the Father’s heart. He has revealed God to us.” To be “seated with Christ in the heavenly places” with Christ is to be in the heart of the Father (Eph 2:6). This is exactly why God created the world and redeemed it in his Son that we might know his heart as Father.

Conclusion

Some years ago I wrote a paper which was published by a Christian counselling journal (http://cross-connect.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Images-and-Intimacy.pdf ). It was a short theological reflection of some personal experiences.  One interesting thing about this article is that it has some diagrams centred around the human heart, for idols are intimate objects in our hearts which steal the devotion which belongs only to our heavenly Father. the article begins like this:

“I was sitting in my office in the middle of an unusually quiet week. Hardly anyone had come to see me for pastoral advice, there was little to do in the way of administration and sermon preparation was not urgent. Inwardly, however, I could not escape the fact that I felt no joy at all, no enthusiasm in what I was doing. I became conscious of a sense of wanting to be in a different job. It didn’t seem to matter which one; whatever caught my mind seemed preferable to the ministry situation in which I found myself. A Bible verse came out of nowhere: “Well done, good and faithful servant … enter into the joy of your master” (Matthew 25:23 RSV). How empty and impossible this all seemed.

I resolved to see a well known Christian counsellor. After a while he asked me: “What did you do with your father when you were young?” I really couldn’t think of anything that Dad and I did together, nor anything I did which gave him joy. Suddenly it all came together for me, my heart’s image of God was a reflection of my experience of my earthly father.”

With time, God has helped me repent again and again about confusing my earthly father with the heavenly Father and has often led me to help others with this same deep problem of idolatry. Perhaps the number one idol I see amongst Christian leaders is ministry. It is easy to substitute doing things for God than living in a Spirit-led relationship with the Father through Jesus. The result is always tiredness and a loss of the joy of the Lord.

What is God saying to you about any idol-competitors in your own heart, any affections which belong to him alone but are being given to someone or something else……