Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3034
“Seek Him that makes the seven stars and Orion, and turns the shadow of death into the morning, and makes the day dark with night: that calls for the waters of the sea, and pours them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is His name.” Amos 5:8.
IDOLATRY has been, in every age, the besetting sin of mankind. In some form or another, the unregenerate are all given to it and even in God’s people there remains in their old nature, a tendency towards it.
In its grosser manifestation, idolatry is the desire of man to see God with his eyes, to have outward representation of Him who cannot be represented, who is too great, too spiritual to ever be described by human language, much less to be set forth by images of wood and stone, however elaborately carved and cunningly overlaid with gold! There is a great God who fills all space and yet is greater than space—whose existence is without beginning and without end, who is everywhere present and universally self-existent! But man is so unspiritual that he will not worship this Invisible One in spirit and in truth, but craves after outward similitudes, symbols and signs. If Aaron makes a calf, Israel forgets the Divine Jehovah’s Glory and says of the image of an ox that eats grass, “These are your gods, O Israel, which brought you up out of the land of Egypt.”
We are apt to imagine that it is a very strange freak of human depravity when men are led to worship visible objects and signs, but it is not at all unusual or singular! It is the general sin of all mankind. I suppose no man has been entirely free from it and every Believer has to contend against it in its subtler forms, for idolatry takes insinuating shapes, less gross in appearance than the worship of Dagon or Ashtaroth, but quite as sinful.
Take, for instance, the common religious idolatry of our own country which consists, in part, of reverence to holy places, as if under the Christian dispensation, which is not one of type, but of fact, holiness could dwell in stone, lime, wood, slate, iron and brass when architecturally arranged! English idolatry further reveals itself in reverence to an order of men, not because of their superior character, but because of certain mystic rites performed upon them, by virtue of which they are supposed to become the representatives of Heaven and the reservoirs of Divine Grace. How trustful are our English idolaters in these men when they behold them appareled in vestments which the tailor has cut into fashions remarkably helpful to devotion! Without these priests and their sumptuous adorning and grotesque disfigurements, our modern idolaters cannot publicly worship—but in these they have as much as the Ephesians had in their great goddess Diana!
They can only worship their god by objects which appeal to the senses. An outward altar, an outward priest, an outward ritual, outward rites—all these are nothing but another form of the old idolatry of Babel and of Bethel! Man still turns from the unseen God. The unseen Priest who has passed within the veil, man still ignores. The spiritualfeast upon the body and blood of Jesus Christ which is the joy of the saints, they know not! But the outward emblems are adored by some and held in great reverence by others. Bread and wine, which are but created and common things, even when placed on the table to assist us in Communion, are made into deities by the blind idolaters of this age! Could Egypt or Assyria do worse? Bread used at the ordinance is but bread and nothing other than ordinary bread. Its emblematic use imparts to it no measure or degree of sanctity, much less of Divinity! It is idolatry—flat, groveling idolatry—and nothing less, which on all sides is spreading its mantle of darkness over this land under the pretense of profoundly reverent piety!
Where Ritualism does not reign, how easy it is for men to be idolaters of themselves! What is self-reliance, understood as too many understand it, but idolatry of self? It is the opposite of dependence upon the living God, the
great Source of power and wisdom. Reliance upon my own wisdom, upon my own resolution, upon my own strength of mind—these are idolatries in a subtle and attractive shape. What is much of our overweening affection to our children and to our relatives? What is our unsubmissive repining but idolatry? How is it that we rebel against God if our friends are suddenly taken from us? O man, why is it that your God has so little of your love and the creature so much? There is a lawful affection—up to that point you should go. There is an unlawful affection when, by any means, the creature comes before the Creator—to this you may not descend! Unlawful love, love which idolizes its object, is to be avoided with all our might!
Then, again, perhaps a less excusable form of idolatry, though no excuse is to be offered for any, is that in which men idolize their estates and their confidence in their accumulations—living only to acquire wealth and position— struggling in the race—not to win the crown which is immortal—but that poor wreath with which men crown the wealthy merchant, the diligent student, the eloquent barrister, the valiant men of arms! This is idolatry, again, for it is setting up an earthly object in the place of the Creator. To God is due all my love, my trust, my fear. He made me and, therefore, I am bound to serve Him—and whenever I lay down at the feet of any person or object, dominion over my powers, apart from God, I am at once guilty of idolatry!