"A God of Our Own Imagination"
The person who made the idol never stops to reflect,
"Why, it's just a block of wood!
I burned half of it for heat
and used it to bake my bread and roast my meat.
How can the rest of it be a god?
Should I bow down to worship a piece of wood?"
The poor, deluded fool feeds on ashes.
He 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?" (Isaiah 44:19, 20 NLT)
We tend to criticize OT people for worshipping such primitive objects as rocks & sticks. We think that they were out of their mind. We can't imagine what benefit they saw to such worship. And the Bible confirms this foolishness. They burn wood for a fire & then turn to worship an idol made of the same wood. Foolish indeed.
But to borrow a phrase from Lee Corso, "Not so fast my friend." They are not the only ones who were foolish.
We also have "gods" of our own imagination. When we make the God of the Bible to be something that he is not, we might as well be worshipping a stick. We have a God of our own imagination.
When we worship a God who wants to save us from hell but not our sin, we have a God of our own imagination. When we worship a God that cares about our church attendance more than our everyday lives, we have a God of our own imagination.
And so, maybe, just maybe we are the foolish ones. We are the ones who are worshiping the gods who aren't gods.
Where do we have gods of our own imagination that have taken the place of God?
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