The idols of today, though rarely recognized as such, are prolific. For the Christian who hopes for the the curses of Deuteronomy 28 to be lifted from America, this can present a daunting task, as the example set before us throughout Scripture shows that idols must be destroyed first before God will deliver His people.
In Judges 6, when God called Gideon to lead the people against Midian, the first thing He required was that Gideon:
. . . “Take your father’s bull and a second bull seven years old, and pull down the altar of Baal which belongs to your father, and cut down the Asherah that is beside it; and build an altar to the LORD your God on the top of this stronghold in an orderly manner, and take a second bull and offer a burnt offering with the wood of the Asherah which you shall cut down.” — Judges 6:25-26 (NASB)
Similarly, when the less-than-evil kings of Judah, such as Josiah, Asa, or Ahaz, wanted to please God, they went out and tore down the idols that had proliferated in Jerusalem.
This was all well and good, but ultimately Israel and Judah both found themselves carried off into captivity specifically for their idolatry.
Obviously, they missed something.
The root of the issue can be traced all the way back to the conquest of Canaan, when God commanded the Israelites:
“Only in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the LORD your God has commanded you, so that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against the LORD your God. — Deuteronomy 20:16-18 (NASB)
This, as we know, was not fully obeyed. We read of Jerusalem in particular:
Now as for the Jebusites, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the sons of Judah could not drive them out; so the Jebusites live with the sons of Judah at Jerusalem until this day. — Joshua 15:63 (NASB)
And in Judges 1 we read of many Israelites who failed to drive out various Canaanite tribes. As a result, God delivered a message to them:
“I brought you up out of Egypt and led you into the land which I have sworn to your fathers; and I said, ‘I will never break My covenant with you, and as for you, you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land; you shall tear down their altars.’ But you have not obeyed Me; what is this you have done? Therefore I also said, ‘I will not drive them out before you; but they will become as thorns in your sides and their gods will be a snare to you.’” — Judges 2:1-3 (NASB)
The idolatry problem was already a tendency in the peoples’ hearts, manifested by their failure to obey God’s directive to annihilate all the Canaanites from the land. That resulted in a bigger issue: The Canaanites remaining among them and capitalizing on that tendency, teaching them to worship the Baals.
The problem wasn’t the golden calves or the Asherah poles or the furnace-bellied Moloch statues. Those were a mere physical fruit of the Israelites’ disobedience.
The root was the hearts and minds of Israelites. Their hearts and minds led to the failed extermination of the Canaanites, which led to the Canaanites living among and influencing the Israelites, which led to the Israelite worship of Canaanite gods.
The various judges and kings could tear down high places and destroy altars all they wanted, but that never addressed the root issue. The idol worship always returned, generation after generation.
Henry David Thoreau famously said, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
A problem is never resolved by eliminating its physical manifestations, but by addressing the cause. Otherwise, we behave in a way that reminds me of the mentally deficient Dufflepuds in C. S. Lewis’ “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”, who, to stop cats from eating their food supplies, keep relocating the food. They never once think to simply evict the cats from the storeroom and close the door. I call it “problem solving from the top down”. Yeah, rolling the idols into the Valley of Hinnom and setting them on fire must have been pretty satisfying and all, but as soon as the next king came along all that was forgotten and the idolatry started up again.
In contrast, Paul and Silas were epic idol-destroyers who knew how to get the job done.
In Acts 17, they come upon Mars’ Hill in Athens. Did they break out the sledgehammers and start smashing and burning? No. If they had, they would never have made any lasting point. Rather, they took advantage of the Greeks’ love for philosophy and their altar to the Unknown God. They addressed the root of the issue, not the branches.
They preached.
In Acts 19, we read of Paul preaching in Ephesus, and the response from Demetrius and the other tradesmen who created and sold idols was to mount a riot. Why? Was Paul running around smashing idols and grinding them to dust? No. He was preaching. And this was enough to upset the idol industry to the point that they felt they had to lash out in self-defense.
As a result of the preaching of Paul and the other apostles, the Gospel spread and idolatry suffered a huge blow. As long as faithful Christians continued to spread the Word of God, idols fell. They didn’t fall to the hammers of the preachers, but rather were tossed out by the very people who had once sacrificed to them.
Herein lay the difference.
While the ancient kings of Judah could simply issue a decree and have the idols cleansed out of Jerusalem, they were doing little to uproot the peoples’ love for them. Simply smashing the idols did not cure the idolatry, in the same way that that applying a Band-Aid does not cure gangrene. They were hacking at the branches.
Jesus and the apostles, however, were attacking the root, the hearts and minds of the people. Once that root was addressed, they never had to lift a finger to destroy the idols. The people did it themselves.
As has been said, idolatry has little to do with statues and much more to do with statutes.
It has more to do with the heart than the external manifestations of the heart.
Jesus, in speaking to the Pharisees, said,
“That which proceeds out of the man, that is what defiles the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness. All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man.” — Mark 7:20-23 (NASB)
Earthly kings and their feeble “legislation” will do nothing to solve the idolatry issue. They never have and never will. As well-intentioned as the Hezekiahs and other idol-smashing kings in Judah may have been, they never got down to the root of the issue. Despite their best efforts, Judah still went into captivity for idolatry.
In contrast, the King of kings, who has in turn made Christians kings and priests under Him, has issued us the Sword of the Spirit, by which hearts and minds are turned away from the idols and to the One True God. As a result of the Word’s growth, the hearers voluntarily put away their idols.
If we want to see idols torn down in our society and era, we need to go about it the way the King of kings, Jesus Christ, directed us to do. Sure, to those who would love to see idols demolished physically in a flash of nitroglycerin and a clatter of rubble, perhaps the method of preaching seems foolish (I Corinthians 1:21), but God’s way is much more effective. It addresses the cause of the problem, the root of our woes.
Consider: The Word of God was powerful enough to bring the world into existence. And He has given us that same Word to use in our own battle against His enemies. It is living and active and sharper than any two edged sword (Hebrews 4:12).
For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, and we are ready to punish all disobedience, whenever your obedience is complete. — II Corinthians 10:3-6 (NASB)
Besides that Word, we have been given the command to have faith, a mustard-seed’s worth of which can remove mountains (symbolically, governments) (Matthew 17:20), through which great people of faith:
. . . conquered kingdoms, performed acts of righteousness, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, from weakness were made strong, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight.— Hebrews 11:33-34 (NASB)
This is the power made available to you and me. We don’t need a modern-day Josiah or Hezekiah to come along and start smashing idols. We have the King of kings, Jesus Christ, who made Christians kings and priests with him, equipped them with the Sword of the Spirit, and told them to “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 18:19)
Idols are truly torn down, not in marketplaces and shrines, but in our hearts and minds. That is where they put down their roots and influence our thoughts and actions. Therefore, that is where they must be attacked. An iconoclastic earthly ruler never has and never will accomplish that.
The idols of pagan Rome were destroyed by the spread of Christian preaching.
Papal Rome was brought to its knees through Reformation preaching.
Kingdoms and idols subdued through the Sword of the Spirit and the faith of those who wielded it.
This is the Biblical and historical example set for us: Men of God who took the Word into the world and proclaimed it. They didn’t wait for some king to come along and do the job for them. As a matter of fact, when they did let a king come along in 313AD in the form of Constantine, all he did was help usher in a new enemy – Roman Catholicism.
No, better to leave the idol of the state, the proven enemy of God’s kingdom, out of our arsenal of weapons against idols. Why put hope in mortal men? We’ll only be disappointed, every single time. Best to stick with the plan Jesus Christ gave us, which in no place provided for us to set up rulers over ourselves in the foolish hope that they’d do the idol-destroying for us.
Do not trust in princes,
In mortal man, in whom there is no salvation. — Psalm 146:3 (NASB)