I John 5: 20-21 (NIV) 20We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true. And we are in him who is true—even in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. 21Dear children, keep yourselves from idols.
We sometimes talk about idol worship as being the worship of money or success or popularity. But that understanding of idol worship stretches the meaning a little and overlooks the religious nature and the God issue of idol worship. Historically, an idol was a picture, a statue, or some other physical object that represented a distortion of who God really was. With or without a statue, idol worship is actually our holding a false image of God in our mind or in our heart. And it is easy to be taken in. For faith is no longer evaluated on whether it is objectively true or not, but on how well it serves what we want.
The desire for God to heal all our diseases and solve all our problems and help us succeed is still very much with us. Does Aphrodite still hold out her promise of happiness through love and sex? And do we still hear Apollo’s message that if we work hard enough and long enough we can have whatever we want? And so we hear that God is against bussing and God is for limited terms in Congress. This is a small sprinkling of some of the idols in our culture. The gods of our culture can corrupt the belief of the most devout Christian.
Jesus is the truth of God. Jesus is the truth about God that resists the distortions and damage done by idols. In Jesus we have the genuine revelation of the mystery of God’s existence, the one clear light among many shadows. Our understanding of the truth given in Jesus may be partial and faulty, but our conviction that Jesus is truth is the bedrock on which we stand.
The strange thing is that we need that truth and at the same time we often resist it. We need that truth rather than getting a bit of belief here and a bit of faith there to put together a religion of sorts based on our memories of growing up, some recent wisdom, our natural bend to being either conservative or liberal, and anything else that pleases us. This type religion looks very satisfying, but it is not conviction of truth that nurtures the soul. These household gods of our own making do not fill us with awe in the presence of real God, or root our feet to the ground. They may give us some comfort and some wisdom, but they lack the power to kick the bars off the prison of our misperceptions. Jesus is the truth about God that resists the power of idolatry and distortions and damage done by false images of God.
John says we know that the Son has come, and we know Him who is true. Our faith rests on great events of God’s action in the person of Jesus Christ.
From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs Pope July 5, 1998
© Rhonda Hinkle Mitchell Broyles
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