Our God is a jealous God

As for you, O house of Israel, thus says the Lord God: Go serve every one of you his idols, now and hereafter, if you will not listen to me; but my holy name you shall no more profane with your gifts and your idols.
(Ezekiel 20:39)

God does not share his people. It is rightly said that He is a jealous God (Deuteronomy 6:14-15). Likewise, Jesus says  the following in Matthew 6:24:

“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.”

Our God is the only true God. Therefore, He is the only God to be praised. To give praise to anything else is idolatry, which is detestable to God. What some of the Israelites have done in this passage is even worse. They have tried to use idol worship—something that our God detests—in service of the one and only true God.

Hypocrisy

This is not only insulting—it is hypocritical. The Bible makes it clear over and over that it is impossible to love both God and idols of any sort. To attempt to use idols in service of God is both an insult to God’s glory and a clear display of hypocritical living. In the same breath, they are trying to say both that God is worthy and idols are worthy.  Since our God is a jealous God, only one of those views can exist in a person’s heart.

In this verse, God is essentially saying to everyone who would come before Him to worship with idols that He would rather they simply depart from Him and admit that they are not His. That is why this is a big deal. If you are clinging to your idols, you might not be a Christian.
There are four reasons to take this seriously:

1. We cannot use idols to facilitate worship

Do you think it is okay for you to spend most of your money on that new car, since you will use it now and then to drive people on church trips?

It doesn’t matter if you try to serve God with it sometimes. An idol is an idol.

Or perhaps this sounds familiar: “It is true that this artist is prone to producing provocative or inappropriate paintings, but they are so beautiful. The beauty in these paintings causes me to praise God.”

We should not use the fact that God created beauty to justify any person’s love for sin, or our own marriage to the world.

We are so prone to attempt to keep our idols because of the good that we see them doing for God’s kingdom, but the fact is God does not need them. He doesn’t even want them. In fact, he hates them.

John Piper has often said, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.” And he is right. God is shown to be glorious in our lives when they declare that we cannot get any gain outside of Him, and that He cannot get any gain outside of Himself. When we try to use our idols to worship God, we are saying that God could benefit from having something that he does not currently have. Does that sound like a satisfied God to you? Or, we are also saying that we could benefit from something in addition to God. Does that sound like an all-satisfying God to you?

2. If we try to use idols to worship God, we might not be Christians.

God does not share worship with anything. He says in Matthew that it is impossible to serve two masters. If we are using our lives to serve idols, it is impossible that we are also using our lives to serve God. How can we be Christians if we do not live our lives for the sake of God’s glory? This is why God says to the hypocrites, “Go serve every one of you his idols, now and hereafter, if you will not listen to me; but my holy name you shall no more profane with your gifts and your idols.”

He is making it very clear that they are not his. He is telling them to go away.

3. God does not want to use our idols, He wants to destroy them.

You shall not bow down to their gods nor serve them, nor do as they do, but you shall utterly overthrow them and break their pillars in pieces.

Exodus 23:24

If God wants us to utterly overthrow our idols, and break them into pieces, do you think that He is interested in them as instruments of worship?

We cannot give God anything that is of use to Him. We can only proclaim His worth by worshiping Him exclusively, and conversely by destroying our idols, thus declaring their total lack of worth in light of God’s preciousness.

4.Idolaters are not only in grave personal danger, but they are a blemish on the reputation of God’s name.

Nominal Christianity is an insult to God’s name. God says here that all of those who will not destroy their idols must no longer associate themselves with Him. Why? Because they are profaning his name.

When we are practicing idolatry in the name of God, we are not only heaping up punishment for ourselves, we are also putting forth a false view of who God is. This is why He says the hypocrite profanes His name. When they go before Him, bearing his name, and act in such a detestable way, they are committing an act of profanity against His name.

Our concern is not only with the welfare of people, but it is also with the image of God’s church. When people who are not God’s identify themselves as His children, they do a great disservice to the reputation of His name. Essentially, it is like people are putting a Rolls Royce emblem on a heap of dung. They are advertising God’s name as being associated with something that absolutely is not.

Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith.Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test!
(2 Corinthians 13:5)

My challenge is for you to test yourself. See whether you are in the faith. Does your life meet the test? This is not meant to be a source of anxiety, because it is obvious that every living person still has some idols standing. But the question is this: do you contend for your idols? Or do you, by the help of the Spirit, search them out and destroy them? I pray that it is the second.

Reflecting on Isaiah 44, Cam Huxford from Mars Hill Church (Seattle, WA) created this short video to tell of his idolatry.

Isaiah 44:21-22:

Remember these things, O Jacob,
and Israel, for you are my servant;
I formed you; you are my servant;
O Israel, you will not be forgotten by me.
I have blotted out your transgressions like a cloud
and your sins like mist;
return to me, for I have redeemed you.

(via The Resurgence)

First of all, think about what this is actually saying: “You have your own special version of happiness that you need to find. And in case you didn’t know where to find that special happy place you’re longing for, we’re going to help you out. We will enhance your dating life. Once you find that person who matches you, completes you, and just makes you feel all warm inside, your search for happiness is over.” This is a horribly self-centered way to think about any sort of relationship. It is objectification. We objectify someone when we are concerned primarily with how that person caters to our needs. We turn them into an object by disregarding their personhood and seeing them only as a source of fulfillment. You set some person, or some quality of that person, in a place they were never meant to be:

The place of worship.

Why does this happen? Why the need to worship? to want? You have emptiness and a dissatisfaction with the way things are for a reason. They must and should be satisfied, but only by the One who put those desires within you, nothing else. That one is God. Not a thing. Not a person. People make horrible Gods. That should be self evident, but we so love to worship the wrong thing; it should be plain to us that we are coming to worship the wrong things—and wrong people—as our gods. This is not a new thing! People have always “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things” (Romans 1:23).

If you are unhappy and unsatisfied, please do not make the mistake of charging another human being with the task of gratifying that emptiness you feel. We do find great happiness and fulfillment in relationships, but if we lose the purpose of showing God as the one to be worshiped and treasured, we only deepen the emptiness of our own souls! I know that feeling is all too familiar for many of us.

Your version of happiness will not be enough if you look for and find it through cheesy Yahoo! Personals, or anything else in this world. Jesus Christ’s death on the cross made it possible for us to have a relationship with God. That is where true happiness found; because only in that relationship can you do what you were made to do. You were made to worship.

C. S. Lewis once said, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that i was made for another world.” Let’s look forward to this other perfect world we were created for and the One who prepares that world—God, the One who is truly worthy of our affection.