Full Transcript

Welcome to Share the Word. You know, in James chapter 1, verse 19, part of it says, Everyone should be quick to listen and slow to speak. So I’m going to take that advice, and all I’m going to say is you need to listen. First Corinthians chapter 10, idolatry now. First Corinthians 10 is a chapter that touches on many ideas I could launch a 20-minute message on, but there’s one big idea that has come more than once up in this letter that gets prominent here in chapter 10: the issue of idolatry. Listen to Paul’s first section in this chapter, and then let me get into some very interesting and surprising things connected to this topic.

For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food and all drank the spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ. Nevertheless, with most of them God was not pleased, and they were overthrown in the wilderness. Now these things took place as examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did, nor be idolaters as some of them were. For it was written, The people sat down to eat and drink and then rose up to play. We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did, and 23,000 fell that single day.

We must not put Christ to the test. Skipping ahead a little, he finishes that paragraph with a warning: Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry. As you know, Share the Word podcast is focused on the New Testament and exploring its biggest ideas chapter by chapter. The New Testament of the Bible is the primary Word of God for our time. But that doesn’t mean the Old Testament is not valuable or any less inspired and true. Paul makes an important point here when he says, Now these things happened to them, that is, God’s people in Old Testament times, as an example, but they were written down for our instruction.

The things in the Old Testament described in the historical books like this really happened, and they were part of the Bible because they contain examples that we in our day need to learn from. Now you may or may not know the portion of Jewish history that Paul is alluding to here in our chapter. He’s talking about the formation of the nation of Israel. Abraham’s descendants, his family, had migrated to Egypt where they became a nation over the next 400 years, although enslaved in the latter part of that period by the Egyptian pharaohs. As the Israelites called out to God for deliverance, God used a specially prepared leader named Moses to deliver and lead them out of bondage after bringing the pharaoh to his knees with one plague after another falling on the land of Egypt.

These accounts are recorded in the Old Testament book of Exodus, and they really happened, including Paul’s reference to God opening up the Red Sea to allow the people to escape when Pharaoh changed his mind and had his army pursue them, as well as his reference to God leading the people with a cloud in the sky that went before them. The Jewish members of the congregation in Corinth certainly knew this formative history of the nation of Israel, but the Gentiles, I’m sure, did not. Paul reminds them all of how God miraculously fed those people. He provided water for them once they passed through the sea and were in the Sinai Desert. He provided manna in the morning and quail in the evening in abundance, enough for everyone to eat their fill. By the way, the estimates are that as many as 2 to 2.5 million people were involved in this migration.

Interestingly, in Exodus 17, it describes how God provided that water for this mass of people in the desert. It says there, to Moses, God speaking to him, Walk out in front of the people. Take your staff, the one that you used when you struck the water of the Nile, referring back to the plagues in Egypt, and call some of the elders of Israel to join you. Then I will stand before you on the rock at Mount Sinai. Strike the rock, and the water will come rushing out. Then the people will be able to drink their fill.

So Moses struck the rock as he was told, and water gushed out as the elders looked on. God brought a fresh spring of water out of a crack in a rock in the desert. Yet Moses named that place Massah, which means testing, and Meribah, which means arguing. Massah, Meribah, because the people of Israel argued with him there and tested the Lord by saying, Is the Lord really with us or not? This was not a one-time event either. Neither the miraculous provisions nor the people complaining and testing God.

Wherever they camped, God provided for them like this. Manna covered the ground in the morning when they awoke. Quail fell from the sky, unexplainably in large numbers, and there was always a rock from which water would miraculously gush, although they were in the middle of the desert. Nevertheless, in probably their worst example of rebellion and unbelief, once when Moses was absent for an extended time, they turned back to open idolatry. In chapter 32 of Exodus is the account of God calling Moses up on the mountain to receive the law. And he was gone for several days, much longer than they expected.

After a time, the people persuaded his brother Aaron that he was probably not coming back. But let’s have a festival. This is when the golden calf was fashioned from their melted gold jewelry, an idol like those worshipped back in Egypt and the other pagan nations around them. How could these people, who had experienced God’s power and provision so many times, so quickly turn back to idolatry? By the time Moses finally came down from the mountain carrying the tablets with the law of God inscribed on them, things had gotten completely out of hand. Paul’s brief summary here of what he found was the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play, and they indulged in sexual immorality.

It devolved into a kind of frenzied pagan revelry practiced by those who didn’t know God. It was a wild scene he found with feasting and dancing around the idol, and apparently some kind of, like, sexual orgy was going on. Moses was so angry at what he saw, he smashed the tablets containing God’s law. And God was so angry that he would have destroyed them all had not Moses intervened and reminded him, These are your people that you made promises to. You promised to their forefathers things that have not yet been fulfilled. But still, 23,000 Israelites died that day as judgment for this blatant and shameful display of turning away from God and attempting to replace him with an idol made by their own hands.

If someone could have pieced together the tablets of the law that Moses smashed in anger that day and disbelief at what he saw coming down from the mountain after meeting with God there. The first few commandments would have read, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt and out of the house of slavery, and you will have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that’s in the heavens above or the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. Any object for worship. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God. I know what you may be thinking: idolatry?

You’re talking to us about idolatry. Does that even exist anymore? You might be really surprised. The answer is yes, it does. And now you’re thinking, really? Are there actually people groups somewhere I don’t know about that are worshiping images made of stone or metal?

Well, actually, again, yes, there are. Although perhaps not in most places this podcast will get heard. But let’s not limit idolatry to just images made of stone or metal or of meteorites fallen from the sky like the one I described for you that was worshiped in Ephesus in the first century. Idolatry more generally means anything worshiped in place of God, anything we fix our hearts on looking for supernatural help or blessing or peace or power or whatever we’re looking for, rather than from the one true God. This is interesting. Think about this with me for a moment.

The people Paul was writing First Corinthians to here in the first century, they were into Greek culture, and they had a whole pantheon of gods and goddesses that were revered and worshiped. It’s hard to gauge how many of them thought of them as literal supernatural beings. Many did. But my hunch is the more sophisticated people did not. The gods and goddesses of Greek mythology, like Zeus and Apollo and Aphrodite and Athena and so on, were for them representational. By that I mean Zeus represented power and authority.

He was the king of the gods. Apollo represented wisdom and intelligence. Aphrodite, beauty and sensual pleasure. Dionysus was the god of wine and revelry. He was the party god. Their gods and goddesses written about in their myths and whose images they carved in stone, their idols, which we’ve discovered in the ruins of their ancient temples.

These were just representations of things people have always sought after: power, pleasure, beauty, ecstasy, wisdom, wealth, just a crazy good time. If we’re being completely honest, these are still the same idols in our society, the same things most people still pursue, and we could use the word worship. Worship is not too strong a word because these are our idols, and people’s devotion to these things is, in fact, their worship. These are the things that people all around us, some of us, honestly, hope will bring satisfaction, hope will take them where they want to go, to experience and enjoy what they hope to get out of this life. But in the final analysis, they don’t. Man, I ran across something this week in research that really struck me.

It was a college commencement speech delivered some years ago. The year was 2005, and it was delivered at an upscale liberal arts school’s graduation ceremony. A young distinguished writer and intellectual, himself a university professor, a man named David Foster Wallace, was the invited commencement speaker that year. And the parents and students heard anything but a typical graduation address that day. It only ran about 20 minutes, and after I read it, I dug further to see if I could watch it or at least listen to it. I did find a voice recording.

When I read it, I was struck by his precise use of words and his tone. But on the recording, I was struck by something different, by how at the outset of his address, parents and students could be heard laughing at some of his remarks. But as he went on, that laughter was rare, and by the end of it, you could hear a pin drop. I can say this for sure after some checking: David Foster Wallace did not claim to be a Christian. But listening to some of his thoughts in that speech that day, I can’t help but think he was getting near the kingdom of God, if you know what I mean. He was a deep thinker, not someone okay just flowing along with the shallow but numbing values of our contemporary culture.

He did not just repeat the drivel you normally hear at such occasions. I wish I could play you the whole thing, but I don’t have time, and that may even be illegal. But I want to share some of his thoughts that rang so true to me. I’m going to quote from his speech verbatim, although it will be in cuttings from the whole. Listen for how his big idea intersects with our big idea in today’s chapter about idolatry. He began this way: There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming in the opposite direction, who nods at them and says, Morning, boys.

How’s the water? And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks at the other and goes, What the heck is water? This is a standard requirement of U.S. commencement speeches, he said, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. But if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I’m not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, most important realities are often the ones hardest to see and least talked about.

Of course, the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you’re about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not to so much fill you up with knowledge as it is about to, quote, teach you how to think. I’m going to posit to you that it isn’t really just about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about, to have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff I tend to be automatically certain of, hmm, as it turns out, I’ve been totally wrong and deluded. I’ve learned this stuff the hard way. I predict you graduates will too.

Here’s just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of. Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid, most important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It’s our default setting. We’re hardwired this way.

Think about it. There is no experience that you have had that you are not the absolute center of. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, so urgent, so real. Twenty years after my graduation, I’ve come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious area: learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from your experiences. Think of the old cliché, the quote, The mind is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.

So lame and unexciting on the surface, this actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It’s not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot their terrible master. And the truth is that most of those who commit suicide are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. This may sound like hyperbole or abstract nonsense, so let me get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any real clue what the day-in, day-out of adult life really means.

There happens to be a whole large part of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustrations. The parents and older folks here know what I’m talking about. If you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at the fat, dead-eyed, overmade-up lady who just screamed at her kid in front of you in the grocery line. Maybe she’s not usually like that. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who’s dying of bone cancer.

Or maybe that lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating red tape problem through a small act of her kindness. It just depends on what you choose to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and making you miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but possibly sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars, with love, with fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things down deep. Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true either.

The only thing that’s true, with a capital T, is that we get to decide how we’re going to see it all. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship. That made my ears perk up. He then said, Because here’s something that’s weird but true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there’s actually no such thing as atheism.

There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship, and the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship. Is pretty much that anything else you choose to worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you hope to find real meaning in life, then you will never have enough of them. It’s the truth.

Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing on you, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fears. Worship your intellect as being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out for who you really are. But the insidious thing about all these forms of worship is not that they’re so evil or so sinful, it’s that they are so unconscious. They are our default settings.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on those default settings because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration of craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms alone at the center of the whole universe. But of course there are all kinds of freedoms, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and attaining. The really important kind of freedom is being able to truly care about other people. And to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy kind of ways every day.

That’s the real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost something more infinite. I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational, the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, though, as far as I can see, is the capital-T truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. This is water. This is water.

By this is water, Mr. Wallace meant, and he was harkening back to his brief story at the beginning about the young fish who were unaware they were swimming in it. He meant, this is the reality all around us. This is the value system we all live in, the world, as the biblical writers call it, the system that has conformed most of us to it. He knew it was messed up. He knew it was idolatry to worship the things people worship, and they never even satisfy us.

Maybe what has made this speech gain notoriety is that just three years later, still a young man in his mid-forties, David Foster Wallace killed himself. I wish I could tell you his whole story had a happier ending. But he was right. The gods of power, money, beauty, pleasure, intellect, and so on, the gods of our world will never bring the peace and joy and security that most people deeply hunger for. Don’t worship at the altar of those things. Only the God who made us is worth worshiping.

When Jesus was asked what the most important thing in life was, he said to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and your mind and your strength, and next to that, to love other people as much as you love yourself. So, what do you really worship? What has your heart in devotion? The writers of the New Testament keep urging us, as Paul does here in 1 Corinthians 10, flee from idolatry. This is Paul for Share the Word. Thanks, Paul.

So when it comes to idolatry, how much has really changed? Not much, it seems. And this episode should be listened to again and again, because the depth of thought in that commencement speech was so profound. At least it was for me. So what do you worship? Who do you worship?

And are you the center of your existence? And where does God fit into your life? These are all questions that will come into focus at some point in your lives, in all of our lives, because idolatry is not necessarily a statue or a cross. It could be your checkbook or so many other things. What are you focused on? Think about it.

From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.