Idolatry is Life Apart from Jesus

Some false gods are made of wood. Some are bank accounts. Some are in our mirrors. False worship isn't limited to a few moments of slavish action toward a physical thing; it's a whole life apart from Jesus, an outpouring wasted on false kingdoms and false gods, even if that god is ourselves.

--Daniel Montgomery & Mike Cosper, Faithmapping: A Gospel Atlas for Your Spiritual Journey (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), 111.

No Such Thing as a Nonworshiper

Idolatry is everywhere because there's no such thing as a nonworshiper.

--Scotty Smith, Everyday Prayers: 365 Days to a Gospel-Centered Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011), Kindle location 339.

Comfort as Idol

Comfort and leisure are good things, but when my personal comfort becomes more important to me than Christ, it impacts my behavior sinfully.

--Timothy S. Lane & Paul David Tripp, How People Change (Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press, 2006), 50.

Worshiping in Truth

Insofar as our conceptions of [God] diverge from what he has disclosed of himself, so far are we worshiping a false god, which is normally called idolatry. To study hard what holy Scripture says about the Son of God, who has most comprehensively revealed his heavenly Father, is to know more about God, and thus to begin to ground our worship in reality rather than slogans.

--D.A. Carson, Jesus the Son of God: A Christological Title Often Overlooked, Sometimes Misunderstood, and Currently Disputed (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), 86.

Impressed with the Attractiveness of Christ

Transformational discipleship occurs when people are impressed with the attractiveness of Christ and confronted with the deficiency of lesser gods.

--Eric Geiger, Michael Kelley, and Philip Nation, Transformational Discipleship: How People Really Grow (Nashville: B&H, 2012), 48.

The Needed Shift of Allegiance

To the degree that you have based your life on something other than the Lord, to that degree God's love and the hope of the gospel will not comfort you.

--Paul David Tripp, War of Words: Getting to the Heart of Your Communication Struggles (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R, 2000), 98.

Following Jesus for All the Wrong Reasons

They were excited about following the King--but for all the wrong reasons. I am afraid that many of us respond to Jesus in the same way. What moves and motivates everything we do is not a submission to God's will and a burning desire for his glory, but our own set of personal desires and dreams. We are excited about the King because we see him as the most efficient delivery system for those dreams. You can tell what really excites us when we fall into discouragement and grumbling, when he does not deliver the "good" that we want. The lips that once praised now complain, and the lips that once encouraged now accuse.

--Paul David Tripp, War of Words: Getting to the Heart of Your Communication Struggles (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R, 2000), 89.

Internal Idols Govern Our Speech

Whatever controls our hearts will control our words. In fact, you could argue that if a certain desire controls my heart, there are only two ways I can respond to you. If you help me get what I want, I will enjoy and appreciate you. But if you stand in my way, I will experience (and probably express) anger when you are around. I want something, but because of you I cannot get it, so I will quarrel and fight!

--Paul David Tripp, War of Words: Getting to the Heart of Your Communication Struggles (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R, 2000), 58.

The Human Heart's Penchant for Self-Glorification

But the point of the book of Jonah is not to foster disapproval of Jonah. Jonah's example shows that those who have a close external connection to God (Jonah was born among God's chosen people and served as a prophet among them), know the Scriptures well and believe firmly that God exists can still persevere in calm, reasoned rebellion against that same God. They can, moreover, even persist in such rebellion despite God's disciplinary actions. Jonah exhibits a puzzling mix of arrogance and apathy, of self-awareness and blindness that should make us very wary of the human heart's penchant for self-glorification, regardless of how closely we are involved with God's people.

--Daniel C. Timmer, A Gracious and Compassionate God: Mission, Salvation and Spirituality in the Book of Jonah (New Studies in Biblical Theology; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2011), 145.

When Desire becomes Demand

The loss of good relationships with family members is grievous, and the desire to have good relationships is strong. It is not this desire that constitutes the fear of people. It is when desires are elevated to demands that there are detectable people-idols in our lives. It is when desires become demands that we are more concerned about our desires than the glory of God.

--Edward T. Welch, When People are Big and God is Small: Overcoming Peer Pressure, Codependency, and the Fear of Man (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1997), 69.

Worshiping the True God Falsely

We also worship the true God falsely. We may not be tempted to make a golden calf, but we are tempted to turn the God who is there into the kind of God we would like him to be. We want God to teach our minds but not to transform our hearts. We want him to give us a lift when we worship him on Sunday, but we don't want him to govern all our words and actions the rest of the week. We want him to change others, but we don't want him to change us. We want his love without his holiness and his mercy without his justice.

--Philip Graham Ryken, Exodus: Saved for God's Glory (Preaching the Word; Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005), 985.

Worship vs. Idolatry

Worship is a biblically faithful understanding of God combined with a biblically faithful response to him. Conversely, idolatry is an unbiblical, unfaithful understanding of God, and/or an unbiblical, unfaithful response to him.

--Mark Driscoll & Gerry Breshears, Doctrine: What Christians Should Believe (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), 341.

Idolatrous Motivations

The deep question of motivation is not "What is motivating me?" The final question is, "Who is the master of this pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior?" In the biblical view, we are religious, inevitably bound to one god or another. People do not have needs. We have masters, lords, gods, be they oneself, other people, valued objects, Satan.

--David Powlison, "Idols of the Heart and 'Vanity Fair,'" Journal of Biblical Counseling 13:2 (Winter 1995), 39.

The Tyranny of Our Idols

Whether the personal center is one's career, relationships, money, academic achievement, or sex, if an individual lives for anything besides Jesus, then that functional god will abuse, crush, and tyrannize one's heart.

--Stephen Um, "The Kingdom of God" in The Gospel as Center: Renewing Our Faith and Reforming Our Ministry Practices (edited by D.A. Carson and Timothy Keller; Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), 201.

Forbidden Worship

It is precisely the attempt to worship Yahweh by means he has already declared totally unacceptable that makes the sin of the golden calf so destructive, far more so than a simple shift of allegiance to "other" or "foreign" gods. The people receive the calf with the confession "These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt," an act they had attributed to Moses, albeit certainly as Yahweh's representative, in [Exodus 32:1]. And Aaron, in obvious and and specific response, declares a sacred day to Yahweh, not to the calf, or to any other god or gods. The composite of Exod 32:1-6 is not an account of the abandonment of Yahweh for other gods; it is an account of the transfer of the center of authority of faith in Yahweh from Moses and the laws and symbols he has announced to a golden calf without laws and without any symbols beyond itself. Moses is the representative of a God invisible in mystery. The calf is to be the representative of that same God, whose invisibility and mystery is compromised by an image he has forbidden.

--John I. Durham, Exodus (Word Biblical Commentary 3; Dallas: Word, 1987), 421-422.

The Attraction of Idolatry

But why did the people want "gods who can go before us"? Were they not satisfied with Yahweh's leadership during the past months, as he went before them day and night? The answer was partly a matter of the strong attractions of idolatry, partly a matter of the absence of Moses, who was so closely associated with Yahweh's presence, partly a matter of the passage of time during which the obvious presence of Yahweh in the pillar of cloud and fire was lacking, partly a matter of the attractiveness of the idea of a syncretism of Yahwism with the Egyptian bull cult..., but mostly a matter of something that continues to plague even Christian people today: an inability to see that the spiritual world is primary to and in control of the physical and visible world. In order to help his people understand this truth, Yahweh insisted on being believed in rather than being seen. It was so much easier to believe in something that could actually be seen. The Israelites were powerfully attracted to the latter option.

--Douglas K. Stuart, Exodus (New American Commentary 2; Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2006), 662-663.

Sinful People Totally Dependent on God's Forgiving Grace

The golden calf story is not simply one of the many biblical accounts of human sin. It is placed right after the conclusion of God's covenant with Israel and functions to replace the God-given instructions to Moses for proper worship before these had even been completed. All this gives the calf incident a definitive quality. It is in the story of Israel as a covenant people what the Fall (Gen. 3) is in the story of humankind: an act that defines Israel's character as rebellious, just as the Fall defined humanity's persistent tendency as rebellious.

In consequence, the relationship of Israel to God is immediately redefined as that of a sinful people totally dependent on God's forgiving grace, just as humanity's relationship to God was, from the beginning, a relationship based on God's forgiving grace. There never was a period in Israel's history marked by faithful covenant keeping, just as there never was a golden age of harmony between humans and God between Creation and Fall.

--Waldemar Janzen, Exodus (Believers Church Bible Commentary; Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2000), 410.

There Never was a Golden Age without a Golden Calf

The very purpose of telling the story of the golden calf immediately after the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai is to show that there never was a golden age without a golden calf, when the hearts of humans were pure. There never has been any such animal as Rousseau's noble savage.

--Godfrey Ashby, Go Out and Meet God: A Commentary on the Book of Exodus (International Theological Commentary; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 130.