biblestudy: The Commandments (Part Two)

Idolatry, Part Two
John W. Ritenbaugh
Given 16-Jul-88; Sermon #BS-TC02; 78 minutes

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In the last sermon that I gave to you, I asked you to examine the source of what you permit yourself to do in business, in education, in entertainment, in athletics, in fashions, in diet, in child rearing, and in marital relations, and on and on it goes. And I did this because this is of extreme importance to the kind of growth that we are going to have within our conversion.

To begin this sermon, I want to go back to a verse that I used last time. I think it is exceedingly important and maybe we will begin to build on this verse once again. It is in Ezekiel the 20th chapter, verses 23 through 25. God is describing His reactions to some of the things that the people were doing in the wilderness, and in the course of doing that, He is also describing what they were doing as well, and of course why He then reacted the way He did.

Ezekiel 20:23 "Also I lifted my hand in an oath to those in the wilderness, that I would scatter them among the Gentiles and disperse them throughout the countries, . . .

You might wonder when He did that in the wilderness. It is in the Song of Moses when he told those people that he knew beforehand what they were going to do and the result was going to be that they were going to be scattered among all the nations even though they had not even become a nation in the land of Canaan or Palestine yet.

Ezekiel 20:23-25 "Also I lifted My hand in an oath to those in the wilderness, that I would scatter them among the Gentiles and disperse them throughout the countries [here is why], because they had not executed My judgments [emphasis added], but had despised My statutes, and profaned My Sabbaths [here is the real problem], and their eyes were fixed on their father's idols. Therefore [here is the result, cause and effect], I also gave them up to statutes that were not good, and judgments by which they could not live."

Utterly impossible for them to live by. Live can be taken taken in two different senses. It can be taken in the sense of abundance. You know, Christ came, not that they might have life only, but that we might have a more abundant life. They could not live in those judgments that God turned them over to and also live in the sense of eternal life. He could not give eternal life to these people who were not living His way of life before they died.

Now what we are seeing here is that "their eyes were fixed on their father's idols" is just another way of saying something similar to what Jesus said in Matthew 12:34, that "out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks." That is, that we are motivated to do things, to say things, to conduct our lives according to what we value to be important. See, what is of value to us. So what do we do? We talk about things that are of value to us. They are in our heart and that is what comes out because that is what we are thinking about all the time.

In like manner, if a person's eyes are fixed on an idol, what is he going to do? He is going to respond to that idol.

Right away here we have to begin to get out of our minds this idea of an idol being nothing more than a leering statue that has been made out of some kind of a metal or (as we heard last week from Mr. Locke) out of fiberglass. Now we have our little Buddhas that are made out of fiberglass and we can carry them around. But what should be so amusing about that? People have been carrying crucifixes around for years and years, and they were not made out of fiberglass. At least the Buddhists are modern in making it out of something like that.

Because their eyes were fixed on their father's idols is given as the reason why they were not keeping God's judgments and statutes and commandments. Now they, like us, probably did what they did largely out of ignorance. They simply did not know. We have done that. We grew up in this world and our eyes were fixed on our father's idols. We had nowhere else to turn. We just accepted what was out there as being truth, and we were not motivated to examine whether or not that was right or not until we became much older, and by that time those things were inscribed within our minds.

Now where our eyes are fixed is the source of the way that we conduct our lives. Or another way of saying this might be that this is going to determine the way a person conducts his life. Or the way a person conducts his life shows what his god is. We can keep turning this from one angle to another, but we have to understand this principle right at the very beginning or we are going to miss a major portion of what idolatry is.

In earlier portions of this same chapter,

Ezekiel 20:7 Then I said to them, 'Each of you throw away the abominations which are before his eyes. . .

Was each person carrying a little golden calf right in front of him all the time, like people could carry a Buddha or a crucifix? I do not think God literally means that at all. They were looking to these things for direction. Their eyes were fixed, it is a figure of speech, that they were looking upon something for direction in their lives and what they were looking to for direction was not the Eternal God of creation. It was something else. In that day it might have been a golden calf. But what they were looking at was determining how they were going to conduct their life. And he says,

Ezekiel 20:7 . . . and do not defile yourselves with the idols of Egypt.'

Well, they worshipped anything that would move in Egypt, or even things that could not move because they were dead. They worshipped the dead and the living. So how much direction, how many opportunities for direction were there in Egypt? Well, I will tell you, probably just as many as we have available to us in the world. Because the world today is nothing more than Egypt, spiritually.

Ezekiel 20:15-16 So I also raised My hand in an oath to them in the wilderness, that I would not bring them into the land which I had given them, 'flowing with milk and honey,' the glory of all the lands, because they despised My judgments and did not walk in My statutes, but profaned My Sabbaths; for [here it is again, the connection is made so clearly] their heart went after their idols.

You see, the idol determined the way of life. The way the person—you and I today—are going to live. Now if we are going to live the right way, it is going to begin because God has called us and opened up our minds, and He has shown us who the true God is. Are we willing to examine what has been the source of the way that we have conducted our life all these many, many years before God called us? Our heart too has been set on idols. Our eyes too have been fixed on our father's idols. And it is that way simply because we had no other place to turn.

Now let us go back to the book of Exodus in chapter 31. I will just give you an illustration out of the Bible of this principle of how God can be traced or that God can be traced by what a person does. In Exodus 31, we ought to know this one almost by heart, and verse 13,

Exodus 31:13 "Speak also to the children of Israel, saying: 'Surely My Sabbaths you shall keep, for it is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I am the Lord who sanctifies you.'

Here we have this special Sabbath covenant given to the people of Israel and, of course, to you and me as well, as a sign identifying to us very clearly, every seventh day, every time we think of it, who our God is. Mr. Armstrong extended that out one step further and the keeping of the Sabbath not only identifies God to us, but it also identifies us to God as well. So here is one point of obedience, and the keeping of that one point points to our God. It is a sign.

Now we understand, of course, that it does not stand alone. I mean, the keeping of the Sabbath does not stand all by itself. There are other commandments, of course, that are tied to this that also point to our God, but the Sabbath is something that even the world can see clearly. When you go to your employer and say, "Hey, I can no longer work on the Sabbath," they may not understand it. They may not appreciate it, but they know that you are a Sabbath keeper and someday they are going to know that you kept it because your God was the true God. Your point of obedience signifies who your God is.

Again, what is the source? That is why it is so important. What we do points to our God and our God tells us what to do. Because our eyes are fixed there and we are looking there for guidance. Our heart is there, which means that our feelings are also involved in this as well. And you know when God begins to reveal His truth, how difficult it is at times to break away from family, friends, associates, business, or whatever, because of the heart and the eyes are fixed on that God, and we really almost sometimes literally have to tear ourselves away from those things in order to follow the true God.

Let us go to another place where he shows this also very clearly in the New Testament in Romans the first chapter. Now what this is showing here in Romans 1 is the cause-and-effect relationship between the right source and immorality.

Romans 1:18-21 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest to them [or in them], for God has shown it to them. [We are talking here about the true God, the Creator.] For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God.

There is the problem. It is identified. They did not glorify Him as God. Now if you do not glorify the true God as God, what is the next step, pray tell? Well, our eyes are going to be fixed somewhere else, are they not? Our heart is going to be on something else. If it is not on the true God and if the eyes are fixed for guidance on a false god and our heart is also involved in terms of our emotions and feelings, what is going to be the effect of that? Romans 1 is telling you: immorality. There is a direct link up. What we are seeing here is really an expansion of what God is saying in Ezekiel the 20th chapter. Their eyes were fixed on their father's idols and their hearts were on their idols as well. The effect of that is to turn our obedience, turn our conduct, turn the way that we live our life, our lifestyle, is going to come about as a result of what our eyes are fixed on.

Now, notice the effect.

Romans 1:21 because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became [here is the effect] futile in their thoughts. . .

A man is a thinking instrument. He has got to do something with his mind. If he turns away from the true God, he has to invent gods. I will show that a little bit more later.

Romans 1:21-23 . . . and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things.

Let me give you a very simple definition of idolatry and what results from it. Idolatry is nothing more than calling a bad thing good and a good thing bad. The good thing of course is God. The effect then is immorality. Immorality results from calling a good thing bad and a bad thing good. Now, has not God prophesied that as we approach the end it would reach such a state that we would be calling evil good and good evil? Certainly He did. Now this is the essence, and essence means the main part, the heart, the core. This is the essence of idolatry.

Now this is the delusion, that is the problem, it is a delusion that causes one to impute the powers and prerogatives of the true God to a non-God. And so we say to our non-God, make me happy. Make me fulfilled. Make me rich, make me healthy. But a non-God cannot do that. It is an impossibility. Those are the powers and prerogatives of the true God. And so we say to immorality—which becomes our god—we say to fornication or we say to adultery, make me happy, fulfill me. We say to lying, cheating, stealing, deceiving, coveting: make me happy. It cannot do it. It is not within the power of those things to do.

And what happens? Over a period of time in a person who has this delusion, calling bad good and good bad, is that they become non-discriminatory in the moral areas. Their values become all screwed up, as we say. And so to them, adultery is good. That is where it is at. Multitudes of women to take off to bed. It is good for the conquering spirit. And the fornication. We say it to food, we say it to alcohol, we say it to drugs. Make me happy, fulfill me.

Now in Romans 1 Paul is showing that the lifestyles which include an abundance of immorality, that is, our world, flowed directly from these people's concept of God. It began with a rejection of the true God. And because man is a thinking creature, that once he did that he had to begin to invent gods. Since they rejected then the true Source of true morality, life could not help but be lived the way it is. Because that God, the true God, is the source of true morality, the true traditions, the true values. He is the source of all righteousness. And so that is why this world has resulted.

So what we have here is the natural consequence of being left to the god of this world. And he, brethren, is bent on destruction. That is his game.

Idolatry can also be defined as an intellectually and morally blind worship of the creature rather than the Creator. See, that is what Paul says here.

Romans 1:23-25 and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things. Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie [The lie is the false god.], and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

Now Satan deceives people into believing that his way brings them control of their lives. You remember what he said to Adam and Eve, "You shall be as gods." Gods have control! They would have the prerogatives of God. But you see, as long as they were obedient to the true God, the old government thing came in. And brethren, we do not want other people pulling our strings! We want to be in control of every situation and that includes God as well. Brethren, this is a major thing that we have to repent of. Are you willing to let God pull your strings? Are you willing to let Him determine the outcome of your life? Are you willing to let Him determine whether you get sick or whether you are healed, whether you are going to be financially prosperous? Are you willing to give your life over to Him in obedience and let Him pull your strings in everything? Maybe if there is some reservations in your mind, you have not repented yet.

In the book of Acts, chapter 20, verse 21, the apostle Paul is giving his final message to the people there in Ephesus. He was defending his manner of life and the preaching that he did. And he says,

Acts 20:20-21 how I kept back nothing that was helpful, but proclaimed it to you, and taught you publicly from house to house, testifying to Jews, and also to Greeks, repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.

What does the word repentance mean? It means to turn. Who is this repentance toward? It is turning toward the true God. Now if we are turning toward the true God, then does it not also seem that we are turning away from false gods? Brethren, this is the hinge pin right here. Because if we do not get the true God as the God that we are worshipping, everything else is not going to fall into place. You have got to have the right Source. God in His mercy allows us to grow. It is just like we slide or slur into things because we could not possibly make that abrupt of a change totally in our life. And so what He normally does is He gives us a little bit of insight about one little area of our life or two or three or something like that. That we are not keeping the Sabbath or we are not tithing, and then we begin to turn in those areas.

You see, we are turning away from that false god that said, "You don't have to keep the Sabbath. Sunday's good enough, or Friday, whatever day you want, they are all alike." Or that God that said that you really did not have to tithe at all because that has been all done away with. Christ nailed it to the cross and the church can get along, do its work with just any old contribution that you see fit to give, and you can prosper without having to tithe at all. Look at these other people out there.

There are all kinds of arguments that come from the false god. So he tells you, "Well, Christmas is just as good, a little baby in a manger there somewhere. I mean, after all, that's the one who grew up to be the Christ. Why can't you worship Him from the time that He's a little child right on up. Look, they gave Him gifts. Why shouldn't you give gifts to one another on the 25th of December?" To a lot of people that sounds logical.

Go ahead, celebrate Easter. Never mind that Passover is the day that God really wants us to keep, you see, but is not it more exciting and grandiose and glorious and magnificent if we celebrate His resurrection rather than His death? Well, that sounds logical, does it not? Oh, what is a little fornication. No problem there. Nobody is hurt after all. Go ahead and do it. Go ahead. I allow you, go ahead. Adultery too. What does it matter? Have a little bit of fun for a night. Go ahead. Oh, you are stealing money from the bank. All right, that is all right. Nobody is going to miss it. They have got lots of money anyway.

That is what the gods of this world do. They give us justification, we can rationalize these things from one end to another because we are thinking creatures. But if we turn away from the false god, you have to turn to the new one if we are going to get to the right Source. I mean to the right one, the true one, if we are going to get to the right Source. That is where conversion begins. And that is the line along which it proceeds as well. If our conversion is going to continue and if we are going to continue to grow, it is going to be because we are responding to God's teaching us of His ideals, His standards, His values in every area of life, and we are gradually overcoming in those areas and turning to them, and we are no longer permitting ourselves the conduct that those false gods did in the world.

In Psalm 10, verse 4, we have another place here where it shows how essential it is that we turn away from this world and understand why God includes a statement like in I John 2:15-17. Here in Psalm the 10th chapter David writes,

Psalm 10:4 The wicked in his proud countenance does not seek God; God is in none of his thoughts.

Does that not very succinctly tell us why we have to come out of this world? Why every system of values that exists in this world—I do not care whether it is the Berbers in North Africa or whether it is the Arabs over in Saudi Arabia. I do not care whether it is in China or Japan or Switzerland or Washington, DC—every system of morality that is not God's system is a wrong system and it needs to be repented of because God is not in all their thoughts. That is a pretty high standard. See, if we are going to be led to the right Source and by the right Source to the right values, it means a great deal of meditation regarding whether or not this thing that I am permitting myself to do, whether it is really right. To me, it begins to point out how much we need the Spirit of God, which is the love of God shed abroad in our heart. Because if we do not have that our search is going to be fruitless.

Now when we came on the scene, all of the cultures were already formed and they were formed along the lines that Paul described in Romans 1. Some more, some less, some more intensely immoral, others less intensely immoral, but every single one of them wrong. Some of them having more of God's truth, some of them less. And those that had more and followed it then experienced a more moral climate in which to grow, marry, rear children. And those who had less there was no possibility at all except purely human experience.

Somebody once asked me what I thought was the greatest blessing that had ever been given to the Western nations. And why they at least on the surface appeared to be more prosperous, cleaner, whatever, however you might want to look at it. What caused them to be this way? Well, I do not know whether my answer was right, but it satisfied me. It is the Bible. Because most Westerners believe at least portions of it. And even if they do not believe that it is the Word of God, they at least believe that it is a book that is worthy to be read and that there is good advice within it, even carnally. So many of those things have been adapted within the cultures. It is a tremendous gift.

You see, we grew up with our minds being educated from the time that we were born by false values, a mixture, admittedly a mixture. But as we have approached the end, the mixture has become more and more diluted with human reason and less and less of the truth of God, the absolutes, the values that will produce the kind of life that people want to lead. And so we have been going steadily into more and more idolatry, and more idolatry means greater immorality, and greater immorality means a lower and lower standard of life and satisfaction and peace, until now many of you are afraid to go out on the street.

Let us go back to the book of Hosea, the 4th chapter. In Hosea 4 are very interesting things regarding this society. He begins the chapter by saying,

Hosea 4:1-3 "There is no truth or mercy or knowledge of God in the land. By swearing and lying, killing and stealing and committing adultery, they break all restraint, with bloodshed after bloodshed. [just an endless series of crimes, one after another] Therefore, the land will mourn and everyone who dwells there will waste away with the beasts of the field and the birds of the air; even the fish of the sea will be taken away."

Is that happening, brethren? Is that the result of immorality? Is that the result of idolatry? Yes, it is. We are going to see this chapter tell you that. Even fish being taken out of the sea as a result of pollution is the result of immorality, which is the result of idolatry. If we really loved God, the true Source of light, we would not be doing those things to the fish in the seas that caused them to be killed that way. We would choose a different course of life far different from what we have that permits our air to be fouled, our eyes to burn because of it, and our lives shortened as a result of it.

Hosea 4:6 [he says] My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge. [There you got it right there. See, what kind of knowledge?] Because you have rejected knowledge, I will also reject you from being priest for Me; because you have forgotten the law of your God, I will also forget your children.

If you turn away from the true God, what are men going to do? They have to fill in with false gods. It might be good for us to say that no religion would be better than a false religion. Only as I tried to show you last week, that is an impossibility because in actual usage there is no such thing as no religion. Because every body of law establishes a way of life and that is what religion is. It is a way of life. Here in America, you remember old Superman. He was all for the American flag and so forth, and then he always added and said, the American way. There is no such thing as no religion. It is impossible to separate the church from the state. That is a dream that will never occur.

See, God is pinpointing the problem. They rejected, just like in Romans 1, just like in Ezekiel the 20th chapter, they rejected the truth of God. Cause-and-effect. You have to go into idolatry. It is the only direction. Why? Because if nothing else, you will be the god. You may say that you are not following any other man. But you will determine for yourself what is moral for you and immoral for you. You shall be as gods. Satan was right. He did not tell them the whole truth though. He left out other other important things.

Hosea 4:10-12 "For they shall eat, but not have enough; they shall commit harlotry, but not increase; because they have ceased obeying the Lord. Harlotry, wine, and new wine [drugs] enslave the heart. My people ask counsel [look at this] from their wooden idols, . . .

Now does that not fit right in with Ezekiel the 20th chapter? Their eyes were fixed on their idols. They were seeking guidance there. Their heart was also involved in it. Here we have, "My people ask counsel from their idols." Which way should we live, pray tell?

Hosea 4:12 . . . and their staff informs them. For the spirit spirit of harlotry [that spirit of harlotry is really idolatry. Here these people were married to the eternal God, the Creator, and they were turning to idols. That was harlotry, adultery, spiritual. It is idolatry.] has caused them to stray, and they have played the harlot against their God."

Hosea 4:16 "For Israel is stubborn like a stubborn calf; now the Lord will let them forage like a lamb in an open country.

Here it comes again. Ephraim, and it does not just mean the nation of Ephraim. It does not just mean Great Britain. Ephraim is put here for the entire ten tribes, all of Israel.

Hosea 4:17-18 "Ephraim is joined to idols, let him alone. Their drink is rebellion, they commit harlotry continually. Her rulers dearly love dishonor."

When Israel gave up the worship of the true God they filled in the void with false ones. We invariably do.

Now here we have a whole listing of sins: verse 2, verse 10, verse 11 and so on. What God is showing you and me is that in their broadest sense, even though they are specifically lying, murdering, stealing, adultery, or whatever, they are all idolatry because the self is being served rather than the eternal Creator God. These people were pleasing themselves. So the self was being worshipped, responded to, rather than the holiness of our Creator.

I want to show you a similar example back in the New Testament in I Corinthians the 10th chapter. And it is very interesting to note the context here. Because the context begins, the part that I am going to read anyway, with the true God and it ends with idolatry.

I Corinthians 10:1-4 Moreover, brethren, I do not want you to be unaware that all of our fathers were under the cloud, all passed through the sea, all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ.

God was the source, he is saying here, for these people who are going through the wilderness. He provided leadership in the form of a cloud and a pillar of fire. He gave leadership in the person of Moses. He communicated with Moses and He communicated with the people and showed them their way of life. He provided food for them and on and on it went. God was pointing out that He was the source of everything that was good and permanent and light and lasting and would really bring the kind of fulfillment that we want out of life.

I Corinthians 10:6-7 Now these things became examples, to the intent that we should not lust after evil things as they also lusted. And do not become idolaters as some of them were. As it is written, "The people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play."

Verse 8 is sexual immorality; verse 9 is tempting Christ; verse 10 is murmuring, griping. and complaining.

I Corinthians 10:11 Now all these things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our admonition, on whom the ends of the ages have come.

I Corinthians 10:14 Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry.

Now wait a minute here. He gave us a list of about five or six different sins there. Sexual immorality, there is tempting God, there is murmuring and griping, there is lusting, but is the only one that we have to turn from idolatry? No. He is reinforcing what Hosea 4 says. That the crux, the real peril, in sin is idolatry. Paul is showing that all the other sins flow from this one. And that if we flee from idolatry, then it is very likely that the other things, the good things, the right kind of morality is going to fall right into place. Something to be very cognizant of.

Again, if we examined it even a little bit more closely we would find that these sins that are listed here, whether they did it in ignorance or whether they did it with a knowledge of what they were doing, the self was being served rather than the Creator God. God says do not commit fornication. Now if He was really being served, they would not commit fornication. So they were serving somebody else. They were yielding to, responding to, devoted to something else. They were serving themselves because that was what is going to make them happy. Make me happy, see, we say to a non-God. Make me fulfilled. Make me feel contentment and satisfaction. And you know what? It does for a little while. That is the problem. That is what deludes us and keeps the delusion going. That somehow or another we can call good evil and evil good. It is because there is a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment for a short period of time.

Do not be deluded, brethren, and allow yourselves to be deceived to the fact that just because sin has brought a momentary release or a sense of pleasure or fulfillment that it is going to continue because it is going to kill you.

In Matthew 22 Jesus is being questioned by a group of people And the question was put to Him: What is the great commandment in the law? What is the commandment that is greater than all commandments? What is number one? What is the worst sin is another way of putting it, that a person can commit. It is idolatry. So Jesus said, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment." It is just an expansion on commandment Numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4. Expansion or shrinking down, however one might want to put it, succinctly saying, summarizing what the first four commandments say within it.

This is the commandment that has to do with fear, talking about the right kind of fear, respect, service, admiration, obedience, worship. And worship has to do with ascribing intense admiration, adoration, honor, and devotion too. So I said to you the last time that worship is our response to whatever our God is. Think of someone that you, in the past or maybe even in the present, respect very highly, you admire them. Does not your respect cause you to do things?

Now, if this person is traveling through your area and you really respect and admire them, the chances are very great that because you know that person is going to come, that you are going to try to bend every effort to spend some time with them, are you not? Sure you are. You are going to do that. And if you know their habits the chances are great you are going to want to emulate them. You want to imitate them.

I had a very good example of this one time. We, my wife and I, were visiting with my brother in Cincinnati. He was involved with the Little League in his neighborhood and he was telling me that almost every little boy all the way up to the oldest in Little League age, almost every boy in that city adopted the stance of Pete Rose. The Pete Rose Crouch. That is what I mean. In some other area of life that might have to do with with fashion, the way people fix their hair. Because this admiration that we have for this person begins to cause us, we are motivated to emulate what this person is doing. When they even suggest that you do something, you are moved to comply to that because of your fear, because of your respect, because of your admiration or even adoration of those people.

Now in Western civilizations, people [unclear] to such an extent, I mean that people do crazy, weird, unusual things. I just should not confine this to Western areas, it is just a human trait. But we are familiar with it in the United States, Great Britain. And so we have teeny boppers—and sometimes even grandmothers—I have witnessed swooning over a crooning singer. One time I saw Tom Jones on television and he seems to be a favorite of older women. I mean, here are these white-haired, silver-haired grandmothers and they are just acting silly over Tom Jones, who can sing a fair song but. . . Why should we be moved to do something like that?

This is the principle that is involved in worship, in worshipping a god.

I mentioned the thing about the boys there in Cincinnati, the Pete Rose thing. Boys, they generally do not tend to croon or swoon over a crooning singer, but I will tell you, they will go ape over a ballplayer, football player, something that they feel is a little bit more masculine, and they will begin to do this. They will try to go to the games when he is going to be in town. They are going to imitate. They will watch him like a hawk. Because if they adopt that stance and if they do everything that he does, they will get hits like he does. That is their idol, Pete Rose or whatever.

You are going to see something this coming week. The Democratic National Convention is on, and if you can bear to watch it the chances are going to be very great that you are going to see grown men and women supposedly mature marching up and down with placards, "Hey, he's my man, he's my man," marching around, funny hats on, blowing whistles, making all kinds of noise, singing. Because that man and that party represents their hope. I do not know whether these people actually go to the place where they idolize these people that I am talking about. I am only talking about the principles. It is just an illustration so you see the principle that is involved in this thing of worshipping the true God or a false god because this principle is what motivates us to get our lives in harmony with whatever that god happens to be.

Now sometimes the god is a thing or a concept, as in the sense of money. You know, the love of money. Or in the sense of power. Power is the idol and power, that desire for it, is what is being responded to and people will trample one another and kill and maim in order to satisfy that drive that is within them. In some cases it might be worldly beauty, as in the case of makeup. It can be things in the sense of a house or a car or ambition. You see, all of these things are really nothing more than the self being responded to in the form of something that is self-pleasing or self-indulgent.

Back in Luke the 14th chapter, beginning in verse 18. This is the parable of the invitation that God extended to the great supper. Here were people being invited to turn to God, to turn to the true Source of righteousness and morality and of life. And so God sends out a servant, and he begins to call these people.

Luke 14:18 "But they all with one accord began to make excuses. The first said to him, 'I have bought a piece of ground, and I must go and see it. I ask you to have me excused.'

Now you can begin to think already about what I am driving at here. These people are being invited to repent. They are being invited to turn to the true God. But something greater than the true God to them is occupying their mind. Which are they responding to? They are responding to their god.

Luke 14:19-20 "And another said, 'I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going to test them. I ask you to have me excused.' And still another said, 'I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.'

There are interesting ramifications to this because these three categories represent something. They represent idols that people have to keep them from obeying, yielding to the true God and finding the kind of life that they really want to have. That piece of ground or farm, as some of the translations have it, equates with possessions and investments. The oxen represents technology or we might say, a technological means of a earning a livelihood. And the wife represents our human-centered comforts, maybe at the very least. And maybe at the greatest or the worst the kind of cult we have of sex and success. Sex seems to be at the center of everything in this nation now and somehow seems to be involved in all things.

Look, a person cannot live without a farm. I am talking in a broad sense there. We need farms. It just represents, as I said, possessions and investments. But on the other hand, brethren, what this book is showing you and me is that the farm cannot live without the true God. We are having an object lesson in this principle here in the United States of America. And this object lesson is going on really all over the earth. Do you realize that at one time the Sahara Desert was a beautiful, green, verdant forest that stretched all the way from the Atlantic to the Red Sea? What you see now is the effect of men using that farm without God.

The Romans used the forests of North Africa to make Rome strong. That is where their wealth came from. That was the source of their material resources, and they built Rome on the strength of North Africa and they raped it. They were godless in terms of having the true God and it is forever a witness to you and me of what happens to land apart from God.

We are doing the same thing in the United States. We are doing it far more rapidly than the Romans ever did. They largely had to do things by hand. We are tearing things up mechanically and chemically and we are in the process of turning the United States breadbasket into a desert. It will not take many more years now. Mankind is doing the same thing in South America, cutting down the forests left and right in order to provide forage area for their animals, cattle, and creating all kinds of trouble as a result.

That is what He is showing us there. The rejection of the true God leads to the kind of life that we are living today in which pollution is going to wipe us out if nothing else does.

The same thing falls in line with the same principle in regard to the technology. It is very interesting that we might look upon technology as being good. At the very least we look upon it as being helpful in the sense that it seems to decrease the amount of labor that we have to put into producing a greater crop and so we can farm greater areas as a result of having tractors and things of that nature. But the history of the world shows me something else. If somebody invents something, it seems to set up almost automatically a process in his neighbors that he has got to have that too.

What are wars fought over? They are fought over money. They are fought over resources. Now if you do not have the true God, you are going to go to war in order to either possess the technology of someone else or you are going to go to war to keep them from possessing the technology that you have. There seems to be a cause-and-effect. A man invents a spear and he has got to use it. He invents a bow and arrow, and he has got to use it. Now he can kill somebody from afar off. And now we can do it really sanitarily. We can kill people from continents away with our technology. And you know very well what is on your front page every day is how are we going to use our technology to remain free, keep those other people away from our shores, and whatever. It is an idol.

And even the thing regarding a wife. You know, we cannot live without a home either. We might even extend that to say that we cannot live without sex. If there was no sex, life would stop, would it not? And so even that, which was a good thing, God created it. And certainly those things are part of a full life. But when those things, sex is more easily seen and even the family life, when those things become the center of a person's life rather than the true God, what happens with sex? It becomes an obsession with people. The next step, because sex apart from God cannot satisfy, it is a false god, is invariably perversion. Because what formerly brought fulfillment will no longer produce fulfillment and so you go from normal sex as God intended to obsession to perversion and from there you go into depression and sadness and terrible kinds of mental psychological hang-ups. False gods are very, very dangerous.

Let us go back to Exodus 20th chapter. (It is about time in two sermons we finally get to the commandments.)

Exodus 20:1-3 And God spoke all these words, saying: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me."

I think one of the interesting things to note here is that in the commandment God does not first reveal or identify Himself as Creator, but rather as liberator or deliverer from the foreign god. That is the key. "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt." God liberates first. He gives first. And we have to understand that God chose us. We did not choose Him. And that God gives before He asks. And the first thing that He gives is freedom from a false god. If He does not give us that first, nothing else is going to work. The whole thing collapses from the very beginning.

So God gives us freedom from a false god, from a false system of morality, and then He asks for righteousness and worship. But we can worship Yahweh only. That is the stipulation. Again, nothing else will work. We have to worship Him only because no man can serve two masters. And to worship God is to have one supreme loyalty in a person's life to whom we give all of our instincts, all of our energies, all of our passions, all of our drives in submission and obedience to.

I will give you some alternate translations of verse 3. "Let there not be to you other gods beyond Me." Or in addition to Me, or equivalent to Me, or by the side of Me.

What is your conception of God? What do you think God is like? Now unfortunately for many of us, without realizing it, we are worshipping our conscience. You might remember that I started the last sermon with this, Romans 14. And I have gone to great pains to try to get all of us to see that we cannot trust our conscience. Because consciences are educated and, by and large, our conscience has been formed in the world. So what is in that conscience is subject to examination from the truth, from the absolutes of Almighty God.

Now if we are worshipping our conscience, and our conception of God is pretty much limited to that, then really that makes God not much more than just a resident policeman. He just kind of something that you carry around with you and if that be true, we have a mighty small conception of God.

There are others who worship really nothing more than a superimposition of their own father. Well, that might be at least partly good if your father happened to be worth worshipping. But what happens if you had a father who was a bounder? What if you had a father who was an alcoholic? What if you had a father who could not keep his word? Promise you the sky, never deliver. What if you had a father who was very indulgent, gave you just about everything you ever wanted. Daddy, give me this. Daddy, give me that. That is a very poor conception of God.

Do you understand that when Christ called the Father in heaven His Father, that He was stressing the relationship. He is not like our fathers. All of our fathers are totally inadequate to measure up to the Great God. God is not a man. He is so far above that we cannot conceive how great the distance is between even the very best father and what He is.

Well, maybe your conception of God, if you examine it, might reveal that God is really nothing more than a grand old man. And I am not talking about the whiskey here, Old Grand-Dad.

But what are your first thoughts about God? Maybe the first one would not be what I am going to say, it might be somewhere down the line a little bit but the chances are very great you are going to get around to it, that God is old. But unfortunately to many that really interprets into or translates into "old fashioned," out of date. I remember reading once of a group of teenagers that were asked this very question. Then they were asked, the next question was, does God understand radar? Well, almost invariably their first response was no, the word "no" would begin to come out, and then they would catch themselves and kind of titter. Because they would begin to realize that they were about to make a stupid statement. And what it translated into really in their life and their ideas about God, is that He was out of date, that He was old fashioned, but we are modern, up to date, and we have radar and we have computers and we can send things to the moon and all kinds of things. Why, we have got television! God surely is not aware of those kinds of things.

You know, one of God's names is "I was, I am, I will be." God is old. But God is just as modern as tomorrow. He is up to date and way ahead of any one of us by far.

Others of us have a conception of God—you might remember the old song, at least I remember some of the words from the poem, "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, look upon this little child," and then it goes on. That is all I remember. Is Jesus meek and mild? Meek, yes, but mild, no. That is almost a horrible word. This was a Man who challenged the establishment, who challenged the hypocrites of His day, who single-handedly put to flight an awful lot of apparently powerful men there in the Temple grounds. He was not meek and mild. He was meek, but He was not mild. He was meek in the sense of being someone who was submitted to God.

I have another conception of God from a movie. Did did any of you see the movie Time Bandits? Anyway, my title for God in that movie is the managing director of the universe. Now at first, that seems good. See, you might remember in the movie that after all these shenanigans went on, and God at the very end of the movie shows up and He is dressed like an English businessman or an American businessman. He has got a nice snappy suit on and He strides in and boy, in just very short order He puts everything back in its place. I think He gave somebody back his life. I am not real sure, but one of the bandits, I think He gave his life back. But at any rate, God arrived on the scene and everything, just like that, was all right. And at first impression that seems good because here is this guy who really has things under control.

But now wait a minute, let us begin to look at that in human terms just very briefly. The managing director, chairman of the board, or however you might word it, they are usually right at the top of the company, the chief executive officer, and surely there is going to be nobody that is above God in the universe. So He is the CEO of everything that is going on and when you begin to think of this in practical terms, is not the CEO of a company really basically cut off from contact with all but a very small clique of other people? He is. He has a small staff that reports to him personally and he has contact with those people, but the rest of them, all he ever sees is reports. Does it bother you to imagine your prayers coming up before God and God is like a harried telephone operator plugging things?

How does He do it? I do not know. But it is part of that power that we have to understand that He is not cut off from one single person.

Now we are beginning here an attempt to very inadequately describe God to you. We have got to get away from some of these misconceptions that we have here. Let us turn to Isaiah, the 40th chapter.

Isaiah 40:18 To whom then will you liken God? Or what likeness will you compare to Him?

Then he gives an example of what was happening in his day of a person making an idol out of gold and silver.

Isaiah 40:25-28 "To whom then will you liken Me, or to whom shall I be equal?" says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high, and see who has created these things, who brings out their host by number; He calls them all by name, by the greatness of His might, by the strength of His power; not one is missing. [That is, from God's accounting of all of them.] Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel: "My way is hidden from the Lord, and my just claim is passed over by my God"? Have you not known? Have you not heard? The everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, neither faints nor is weary. There is no searching of His understanding.

Now the revelation in the Bible is God's effort to convey to His creatures the correct impression or image or conception of Him.

Just a couple of chapters later in Isaiah 57, verse 15. This is to me one of the most magnificent statements in regard to this. To me it is breathtaking. I cannot understand it. It is incomprehensible to me and I cannot describe it, but I think it is a place to begin.

Isaiah 57:15 For thus says the High and Lofty One who inhabits eternity, . . .

I go blank. Like *tilt, and I cannot think any further. How can somebody inhabit eternity? It is like He fills it. And I cannot even say 'from one end to the other' because eternity has no beginning or no ending. My conception of time is limited to this human thing here. People can give me figures as to how big the universe is in so many light years, and it makes my head spin that here we have got a God who is so great that He inhabits it from one end to the other. That is wrong. You see, you begin to run out of words. He is so awesome! He is so magnificent in the power of His mind.

How could we possibly, once we know, turn away from this God who knows all and who knows everything and who has experienced life in all of eternity? And He knows what is of absolute value and what is vanity and what is not. And what is going to end at the grave and what is not, and what is going to pass through, and what is right and what is wrong, and what is going to produce good life and what is going to produce health and happiness and peace. How could we possibly turn away from a God like that to our own puny, miserable, tiny life? Or to any other human being for that matter.

And yet this God says in that verse,

Isaiah 57:15 . . . whose name is Holy: "I dwell in the high and holy place, with him who has a contrite and humble spirit."

That God, as lofty and high, and as great and as mighty and as magnificent as He is, wants fellowship. But He only wants it with those who are humble and contrite. Those who will submit to Him and find that His absolutes do produce the right things in life. Do you know that Jesus said in John 17:3 that eternal life is to know God? You cannot know God until you can get close to Him. And He is telling you how to get close to Him. He will live with the person who is lowly and contrite. And He will be our God.

Well, I was going to go on and show you that John 1:1-3 and Genesis 1:1 chronologically show us that God is the Creator. I mean, chronologically it reveals Him first of all as being Creator and then other portions of the Bible begin to reveal Him in more specific areas. However, what we are left with in almost every case that He reveals Himself, especially in the Old Testament, is so far beyond our capacities to understand, let alone imitate, that we are left either with the vaguest kind of impression or conception of what He is or a helpless, hopeless, crushing feeling of the impossibility of ever measuring up. Because we cannot grasp His greatness.

So God says, I will solve that. And so we have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in which God became a Man and lived life the way life is to be lived. You see, that we can understand because here is God revealing Himself in human terms. Here is the Source of everything, because Jesus Christ is Creator. Here is the Source showing us in very simple terminology the personality and character of the Great God.

And so we have in John 8:42 and John 14:6-10, Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life," and "He who has seen Me has seen the Father." So we cannot escape. God has given us a revelation of what He is in human terms so that we can imitate.

We are going to finish with a verse back in the book of Ezekiel, the 33rd chapter. Consider this in the light of the things I said about how are we living, and what is the source, who is our God. What are we following? What are we yielding to, worshipping?

Ezekiel 33:10 "Therefore, you, O son of man, say to the house of Israel: 'Thus you say, "If our transgressions and our sins lie upon us, and we pine away in them [not even knowing the problem in many cases], how can we then live?"'

Two aspects to live. How can we continue to live this life? How can we live eternally?

Ezekiel 33:11 Say to them [from God through Ezekiel to you and me]: 'As I live,' says the Lord God, 'I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn, turn [repentance is toward God, and then we are to live as God lives as shown in the life of Jesus Christ] from your evil ways! For why should you die, O house of Israel?'