1.  The commandment recognizes that we were created to worship – to find a god – and that will either be toward the true God or to a worthless substitute. We cannot be neutral. We cannot turn off the “worship gene”. It is permanent and the only choice is to whom or what we direct it and how that either makes us mature or destroys us.

2.  The second and always unpopular fact of any discussion of idolatry is our primary relationship with God. He says he is a “jealous” God and we take that to mean He has moods or is insecure about our love for Him. The word really means intense, totally committed and completely focused. He is the only God who can love us completely. There are no other gods who would sacrifice themselves. All other gods simply reflect our own interests. J.B. Phillips in “Your God Is Too Small” says, “There is always the danger of imagining a god with moral qualities like our own, vastly magnified and purified of course, and with the same blind spots.”

God is jealous because we are His. We would prefer to be volunteers and to choose Him. In fact, we have encouraged people to think that way – to choose God to make life better. That’s not how God sees it. We are His completely. The whole earth and all of creation is His. He owns it. Paul says it in Corinthians. “You are not your own. You are bought with a price.” He is repeating what God himself says in Deuteronomy and other places in the Old Testament.

Deuteronomy 7:6: “For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.”

Deuteronomy 27:9: “…for you are a people holy to the Lord your God. Out of all the peoples on the face of the earth, the Lord has chosen you to be his treasured possession”

Exodus 19:5: “Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession.”

Deuteronomy 7:7: “The Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. 8 But it was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath he swore to your ancestors that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt. 9 Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments.”

God is jealous for our good. Not for His. He knows what happens inevitably to a person or a church or a community that worships something other than God – and it will destroy generations.

God knows our hearts and knows what happens when we think we can get away with idolatry or avoid the consequences.

Deuteronomy 29:18: ‘Make sure there is no man or woman, clan or tribe among you today whose heart turns away from the Lord our God to go and worship the gods of those nations; make sure there is no root among you that produces such bitter poison. 19 When such a person hears the words of this oath and they invoke a blessing on themselves, thinking, “I will be safe, even though I persist in going my own way,” they will bring disaster on the watered land as well as the dry.”

That is why He commands us not to “intermarry” with the beliefs and values of the world around us. “Do not intermarry with them…for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods.”

But we do that and we follow gods that are more consistent with our own nature and do not make – at first – such demands of loyalty and exclusivity. Idolatry seems to allow us to free ourselves from being possessions. Most people do not choose evil. They choose what appears to be good. Idolatry begins with choosing what appears to be good, practical and sensible. It begins with self-interest and that’s what most idols promise – a better life. They offer good things – more crops, children and prosperity. They don’t demand much at first and then they turn our hearts. Idolatry allows us to stop being servants but makes us slaves instead. We don’t set out to become evil or depraved. We set out to have a good life but without depending on or being a possession of God.

3.  The standard by which every king of Israel was judged was ultimately by how he responded to idolatry. The epitaph for every king includes whatever good he might have done but the final word is reserved for how he steered the nation toward or away from idolatry. The major responsibility was to return the people to God before anything else – before prosperity, peace, religion and even wisdom. No matter what he did other than that was inconsequential.

“He did what was right in the eyes of God but he allowed idols.”

People need leadership to stay away from idols and when leadership is absent we will stray toward idols. Look at Judges 2:

6 After Joshua had dismissed the Israelites, they went to take possession of the land, each to their own inheritance. 7 The people served the Lord throughout the lifetime of Joshua and of the elders who outlived him and who had seen all the great things the Lord had done for Israel.  10 After that whole generation had been gathered to their ancestors, another generation grew up who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel. 11 Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord and served the Baals. 12 They forsook the Lord, the God of their ancestors, who had brought them out of Egypt. They followed and worshiped various gods of the peoples around them. They aroused the Lord’s anger 13 because they forsook him and served Baal and the Ashtoreths….18 Whenever the Lord raised up a judge for them, he was with the judge and saved them out of the hands of their enemies as long as the judge lived; for the Lord relented because of their groaning under those who oppressed and afflicted them. 19 But when the judge died, the people returned to ways even more corrupt than those of their ancestors, following other gods and serving and worshiping them. They refused to give up their evil practices and stubborn ways.”

I believe it is the standard by which every leader is judged. Did you keep your people from following other gods or did you conveniently overlook that? Did you do right personally but allow people to pursue worthless things that ultimately will harm them and their families for generations?

A few years ago a company created a product that allowed pastors to survey their congregation and ask them what sermon topics they would like to hear preached. They became very popular with pastors because they saw themselves becoming more customer focused and market sensitive. I’ll let you guess how many times the topic of idolatry was mentioned. Practical sermons about being happy, fulfilled, raising successful children and healthy marriages were all at the top. Left to ourselves we will always choose those things that seem good to us.

No doubt some of you have seen the video clip of Victoria Osteen in Houston that went viral this week: “I just want to encourage every one of us to realize when we obey God we’re not doing it for God — I mean that’s one way to look at it,” she said from the pulpit. “We’re doing it for yourself, because God takes pleasure when were happy. That’s the thing that gives him the greatest joy this morning…just do good for your own self. Do good because God wants you to be happy.”

She added, “When you come to church when you worship him, you’re not doing it for God, really. You’re doing it for yourself, because that’s what makes God happy.”

I don’t want to talk this morning about all those things we normally put up as idols – money, power, sex, because I think they are symptomatic of our greatest idol. Those are what we might call “household gods”. They are small or customized versions of a larger idol. The pursuit of personal and corporate happiness has become our national idol.

When Alexander Solzhenitsyn addressed the graduating class at Harvard University in 1978 he said the source of our national idol is making man without God the measure of all things. Freedom is dependent on an outside authority and we have eliminated that authority in favor of what he calls the “autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness.”

“It has made man the measure of all things on earth — imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.
We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West. This is the essence of the crisis: the split in the world is less terrifying than the similarity of the disease afflicting its main sections.
If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it.”

4.  The great irony of idolatry is that is destroys people and nations all the while they are thinking it is making things better – and that is the great pleasure of evil. Well, evil is incapable of actual pleasure so let’s say it makes evil happy. Of course, the greatest happiness is for religion to be used to do that. Satan does not want to get rid of religion. He simply wants to define what is worshipped and taught about the nature of man and God. Religion that does not teach we are not our own but bought with a price is the most dangerous religion of all – but it is so appealing to our natural desires. We want religion that is practical and helpful and, most of all, that will make us happy. We do not want the “foolishness of the Cross” as much as we want to be happy. Sadly, the pursuit of happiness or self-worth or fulfillment ends up in worthlessness.

Jeremiah 2:5: “They followed worthless idols and became worthless themselves.”

Solzhenitsyn would say we have glorified ourselves and our own interests and trivialized God.

5.  God tells us there are consequences to idolatry in Romans 1:18-32:

18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. 24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. 26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error. 28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

Again, most idolatry does not begin with the intention to do evil things. It begins with wanting good things by our definition. I don’t think ancient people actually worshipped birds and animals. I think they desired qualities and abilities they possessed – strength, courage, power. Our idolatry begins with our rights or our happiness or our significance being the measure of all things. We don’t say it that way, of course. We don’t say it as blatantly as Victoria Osteen did but we too often live that way. God’s primary interest is our happiness…and it is not. God’s primary interest is His glory.

All of our good intentions and plans detached from an understanding of the authority and glory of God as the starting point will take us eventually to Romans 1.

Economics without God leads us to socialism or greed.

Justice without God leads us to oppressive laws and the regulation of everything.

Religion without God leads us to self-worship.

Medicine without God leads us to experimentation or eugenics or worse.

Freedom and tolerance without God leads to repression and tyranny.

One of the great ironies is when we overvalue anything it eventually leads to degrading it. “Man is the measure of all things” instead of “What is man that thou art mindful of him.” has lead not to the benefit of man but incredible horrors and atrocities. There is no telling what evil has been done that began as the desire for something good detached from God. There is no telling what evil has yet to be done for the same reason.

Nothing created by God for good can remain good if it is free of God. Anything that is not “captive” to God will turn on us and kill us.

Bad ideas start off as pets and end up as predators – because it is their nature. This is the message of “Jurrasic Park”, isn’t it?

Good things detached from the authority of God are dangerous things and ultimately fatal things. They destroy not just individuals but generations. They destroy communities and nations.

6.  So, in a few words how do we avoid the ultimate consequences of idolatry of happiness in our own lives?

First, God said tear down the idols inside Israel first – not tear down the idols in the surrounding culture. Tear down the idols of self-fulfillment, self-satisfaction, and self-actualization.

Second, return to the foolishness of Christ crucified and give up on the desire to have our beliefs make total sense or be superior to those around us. Instead of trying to create a religion that seeks the approval of the world we need to accept the fact the Cross is foolishness. We do not come to the Cross for a better life – but a crucified life.

Finally, be prepared to suffer. Do not be surprised. I know that sounds dismal but it leads to glory.

Think about this one thing this week:

“What does it mean to be a “treasured possession”? Not just a treasure and not just a possession but a treasured possession with a purpose that is far beyond happiness. We are not an exceptional people. We are a peculiar people.

Exodus 19:5-6: “Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, 6 you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’