Idols and Imagination

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“The people of God in Isaiah’s time had starved their imagination by looking on the face of idols.” So said my new, late friend Oswald Chambers in his Feb 10th devotional. “Is your mind focused on the face of an idol? Is the idol yourself? Is it your work? Is it your idea of what a servant should be, or maybe your experience of salvation and sanctification?”

Idolatry seems to be an unpopular term these days. We feel quite comfortable with those first couple of the Big Ten Commandments: No other gods. No wooden idols. Check. I’m good.

But several years ago, I read Addiction and Grace by Gerald May and got a whole new perspective on this idolatry business. Addiction, he contends, is basically the modern word for idolatry. It’s putting something else in the place that God supposed to have in our life. The top priority. On the throne.

And really, we are all addicted to something. May lists fifty-some different possible idols we could have in our lives. Not just the obvious ones like alcohol, food, shopping, sex . . . we can be addicted to reading (ouch). We can be addicted to punctuality. To guilt. To being nice. To church. To family. Anything that is filling the God-shaped hole that he is meant to fill. It’s an addition. An IDOL.

And on February 10th, Oswald was telling me that even my self can become an idol.

Yeah. That’s convicting.

This Oswald quote came back to me recently because one of my daughters told me that she has recently come to view a certain behavior in her life as an addiction. And addictive behavior is not uncommon in my family. I’m kind of grateful, actually, that we recognize it for what it is. The question is what to do about it, especially since it is essentially a violation of the top two of the Big Ten.

Oswald contends that our ability to see God is blinded because we continue to look “on the face” of our idols, to the point that we have “starved our imagination.”  I’m an artist (to some degree anyway), so imagination is important to me – and I have noticed that it is a pathway for me to see God. In fact, I often use it specifically and intentionally for that purpose.

At some point in the past year, I was struggling to keep myself focused during the day, and I came up with a little mantra that helped me. God made me and saved me for a purpose . . . he has purpose for each hour of my day . . . and I meet God in his purposes for my hours . . .

This hour is for teaching my students, and God is in that. He is in the face of each kid I see in the classroom . . . he loves them and made them unique . . . he opens my eyes to their individual needs . . . he gives me the means to communicate each concept effectively . . . God is there in my teaching. That’s not me. That’s him.

This hour is for making lunch and picking up the house, and God is in that. He made food that gives my body what it needs to function (and that tastes good besides!) . . . he is giving my brain a shift of activity so it will be fresh when I go back to brain work . . . when I create order in my house, it’s a reflection of the order he creates in the universe . . . to paraphrase Eric Liddell, “God gave me a desire for structure, and when I organize, I feel his pleasure.” Again, it’s not me. It’s God. God is there.

I use my imagination to look for God in my work and my play and my relationships and my everything . . . and to imagine him standing beside me, living it all with me. Because that’s the reality – I just need my imagination to see it. I need to look on HIS face . . . not on the face of my idol, my self.

Gerald and Oswald – thank you, friends. God is there in your words, too.

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