reading we turn to the book of the Prophet Isaiah, the 44th chapter, beginning to read at verse 6. Isaiah chapter 44 and verse 6, let us hear the Word of God. This is what the Lord says, Israel's King and Redeemer, the Lord Almighty, I am the first and I am the last. Apart from me there is no God. Who then is like me? Let him proclaim it. Let him declare and lay out before me what has happened since I established my ancient people and what is yet to come. Yes, let him foretell what will come. Do not tremble, do not be afraid. Did I not proclaim this and foretell it long ago? You are my witnesses. Is there any God besides me? No, there is no other rock. I know not one. All who make idols are nothing, and the things they treasure are worthless. Those who would speak up for them are blind. They are ignorant to their own shame. Who shapes a god and casts an idol which can profit him nothing? He and his kind will be put to shame. Craftsmen are nothing but men. Let them all come together and take their stand. They will be brought down to terror and infamy. The blacksmith takes a tool and works with it in the coals. He shapes an idol with hammers. He forges it with the might of his arm. He gets hungry and loses his strength. He drinks no water and grows faint. The carpenter measures with a line and makes an outline with a marker. He roughs it out with chisels and marks it with compasses. He shapes it in the form of man, of man in all his glory, that it may dwell in a shrine He cut down cedars or perhaps took a cypress or oak. He let it grow among the trees of the forest or planted a pine and the rain made it grow. It is man's fuel for burning. Some of it he takes and warms himself. He kindles a fire and bakes bread. But he also fashions a god and worships it. He makes an idol and bows down to it. Half of the wood he burns in the fire, over it he prepares his meal, he roasts his meat and eats his fill. He also warns himself and says, ah, I am warm, I see the fire. From the rest he makes a god, his idol. He bows down to it and worships. He prays to it. and says save me, you are my God. They know nothing. They understand nothing. Their eyes are plastered over so that they cannot see and their minds closed so that they cannot understand. No one stops to think. No one has the knowledge or understanding to say half of it I used for fuel. I even baked bread over its coals. I roasted meat and I ate. Shall I make a detestable thing from what is left? Shall I bow down to a block of wood? He feeds on ashes. A deluded heart misleads him. He cannot save himself or say, Is not this thing in my right hand a lie? Remember these things, O Jacob. For you are my servant, O Israel. I have made you. You are my servant. O Israel, I will not forget you. I have swept away your offenses like a cloud, your sins like the morning mist. Return to me, for I have redeemed you. Sing for joy, O heavens, for the Lord has done this. Shout aloud, O earth beneath. Burst into song, you mountains, you forests, and all your trees, for the Lord has redeemed Jacob. He displays his glory in Israel. We end our reading from the prophet at the end of verse 23. Reading we continue in the Old Testament from the book of Deuteronomy. And we turn to chapter 32. Deuteronomy chapter 32 and verse 15. This word with which the verse begins is one of the names of Israel, God's people. It means the upright one. Deuteronomy 32 and 15. Shishun grew fat and kicked. Filled with food, he became heavy and sleek. He abandoned the God who made him, and rejected the Rock, his Savior. They made him jealous with their foreign gods, and angered him with their detestable idols. They sacrificed to demons which are not God, gods they had not known, gods that recently appeared. God your fathers did not fear. You deserted the rock who fathered you. You forgot the God who gave you birth. The Lord saw this and rejected them because he was angered by his sons and daughters. I will hide my face from them, he said, and see what their end will be. For they are a perverse generation, children who are unfaithful. They made me jealous by what is no God, and angered me with their worthless idols. I will make them envious by those who are not a people. I will make them angry by a nation that has no understanding. For a fire has been kindled by my wrath, one that burns to the realm of death below. It will devour the earth and its harvests. and set on fire the foundations of the mountains. Then moving to verse 28. They are a nation without sense. There is no discernment in them. If only they were wise and would understand this and discern what their end will be. How could one man chase a thousand or two put ten thousand to flight? unless their rock had sold them, unless the Lord had given them up. For their rock is not like our rock, as even our enemies concede. Their vine comes from the vine of Sodom and from the fields of Gomorrah. Their grapes are filled with poison and their clusters with bitterness. Their wine is the venom of serpents, the deadly poison of cobras. Have I not kept this in reserve and sealed it in my vaults? It is mine to avenge. I will repay. In due time their foot will slip. Their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them. The Lord will judge his people and have compassion on his servants when he sees their strength is gone and no one is left, slave or free. He will say, now where are their gods? The rock they took refuge in? The gods who ate the fat of their sacrifices and drank the wine of their drink offerings? Let them rise up to help you. Let them give you shelter. See now that I myself am he. There is no god besides me. I put to death and I bring to life. I have wounded and I will heal and no one can deliver out of my hand. We end our reading at verse 39. May God bless his word. I hope that most of you have got an outline of tonight's sermon which I prepared and had copied I don't propose to do this every evening but there were quite a number of subheadings and scripture references so I thought that it might be helpful for you to have something to take away and refer to later. As I said this morning I hope to begin a series of sermons to take us perhaps to the end of August and the title of the series is 20th Century Idols. At one of our meal times today in our family the question was asked, what sort of idols are you going to preach about? So I said that I hope to deal with a number of isms. And then I was asked what sort of isms? I said relativism and pragmatism, materialism, hedonism, and perhaps Freudianism, and nationalism. That was a sort of a sample. And there was then what I suppose you could call a pregnant silence. No one said, oh good. It was just a sort of a, everything went very quiet. But I don't think it will be as bad as it sounds. I certainly think it's important. And I want tonight to introduce the subject of 20th century The Bible, as you know, is filled with teaching about idolatry. The Old Testament is full of it. The prophets are constantly preaching about idolatry. The history of the nations of Israel and Judah deals In many, many books with the influence of idols among the people of God, the Psalms, as we have been singing, have quite a lot to say about idolatry. And when we come to the New Testament, particularly in the epistles and in the book of Revelation, we find the same theme continuing. Scripture has indeed a great deal to say about false gods and the worship of false gods. And I think it's all too easy for us to assume that that teaching has all to do with the past or with other nations and other cultures and has nothing to do with us today. Now that would be a great mistake because we live in a world which is infested with idols. We're surrounded by worshippers of strange gods. just as much as the people of Israel ever were. And we're not only surrounded by those strange gods, but we are influenced by those strange gods. One of the great dangers in the Old Testament was that the people of God became influenced by the gods around them. And we too face that danger, perhaps even more subtly than they did. of being influenced and damaged by the gods around us. And in this series I want God willing to look at some of the idols of our own day. It's not my intention at this point to deal with any of the openly religious idols. Perhaps sometime in the future it would be useful to look at some of the false religions, some of the cults and sects of our day, the New Age movement and other things, but I'm not intending to look at those at the moment. But you'll see as the series develops the sort of topics we want to look at. But I want this evening to introduce the subject by asking four simple basic questions which you have before you. What is an idol? Why are idols worshipped? Why is idolatry dangerous? And why should we study idols? First of all, what is an idol? We tend to think of an idol as some hideous carved figure made out of stone or wood or metal. Something you would see in an Indiana Jones film. Something very bizarre and exotic. We think of that as an idol. But of course an idol is much more than that. And I offer you a suggested definition. An idol is anything, usually made by man, which takes the place of God. An idol is anything, usually made by man, and I'll explain that usually in a moment, which takes the place of God. Let's look at that definition for a moment. An idol is made by man. That's its great characteristic. In Isaiah chapter 2 verse 8, God says their land is full of idols. They bow down to the work of their hands, to what their fingers have made. These were the idols, they had made them with their own hands. We've just been singing from Psalm 115 verse 4. Their idols are silver and gold, made by the hands of men. And normally that is the great distinction between an idol and the true God. On every idol there is a stamp, a trademark, made on earth, made by man. An idol is anything made by man. It may be a literal idol. It may be a religious statue. It may be a false god who is worshipped. Or it may be many other things. It may be money or possessions. That can be an idol. In Matthew 6, 24, Jesus says you cannot serve and money, or mammon. These are two alternative gods who are served, who are worshipped by their slaves. That's what the word means, to serve as a slave. So it seems that money or possessions is a god, an idol, whom people can serve as slaves. Our desires Our ambitions may be our idol. In Ephesians chapter 5 verse 5, Paul talks about people who are immoral, impure, or greedy. And he says, such a man is an idolater. He's an idolater. His impurity, his immorality, his greed, these are his idols. These are the gods he worships. Or again, the scripture tells us that an idol may be a deviation from the truth of God. In 1 John 5, 21, writing about false doctrines, The Apostle says, dear children, keep yourselves from idols. These are the idols we'll be looking at, the isms, the philosophies, the ideas of men. Sadly, an idol may even be something which is from God. That's why I said it's usually made by man. It's not always made by man. It may be something which is good. Something which is good and pure and beneficial. Something which is given to us by God, which we then misuse and turn it into an idol. You could make your children your idol. Parents who to get their children out of proportion in their thinking and their lives. They live for their children. Those children are gifts from God. But they take them, they make them an idol. You could make another person an idol. In Philippians 3.19, Paul speaks of people whose God is their stomach. Eating becomes an idol for them. Something as it were that they worship. It takes the place of God. What a horrible phrase. So it's anything. Anything. Anything usually made by man. Anything which takes the place of God. Now what do I mean by that? Well it's not necessary that we should kneel down to our idol. Or pray to our idol? Or sing songs of praise to our idol? No, no. People can trust their idol. They can depend on it. They can need it. If there's anything in your life which you feel you need, which has taken the place of God, that is an idol. Something you can't do without. It's an idol. Something you must have. It's an idol. Something you trust and depend on. Whatever we love. If we give a love which should go to God, to someone or something else, that's an idol. Something we obey. Whenever it makes its demands, we respond. We're held captive by it. No matter what it is, we're governed by it, ruled by it. It's an idol. Something we think about. People can think about all sorts of things. They think about them constantly. It might be money. It might be pleasure. It might be sex. It might be sport. It could be a whole range of things. People's minds are filled with these things. They're just obsessed with them. Absorbed by them. Taking the place of God becomes an idol. So it's a very broad field. An idol is anything which takes the place of God. Let me ask secondly, why do people have idols? Why are idols worshipped? There are many reasons, but I put before you three biblical reasons. The first, I suppose, is the least blameworthy and most understandable of all. Sometimes idols are made for a good motive. They are made to help in the worship of God, of the true God. You know, when the Israelites in the Old Testament made golden Perhaps they weren't meaning to turn away from the true God at all. Some scholars suggest that these casts were just meant to be visible representations of the power and might of the God who had brought them out of Egypt. It was to help the people. The people needed to have a visual aid. They needed to have something they could see and identify with, like all the other nations. Perhaps the thought was to help the people. We'll disobey God, we'll make an image, and this will be an image of God. Here are your gods, Aaron said, who brought you up out of Egypt. And men have always tried to make the worship of God easier, more attractive. In the Middle Ages, when the Roman Catholic Church started introducing statues and images into their worship, it was for a good motive. It was for a good motive. It was to help ignorant, uneducated people visualize and understand God better. It was the wrong thing to do. It was disobedience to Scripture and it had a devastating result. It produced idolatry and superstition. But originally, you see, the motive, that's why it was so subtle, the motive was a good one. Even today, people will take certain doctrines out of the Bible. They'll try to change the doctrines of the Bible. And they will say their motive is a good one. We don't want to put people off religion. We don't want to turn them away from Christianity. If they hear about hell, if they hear about an angry God, they'll not be prepared to listen to it. So we'll not talk about that. And they start, you see, to change. To make the worship of God easier. Or again, idols are often worshipped because faith in God has been lost. Because faith in God has been lost. either partially or totally. Sometimes faith in God is lost partially. When the Israelites came into the promised land they faced a new situation. They had been a wandering desert nomadic people and they knew that God the Lord was the God of the desert and the mountain. But now they were in a rich land where they had to farm and settle down. And the God of this land was Baal. And Baal gave the rain, and Baal gave the harvests, and all the people there worshipped Baal. So the temptation to the people of Israel was to worship both Gods, the Lord and Baal. God's all right for the desert. God's all right for the mountains. God's all right for giving us his law. But what we need is another God to help us with our harvests and our income. Do you remember how Elijah came to them and he said, listen, you have to choose. You cannot worship both. If the Lord is God, serve him. If it is Baal, serve him. You can't halt between two opinions. There are people today who have idols. They say, well God's all right for Sabbath day. God's all right for religion, for the soul. But when it comes to friendships, when it comes to making money, when it comes to my career, when it comes to getting on in the world and having a good reputation, God can't help me there. I have to trust to something else. The people do now what the people of Israel did. They have two gods or three gods. They say we'll give God his place, but we need these other things. God himself isn't enough. They make idols because they lose faith in the true God. Sometimes they lose faith completely. The people of Israel were taken into captivity. It was a great temptation to abandon faith in God and to believe that the gods of Assyria and the other great nations were stronger. And many of the people of God turned from God and worshipped idols. We're living in a day when many people don't believe in God any longer. They have lost faith. They don't think there's a God in heaven. They don't believe in the God of the Bible. He is not credible to them. And so they turn to other gods. Idols are worshipped because faith in God has been lost. And thirdly, idols are worshipped most seriously and most terrifyingly because the true God is hated. And that is the most basic reason, and the most common reason, and the most serious reason. Man in sin hates God. He is at enmity with God. He doesn't want to know God. He doesn't want to believe in God. You remember what Paul says in Romans 1? Men suppress the truth, although they knew God. They neither glorified him as God, nor gave thanks to him. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the creator. They did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God. They don't want to know God because they hate him. As G.K. Chesterton once wrote, When men stop believing in God, they do not believe in nothing, they believe in anything. We are seeing a world today where people are believing in anything, anything but God. I was in a book shop in England last week and saw a man beside me buying a new book by a sportscaster you may remember, David Icke. And this is an account of David Icke's visions and mission from God to save the world. He said he was the Messiah last year. Now he says he's not the Messiah, but he's very close to the Messiah. And I looked at this man, I suppose I hadn't the courage to speak to him, but I just found it quite incredible that anybody in the world could buy that book. And I thought of Chesterton's statement, when men stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything. Why idols are worshipped. Let's turn thirdly to ask the question, why is idolatry dangerous? I leave these Bible references for you to look at later at your leisure. Let me just identify these points. quickly. Idolatry is dangerous in the first place because it increases spiritual blindness. We read from Isaiah 44, they know nothing, they understand nothing. Their eyes are plastered over so that they cannot see. Their minds are closed so that they cannot understand. No one stops to think. A deluded heart misleads him. cannot save himself or say, is not this thing in my right hand a lie? Man is naturally blind to truth, but as he worships God he becomes blinder, he becomes harder, he becomes more insensitive. His mind is possessed by the lie he is embracing until he really believes it and does not see its utter foolishness. There are people like this all around us who are captivated by utter folly and stupidity and they live for it and they are spiritually blind. The second reason why idolatry is dangerous is that we become like the God we worship. Man becomes like his God. Now for a Christian That is a very, very glorious promise. 1 John 3-2, we know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him. You've often heard people say that you become like your dog. If somebody is a boxer, a few years later you meet them, they look like a boxer. You need to be careful what dog you would have. But it's true you're God. You become like you're God. You become like you're God. And that's gloriously true for the Christian. But it's terrifyingly true for the idolater. Psalm 115 verse 8. Those who make them will be like them. Those who make them will be like them. Jeremiah 2 5, they followed worthless idols and became worthless themselves. Hosea 9 10, they consecrated themselves to that shameful idol. And they, listen to this phrase, they became as vile as the thing they loved. They became as vile as the thing they loved. Be careful what you worship, because you'll become like it. A man who worships money, a woman who worships pleasure, you become like your God. Open your eyes, look at the world. People are becoming like their gods. They're becoming cruel, and selfish, and perverted, and hard, and ugly. They're becoming like their gods. And thirdly, we see that idols can't give true help. I encourage you again to read Psalm 115 and Isaiah 44. What a stinging, sarcastic, humorous piece of writing that is. You remember the prophet talks about a man who cuts down a tree. He takes a piece of wood. He uses half of it for sticks for the fire. From the rest he makes a god. He bows down to it and worships. He prays to it and says, save me. You are my god. He's a stick, but he's cut down from the forest. Save me. You are my God. The principle is this. Nothing is greater than its maker. Nothing is greater than its maker. Whatever I make is less than I am. Whatever man makes is less than he is. It must be. And if we are trusting in what we have made, when we come to a loss, the things which we have made can't help us. Our ideas, our dreams, our philosophies, our isms, our possessions, our pleasures, our pursuits, they can't help us, for they're less than we are. And in the moment of crisis, we need a God who is greater than we are, who is stronger and wiser and holier and more gracious. And man finds in the moment of crisis, either in this life or the day of judgment, that his idol fails. The millionaire Bereaved of his wife goes into his home and looks at his bank book and he suddenly realizes it's useless. The philosopher faces the emptiness of life and suddenly his philosophy has no answer. The person who lives for pleasure looks in the mirror one morning and sees the marks of aging. hears the echo of approaching death and suddenly the pleasure just turns to ashes. It's useless. It's helpless. The danger of idolatry is that you're trusting in something that's going to fail you. It's going to let you down. And then fourthly, it's dangerous because idols, we're told, are used by evil spirits There's a strange paradox in scripture. On the one hand, we're told that an idol is nothing. In 1 Corinthians 8.4, Paul says, we know that an idol is nothing. And there is no God but one. There's nothing to fear in an idol. There's nothing to love. It's literally a non-entity. Yet in the same letter, chapter 10, verse 19, The Apostle says, do I mean that a sacrifice offered to an idol is anything, or that an idol is anything? No. But the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons. And I do not want you to be participants with demons. We know that there are evil spirits. And it seems from the scripture that these evil spirits use idols as avenues into the human personality. And whenever we worship an idol, we are, as it were, opening a door for evil to enter in. We're opening a door in our personality, in our life, and we're putting out a welcome sign for evil, mysterious evil forces to enter in and to damage us terribly. And we only need to look at some of the occult practices in our land today to get some idea of the damage which is being done. And then lastly, idolatry is dangerous. Idolatry is wrong because it is spiritual adultery. Adultery means the giving of a special love to someone else to whom that love does not belong. The giving of a special love to someone else to whom that love does not belong. Now man was made by God and man belongs to God. And yet man gives himself to someone else. That's adultery. We read in Deuteronomy of the adultery of the people. In the book of Hosea you can look up the reference. God tells the prophet to take an adulterous wife because the land is guilty of the vilest adultery in departing from the Lord. The worst of it all is that we commit that adultery. in front of God, in front of God. What would we think of a person who committed adultery in front of their partner? That would be the vilest act imaginable. So God says, you shall have no other gods in front of me, before me. That's what it means. before my face, before my very eyes, that's what you're doing. God has made us and we belong to God and it is a terrible thing to stand in the presence of the living God and give ourselves to something else or someone else. Now just in a few words to close I realize tonight this is more in the nature of a study than of a sermon. Let me suggest three reasons, three practical reasons why we should study idols. It's not a very pleasant study. If you were on holiday you probably wouldn't like looking at some of these vile, perverted, distorted images that people have made. They're not very attractive to look at, they're ugly. But as we look at idols, we'll see a lot of ugliness. You may think, why do I want to spend 10 or 12 Sabbath evenings looking at ugly things? And in some respects, I'll not hide from you the fact that we'll need to think. It's a difficult study. I hope it'll not be complicated, but we need to use our minds. We need to reflect and consider why should we spend time studying idolatry, let me mention three reasons. First of all, to be forewarned. To be forewarned. We who are the people of God need to be warned of the idols which are around us. For our own sake and for our young people. The pressures, the attractions, the seductions, the dangers. We need to be warned of the ways in which we may have become idol worshippers. Idolatry may have captured part of our hearts. We may be departing from God. Without realizing it, we may be unconscious idolaters. We're surrounded by these idols, as we'll see, and it's very, very difficult to resist their temptation. And as we study them, I hope we'll be alerted and warned the dangers in our own lives and in the lives of our young people. It's a warning also to any in our midst who may be idolaters. Perhaps your God will be identified. Perhaps you'll see the ugliness of your God and the foolishness of worshipping your God. Perhaps by God's grace you'll turn away from your false God and come to Christ. So I want to study these idols that we may be warned. Secondly, I want us to study these idols that we may understand the people around us. If a missionary is going to a new country, he has to spend a period of time learning to understand the people among whom he or she is going to work. When Ezekiel was called to be a prophet, he tells us he went among the people and he says, I sat where they sat. I hope that in this study we will be helped to understand the people around us at the end of the 20th century. To understand how they think. To understand the influences which are shaping them. to understand what makes them tick, what they want, what they hope for in life, and to understand how to reach them. For if we don't know their idols, then we cannot speak to them as clearly as we might. I hope it will help us to understand. And most importantly of all, I hope it will increase our appreciation of the true God. There's nothing which can highlight as clearly as contrast. If you go into a jeweller's shop to buy some jewels or a ring or something like that, the jewellery will almost always be displayed on a piece of black velvet. And the blackness of the cloth is in stark contrast with the beauty of what is being presented to you. There's a contrast there. It highlights it. It throws it into relief and you can look at the ring or the brooch or whatever it is and you can see all its colors and all its brightness because of the dark background. I hope that again and again as we study these things together you will be moved to thankfulness and worship and say that our God isn't like that. We see these idols can't help. We say but our God can help. We see these idols aren't real. We say but our God is real. It is not that the psalmist said, for all the gods are idols dumb, which blinded nations fear, but our God, but our God. I hope that each night as we leave, we'll not be thinking of the idols. but we'll be thinking of our God who is so much greater. So may God help us, give us the necessary understanding as we seek to study this for His glory.