Holy Idols, a beginning

Kenny Embry: In this episode of Balancing the Christian Life, we talk about holy idols. Welcome to Balancing the Christian Life. I'm Dr. Kenny Embry. Join me as we discover how to be better Christians and people in the digital age. long time ago, my wife and I decided to go out to dinner one night a week. It was a cool thing to do. My oldest was about 10 or 12. I don't remember, and my youngest, oh, was about oh four or five. The house was loud when we were there. The kids needed us for everything. We wanted one night to get away, reconnect, and put our marriage first. It was a great idea. It still is. Nobody sat us down and told us to do it, and nobody would have faulted us for skipping it. We chose it because we wanted our marriage to come first, and for a while, that is exactly what it did. It worked, until one day, I was looking down at my phone, and across the table, there was my wife, doing the same. The cell phones were out. It wasn't a big deal. It's still not a big deal, but we noticed that we were just eating and then splitting up. She went to a clothing store and I went to the technology store. We each found something to buy, and most of it was stuff we really didn't need. Some nights our whole conversation was planning the week ahead, what will we make for dinner? What do we need to get at the grocery? And who's going to taxi the kids to whatever events they have to go to? Some nights, we just sat in silence. We often went home feeling less connected than when we left. We had spent the whole evening together, and it hardly mattered. However, we never missed one, not one. If you graded us on attendance, we would have earned an A. The tradition that was meant to make us stronger was teaching us to be individuals, sitting across a table with phones out. By every outside measure, we were doing it right, and that is the part that bothered us. So, what was wrong with date night? Am I telling you it's a fraud or that you should quit? No. The problem is the one I just described. We broke the spirit of date night, while we kept the practice extremely well. Look, most of life is ritual. We repeat the same stuff over and over again. We get up, we go to work, we eat, we show up the same places with the same people, and say the same kind of things. That's not a problem. Repetition is how anything good gets built. Nobody becomes a good musician, a good parent, or a good friend without doing pretty much the same ordinary stuff over and over again. The trouble starts with what we tell ourselves about it. As we perform our roles, we begin to interpret our own actions, and the interpretation drifts away from the truth. We never missed date night, so we must be fine. The record becomes the evidence. The meaning leaves, and no one announces it. There is no night when the alarm goes off. You just look up one day, and you realize you've been going through the motions for a long time. This idea is a central thesis in a book I've been writing. I'm almost done with it, called "Holy Idols, Godly Acts, Godless Hearts." Everything in this series grows out of ideas in that book, and I'll tell you more about it as we go. Date night was a good act and a good idea. Nobody walks into a weekly dinner with their spouse while chasing something bad. It was a pathway to each other, and it turned into a proxy for the marriage itself. We counted attendance as if it were closeness. That is this series in one story. Over the coming episodes, I will look at excellent things: knowing the Bible, praying, extending grace, discerning right from wrong, going to church, staying pure, pursuing justice, caring how we look to each other these are not sins we confess. These are the things we get praised for, and each one turns dangerous when we use it as a proxy for God. Instead of as a pathway to him, it does not happen because we are chasing idolatry. It happens because we are chasing God. The pursuit is sincere, the acts are good, and somewhere along the way, a practice that was supposed to carry us toward Him starts to stand in for him. Each step is reasonable. Each trade-off makes sense when you look at it alone. Add them up, and the practice is still running. But the person it was for is gone. The test is what the thing is doing. A practice is a pathway when it moves you toward the person. It's a proxy when it replaces the person, and it feels like closeness because the practice is still going. That's why the danger is harder to see in the people who do it best. I call them holy idols, and I mean it in reality, not just as a title. It's not clever, but it means something. They are legitimately holy because they are good, and they came from a real desire for God. But they are also idols because they have started to take his place. This series will not only be me talking along the way. I bring in people who know these subjects far better than I do. Perhaps a historian, a historian who studies the Pharisees, someone who can talk about righteousness and what it means. The point is to get the details right so that we are not working from a cartoon or from our assumptions. This is the first episode, though, so this is a wide look. We will come back to every one of these ideas, and each time we go deeper, I'm not trying to settle it all today. I'm trying to put the question in front of you. I'm also not standing above anyone here. Date night was mine. The goal is not guilt; it's diagnostic. It's to help us see our Christianity better, and perhaps more like the way God sees it. To start, I want to go to a story Jesus told, and the people that he told it to. Luke 15 opens with a crowd. Tax collectors and sinners are crowding in to hear Jesus. Off to the side stand the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, muttering. Their complaint is simple: this man welcomes sinners and eats with them. The Pharisees deserve a fair hearing, which they rarely get. We use their name as an insult. In their day, it was a compliment. They studied Scripture closely. They prayed. They gave of their means. They took God seriously enough to arrange their whole lives around obeying Him. If your church had a Pharisee in the pew, he would be your most reliable member. So their complaint makes sense. Holiness matters. God cares how people live lives. They were not looking for a fight. They were guarding something good. Think about how that scene feels. These are people who have done most things right, and they are watching a man they consider dangerous welcome people they consider unclean. They believe they are defending God's honor. Jesus answers with three stories: a lost sheep, a lost coin, and a father with two sons. The third is the one most of us know, and is told to them. It is told to the people who are certain they are standing on the right side of the line. A man has two sons. The younger one asks for his share of the estate now. He is telling his father, "I want what you leave behind, and I want it before you're gone." In that world, that was kind of as insulting as you can get. Under the law of Moses, the firstborn received a double portion. With two sons, the older son would get two parts, to the younger son's one part. That matters later. The father divides the estate and gives it to him. He didn't need that inheritance to have what he needed. Handing it over cost him pain, but not anything he required. The father needs nothing from either son. Keep that in mind because the story only makes sense if you do. The younger son goes far away and spends everything. He's an idiot, and I mean that. He takes the best thing he was ever given and burns through it. Famine hits. He ends up feeding pigs, which for this audience was about as low as a man could go, and he is so hungry. He's jealous of the pigs. Think about what that moment looks like from the outside: a young man, broke, hungry, covered in pig mud, a long way from anyone who knows his name. Then Luke gives us a line that is easy to read past. He comes to his senses. He says, "How many of my father's servants have more than enough food?" And here I am starving. He's thinking about the father, and he's also thinking about the father's household, about the fact that even the hired servants in that house are fed and well. He builds a plan, and for the idiot thing that he's done, it's a reasonable one. He'll go home and say, "I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me one of your servants." And I think he rightly expects to come home in a lesser capacity. He'll be home near the father, which is what he wants. And let's be clear, his motives are mixed. He's hungry. He's running from the weight of what he did, and part of why he left was to get out from under his father's disapproval, and he's heading back, and he really has nowhere else to go. I mean, yeah, he could go on to another place where he would be just as poverty-stricken. But he recognizes living with his dad was actually a pretty good deal. His plan carries a belief that the older son never shows the father is good, and being near him is better than anything out there. The father was always the prize for sons and for servants. He starts traveling home, and when he's still a long way off, the father sees him and runs. The younger son starts his speech, and the father cuts him off. A robe, a ring, sandals, a feast. You know the story. The older son is in the field, doing what he's always done, working. He hears music and dancing and asks a servant what's happening. When he finds out, he's furious and he refuses to go in. His brother is home, alive, and he is pouting outside in the dirt, so the father goes out to him and pleads with him. The older son answers, "All these years I have been slaving for you, and I never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat to celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours comes home after wasting your money, you throw him a feast. Let's be clear: the older son is right, but he's also being petty. Both of those can be true. He did work. He did obey. He did stay, and his comparison is pretty accurate. Next to his brother, he looks great. The father never argues with any of it, not one fact. If the story were about who had the better record, the older son would win. That's why it's a good story to tell the Pharisees. They would have agreed with all of this. They would have recognized themselves, and not with embarrassment, they would have nodded. If he is off anywhere, it's not on his facts. It is in the measure. He compares himself to his brother, and next to his brother, he looks great. We all do this. We compare ourselves with other people, and we almost look better against a perfect standard. Against a loving God, none of us look nearly as good, and that includes the older brother. Luke 18 has the same move. A Pharisee stands to pray and says, "God, I thank you that I am not like other people," and then points to a tax collector nearby. His comparison is probably accurate too. It was still the wrong measure. The father answers his older son, "My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours." After the younger son took his share and left, what remained was the older sons, the father's not offering a reward, he's stating a fact. The older son already owns what's left, and the father needs neither son. Look, if both of them walked away, he loses nothing he needs. Both sons, however, need the father. The younger son learned that in a pig pen. The older son, well, he might not have learned that at all. Both sons wanted the father's stuff. The younger son wanted it and wanted to escape disapproval. The older one believed the father owed him approval for doing what was right. Different roads, same mistake. Neither asked the question that mattered. What was the gift of being home? The gift of home was the father, not the inheritance, not the goat, not even the party. The gift with his father. The older son stood next to the best thing in the house his entire life, and treated it as a job. He lived in the father's house for decades and never really lived with the father. Obedience was meant to be his pathway to the Father. He used it instead as a proxy for the relationship, and as a claim on the Father's approval. Someone asked Jesus in Matthew 22, "Which commandment is the greatest?" He doesn't give one; he gives two. He says to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and the second is like it of your neighbor as yourself. Inside those two commands there is obedience in action. You do good things, and there is love of the Father. Both, not one or the other. The older son kept the first half. He did the right things. What he could not say was that he loved his father, and that absence runs through every line of his complaint. He called his years of work slaving. People do not say that about someone you love. Love can be called motivation, the reason a person does what they do. I wonder if it's more than that. I wonder if it is the central question of all Christianity: Do you truly love God, or are you simply checking godly boxes? That was the question date night asked. We had to answer whether we loved each other or simply kept the schedule. It was the question put to the Pharisees. It was the question put to the older son standing in a field outside a party, with every box checked, a person drifts from one to the other by reasonable steps. The Pharisees protected holiness, and that turned into separating from sinners. They learned the law well, and that turned into measuring everyone by it, they stayed faithful, and that turned into resenting anyone who came in cheap. Not one of those steps is foolish; each sounds like wisdom. At the end of it, though, a faithful man is standing outside a party keeping score. Date night had the same shape. Being intentional turned into a plan. Doing it well turned into a performance. Keeping it up turned into a way to feel faithful, without being present. All of it was reasonable. It's easy to criticize the Pharisees from 2000 years and half a world away. We get to read the end of the story. We know who they were arguing with. They argued with God about God. But what if the Pharisees are not our targets? What if instead they are our mirror. Most of us hear ourselves in the younger son. We know the church language. We came home. We got the robe. We sing about it. This is an assumption and a comfortable one because it lets us treat the older son as someone else's problem. But the person who keeps every box checked and never misses a Sunday is not hiding in the first century. Neither is the person who knows the right answer and sits through the sermon with arms crossed, quietly believing he has earned this. What if the Pharisees did not miss Jesus because they were so far off? What if they missed him because they were too close, they had the same scripture. They believed in the same God. They worked harder at it than anyone in the room. They were standing right next to him, so sure they were in the right place that they could not see him. And what if Jesus corrected the Pharisees not because he hated them, but because he loved them, he tells this story to them, not about them behind their backs. Luke records him sitting down to dinner at a Pharisee's table more than once. He talks about that in Luke seven. He talks that about about that in Luke 11, and then chapter 14. You don't share the truth to people who you have written off. You tell it to people you want back. And if that is true, then this story is not so much an accusation; it's an invitation, and it's addressed to us. This episode is for the person who feels they are doing Christianity pretty well, you're not struggling, you're not coasting. You show up and you serve. You know your Bible and you have a settled understanding of who God is. I'm not saying that's wrong. I am saying there is a hidden danger in that you probably do not see, because Christianity is tricky. The more certain you are about understanding God and your execution of Christianity, the more dangerous you ground. Here's an easy exercise: three questions. First, which son did the father hate? Take your time. The honest answer, and you really know it already is neither of them. He ran to one, and he went out to plead with the other. If your picture of God has him disapproving of somebody in this story, that picture is a problem. Second, at what point was the younger son lost? Was it in the pig pen? Was it when he left, when he spent the money? In some ways, I think it was earlier than that. The leaving was the symptom; his heart was already gone when he asked for the stuff instead of the father. And the older son was just as lost, in exactly the same way, but this time, from inside the house, not outside. Being lost is not a location. Nobody could see it in him, because he never left. Third, as you get older, your interests change. What you care about at 20 is not what you care about at 60. Did God change, or did you? You already know the answer to that as well. God didn't change. God doesn't change. You did, and the relationship with Him should be deeper the longer you're in it. That is what maturity looks like. Maturity is not a firmer conclusion. It's a deeper relationship. If your understanding of God has not moved in years, that's worth asking about. A relationship that never changes in 15 years is usually a relationship that stopped. When you have landed on the one incontrovertible conclusion, take heed lest you fall, the Pharisees were certain, and they were certainly wrong. They were also the most devoted people in the room. If you think you can always reliably speak for God, watch out. Here is a way to test that. Can you always adequately speak for your spouse? You've lived with her for years, you love her, and you still get it wrong. If you cannot speak for someone that close and that human, think hard before you presume to speak for someone who is all powerful, perfect, and loves you out of mercy, not merit. Let me say that again. He loves you out of mercy, not merit. That is the older son's whole problem. His case was merit, the record, the ledger, the years of obedience. And the father answered with mercy. The person who feels they are doing Christianity well is the person most likely to be running on merit, without knowing it. My answer to the certainty problem comes from Daniel three, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. They're told to bow down to a statue or be thrown into a furnace, and their response is this: God is able to deliver us, but if not, we will still not bow. They're confident about who God is. They're humble about how He will act. They do not claim to know the outcome, and they do not make their faithfulness depend on it. That posture is what leaves room for you to be wrong without losing the relationship. It lets you obey fully and hold your conclusions loosely. And I do not think we are very good at doing both. Certainty about God can be the ground you stand on. Certainty about my own understanding, my own execution and about how God has to behave is the field the older brother is standing in. So, where is date night now? It looks exactly the same. We go out on Friday and we still do not always get it right. It's not all success. The ritual has not gone away. What changed is that when we do it well, we remember it's because we love each other, and not because it's what we do on Friday. The practice is a pathway again. Some nights it is only a proxy, but we know the difference. Luke ends the story with the door open. We never learn whether the older brother goes in. I think that's Luke's way of leaving the question with whoever is listening. Which brother are you in this story? Where are you doing something excellent that has become a stand-in for the one that it was for? I don't have five steps for you, and I don't think a Christian needs them. Christianity is not a process we perfect once and then repeat. It's a process we grow through. Date night taught me that. The practice stays, and the relationship underneath it keeps deepening, or it quietly dies while the practice goes on, that's really what this series is about. I plan to talk to somebody who studied the Pharisees. I also have a lot of other ideas that I want to tackle. We'll talk about several ideas, like what happens when knowing the Bible becomes a way of knowing about God, instead of a way of knowing God? What happens when prayer turns into a routine we perform? What grace looks like when it becomes a verdict we hand to other people? Each of those is an excellent thing. I'm not going to argue against prayer. I'm not going to argue against righteousness, discernment, grace. I'm not arguing against any of it. It's all good, but they're not God. They should all be pathways to Him. I'll also keep telling you about the book as the series goes, because Holy Idols is where all of this comes from, and it's coming pretty soon. Today was the wide view. Each of these ideas gets a deeper treatment, and I expect to find that I am the older brother in more of them than I want to admit. So, until next time, let's be good and do good.