Idols | The Myth Of The Perfect Relationship
About this series:
To follow Jesus as Lord means putting nothing before Him. This is not only right but logical: no one is greater, no one satisfies more. Yet the daily struggle of discipleship is the pressure—both within and around us—to live as though something else is more worthy.
Christians have long understood this in terms of idols. Tim Keller defines an idol as “anything more important to you than God…anything you seek to give you what only God can give.” Martin Luther said, “Whatever your heart clings to and relies upon, that is your God.” John Piper calls it “anything we rely on for blessing or guidance in place of wholehearted trust in the living God.”
Scripture is clear from the start:
“You shall have no other gods before me” (Ex. 20:3; Deut. 5:7).
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind” (Matt. 22:37).
The danger is profound. Idols dishonor God, deceive us with false promises, and deform us into their image: “Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them” (Ps. 115:8). Humanity is wired to ascribe worth to something beyond itself, but this longing finds fulfillment only in the Creator: “Trust in the Lord—he is their help and shield” (Ps. 115:11). Only He truly satisfies, only He is worthy, only He is “the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn. 14:6).
Identifying idols is not always simple. Good gifts from God can quietly become an idol that replaces him. However, questions like these can help us begin to probe our hearts and minds:
What consumes most of my time and thoughts?
What stirs my emotions most deeply?
What do I feel I cannot live without?
Where do I place my hope for meaning and worth?
About this talk:
God created human beings with the capacity and need for relationship - to know and be known; to love and be loved. One major reason humans have this capacity is that we are created in the image of the God who has always been God-in-relationship. God didn’t need to create humanity in order to be love and express love because Father, Son and Holy Spirit have always existed in perfect love - “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world” (John 17:24).
And God’s intent is that, as in all things, we find our needs satisfied ultimately in him. It’s not that we don’t need to experience the love of other people, but that our need to know and be known, to love and be loved will only be fully met when we are satisfied and secure in his love more than we are in the love of anyone else. And so we are relational beings by God’s design. Which, of course, is a good thing - but also a very complex thing.
Especially when the love we are designed to give and to experience becomes an idol and takes on toxic forms, which to some extent it does in all of us. We seek approval in reaction to our insecurities; we look for connection without commitment; we place our hope for meaning and identity in a human relationship. We have a tendency to believe that life will be complete when we have the perfect, ideal relationship - something we may see in movies or think we see in other people’s relationships. And so we sacrifice our time, attention, money and thoughts at the altar of the ideal relationship.
But to hope that someone else, especially in a romantic relationship, can ‘complete us’ is destined for disappointment for two reasons: because only God is perfect; and because every single human being is flawed and cannot possibly fulfil any concept of ideal. There is therefore a great danger: idealisation kills love because it sets such a high bar that failure to meet that standard is inevitable and because it can become very controlling as it seeks to maintain what is, in reality, impossible.
In Jeremiah 2 God speaks to his people with both sadness and judgement:
vs 1-3: remembering former days when God’s people were devoted to him.
vs 4-8: questioning why they have deserted him when he had done so much for them.
v 9ff: charging his people about their guilt.
And in v 13 God says, “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” The shock of what God’s people have done is expressed in vs 10-11: “see if there has ever been anything like this: has a nation ever changed its gods? (Yet they are not gods at all.) But my people have exchanged their glorious God for worthless idols.” See also Jeremiah 18:13-15.
While that doesn’t speak specifically of our search for love in other places, it definitely relates to it and is a suitable description of what his people did then and people do now - we look for love, satisfaction, meaning, life not in the one who is the source of living water, but in other sources, including other relationships, that we hope can provide those things but “cannot hold water.” When we look to any relationship, other than our relationship with God, to provide the living water we thirst for, we set up an idol and will find only “broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”
The answer, of course, is to recognise that only God is capable of loving us perfectly, only he is the spring of living water. And then all other loves are prevented from being idolised - no one else is expected to provide the security and significance that only God can give.
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