God created the universe and everything in it, so not only does he demand we worship him alone, but he is the only one who deserves to be worshipped.  There is nothing even close to his greatness, so for man to worship anything other than God is truly sinful.  He tells us right in his commandment he is a jealous God.  Why should he not be jealous? He created us, created the earth and the universe that we live in.  He has every right to demand he is the only one we should worship.  God created us for himself.  He made us and put us on this earth to worship him so all our thanks and worship should go to him and nothing else.

 

What if you were married and you and your spouse had a baby.  You and your husband created that baby, you two alone.  Your husband’s parents come to see the new baby and he goes over to his parents and thanks them for the great life they gave him, the great genes they passed on to him and gave them credit for this perfect child you and your husband created.  What would you think about your spouse doing that?  You would not be very happy, because you created that baby, that life, and someone else was being given credit for it and being honored for your creation.  If we create and worship false idols then we are giving credit for our lives and this universe to that false idol and not to God.

 

God knows that if we start to worship things other than him, we will lose track of him and his divine plan for us on planet earth.  Creating an image, though maybe with good intentions, is the start of losing a direct relationship with God and replacing him with something earthly.

 

There are two types of idols we can create for ourselves.  There is the one that is readily identifiable.  The Jews created a golden calf to worship while Moses was on top of Mount Sinai getting the Ten Commandments.  This object was easily identified as something people worshiped instead of God.  Then there is the subtle idol.  Images we make to honor God and to help us worship him, but are a replacement for God just the same.

 

1 Kings 18:16 (1a) has a great story about Elijah and a show down he had on Mount Carmel with King Ahab and his prophets who worshiped Baal and Asherah.  This was a contest to see who had the better god, Ahab or Elijah.  Elijah told them to go get two bulls.  They would each cut their bull to pieces and set it on a fire for sacrifice, but they could not set the fire to it.  They had to each call on their own god to set fire to the wood.  The god who answered their prayers with fire would be the winner and declared the true god.

 

Elijah told them to go first and prepare their bull and then call on their god to light the fire.  They called from morning till noon and no fire.  At noon Elijah began to taunt them.  He suggested maybe their god was sleeping, or traveling, or in deep thought.  Maybe they needed to shout louder so he could hear them.  They shouted louder and even slashed themselves to bring down fire from their god.  By evening they still did not get the attention of their god.

 

Then Elijah prepared a stone altar, dug a trench around it and put his wood and bull on it.   He even poured four large jars of water on his sacrifice and wood.  He had the people pour water on the sacrifice two more times so the water filled the trench he had dug.  Then Elijah called on God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to come down and set his sacrifice on fire.  Fire came down and burned the sacrifice, the wood, the stone alter, the soil, and the water in the trench.  Only a true and living God could come down and light the fire.  The idols are just worthless objects that can do nothing for us!

 

What if I decided to make an idol to worship God?  I decide that since I love God and worship him, I am going to make an idol in his honor and put it right in my house, so I can see him and honor him every day.   So I go out and get a big piece of wood and chisel it into an image of what I think God would like. When I am done, I take it to a gold smith and have him cover it with 24 karat gold.  So now I have this six foot tall, 24 karat golden idol of god in the middle of my living room. 

 

I see him every day and worship him, but as time goes on he begins to be a drag on me.  He seems to listen to my prayers, because he is there, but I don’t see him answering any of them.  My wife asks me to move him so she can vacuum around him.  This thing is heavy and now I have to move him, why can’t he move himself?  As we all know in 2008 and 2009 the stock market continued to go down.  I sold a lot of my stocks and used up my cash reserves to have my idol covered in gold.  My portfolio has dropped in value and this idol of mine is just sitting there.  I have to maintain him and polish him to keep him shiny. 

 

Since I have done all these things for my idol, I feel it should be giving me something back.  So when I have a problem I pray to him for an answer.  But he never answers me.  I gave him ears, but he doesn’t seem to hear a thing I say to him.  I gave him a mouth, but he does not seem to be talking to me.  My plight is no different than Ahab’s.  I created an idol that is worthless.

 

Imagine you are married and are transferred to another state for a year to work.  You leave your spouse and go to your new assignment.  You get an apartment and put up all your pictures of your spouse and settle in.  You work all day, come home at night, see her pictures and feel she is still part of your life.

 

One day your spouse calls and asks why you never call home.  You tell her I am with you all the time.  I see you all the time.  Your pictures are here in my apartment with me and at work in my office.  I never really left you because your pictures (images) are with me all the time everywhere I go.  You are still part of my life.  At this point you can see that you stopped having a relationship with your spouse and started having a relationship with her images.  God does not want this to happen to us. 

 

One of the problems with creating idols to worship God is you no longer have that direct relationship with God, but now have a relationship with the idol.  God is a living God and he wants us to have a day to day relationship directly with him.  Though your intentions may have been good at the start, by making an idol of God, you are losing that one on one relationship with God. 

 

God is three persons in one, God the Father, God the Son (Jesus) and God the Holy Spirit.  It is through the Holy Spirit by which God communicates with us.  We worship him and he communicates with us through the Holy Spirit.  That is how our prayers are answered.  So when you think of a direct relationship with God, you are not going to see a person or an image of God sitting across the room from you.  You are going to feel, and hear in your heart his Holy Spirit, answering your questions and prayers, and bringing a feeling of well being to you as you worship the Lord.  By having a direct relationship with God you will be able to bring your problems to him and he will speak to you through his Holy Spirit and help you with your day to day life. 

 

About 10 years ago I went to my doctor for a physical.  He checked my blood pressure and thought it was a bit high.  Since my mother and older sister were taking high blood pressure medicine he put me on some as well.  I came back about three months latter and he asked me how I was doing and I told him I was fine, other than I go to the bathroom a lot more now.  He laughed and told me it was a diuretic.  I told him I did not know what that meant and he told me it helped pass water out of my blood stream (the thing that causes high blood pressure).

 

About six months ago I realized I was not getting enough sleep.  I would go to bed at 10:00pm, wake up at 1:00am and go to the bathroom and wake again about 3:00am and go to the bathroom again.  The problem with this was I was not getting back to sleep.  I have taken on a new job and a new career and I am stressed out.  Instead of going back to sleep, my mind just turns on and I lay there for the rest of the night, thinking about work.  As a result of this I was getting about four to six hours of sleep a night.

 

Two years ago, I was getting eight hours of sleep every night.  I would go to bed at 10:00pm and wake up at 6:00am.  I would sleep through the night and not wake up.  I was getting eight hours of uninterrupted sleep every night.  I looked at my present sleep situation and realized I was in trouble; I used to get eight hours of sleep every night, experienced little to no stress, swam one mile every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and rode my bike 19 miles every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.  So here I am a year after my heart bypass, I am sleeping 4 to 6 hours a night, stressed out to the max (at least an 8), no longer have time to swim and maybe ride my bike or walk four times a week.   Something broke when I was doing all the right things for my body and now I am doing less and getting less sleep.

 

Then I remembered the diuretic blood pressure medicine I was taking in the past.  I thought if I just switch what time I take the two blood pressure medicines I was now on, I would stop going to the bathroom in the middle of the night and I could start getting back to 8 hours of sleep.  So I switched the medicines and took the morning one at night and the night one in the morning.  This did not work. 

 

Since this did not solve the problem, I prayed to God to help me.  I asked him to give me sleep.  When I would wake up at 1:00am I would ask him to let me sleep more and I would sleep till 3:00am.  I was still waking up to go to the bathroom, though.  I kept on praying to God to help me and then the thought popped into my mind, “which one of those two blood pressure medicines are the diuretic?”  So I asked my wife, she looked up both medicines and told me neither one of them were.  They are both calcium channel blockers. 

 

About two weeks after my heart bypass, my blood pressure got up to about 220 over 150.  My son told us we better get into Hoag before I blew out the graphs from my bypass.  We went in, and as a result of it they put me on another calcium channel blocker and took me off the diuretic.  So I was no longer on a diuretic and a calcium channel blocker, but two calcium channel blockers. 

 

My wife was taking a pharmacology class and asked me if I wanted to come to one of the classes.  It was on calcium channel blockers and since I was on them, it may be interesting to me.  The teacher kept on saying, “Water follows salt.”  What calcium channel blockers do is pull the salt out of your blood, the water follows the salt out of your blood and your blood pressure goes down.  Guess where the water goes?  To your bladder and you pee it out. 

 

After taking my problem to my living God (who wants to have a daily relationship with me, and speaks to me through his Holy Spirit) the light went on.  My two medicines were driving water out of my blood 24 7 and I was going to the bathroom 24 7.  This is why I was getting up all night.  It was me who decided to take one pill in the morning and the other one in the evening to let them work on my high blood pressure 24 hours a day and I did not realize they were also making me go to the bathroom 24 hours a day.  By having this relationship with God, I was able to take my problems to him and he told me how to correct them.

 

God wants us to have a relationship only with him.  He wants this for many reasons, one of which is that he can speak to us through his Holy Spirit and still be part of our lives and bring input into it.  If we worship idols, even if we think they look like God (pictures of Jesus) or were put there to represent God (a cross on a table), they are not God.  We will not have that one on one relationship with him that he wants us to have with him, and need to have with him.  Hey, God wants to be part of our lives.  He wants us to seek him out so he can help us and be part of our lives.  He is the best parent we could ever ask for, and the only way we can have this great relationship with him is to pray directly to him, not make an idol to represent him or replace him.

 

I do not really know where to draw the line for objects that represent God, but I will tell you something I noticed about myself.  When I would be done reading my Bible in the morning I would put it down on my stomach, cross my hands over it and say a prayer to God.  One day I said to myself, this bible of mine is an object made by man.  Yes it has the words of God in it and I read it all the time, but the book, the Bible, is a man made object.  With that in mind I now put my Bible to the side, put my hands on my stomach and pray to God.  This may be a stretch, and there is nothing wrong with my bible, but I feel better knowing that when I call out to God to pray; it is just my hands, folded on the body God gave me, as I give thanks to him in the morning and night for the life he has given me.

 

Since God is a living God we don’t need an idol to worship in his place.  We don’t need any object to come between us as we worship him.  He is right here, right now, next to you.  We need that direct relationship with him, and he has made sure we can have it by telling us not to put any idols in the way.  God wants us to have a direct relationship with him and him alone.

 

How could man possibly create an image of what he thinks God should look like?  Man was created in God’s image, so we look somewhat like God, God does not look somewhat like us.  To explain this to my sixth grade Sunday school class I use the following example.  I draw a picture of a six foot tall stick man on the board.  I ask them what this is and they say it is an image of a man.  Then I stand next to my stick man.  I tell them that in order to get an idea of what it means that man was created in the image of God, is to compare the stick man to me.  But in this example man is the stick man and God is better than me.

 

For us to create an image of God is to put ourselves on his level.  Look at all the great art works of the centuries.  Who is remembered, the artist or the model?  Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, and we all know the name of Leonardo, not the girl in it.  For us to create an image of God is to put ourselves above him.  We become the creator of our god and in so doing have diminished him in our lives.  We have made him less than us and God is not going to stand for that.

 

If we start to make false idols and images of God, then we will start to pray to them and worship them since they are on the earth.  We can see them, touch them, and over time will find them more real to us.  At first we may have good intentions to make a place to worship God and have an object there to represent him.  Over time we will lose track of God and his presence and come to our idol to worship him.  By making an idol to honor God we have replaced him, the complete opposite of what we set out to do.

 

By faith we believe in God, and by this same faith we should worship him even though we have never seen him.  We do not need a medium to worship God and God does not want anything to come between him and us.  One of the hardest concepts I had to over come when I started going to a Christian church 14 years ago, was to understand what people meant when they said you can have a “personal relationship with God.”  I always wondered; how can you have this personal relationship with God?  He is supernatural and lives in heaven and I am human and live on earth.  He is perfect in every way and cannot sin, and I am flawed and usually sin by the time I get home from dropping my son off at school every morning.

 

Over time I have come to have this personal relationship with him simply because I started to seek him out in my life and in my prayers.  No statues, no pictures on the wall, just me starting to read my bible and praying to God.  Over time I saw that my life was changing, all for the good, and I never shook God’s hand or wiped the dust off his picture.  I prayed to him because I always believed in the fact there is a God, He is standing right next to me and by this faith He came into my life.

 

God wants to have a one on one personal relationship with us.  He knows that if we create images or idols to replace him while we are on earth, then that object will come between us and him.  If we start to worship these false idols, we will lose sight of God and fall short of his loving arms.  He wants to sit with us and hear our prayers.  He wants to hold our lives in his hand. Not only does he want to be part of our lives, but he wants to be the focal point of our lives.  Why?  Because He loves us and He knows that in order to maintain this loving relationship, there must be nothing between God and us.

 

Think of a special gift you have given to the most important person in your life (maybe like a wedding ring).  Did you mail it to her or did you come in person, hand it to her and tell her how much you loved her?  That person and that gift which represented your love were so special to you that you showed up in person.  We are more loved by God and more special to him than any human relationship could fathom so put away your false idols and put your hands together and call out to God.  He will hear your voice and come to you, so you can jump into his loving arms and enjoy all the gifts he has in store for you.