We Are What We Worship

 By Bill Muehlenberg - Posted at Culture Watch:

Published March 4, 2024

The sexual revolution and cult of self are dead-ends:

John Calvin once said that the human heart is an idol-making factory. If we do not worship the God who created us, we will worship anyone or anything else. And we inevitably become like these objects of worship. We love our sins and we love our idols, and we move further and further away from who we were meant to be.

Back in 2008 the American New Testament scholar Greg Beale released a volume on idolatry called We Become What We Worship (IVP). In it he said this: “All of us are imitators, and there is no neutrality. We should disabuse ourselves of the notion that we can be spiritually neutral. We are either being conformed to an idol of the world or to God.” And this is serious business, given how often we find in Scripture idols and idolatry related to the demonic.

The truth is, if we get God wrong, we get everything else wrong. Our understanding of who we are and why we are here gets fully distorted and twisted if the one true God is not our focus and our sole object of worship. Being image-bearers of God, our proper sense of identity and self-worth is fully bound up in him. When we worship false gods of any sort, our identity gets radically warped and disfigured.

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