As for an idol, a craftsman casts it, and a goldsmith overlays it with gold and fashions silver chains for it. Isaiah 40:19 (NIV)
Idols are images that we have created. They are our distorted attempts to represent what God is like. This speaks very powerfully to our culture today. Our culture preaches that anything sincerely believed is a valid expression of truth and that if we want to know what God is like, we can discover that by listening to any and all religions.
Do you see how this is precisely the opposite of what Isaiah says? Isaiah was surrounded by religion—fertility cults, worship of the male gods Molech and Baal, and the female goddess Asherah. Many people today would say that all religions are talking about the same thing.
Our culture says that we are like blindfolded people trying to describe an elephant, and one grabs the tail and says it is like a rope, another grabs his trunk and says it’s like a tube. But, of course, we are all describing the same reality, it’s just bigger than any of us can grasp.
But Isaiah doesn’t say that: “To whom, then, will you compare God? What image can you compare him to?” (40:18). God is nothing like the idols. If you try to grasp truth by taking a little bit from each of the world religions and melding it together into your own personal belief system, you will end up with a very distorted picture indeed.
In the Garden of Eden, Satan painted a distorted image of God. “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’” But God never said that. In fact, God said Adam and Eve could eat from any tree in the garden except for one.
If Eve comes to believe that God is miserly and mean-spirited, she will not find it difficult to sin against Him. And if the enemy can project a distorted picture of God onto your mind, it will be very easy for him to tempt you to sin.
Are you trying to cobble together a view of God from different religious traditions?
