When The Culture’s Idols Fall

By Matt Watson

We all have idols. However, we rarely have little carven figurines representing any one of the pantheon of so-called deities to which we worship and make sacrifices. John Calvin said that a man’s heart is an idol factory; we are exceptionally good at manufacturing functional saviors. So it's not as if we don't have idols today, they've just gotten sneakier and have disguised themselves. 

Statues, figurines, and various images were made as representations of gods. Devotion and sacrifices were given to them, from money and food to child sacrifice and sex. Not much has changed. These days our idols may look like success, influence, celebrities, sports teams, blasphemous ideologies, and anything we give our time, talents, and treasure to other than God. Porn, Only Fans, and the LGBTQ+ alphabet soup are sex cults and obvious examples of idols that receive our time, talent, and treasure and therefore steal worship from God, who alone is worthy of it.

However, our idols may also include less obvious, and more conservative, ones like freedom, self-sufficiency, individualism, a new truck or other stuff, or even anything that is good but turned ultimate by how we use it and value it, like family, job success, and financial security.

There is a very simple objective when we begin to see our idols, just one action required of us: kill them all (Rom 8:13).

It Starts With You

In the book of Judges, Gideon was called by God to repent and destroy his family’s idols (and therefore his idols), and then the idols of his community.

The altar to Baal, and its Asherah counterpart, belonged to Gideon’s father, but they were used by the whole community for worshiping those particular false gods. Gideon, and his father Joash, exercised influence in their town and provided the means for treason to God. When God called Gideon to act, he started with getting his heart and home in order first. By transforming his home, Gideon was able to start transforming his city.

Likewise, for the Christian today, and specifically for our church in San Antonio, cultural transformation starts in the home, with you. If you have secret idols hidden next to the skeletons in your closet, they need to be torn down, cast aside, and set on fire.

Seek and destroy what your heart gives false worship to. Then within your family, cut down the idols that live there, whatever they be. Identify them and then deal with them. Then you can begin transforming the culture now that you’ve done the necessary surgery to see (Matt 7:4-5).

The Boniface Option

Gideon took The Tent Stake Option. When we studied Barak, Jael, and Deborah, we saw how Jael’s decisive repentance contrasted with Barak’s twenty years of waiting for the right time. Likewise, Gideon received a command from the Lord, and he obeyed as decisively as Jael.

This is a biblical example of The Boniface Option. Boniface was a missionary to the Saxon people in Germany in the late 7th and early 8th centuries. The Saxons still had ties to the Norse pagan practices of their forefathers and tended to mix them with Christianity. There was a tall oak tree that they believed belonged to Thor. Boniface cut it down and built a church out of its wood. To the Saxons, this was a display of Christ’s might over Thor, and they converted en masse.

But this is very important for the more assertive among us: The Boniface Option is not just cutting something down. It replaces that which it cuts down with something better. Thor’s tree was turned into a church. Gideon’s father’s shrines to Baal and Asherah were replaced with an altar to God.

We also need to remember that Boniface didn’t cut down Thor’s tree because he hated the Saxons and viewed them as his enemy, but because he loved them and wanted the best for them—Jesus. Similarly, Gideon didn’t tear down his father’s idols because he was feeling rebellious against his dad, but because he loved his Father and obeyed his commandments.

When God stripped us of our identities as slaves to sin and removed our old flesh, he didn’t stop with unmaking us. He made us new by giving us something better than what we had: himself. “I was born this way,” they say. But Jesus said “You must be born again” (John 3:3).

That’s what we have to do with cultural idols. We cannot just tear them down. We definitely need to do that, but if we stop with the law then no one hears the gospel. We must replace false worship with true worship. We must tear down idols and hold up the truth of God. We challenge the darkness with God’s beauty.

Cut down the idols, but replace them with something so glorious and real that there can be no other substitute. Give them Jesus.

Let the Baals Contend for Themselves

Here is something else to remember as you seek and destroy your idols: Sometimes revival is accompanied by riots. This is true individually (who hasn’t bargained with their sin?) and corporately.

Don’t lose hope when the nations rage. That’s what they do.

The more you cut down the idols of your family and the idols of the culture, the more the culture will rage. Our nation raged when Roe was struck down with the Dobbs decision. Our city raged. With much weeping and gnashing of teeth they mourned the loss of the federal protection to murder their babies. They plot in vain new ways to worship their demonic ideas and practices.

But Jesus mocks them all to scorn.

When the altar of Baal and the Asherah were torn down and burned, the people were angry with Gideon. They wanted blood, and they came to his father, the one who had provided these places of worship to begin with. But Gideon’s actions were already having a transforming effect on his family, for his father stood tall and said,

He is saying what all the prophets have said before and after him: if the gods you serve are so powerful, so satisfying, so important, then let’s see how they contend with the One True God. But be warned, if your false gods fail, then you have to contend with the Lord.

And so the psalmist says unto you today, right now: Kiss the son lest he be angry.

This article was originally published by Matthew Watson with Awake! Put on strength!, and is used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.