I'm slowly realizing that America is a more 'religious' place than I thought during my college years. Being enveloped by that kind of Christian bubble, as I was at APU, makes you start to draw a lot of lines amongst different groups of people in order to better distinguish yourself as an individual in a world full of very similar people. You start to think that you either have God or you have nothing. I now believe that everyone has a god, but only some of us have God. Human beings are wired to worship something. It's unavoidable and potentially destructive if anything besides God becomes the center of our worship. Jonathan Edwards wrote a book entitled The Nature of True Virtue, in which he argues that "human society is deeply fragmented when anything but God is our highest love." So as human beings who are wired to worship something, created with the need to love and be loved; What would happen to a society full of people who neglected to worship God and make Him their highest love?
A lot of people don't understand the harm that comes from this. What if you idolize something or someone good? What if you idolize world peace or Gandhi? During World War II Dorothy Sayers wrote that "The people who are most discouraged are those who cling to an optimistic belief in the civilizing influence of progress and enlightenment." For how in the world can you ever be encouraged by your god of world peace when there is nothing but continual war, conflict, and genocide? But, how about idolizing something more sentimental, such as your marriage or family? C.S Lewis writes in Mere Christianity, "No human relationship can bear the burden of godhood." People will always let you down because, quite simply, we aren't perfect. Our imperfections prevent us from loving each other the way only a perfect, diving being can. Timothy Keller writes in The Reason for God, "Sin is not simply doing bad things, it is putting good things in the place of God." So loving your husband, wife or kids is good up until the point that they become your god. The problem with putting good things in the place of God is that we inherently become addicted to them because we can never reach any lasting sense of satisfaction from material things. It's the classic problem of trying to fill that "God-shaped hole" inside of us. There's only one peg that fits inside that space and human beings will spend a lifetime trying to bend, twist, and shove things into it until they end up just as empty and unfulfilled as the day they began the search for their missing peace (pun intended). Now to take a macro look at the problem of a society full of idol worshipers.
So far I have supported claims that the worship of idols creates empty, unhappy, addicts who will never reach true fulfillment. It also creates hostility. Yes, hostility. Why don't we all just get along? Because we physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually can't get along while there are idols rooted in our hearts. Keller writes, "The more we love and identify deeply with our family, our class, our race, or our religion, the harder it is to not feel superior or even hostile to other religions, races, etc." I've experienced this in more ways than I can count. We've all seen wars waged over religious disagreements, political disputes, and racial elitism. Jesus Christ is nowhere near the highest tier of importance in the lives of the people behind these conflicts. On a smaller scale, I believe a continually growing problem in American culture is idolizing personal image. We are always upgrading, changing fashions or technology, so much so that it's gotten to the point that people who do not fit into our categories of "techy, hipster, country, urban, conservative, preppy or indy" are outcast and caricatured into people who are "less than" or "lacking" something essential to being counted as an acceptable human being. It's childish and it really gets to me, especially when I see Christians doing it.
But, I digress. As I've been saying, everyone is living their life for the one thing they find to be of greatest significance. It could be as simple as living for daily pleasures. The key problem with living for anything besides Jesus Christ is that nothing else can die for your sins. Therefore if you are living for anything besides God you are not truly living, you are actually suffering from the degradation of your soul. I pity the many people in this world and Hollywood especially (for they perpetuate the problem) who have become unaware to this soul-splitting feeling due to the numbness that has been created by sin from worshiping something or someone who can never really give them the genuine spirit of fulfillment that comes from a relationship with Christ. As Timothy Keller says at the end of his chapter on The Problem of Sin, "Jesus is the only Lord who, if you receive Him, will fulfill you completely, and, if you fail him, will forgive you eternally."
I want to end with one last story about idols that I've heard many times before but still love. It's relevance to me comes from the fact that I work in the very industry which the writer, Cynthia Heimel of the Village Voice, chose to write about. The idol of discussion is fame.
"I pity celebrities, no I really do – Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Barbara Streisand, were once perfectly pleasant human beings. But now their wrath is awful. I think when God wants to play a really rotten practical joke on you he grants you your deepest wish and then laughs merrily when you realize you want to kill yourself. You see Sly, Bruce, and Barbara wanted fame. They worked, they pushed and the morning after each of them became famous they wanted to take an overdose. Because that giant thing they were striving for, that fame thing that was going to make everything OK, that was going to make their lives bearable, that was going to provide them with personal fulfillment and happiness had happened and they were still them. The disillusionment turned them howling and insufferable." Cynthia Heimel, “Tongue in Chic” column in The Village Voice, January 2, 1990.
No comments:
Post a Comment