Little Idols Everywhere

What does this quote mean in context of christianity?

When I was 15 years old I travelled to Thailand with my family and some members of our church on a missions trip to take materials and encouragement to the struggling churches in the north of Thailand and to take medical supplies across the border to the refugees in Burma.

As we travelled through a country where Buddhism is the main religion, my parents would point out the little idols everywhere and make points along the lines of ‘look at the crumbling idols they worship here. Why would you worship something man-made that’s going to decay and rot?’

But idols are everywhere and they don’t always come in the likeness of an image. What if my beliefs also had crumbling idols. Ones you couldn’t see made of wood or stone, but were still there, still idols? What if my beliefs were man-made ideas about God?

Until I began to study sociology I didn’t have the words to articulate what was already causing doubts in my mind about the type of christianity I was into. 

Cultures are made up of values, beliefs and symbols. 

Religions too are a mix of values, beliefs and symbols.

Cultural christianity is no different to this.

I’ve been trying to pin point when my doubts began. Where those little lights of truth tried to creep in. 

When those doubts and questions started intruding into my safe, comfortable belief system. I’m not sure I can pinpoint it exactly, but it was lots of little, trivial, sometimes not trivial events or observations that made me file them away in my brain to ponder. Sometimes I think living in and experiencing other cultures helps to broaden your world view-you start to see life through the eyes of other people who have different backgrounds, different cultures.

As I’ve been thinking back on it this last week, I’ve struggled to write it down. It’s not easy to put your idols on display before you and realise they have no power, and are man-made, even now when I have worked through all this.

What I started to question went against everything I had been raised to believe. Everything I’d been taught about God and christianity. I’ll tell you about a few of them.

In the early days of my doubts, I kept coming back to this question: what do I know?  “I know that I know that I know’ - as we used to say in YWAM. What I knew was at the core of my belief was:

• the existence of God

• That He created the world

• That Jesus His son came to Earth.

Beyond that, I was open to anything. I was prepared to start over, from scratch. I said to God that I wanted to find the real Him and would He help me please, on my search, because I was scared as hell to do it.

When I was a child growing up in my beautiful, safe christian community fairytale, I was a timid, quiet creature with no obvious beauty or talents, but I was good at one thing. Remembering things, and specifically, Bible memorisation and knowledge. During church time and the long sermons instead of taking diligent notes as some would, I would totally switch off, open my Bible and read the ancient stories or study the maps in the back. I got to know the Bible very well.

It wasn’t until we joined the Bill Gothard cult in my late teens that Bible memorisation became mandatory and rote and took the life out of it. I felt that I had gained a good knowledge of the Bible just from those Sunday mornings in church when I found ways to entertain myself without getting a growling from the parents. This helped me later in life as I looked for God. 

My mother tells me that one of her proudest moments is when I won the Bible quiz at a community night when I was about 11 or 12 years old. 

All those times reading and re-reading, I feel like I was hiding God’s Word in my heart, as Psalm 119:11 says. 

Two incidents stand out for me in the beginning of my questioning.

A member of my family really got into the debate between Armenianism and Calvanism. It was the topic of discussion wherever we went for awhile and it made me feel uncomfortable. To give a brief summary of what the two schools of beliefs are, Calvinists believe that God is 100% sovereign and knows everything that will happen because he planned it. Armenians believe that God is sovereign but has limited control in relation to man’s freedom.

Of course it is much more complex than this. But my issue with it was multiple:

1. Why must God be limited to these two concepts. What if neither is right?

1. I recalled the Bible verse from Matthew 18:2-4. “He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them, and he said: ‘truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” It seemed to me that making faith complicated with debates about God’s sovereignty and more importantly, teaching about God’s sovereignty was perhaps not what we were supposed to be doing.

The other incident that occurred happened on social media and was the one that really shook my faith up. The one that really got me digging deep for answers.

I happened to know two acquaintances - both christian - who had sick newborns with life-threatening conditions. They, of course, were asking all the people to pray for their babies.

But one died and one lived.

The family of the one that lived praised God for the answer to their prayers. God had saved their baby. God had shown them mercy. God had saved their child’s life.

But what about the other baby? The one who had died? How does God decide who lives and who dies? 

Does God decide who lives and who dies? Do prayers en masse make a difference? 

But both families had prayers en masse. Did one family have more people praying than the other and that made a difference? 

None of this seemed right. None of this seemed to be fair. Did I want to know a God who made decisions like this based on the numbers or fervency of prayers? Did one family have more sin in their life than the other, so God punished them? How can I follow a God like that? 

I can’t.

So was this a man-made idea of God.

Probably.

I kept coming back to these Bible verses, ‘For the Lord your God is a God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes.’ Deuteronomy 10:17. Or this one: “Then Peter began to speak: ‘I now realise how true it is that God does not show favouritism.” Acts 10:34

Of course God also says to pray without ceasing “rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, so I am not saying that prayer in these times is pointless. 

I have come to see it as an act of faith. A comfort in troubled times, an open expression of worship and acknowledgement of God. I do not believe anymore that - unless it is in very special circumstances such as a spiritual battle against evil which is intercessory prayer, which I might get into later - that prayer should be used as a bribery of God to give you what you want or need or show how good your faith is so God will reward you.  God is not Santa Claus. 

Then someone mentioned the Old Testament and the angry God we sometimes see in those old stories. God does seem angry at times. God did wipe out entire generations - sometimes ruthlessly, cruelly. There were a lot of rules and harsh punishments if the rules were broken. Like - really harsh. Unthinkable harsh.

In reading the stories of the Old Testament we often forget that actually something is missing from God’s perspective. A doorway to the truth.

It wasn’t until we were in the middle of the lawsuit battle and crying out to God for help when everything was stacked against us, that I learned about this. It surprised me.

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