The Idol State

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson, here with Greg Uttinger. I’m filling in for Bryan Broome, which feels weird to say because I hosted this podcast for a long time and now I’m just here filling in. I’m the second fiddle today.

It’s sad.

But we do miss Bryan.

Yeah, we’re thankful for him but he’s ill right now.

So we can be praying for his recovery.

We have been talking about the reign of Solomon and are moving on today to talk about a time when a leader of Israel thought, “You know, you really need to see the Lord your God, and what better image than calves made of gold.” We’re in Exodus, right?

Well, no, actually not. But apparently Jeroboam had read Exodus, because if you read the Bible then you’ll do exactly what it says.

And this was a recommended course of action, was it? To build a golden calf?

But see, no, Moses was opposed, but Moses was mean and narrow-minded and cruel and power-hungry.

Kind of Puritanical.

Yeah. He wouldn’t let people pursue the old-time religion. We better stop this before someone comes in and…

Okay, switching off the sarcasm.

Sarcasm at rest.

Let me read at some length, so we don’t have to keep going back to it, the relevant section from I Kings. This is chapter 12. I won’t read the whole chapter, but what’s happened so far is that Solomon has died and Rehoboam his son is up for being king, but the succession was not automatic. The tribal heads had to agree to the new king, so in that sense it was something of a confederacy, although God had made very clear as to which family was supposed to rule. Still, case by case the people had to agree at some level.

Jeroboam had made himself a nuisance back in the days of Solomon and in consequence was forced to flee to Egypt, but now with Solomon dead he comes back to represent the northern tribes, and they summon Rehoboam, the heir apparent, to Shechem, which is in the tribe of Ephraim.

This is already not looking too good. We have the rabble rouser of the previous generation acting as a spokesman for tribes and telling the new would-be king, “You’re going to come into our territory and talk with us on our ground, and we’re going to set some parameters for your kingship.” But Rehoboam to this point wisely goes along, and he finds out that they want a lower tax burden and no conscripted labor and just a kinder gentler sort of rule. Rehoboam tells the crowds, “Alright, let me think about it. Give me three days.”

He goes to the older men who stood with his father and they say, “Yeah, do that. Be nice to them. Speak peaceably. Back off a little here and there, and they’ll serve you.” Then he goes to the guys he grew up with, so these people would be in their late ‘30s and ‘40s. He says, “What shall we answer them?” and they say, “Oh, you’ve got to be real tough. You’ve got to threaten them. You’ve got to tell them they’re so slacking. Who do they think they are?” and that’s the line that Rehoboam takes.

So when all Israel saw that the king hearkened not unto them, the people answered the king, saying, What portion have we in David? Neither have we inheritance in the son of Jesse. To your tents, O Israel. Now see to thine own house, David. So Israel departed unto their tents.

But as for the children of Israel which dwelt in the cities of Judah, Rehoboam reigned over them. Then king Rehoboam sent Adoram, who was over the tribute, and all Israel stoned him with stones, that he died.

He sent the tax collector, and the tax collector was murdered.

Therefore king Rehoboam made speed to get him up to his chariot, to flee to Jerusalem. So Israel rebelled against the house of David unto this day.

And it came to pass, when all Israel heard that Jeroboam was come again, that they sent and called him unto the congregation, and made him king over all Israel. There was none that followed the house of David, but the tribe of Judah only.

And when Rehoboam was come to Jerusalem, he assembled all the house of Judah, with the tribe of Benjamin…

And he proposes war. But God sends a prophet who says, “No, this thing’s from me. Back it off,” and he does.

Then Jeroboam built Shechem in Mount Ephraim and dwelt therein and went out from thence, and built Penuel. And Jeroboam said in his heart, Now shall the kingdom return to the house of David. If this people go up to do sacrifice in the house of the LORD at Jerusalem, then shall the heart of this people turn again unto their Lord, even unto Rehoboam king of Judah, and they shall kill me, and go again to Rehoboam king of Judah.
Whereupon the king took counsel, and made two calves of gold, and said unto them, It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem. Behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. And he set the one in Bethel, and the other put he put in Dan. And this thing became a sin, for the people went to worship before the one, even unto Dan. And he made a house of high places, and made priests of the lowest of the people, which were not of the sons of Levi.
And Jeroboam ordained a feast in the eighth month, on the fifteenth day of the month, like unto the feast that is in Judah, and he offered upon the altar. So did he in Bethel, sacrificing unto the calves that he had made, and he placed in Bethel the priests of the high places which he had made. So he offered upon the altar which he had made in Bethel the fifteenth day of the eighth month, even in the month which he had devised of his own heart, and ordained a feast unto the children of Israel, and he offered upon the altar and burnt incense.

This practice of worshiping golden calves is something that the rulers of the northern kingdom perpetuate to the end, with the exception of one king who only reigned for a week. We are told of each of them, “And they walked in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin with the golden calves at Dan and at Bethel.”

It’s important as we look at this to understand that in his mind – well, maybe not in his mind, but in his public proclamations, in the printed material, in the handouts, in telecasts – he was not advocating that Israel worship a new God.

He was saying, “This is your God. This is the same God. This is the God that brought you up out of the land of Egypt. We’re just putting a face on him. True, it’s the face of a cow, but there’s historical precedent for that. A cow just makes God so much gentler and easier to understand. And besides, now you won’t have to take that long hard trek to Jerusalem. You can stop at Bethel along the way and visit the gift shops. After all, Jerusalem is so much further.” It’s all of 15 miles further on. It’s going to be a more user-friendly religion with a God you can see and touch, if he’ll let you. Maybe that’s the extra, when they charge $1.50. That’s it.

The motives of course were purely political. He realizes that if the same religion dominates both countries, the people will continue to go to the temple, they’ll go to Jerusalem and they’ll see that kingdom. They’ll rub shoulders with people who are citizens of that kingdom and who are still loyal to the sons of David, and they may begin to think, “You know, what were we doing there? This is where we belong,” and eventually they’ll raise some kind of revolution, and he sees the worst possible thing – “They’ll kill me and they’ll go back. We can’t have that. Even though God has promised to bless me in this kingdom if I obey him, I don’t want to trust that. I’m going to trust my own political inclinations,” and he does, and it seems to work – seems to. That’s what we’re talking about – why politics and the worship of images go hand-in-hand.

It’s interesting that the continued worship at Jerusalem would have recognized an imperfect king. You have Solomon on the throne before he dies, and if you’re going to continue to submit to the worship of Yahweh at Jerusalem you’re acknowledging that God put this guy on the throne, and he’s got 700 wives and 300 concubines and isn’t ruling justly. He’s multiplying chariots, he’s making alliances with foreign nations, and yet you’re still supposed to do that instead of making your own religion.

That’s touchy. I think you’re being too judge-y here of some people. I wouldn’t want to say who or anything.

I didn’t have anyone in mind.

You don’t have to have anyone in particular in mind for that one. “The powers-that-be aren’t doing their job, so let’s go create our own church, our own religion, and it will vary in just a very few particulars.” But you know what? This was his argument, or his implied argument, I guess. I don’t think it’s an argument. It’s an implied manipulation. “Let’s go back to the old-time religion.”

There are some things in the text that are easy to pass by. They called Rehoboam to Shechem, and then after all of this we’re told that Jeroboam rebuilds Shechem. Shechem is a city with deep roots in the Old Testament going all the way back to Genesis. It’s where Abraham landed when he came into the land, and Jacob after him. It’s also where the slaughter of the Shechemites by Levi and Simeon took place, so there’s a lot wrapped up in that.

Then Penuel, that’s where Jacob wrestled with God, and saw God face to face and came away limping, halting in the Promised Land. Then finally, Bethel is where Jacob saw the ladder to heaven, the angels ascending and descending, and where Jacob said, “This will be the house of God.” Actually he said, “This is the house of God, and when I come back this will be God’s house.”

It would not be until much later, as far as we can tell, that any formal structure was built, although Jacob may have put up a tent or something. But later on in the book of Judges, Bethel becomes the place where the tabernacle stays for a while. There are a couple references in Judges where it speaks of going to the house of God. The house of God is Bethel. The tabernacle would have been pretty far away, whereas Bethel was real close, so more likely that’s what’s going on there. They went there. Actually, at that point they would have been the same thing. So he’s playing with places and names that have a deep historical significance, that go back before Moses, back before the 10 commandments, back before the Mosaic covenant, back to the time of the patriarchs.

And without necessarily saying in so many words, “This is the old-time religion,” he sure seems to be implying it, particularly when he says, “These are your gods who brought you out of the land of Egypt,” or “This is your God.” The word can be either plural or singular, depending upon context. This is what Aaron said at the foot of Mt. Sinai when he presented Israel with the single golden calf and said, “This is your God,” same word, so again he’s pushing us back.

It’s not an accident. It’s not that he read a book that no one else knew and found something cool that he thought he would borrow. This is something that everybody would have known, and the appeal to it is very deliberate and obvious.

In other words, “Aaron got it right. He was the first High Priest, after all. It was Moses who came down and inserted the law on top of this, so we need to go back behind Moses to what was really going on there first, and therein find this kinder gentler religion that is more user-friendly.”

I think that modern expression is very relevant here. The one thing we’re told in terms of appeal is, “It’s too hard for you to go to Jerusalem.” Jerusalem is 15 miles further on. It wasn’t that big a deal. Another day’s journey at most.

That’s not even a day.

But he made a big deal out of it. And of course if we go back to the Exodus account, the people had appealed, “We don’t know what’s become of Moses. Make us gods that shall go before us.” That is, they weren’t asking for a replacement for Yahweh, for Jehovah. They were asking for a replacement for Moses.

“Moses has been our leader. He’s been gone for 40 days and 40 nights. We want something we can latch onto. We want someone we can see, someone who is a visible representation of this invisible God of ours, and that’s not something scary like those fires and thunderings on the top of the mountain. We want something down here close that we can relate to,” and Aaron picked a calf.

The general trend of the commentators over the centuries, failing to see an obvious precedent in scripture, is to go back to Egypt and talk about the Apis bull, who was an incarnation of Osiris, and say, “This is where they got it. That was the big thing in Egypt. They just borrowed it.”

That may have played into it, but we’re never told that. The basic principle of hermeneutics is to start by interpreting scripture with scripture first, and then possibly appeal beyond it to what we know of geography, culture, and the surrounding area. When you start thinking ‘calf’ in scripture, particularly in terms of Exodus and Leviticus, something should stand way out, and that’s the calf that was used for sacrifice.

Now, if Aaron had said, “Here’s a golden lamb. Behold your God,” we would get exactly what he meant. Or in the 21st century if we said, “Behold a golden lion,” we would probably get that one too. But that’s because the New Testament spends more time calling Jesus the Lamb of God or the Lion of God than it does calling him the bull of God, although there are certainly references to the sacrifice of calves and bulls and so on.

The bull was the expensive sacrifice. It was the sacrifice for the nation or for the priest or for somebody really important. If you really wanted to do some kind of big covenant renewal service, the bull was going to be the first thing on the offering menu, so to pick that was simply to exalt the sacrifice, hold up the sacrifice as if it were divine. Oh wait, this is sounding familiar from another direction. “Let’s elevate the host and everyone can bow down to it.”

This is central to why God forbade idols, because once we see them we accept them as reality, and then we do the next logical thing. We submit ourselves to them. We bow down to them. We worship them. We can say all we want that, “No, we’re not really worshiping it. We’re just showing it respect because it’s an image of a reality.”

“We can use a different word, like veneration.”

“Yeah, we’re not worshiping it, we’re just venerating it.” It’s worship level 2, not worship level 1. But the second commandment forbids us not only from making and having idols, but from bowing down to them. We are not to bow down to any creature as if it is God.

We can bow to humans because they are the image of God – a God-made image of God – but we do not bow down to them as divine. We bow down to them as humans who deserve our respect. So we see various patriarchs and prophets bowing to kings, and this is fine. They’re not transgressing the law of God. You can kneel in front of something. If you want to kneel in front of a car to change a tire, you’re not worshiping the car.

The bowing down is sort of a figure of speech, a metonymy, for worship. It’s not that the act of sitting on your knees is somehow forbidden.

However, the flip side – you said metonymy, but that means that there is a part here you’re taking for the whole, and the part is that worship traditionally has involved bowing. Now, American Christianity, particularly evangelical fundamentalist Protestant Christianity and Reformed Christianity has gotten away from that. We don’t bow anymore.

In a Lutheran church or an Episcopalian church or Anglican church, you’re likely to see people bowing, but we’ve gotten away from that with a sort of Gnostic “Well, that’s High Churchy. That’s something else. All God cares about is my heart, if I’m bowing in my heart.” There’s a danger there. There’s a very real danger.

The danger being the implication that it doesn’t matter what you do with your body.

It doesn’t matter what you do with your body, and therefore this is the other side of it doesn’t matter what you do with your body. “So there’s this big golden image, and the music’s playing, and we’ve been told to bow down and worship it, so this would be a great time to bow down and tie my shoe because I’d be bowing but my heart wouldn’t mean it, so it would be okay,” say the three Hebrew children to one another – not.

I’ve taught through that chapter I don’t know how many times and get the question, “Well, couldn’t they just, you know, bow their knees as long as they weren’t bowing their hearts?” in so many words. No.

The thing is, their hearts and their knees all exist within a cultural context where these things matter.

It matters, and to bow the knee before an idol is to worship the idol, to submit yourself to the idol and the reality and the worldview it represents. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego did not bow to the idol. They stayed standing. They were willing to show respect for their king as a human king, and in that sense an instrument and representation of God, but they were not going to let that king, let alone an idol, usurp Jehovah’s place. They were going to stand straight, even if it meant going into a fiery furnace.

There are issues within issues here when we detract from the significance of man’s true humanity as a physical creature in a physical universe, a creature that has legs and arms and knees and eyes and nose and mouth and hair and torso and sexuality and speech and sight, and we say, “Well, that’s just the empty shell. That’s the dressing. The real man is somewhere deep inside.”

Do not tell this to a psychotic child with a really sharp knife, because he may want to get the person who’s inside out of the body and free him/her from being trapped there. Just listen to the words. Where inside exactly? And does that mean that it doesn’t matter what we do to your body because we can never touch you?

There is, to be sure, a sense when we say that that which is deep and that which is in the heart cannot be touched directly by human hands. That’s absolutely true, and if we step away from that we begin to bring good works into the gospel, or ritual or rite or something else that will infuse grace by force from the outside.

But at the same time, when the heart embraces something, the body embraces it too. And when the heart rejects something, the body will reject it too, because that’s the nature of humanity. Man is a unified whole. The heart is, as it were, the bridge, the steering wheel, the point from which all the issues of life flow, and that includes what the body will do, so we can’t disconnect the two. We can’t say that it doesn’t matter what you do with your body in worship because all that God looks at is the heart. No, he looks at the body too.

It does matter whether you sing loud or not in church, or whether you just mumble, whether or not you mouth the creeds or recite them joyfully, whether or not you hear with attention or whether you’re just in the room when the pastor is speaking. These are all actions we perform with our bodies and they are basic to worship.

When we get away from that and limit it to, “Well, my body went through the form so that’s good enough for somebody,” or “I went through the forms but I didn’t really mean them, so I’m not guilty of idolatry. I just, you know, was doing what everyone else was doing, because an idol is nothing in the world and there’s no other God but one, so I can eat the meat offered to idols, even though it meant going to an idol festival and getting splashed with their blood. I wanted a good steak dinner at the end.”

That’s not what Paul is talking about when it comes to Christian liberty. Physical worship is real worship. We can talk about cultural connotations, but there are some absolutes here where God says, “Don’t bow down to image that claim to be God. Don’t submit yourself to them.”

Here’s the other thing. The second commandment is not primarily about bowing down to false gods. That was covered in the first commandment. Don’t have false gods. Don’t have any other gods. The second commandment is, “And when it comes to me, don’t make images of me.”

This is where I almost always go these days, because it drives the point home so I’m going to do it again anyhow. Think of a marriage where a woman discovers her husband has been using pornography, and she calls him on it and he says, “But honey, all the time I did these things I was thinking of you.” Is that going to fly?

100% no.

100% no. Or she looks and it’s a picture of – I don’t know who’s a pop star today that would actually mean something. It my day it was Marilyn Monroe or someone like that. “No, this does not look at all like me!”

“Well sure! I mean her eyes are beautiful just like yours. Her figure is great just like yours. She makes me feel warm and cozy like you do, so see? It’s exactly the same thing, for all that matters.”

No, it’s not.

And yet somehow when it comes to pictures of Jesus, pictures of God, we blow past that. “I know that this is not what Jesus looks like, but it makes me think of Jesus.” Well, the calf made them think of God, so they claimed. The reason was, “It’s the chief of the sacrifices. Would it make you feel better if we substituted a little lamb, then?”

“No.”

“But it’s the sacrifice.”

“No.”

“And gold is rich and pure and valuable and reflects the glory of God. Think of all the golden things that are in the tabernacle – the golden showbread table, golden altar, golden menorah, golden ark. A golden calf is just the next logical extension. The calf is strong, and although meek yet powerful.”

I was going to say, the bull is kind of the more ferocious of the sacrifice animals. I was just reading Ferdinand to Gretchen the other day. That was a non-ferocious example, but the reason we have Ferdinand is because bulls are scary.

Bulls are scary, especially in a culture that still does bullfighting. In Israel it’s an agrarian society. “The bull pulls the carts, it pulls the plow, it’s a means of transportation, and just does so much. The female version gives us milk. They give us steak occasionally and leather. I mean it provides all of our needs…just like God. It’s this really cool representation of God, so when I see it I know it’s not God. Everybody knows that, but it reminds me so much of God and I get this warm fuzzy feeling and it just helps me. I mean, maybe you’re at that point where you don’t need help, but some of us poor simple believers just need a little bit of extra help from our friends to get along, so it’s okay. I’m sure God doesn’t mind.”

And how are you going to decorate your house, if you’re not going to have little religious images? You’d have to have not-religious images and that would be less spiritual.

Yeah. You need to bring God near by having lots of little images, and that way your house is much more spiritual if you fill it full of these little religious image things. The Old Testament calls them teraphim, little idols you put here and there. They weren’t God exactly, but they were like angels or saints or representations of this divine attribute or that. It was a very spiritual religion.

I guess that’s where we end up eventually. We haven’t really even gotten to the whole political angle here, but I think in order to do so we had to lay this ground. The 20th century saw the separation, supposedly, of Church and State, of religion and politics, but what we actually saw was the separation of the State from traditional Christian thought forms and practices.

Man is a religious being and you cannot yank religion out of him. You can’t tear it out of his heart. In the absence of worshiping the true God, man does worship something. In the 20th century and before that – basically from the Enlightenment on, or even from the Renaissance on – the powers that unbelievers began to worship were those of the State.

The Enlightenment basically told us, “Grant the State all of its due attributes – omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence – and it will give you Utopia. It will give you paradise on earth. It will give you something your God always promised you, but we just need more knowledge (omniscience), more presence (bureaucracy and surveillance), and more power (the ability to make whatever laws are necessary to force forward our vision) and we’ll give you paradise, because after all, man is naturally good. It’s religion that’s been complicating things (meaning Christianity).” But what they’re offering is a different religion. It’s not no religion. That’s not possible. They offer this religion and therefore this sort of spirituality, and it can come cloaked very much in spirituality.

In the crisis we’ve gone through in the West here in the last couple years, it was interesting to see the fusion of “the State says,” “science says,” and “don’t you love your neighbor?” into this mystical hodgepodge of, “Therefore you will do exactly what you’re told. You will not ask questions. You will not challenge the system, and you will conform all of your values and all of your family practices and all your church practices to this new standard, because it’s the loving spiritual sweet kind thing to do. It’s what science says is necessary, and we know science. And besides, it’s what your government says, and you are loyal patriots after all, aren’t you?” and it was a very winning combination for a while.

There was enough cultural baggage from Christian capital and conservative capital to say, “Uh, wait, sir. Just a minute, please,” but the battle is already won and this is the direction that politics, that Statism, will take religion. It will try to make religion a tool of the State.

Now, that religion may not be Christianity. If Christianity is no longer popular, if it no longer holds sway over human hearts, then it will get dumped. It will become the persecuted minority. It will be pushed off as an extreme lunatic fringe, not true religion at all, but the appeal will be made to some sort of religion.

Jeroboam in the context of very active covenant life in Israel and Judah appealed to what seemed to be at least one interpretation of how things had been, the old-time religion, the religion before it got systematized and developed and learned where it had to defend its borders, like no idols, to something where you can imagine what it was like, where there was more freedom and more love, and you could follow your heart and your impulses and that which was truly spiritual.

We’ve still got this in the 19th and 20th century. We’ve got a lot of this in the cults. “Things were great in the early Church, then along came Nicaea with this Trinity thing and just destroyed it all. We want to go back behind all of that to the real old-time religion, to how the apostles taught and lived, how the early church lived. We want to go back to Corinth.”

“We want a real New Testament church.”

“We want an apostolic church. We want a Pentecostal church.”

“Like Corinth.”

Yeah. Now, there are senses to be sure in which all those are true. We do want an apostolic church. In the creeds we confess one holy apostolic catholic church, but it means something very specific. It doesn’t mean we want to unwind time, go back to the beginning, and live out how we think it would have looked like.

When we talk about, for instance, Pentecostal, there’s a true sense where Pentecostalism is very important. The outpouring of the Spirit brought the church to new life in terms of Jesus’ resurrection. We never want to forget that or the great work that God did then.

And old-time? Early church? First-century church with the Christianity described in the New Testament? Of course, that’s what we want in a more mature developed form, because they were babies and they were just learning.

The solution to the sins of maturity is not to go back and adopt childhood again, not become babies all over again, so we need to beware and be careful of that kind of verbiage because it’s a trap. It leads us back away from the maturity that Christ has worked in his Church, to something that’s immature, that lacks the boundaries, the sensibilities, the development, the maturity of where Christ has brought us.

Can I jump back and take a detour on this idea of user-friendly? I think it’s such an apt phrase, for all the reasons you said, and then also because it is manipulation cloaked in service. It ostensibly is, “Oh, it’s making it easier for you,” when what’s really getting easier is the maker of the thing controlling you and getting you to do what they want you to do, whether it’s to use their product or go to Bethel instead of Jerusalem. Maybe I’m on my anti-big-tech soapbox, but it just seemed very apt.

It’s something we respond to, unfortunately, because when it comes to the worship of God we are constitutionally sinfully lazy. We get up as late as we can. We don’t do the necessary spiritual preparation. We squabble and fight on the way to church, then walk in with our plastic smiles stamped on our faces and begin the worship of the transcendent sovereign God. Then the pastor goes 5 or 10 minutes over and we start looking at our watches.

Worship is a difficult thing. It’s difficult in the flesh. It’s difficult for the natural man to submit himself wholly to God, to God’s structure, to God’s purposes, even for a short time, and we use all the excuses. “Well, it may be God, but we’ve got a mere sinful human up there and he’s gone over time and my roast is burning,” or “Yes, this is the worship of God, but listen to the choir. They’re horrible.” We find things to complain about and then pretend, “But my heart’s in the right place.” Well, apparently your heart is not in the right place or you would be able to forego these externals.

The worship of God demands the whole man, beginning in the heart, but moving out into the body. The worship of God demands humility, and this is kind of where you started. God puts us in an imperfect world with imperfect leaders, sinful leaders, who say stupid things and sometimes sinful things, even from the pulpit, and he expects us to submit to that, knowing that he’s got it covered. The blood of Christ has atoned for all our sins and all our deficiencies and all our failures.

That’s not to say we should not correct those we can, but we don’t have to wait until they’re perfected to enter into them and enjoy them and participate in them. We do not need to say, “I cannot go to this church because it does this, this, and this thing.” They may not be exactly biblical, but they’re not blatant idolatry, and they’re done with an imperfect faith.

Especially if that’s the congregation of the Lord that’s meeting in a place that you can get to on Sundays.

Exactly. I’m going to go on a side tangent here and probably get myself in trouble in the process. The struggle between Christianity and the ancient world, its worldviews, philosophies, and religion, came down to this – God has spoken truth in scripture that is accessible to God’s people, and if we do not have this truth then we fall back into idols and demons. This was absolutely correct, so the martyrs fought and died in terms of this, for things that to our generation would seem silly.

“What do you mean you won’t buy a license from the State to have your church open? It’s just a little pinch of incense and some words that you don’t even have to mean.” No, martyrs went to the stakes and to the lions rather than say, “Caesar is lord” to obtain that license. And on into the Middle Ages, as the church warred with local superstitions and pagan gods and chopped down pagan oaks and such. They continued to insist that truth is what matters. Without truth there’s no gospel.

Then along comes the Reformation and again it’s going to divide the Church over the issue of truth. So in the wake of the Reformation we get this interesting situation, particularly in America, and to a lesser extent elsewhere, where there is no more State-sponsored Church. Anybody really can set up a church and say, “Here’s the truth.”

Now, what do you do with that? You can say, “All right, well, these people, mostly I agree with them. They seem to be on-board with most of what God says, except for that one thing there. I don’t know about that. These people? They’re really off but they seem to love Jesus. These people talk about loving Jesus, but they don’t even seem to know who he is. And these people don’t even seem to love Jesus, but they go through all the old traditional forms. Where is truth in all of this?”

In the wake of the Reformation there was a lot of conflict over, for instance, the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper – transubstantiation, consubstantiation, real spiritual presence, real spiritual absence, whatever you have there – and wars were fought over this ultimately.

The idea that, yes, truth is important, it’s enough to lay down your life for, but it isn’t enough to go kill somebody for – that was a huge thing that Cromwell started to solve in England, and lost a lot of Puritan support because of it, especially American Puritan support. But then in America we had it full-blown.

I live next to a Lutheran, across from some Baptists, next to some Roman Catholics, and you know what? We don’t burn crosses on each other’s lawns. We don’t go about plotting how to get each other dragged before a civil magistrate for crimes of heresy. Even if these things were possible, it would never enter our minds. Does that mean that we now despise truth? Well, it might, but it also might mean that we understand that truth speaks to the heart and it cannot be forced by purely political means.

Now, the secular State doesn’t see it that way. Oh yes, it talks a great deal about freedom of speech and all that, but more and more as the State has taken control of the educational system, we have seen exactly the opposite of freedom of religion. We see the State more and more mandating what our children will be taught – that is, indoctrinated in – what values they will be required to accept, and what values you as a family will be required to accept in order that your children will be trained correctly.

The State is reaching for the heart, which it does not acknowledge exists, but it’s reaching for the man on a biochemical level, which is all they know of man, so by reaching his total environment down to his DNA they are trying to reshape man in terms of their religion, and it is a religion.

Whereas Christians have learned, “Look, you’re Lutheran, you’re Reformed, you’re Presbyterian, you’re Baptist, you’re Methodist, and we actually do love and serve the same Jesus, although we have some serious disagreements on what he requires of us. But we do understand that we come to God through faith in him and that he’s our Savior. You know who Jesus is? I don’t care what you call yourself. You think he’s the brother of Lucifer? No, you’re right out. At least you used to be. You seem to be remodeling your religion. I don’t know what that’s all about.”

But in any case, it doesn’t mean we have to go kill people. We can fight with the Sword of the Spirit. We can fight on a spiritual level with prayer and love and compassion and the Word of God and discussions and reasonings, rather than go kill people.

The State has one weapon. It’s force. And it can adopt a prophet, a priesthood. It can adopt a spokesman to speak for its images.

In the book of Revelation we run into the beast, which is apostate civil government at some level, but the beast is accompanied by a false prophet that rises out of the land. The beast comes from the sea, from the Gentile world, the false prophet from the land. In those days that would be the land of Israel. It is the prophet who supports the beast, and the prophet who makes the image of the beast and demands that men worship the image of the beast.

Here we have a false religion setting up images for the beast for raw political power and requiring people to worship it. And if you don’t do that, you can’t play their game. You cannot buy and sell, and in Revelation buying and selling is an image for participation in covenant life and worship and such. Jesus counsels the church of Laodicea to buy from him the things necessary to the faith, and the image proceeds along.

So are we right to fear a confusion of Church and State? Church and State maybe not. Religion and State, absolutely, because the State has to rest on some religious foundation. If it is not that of covenant life revealed in scripture, it will be that of continuity of being, an idea we’ve talked about perhaps ad nauseum. But if all reality is one, and the State is the best representative of that, then any deviation from that on the part of the subjects, the worshipers, cannot be tolerated. Everybody must be assimilated. Everybody must conform. After all, they love us, don’t they?

On that note, wow, talk about ending on a downer, but we should go to recommendations because it’s time.

All right. Do you have one? Your husband prefers you to go first.

I do. I recommend reading books out loud with people. I think it’s a great alternative to movie nights, because on some level we pretty much all know what movies are out there, and we pretty much all know which ones we are likely to enjoy. Then while it’s on you can’t socialize. It’s got to be the right crew around you if you’re going to talk through the movie. Everybody has to sign onto it and everything.

With a book, you can read as much as you feel like and then take a break and have some snacks and talk about it, and then get back to it. You’re discovering something that probably nobody else has read out loud to you before, because we don’t do that as a culture anymore and it’s really fun. We did this on Monday night. We had a book read-aloud party and it was a collection of short stories and it was a whole lot of fun.

Not exactly along those lines but sort of along those lines, I want to recommend two books. First, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Neil Postman probably called himself a Christian, probably by our definitions a liberal one, but at least he took the second commandment very seriously and thought, “You know what? Images in content matter.”

The book Amusing Ourselves to Death is at some points a little difficult, particularly his discussion of epistemology. He doesn’t use the word quite the way I would use it, but it is worth following his argument of the relationship between words and images, and how images tend to displace words, and yet carry a power of their own which is often beyond rational discussion because they’re not rational propositions in the first place. There’s a lot there.

His whole chapter on images in religion, which I think he calls “Shuffling off to Bethlehem” is worth the price of the book. He also talks about how it applies to politics and so on, and ties in discussions of Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, and such.

Similar is Arthur W. Hunt’s book, The Vanishing Word. It’s subtitled “The Veneration of Visual Imagery in the Postmodern World.” It’s a Crossways book and in some ways it’s a watered-down Christianized form of the other book, but it’s probably more accessible. The language is a little easier and you are dealing with someone who is self-consciously Christian. The discussion is very much the same.

There is a danger in appealing to images, because images bypass the rational. You look at a sunset or a piece of pornography and you have a reaction to the image and you cannot say, “Wait, I don’t believe that.” Believe what? There’s nothing to believe. You just responded. You responded at gut level, an emotional level, a visceral level. You’ve quickly moved beyond rational discussion because there’s no rational proposition in the first place.

God did not give us a picture book. He gave us a book of words, and Jesus is the Logos, the Divine Word. We need to recenter our thinking here. It does not mean that God has no place for images.

And Jesus is the image of the invisible God.

Yes. He came down where we could see him, but we don’t see him now. We have to read his love letter. We have to read his words, his commandments, his testimony, his gospel.

There is much to think about here and much to reorient our thinking about the culture and the wider world, so that’s it – Amusing Ourselves to Death and The Vanishing Word.

Awesome. I remember reading Amusing Ourselves to Death, but I’ll have to check the other one out as well.

That is all we have time for today. Thank you so much, Greg, for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband, who is currently watching our baby as she smiles at him, I hope. Maybe she’s yelling, who knows? I can’t hear. I have noise-cancelling headphones.

Thank you also to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in. Hope you had as much enjoyment and benefit from this episode as we derived from making it.

If you’d like to join the ranks of our financial supporters, you can visit our website at anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion. Thank you also to our financial supporters. We appreciate you keeping the show rolling. You can follow us on Facebook, YouTube, and Rumble, and I think that’s it. I’m still on Good Reads. Be my friend. See you next week.