Direct your attention now to a short reading from the book of First Thessalonians. We're working through the book of First Thessalonians this winter in spring and this is Paul's letter to a church that he had started and been a part of just a few months before he writes this letter back to them. Notice there in verse 8, chapter 1 he says, for not only has the word of the Lord sounded forth from you in Macedonia and Achaea, but your faith in God has gone forth everywhere so that we need not say anything. For they themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you, how that you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, the Word of the Lord, and you may be seated. In the ancient world, idolatry was ubiquitous everywhere idols all across the globe, peoples, nations, tribes, individuals, families all had and worshiped idols. Goes back to the very beginnings of human history, idol worship, icons, carvings, pillars, faces, structures, totems, all sorts of things, have symbolized some aspect of the other world or some aspect of God or something that that men and women and families would bow down and worship. Idolatry was rampant all throughout human history and was covering all of humanity by an early, early day. Paul had been in Athens just a few weeks before he wrote this passage. And in Athens, which we would think of as the intellectual and philosophical capital of the ancient world, he found there too, even with all of the intellectual sophistication and all of the philosophical profundity, he found the city filled with idols, idols everywhere, idols to honor everything imaginable. And he had his belly full of it, having been raised and nurtured a Hebrew of the Hebrews, a Jew who heard the commandment of God that came saying, thou shalt have no other gods before me. I am the Lord thy God which brought the up out of the land of Egypt. Hearing the commandment of God which said, thou shalt make unto the no-graven image, a young man who had been nurtured in the faith, the monotheistic faith of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who had learned from his mother's knee that there was one God, he was the true God, he was the living God, and he could not be found by worshiping idols of any kind. Not only that having come in a marvelous conversion experience some years earlier, Paul had come to know the one icon, the one image of the true and living God. And that is the man Christ Jesus, the crucified carpenter of Nazareth, who himself in his body manifested all the fullness of the Godhead bodily and Paul had come to know Christ and knew Christ to be the only image of God among men. And so when he saw that rampant idolatry, he could not help but speak of the true God, the living God. And that's what he did in that great sermon that we have recorded in Acts 17 in his sermon in Athens. And now he moves down to Corinth where he's staying in ministry now for some time, writing this letter back to the Thessalonians back north in Macedonia to the church there. And here's his testimony. He said, this is how you received the gospel. You turned from idols to serve the true and the living God.
That's really the turn that each one of us must make. At some point in our lives, we must have a turn, a turning back, a turning away from a reversal from idols, whatever they may be. And we'll talk about that in just a minute. Turn from idols to the true and the living God.
Just a little bit of background, I found myself experiencing a little bit of sanctified disgust as I read a little this week on ancient idolatry. It's easy to forget. We have a strange and interesting situation in the history of humanity. America and our heritage in this country, especially our heritage as it comes to us from our forebarriers in Europe and in England especially, our heritage is really atypical of the heritage of the peoples of the world. We are the heirs of an iconoclastic religion. Our forebarriers, John Knox and Calvin and many of the other reformers of the 16th and 17th century made it a point to rid the faith and the church of everything they could possibly see that was iconic in any way. Getting rid of the statues that surrounded the various cathedrals and chapels of Christendom, carrying down and getting rid of the structures that had images of everything you can imagine, the apostles, the Virgin Mary and all else. Also, they were strong to get rid of even stained glass windows that had a large amount of symbolism in it. A lot of it coming from an ancient pagan background. And they tried to put into the minds and hearts of the people that the true God is invisible and the true God is like nothing else on earth and cannot be symbolized and cannot be described in any way other than the metaphors and the images of Holy Scripture and even then those fail so closely. God Himself, when it came time to design images of Himself for men, has been very discreet in what He did to picture Himself. The first thing God did was prescribe the Tabernacle. You recall how when God took Moses up to the mountain, He gave Him specific instructions as to the details of the Tabernacle that was built. And basically, the Tabernacle was portable. It was movable. It was a tent and it had staves and poles and over that were stretched the skins of animals, symbolizing nothing other than the incarnation of Christ, skin stretched over bone. And that's why He made sure that Moses understood every detail of the Tabernacle because it was the Tabernacle and the furnishings and the apparatus of the Tabernacle that's so pictured and so symbolized, the person of Jesus Christ and the person of the Holy Spirit in all of its imagery. And God specified everything that was to be put in there. And a careful study of it is one of the most rewarding studies you'll ever make is to study through the Tabernacle, the furnishings, the altar and the candle, labyrinths and all that are there that are very simple, but each one having an enormous teaching value concerning the person of Jesus Christ and His work as well as the work of the Spirit of God. But that was it. When David, King David, desired when the people came into the land and it settled in, it became not a nomadic people moving and taking the Tabernacle down and hauling it and setting it up and taking it down. When they became residents in the land and became agrarian, just like all the nations around about them settled in the land of milk and honey, the land of canon, it became the desire of David to build a house for God. God did not take David up to a mountain and tell him how to build the temple. He said, do what's in your heart. So David did. The temple was designed and modeled in many ways after the Tabernacle. David was diligent in finding the artifacts and the things that he could to bring into there. The Ark of the Covenant was restored from the Philistines and brought back so that it could be housed in the temple. But the temple had a lot of features to it that matched the the symbolism and the artwork and the craftsmanship and the structures of the world and the pagan world round about. And so it was easy for David's son Solomon to begin as he began to court women of other nations for diplomatic purposes, for marital purposes and who knows what other purposes. As he began to accumulate to himself wives, they would bring with them their idols from their various nations. And Solomon as he grew older began to make a place for them and he began to add porches and portacos and courts where these other idols could be set up. And that progressed throughout 300 plus years of Israel's history where they began to bring more and more idolatry, closer and closer to the habitation of God in the temple. And it was the last prophets before the fall of Jerusalem who prophesied men like Ezekiel and Jeremiah who talked about how God had just about enough of that. In fact, Ezekiel talks about how they had brought in a huge, huge phallic symbol and put it before the courtyard and the altar of God. The ancient idolatry had become extremely, extremely vile in so many ways. They had learned, the people had learned in their depravity to worship God's creation rather than God himself as the creator. And so they had all kinds of idols to birds and creeping things and all sorts of animals and places of nature, the stars and they worship the forces of nature, lightning and thunder and rain and on and on and on they had. In fact, when God delivered them out of Egypt, the 10 plagues of Egypt in Moses' day were actually attacks upon the pantheon of ancient Egypt. They worshiped, for example, the Nile river and God turned the Nile to blood and you can go through the various plagues and you can see that God was showing his superiority and his supremacy over the idols and the gods of ancient Egypt and the persistence when Moses came down from the mountain and found the people on the direction of the man that would be their high priest leading them in false worship. By the way, it was a very exciting worship service. If all you want out of a worship service is excitement, you would have enjoyed the little thing around the golden calf because it was music and it was dancing and it was a thrilling and exciting and invigorating, marvelous, uplifting worship service. But let me tell you what they were doing. When I was a kid, I heard the story about the calf. I thought, I imagine a little wobbly legged calf. It's just been born that they made an image. No, no, no. This was the bull, the bull, the young bull, the symbol of fertility in the ancient agrarian world and so they were worshiping fertility and they worshiped nature, the sowing of the seed and the harvesting and everything you can possibly imagine that went with it, constantly thinking about and bowing down to. In other words, they were completely involved in. I'll use a modern word materialism. Ancient idolatry was nothing more than worshiping the stuff that they had, the stuff that they knew about, the stuff that they possessed, the stuff that they could control, the stuff that they could have some use for in exchange
and it went all the way down to the personal level. Let me just mention the two extremes quickly. On the one extreme, you had the personal level of the idol. Do you remember Rachel, the beloved wife of Jacob, when she made the migration and leaving her father's home, Laban's home and began to move with Jacob and her sister and their children and began to move back toward the land of Canaan, the promised land. She took her father's idol, portable, controllable, headed among her possessions. Even though she knew the one true God, even though Jacob was to be one of the great patriarchs of God's people, the insidiousness and the deceptiveness of idolatry stayed even in that royal family of faith. Abraham's family became very personal. We cling to our idols deep within our souls. It's that which we will not give up. It's that which we must have. It is interesting that when Christ calls upon His disciples for true discipleship, the first thing He says is, you have to deny yourself. Ultimately, when you get right down to it, the biggest idol in your life is you, your world, your pleasure, your ambitions, your plans.
I worship at the altar of Ron far more than I worship the true God. That is a condition of my depravity. I don't think many of you are much better off than I am. We are born in that sea, and we're born turned to ourselves and turned inward. We are constantly worshiping that idol of self. Even when we do things that are altruistic, benevolent, and illimensionary, there's usually some satisfaction, some motive, something within our hearts that pleases us. At all, there's a check that's got to be put there. We have got to ask the Lord to search us and to know us. Let me mention briefly, and I hope it's not too briefly, because I want you to at least understand that on the other end, idols can be large. Not just small and individual and personal all the way down to our own selves can be an idol, but there can be an idol that is large. And throughout human history, mankind has tended to bow down in worship and surrender and give obeyets to idols that are large. How large, large enough to be the sovereignty over us, the government, the Caesar, the Pharaoh, the federal government, the national government. We bow down to that, looking for everything to come from the hand. It's only just a small measure between Molek, the God of the ancient Canaanite pagans, and Melek the King. It is the tendency of the corporate man and the corporate human to put government, some kind of sovereignty in the place of God, to look to man, civil government, the King for life, for sustenance, for liberties, for freedoms, and they're not found. And then even man writ large as a government, corporate man, tends to have two idols that it worships. It either worships at the idol of the individual man, the rugged individual, the successful, the powerful, the self-made man, the man who has all within himself the virtues that he needs, the prideful man, the upright man who is upright in his own thinking, and put that man at the center and make him the idol of the society and pursue all that makes for that man, whether it's education, prestige, breeding, connections, make that person in that ideal our idol,
or it goes to the other side. And that's to make needy man, pitiful man, broken and helpless man an idol, to put it the forefront of all of our worship and our money and our taxes and which become ties when we make the government our God that becomes ties and we give them in order to take care of the forgotten man, the unemployed, the down and out, the discriminated against, those that have been treated we think unjustly in society and elevate that forgotten man to a place to where he becomes the most important thing in the society and all else must be regulated and governed according to that man. It's when our pity gets perverted and turns into worship so that whatever we do wherever we go we are told we've got to take care of that forgotten man. There is man corporate, all great movements of man is always to cluster into giant communes and communities and so there is a religious zeal to those that would put us all together in a communism and give that absolute sway over every area of our lives, require obedience and obeyance in every area of our lives, control all of our speech, our worship in everything or the benefit of man in commune. You see what happens? We tend to change the truth of God into a lie and instead of worshiping the true God we worship the idol. Let's put the word idol means by the way it means empty it means perverted it means false
and we're far beyond in our way of thinking and winning our heart from just a totem up on a tree or a little icon sitting on a shelf or a dashboard. We're way beyond that. Our problem is the deepest recesses of our souls what do we worship to whom do we bow down who strikes the most fear in our hearts and who do we give reverence to immeasurably and continually and constantly the Lord is calling those from Pharaoh's day from Caesar's day from Nebuchadnezzar's day and from every century in modern times all the way to today's day. God is calling us away from those idols back to himself, atturning from all that to him and the selection today for the reading earlier just says it bell at anything else and let me just close with the voice of Isaiah the prophet. There is no other God besides me a righteous God and a Savior who saves us, who rescues us, who provides for us, who comforts us, who encourages us, whoever does that is our God. Does that arise from ourself? Does that come from our community? Does that come from our government? Does that even come from our church? Whatever that is is becoming our God. But if we look to the true God he says there is none besides me and so he sends out the invitation turn to me and be saved all the ends of the earth. Why all the ends of the earth? Because all of the earth lies in our Dollar Tree. It is as I said at the outset you bick with us. It's everywhere. All the earth needs to hear this message. I am God and there is no other by myself. I have sworn from my mouth has gone out in righteousness a word that shall not return. What word is that? It is the gospel. It is the gospel of Jesus Christ that there is a liberating from the slavery of idolatry. There's a turning from it and it comes in Christ himself. In fact let me read one verse beyond where we read this morning earlier. To me every knee shall bow and every tongue shall swear allegiance. Listen to that language. Knees bowing swearing allegiance. I pledge allegiance to God and God alone always. Everywhere, every one. God won't have it any other way.