I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a chasing after wind. (Ecclesiastes 1:14)
They worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator. (Romans 1:25, ESV)
“Is that all there is?” “There has to be more to life than this!” These sentiments and more like them represent the fleeting nature of achievements and accumulation.
Chasing the “big moment,” the historic trophy, the wrong kind of “immortality,” or recognition and fame can leave an enormous hole in our souls.
Long before we saw Tom Brady’s over-the-top move on a made-for-TV special, we watched an infamous 60 Minutes interview in which Brady rhetorically asked, “Why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think there is something more out there…there’s got to be more than this.”
While he stands atop the best of the best quarterbacks in NFL history, he is also the poster child for “chasing the wind.” Of course, anyone living in a glass house shouldn’t throw rocks—meaning, we might not be a Hall of Fame quarterback, but we, like Tom, know what it is like to achieve a dream and realize “there has to be more than this.”
Tim Keller writes, “Though we think we live in a secular world, idols, the glittering gods of our age, hold title to the functional trust of our hearts… What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.”
We might not have statues or icons before which we bow, but, sadly, we have given our hearts to idols that cannot deliver what we expect from them: meaning, purpose, satisfaction, contentment, happiness, etc.
Like Sisyphus in the Greek myth, we roll that stone to the top of the mountain only to endlessly repeat the cycle of “searching and never finding.” Tragically, we deceive ourselves into thinking that if I only had more of the same, at some point I would find that elusive happiness about which I have always dreamt.
Thomas Oden astutely observes, “When a finite thing [becomes] a center of value by which other values are judged . . . [and] has been elevated to centrality and imagined as a final source of meaning, then one has chosen what Jews and Christians call a god [idol]. . . One has a god [idol] when a finite value is worshipped, adored, and viewed as that without which one cannot receive life joyfully.”
Granted, understanding the heart of Oden’s observation might take a minute or two, but the gist of what he argues is this: take any good thing (relationship, career, hobby, sport….) and make it the most important thing, and we have fashioned an idol.
Taking a good thing and attempting to make it the best thing ends up making it a bad thing. Whenever we try to center our lives around created things rather than our Creator, we have fashioned an idol. As John Calvin remarked five hundred years ago, “Our hearts are perpetual idol factories.”
A part of what it means to be created in God’s image suggests that we are hardwired to worship. We cannot avoid worshipping someone or something. If we refuse to worship the lover of our souls, we don’t stop worshipping; instead, we end up worshipping some created thing—that is a textbook definition of idolatry.
The outcome of all this futility is that we become like what we worship: blind, deaf, and lifeless. The only way to recover from this miserable situation is to turn from idols to the true and living God.
Ironically, when our Creator becomes the preeminent focus of our lives (our supreme good), all created things (relationships, sports, hobbies, careers, achievements) become immensely more meaningful and satisfying.
Prayer: Father, forgive me for taking your gifts and elevating them above you in importance.