Exodus 20:3; 1 John 5:21
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen.
D. L. MOODY (1837-1899): You don’t have to go to heathen lands today to find false gods. America is full of them.
C. H. SPURGEON (1834-1892): In America, it is said, they worship the almighty dollar.
D. L. MOODY: With many, it is the god of money. We haven’t got through worshiping the golden calf yet. If a man will sell his principles for gold, isn’t he making it a god? If he trusts in his wealth to keep him from want and to supply his needs, are not riches his god? Many a man says, “Give me money, and I will give you heaven. What care I for all the glories and treasures of heaven? Give me treasures here! I don’t care for heaven! I want to be a successful businessman.”
WILLIAM JAY (1769-1853): What do you think of the man whose thoughts and affections daily encircle the throne of mammon; whose earth-born soul cannot pass by a particle of shining dust without kneeling and praying; who, to acquire it, rises and grinds the faces of the poor, and transgresses the laws of God; whose highest aim, and whose only business is to amass his thousands? Why, such a man, to use the words of Job, “says to gold, thou art my hope, and to fine gold, thou art my confidence,” Job 31:24. “His wealth,” says Solomon, “is his strong city, and a high wall in his own council,” Proverbs 18:11. “He trusts,” says the apostle Paul, “in uncertain riches,” 1 Timothy 6:17; the covetous man therefore is expressly called an “idolater,” and stands in the Bible excluded from the kingdom of God, Ephesians 5:5.
MATTHEW HENRY (1662-1714): Observe, covetousness is spiritual idolatry: it is the giving of that love and regard to worldly wealth which are due to God only, and carries a greater degree of malignity in it, and is more highly provoking to God, than is commonly thought.
WILLIAM JAY: What is idolatry?
OLIVER CROMWELL (1599-1658): Idolatry is anything which cooleth thy desires after Christ.
WILLIAM JAY: Is it not the transferring to the creature, the homage due to the Creator? If therefore we love or fear any thing more than God; if we make it our portion and depend upon it for happiness, we are chargeable with idolatry.
D. L. MOODY: Whatever you love more than God is your idol. Rich or poor, learned or unlearned, all classes of men and women are guilty of this sin. “The mean man boweth down, and the great man humbleth himself,” Isaiah 2:9.
MARTIN LUTHER (1483-1546): We easily fall into idolatry, because we are inclined to it by nature.
MARTYN LLOYD-JONES (1899-1981): Look at the modern idols―the desire to be thought great―or, people who are considered great, they turn them into idols.
C. H. SPURGEON: Some idolize themselves; they look in the glass, and there see the face of their god.
D. L. MOODY: A man may make a god of himself, of a child, of a mother, of some precious gift that God has bestowed upon him. He may forget the Giver and let his heart go out in adoration toward the gift. Many make a god of pleasure; that is what their hearts are set on. If some old Greek or Roman came to life again and saw man in a drunken debauch, would he believe that the worship of Bacchus had died out? If he saw the streets of our large cities filled with harlots, would he believe that the worship of Venus had ceased? Others take fashion as their god. They give their time and thought to dress. They fear what others will think of them…But all false gods are not as gross as these.
C. H. SPURGEON: Might we not also say to many a mother and many a father concerning their children, keep yourselves from idols?
SAMUEL RUTHERFORD (1600-1661): Take no heavier lift of your children, than our Lord alloweth; give them room beside your heart, but not in the yolk of your heart, where Christ should be; for then they are your idols, not your children.
MARTYN LLOYD-JONES: Oh, there’s no limit to the variety of idols that men and women make.
JOHN CALVIN (1509-1564): Every one of us is, from his mother’s womb, expert in inventing idols―man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual idol factory.
C. H. SPURGEON: You may be sure that there is one idol of which we can never thoroughly cleanse our hearts though we try, and though by God’s strength we give him a blow every day. It is the god of pride. He changes his shape continually; sometimes he calls himself humility, and we begin to bow before him, till we find we are getting proud of our humility. At another time he assumes the fashion of conscientiousness, and we begin to carp at this, and cavil at the other, and all the while we are tampering with our own professed sanctity, and are bowing before the shrine of religious pride…Idolatry will intrude itself in one form or another.
MARTYN LLOYD-JONES: Look at the gods that the world makes for itself. The man who doesn’t believe in God invariably believes in something. And what does he believe in? Well, he believes in idols.
D. L. MOODY: The atheist says that he does not believe in God; he denies His existence, but he can’t help setting up some other god in His place.
MARTYN LLOYD-JONES: There are people who undoubtedly worship science; they’re always talking as if science were some kind of deity―the modern man says, ‘I believe in Science, I believe in learning and in knowledge.’ He’s turned his back on God―he can’t believe that sort of thing, but he believes that the advance of knowledge and learning is really something that’s going to save man and the world; it’s going to put everything right and straight. Political action, all these things, these are the modern idols, the modern gods.
WILLIAM JAY: All this is trusting in man, and making flesh our arm; and in proportion as we do this, the heart departeth from the Lord. And this is the essence of man’s apostasy; something besides God has his admiration and attachment, his hope and dependence.
MARTYN LLOYD-JONES: The modern man, increasingly, it seems to me, believes in men―in great men. We surely all ought to be wide awake to this. It was the whole explanation, in a sense, of the tragedy of the Second World War, this idea of the superman, the dictator―the great man. Yes, it’s all very well for us to look on at what happened in Germany before the war. My dear friends, this country is rampant with the same thing, in a sense. Not always the same great man, but great men, a belief in men―there are many instances of this, and many manifestations of it. The tendency to turn men into gods; to idealize them―the wise man, the far-sighted leader―and they’re going to solve all the problems of life for us and lead us into some kind of paradise.
C. H. SPURGEON: O beware of all idolatry! We may very well say “Amen” to that.
