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What are you counting on to provide meaning, purpose, hope, and happiness for even the smallest part of your life? If it’s not Jesus Christ, then you are locked in a life and death struggle with a most formidable spiritual enemy: idolatry. Idolatry is what leads us to conclude that Paul could not possibly be serious when he declares that everything in the universe must either find its meaning by bowing before Christ, or become a foe that will rob us of spiritual life itself.

oikonomia

 

 Chosen by God
Our Greatest Spiritual Threat
May 1-2, 2010
Glenn McDonald
Ephesians 1:9-10, 22-23

 

What is the most frequently mentioned subject in the Bible? That’s kind of like asking, “What body of water lies next to Atlantic City?” As you might expect, the Bible’s number one subject is God. Here’s a harder question: What is the second most frequently mentioned subject in Scripture? The answer is idolatry. God comes in first. Not-God comes in second. More than anything, the Bible is a book dedicated to helping us know the identity of the one-and-only Lord of life.

The book of Ephesians isn’t bashful about proclaiming more specifically who that Lord is. The words “Jesus” or “Christ” appear directly or indirectly in nine of the first ten verses of Paul’s letter. This is a document that is all about God and his Son, and how a life surrendered to the Lord will become a life transformed. We hope that once again you have brought your own Bible here to church. Let’s turn together to Ephesians – a book that is short in length but astonishing in its impact over the course of human history.  

We’re going slowly through Ephesians chapter one, lingering over what scholars like to call a “purple patch” of Bible teaching. That’s because verses 3-14 are dense and theologically rich. If we hydroplane over these verses, merely skimming the surface of grammar and syntax, we will miss so much. If you have a chance to visit the Louvre in Paris, you don’t walk down all the halls as quickly as you can just to say that you’ve been there. You stop in front of the Mona Lisa and Winged Victory and other priceless works of art and you drink them in.

Paul is inviting us to do something counter-cultural: to put on the brakes, to give up multi-tasking for a few minutes, and to think deeply and clearly about what God has done for us in the person of his Son. Today we arrive at chapter one, verses 9-10. Since the content of verses 22-23 echoes what we find there, let’s tackle all four of these verses together. More than that, let’s imprint them on our minds intentionally. Scientists have determined that we remember approximately 10% of what we hear and as much as 60% of what we see. But we remember 100% of what we commit to memory. Our hope is that you will continue to accept the challenge of memorizing this part of the Word of God. Let’s stand and speak these verses together – whether by reading your Bible, looking up at the screens, or reciting from memory:

And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure,
which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment – to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ… And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him
to be head over everything for the church, which is his body,
the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.

For the past few weeks we’ve been considering in detail how God has blessed us since before the creation of the universe. Now we shift to the fact that all this has happened through a specific person: Jesus of Nazareth.  

If someone asks you, “Where exactly does the Bible affirm that Jesus is the only way – the one-and-only centerpiece of God’s plan to rescue the world?” point them to Ephesians chapter one. Paul doesn’t mince words. “God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything…” That’s all things and everything. Jesus is not one of five remaining contestants in a competition called Religious Idol, where a panel of judges weighs in every week as to whether he is more talented and popular than Buddha, Mohammed, Moses, or Confucius – and all of us get to vote in the winner. The first mark of a disciple is not merely a heart for Christ, but a heart for Christ alone.

Christians do not believe in God “in general.” We believe that Jesus of Nazareth represents the character and the identity of God specifically – that Jesus is, in fact, the second person of what theologians have come to call the Trinity. What we learn from Scripture is that God is extraordinary. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – three persons who each represent 100% of the nature, holiness, and purposefulness of the one living God. It should not surprise us that at the very core of Reality there is a mystery that our minds will never fully be able to comprehend, in this world or the next. The wisest response to this is to be humbly and utterly amazed.

Look at how Paul builds the bridge between verses 9 and 10. God’s purposes for us and for the world, which are being carried out uniquely through Christ, will be “put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment.” The five English words “to be put into effect” are a translation of a single Greek word: oikonomia. That’s the source of our modern word “economy.” Essentially Jesus is the Alan Greenspan of the universe. He watches over all of reality, and carefully plans everything that is happening – except that with Jesus, there is no possibility that God’s management system is ever going to melt down or crash.

Whenever we get together to worship, this is one of the things we always need to keep in mind: God owns and manages everything. In the words of theologian Walter Wink, “To worship is to remember Who owns the house.”

On several occasions our family has been invited to spend a week living in somebody else’s vacation home while they are gone. We cook in their kitchen, sleep in their beds, and change the channels with their remote. Everything in that house reminds us of them. Their family pictures are on the walls, not ours. They have organized things as they think best, and we are neither empowered nor encouraged to cut new windows into the walls just because we’d prefer a different view. Living on somebody else’s property helps us understand what it means to cultivate an attitude of stewardship. We all live in God’s house. Everywhere we look, we see reminders of him. Scripture tells us that God specially created this world as a wonderful place for us to occupy for a time, and that Jesus is the one who directs our oikonomia – God’s spiritual economy whereby he will provide everything we need…if we trust him.

What about the phrase in verse 10, “when the times will have reached their fulfillment”? Does this mean that Jesus will finally be in charge of everything at the end of history, but that he’s not fully in charge of anything right now? The New Testament teaches something different. From the moment Jesus ascended into heaven 40 days after his resurrection, he was declared in the presence of the angelic and demonic hosts to be King of the universe. Right now he rules invisibly. At the second coming his rule will become visible to everyone. A Christian is someone who gambles everything in the present moment that Reality is more than meets the eye. Today we can sample in part the spiritual treasures that will one day be ours in full.

That brings us to the last two verses of the chapter. Speaking of Jesus, Paul says, “And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.” This notion of fullness, or pleroma in Greek, was very important in the ancient world. How could I be filled up with the presence and the power of the gods so that my life might literally be full-filled?

Paul shouts, “Here is God’s answer to that question! If you are in Christ – if you trust him with all your heart and mind and soul and strength – then all the fullness of God is in you.” If we have Jesus, we have everything we need. And that means there is no room or no demand for anything else.  

The first chapter of Ephesians ought to remind us of the first line of the Ten Commandments: “You shall have no other gods before me.” That word “before” can also be translated “beside.” No other pretender deity can be in front of, in place of, alongside, or even within sight of the true God. God is not the highest peak in a chain of mountains. He is not the best deal we can get at this time in history. The primary message of the Bible is that there is no God but God – and Ephesians specifically informs us that all of God’s identity and purposes are summed up in Jesus.

Therefore other so-called deities and saviors will inevitably fail us. Consider the parade of gods that has marched across the pages of history. We can expect no help from Baal, Isis, Zeus, or Aphrodite. There will be no final security from the Sanhedrin, the Houses of Parliament, or the Pentagon. Both communism and capitalism will fail to bring us the Good Life.

Our deepest needs to be full-filled will not be met by great jobs, great vacations, great lovers, or great expectations. The gods of my child’s happiness, my spouse’s welfare, or my need to be in control, or my dreams for the future – if I live for them more than I live for the true God -- are going to disillusion me. Bud Light will not slake what I’m really thirsty for, driving a Hyundai will not set me free, and while staying at a Holiday Inn Express may make me feel smarter, I’m not going to be any wiser.

We can now assign a name to the greatest spiritual threat that any one of us is ever going to face. It is idolatry. The worst thing that can ever happen to us is that we will seek fullness, in whole or in part, in something or someone besides the One whom God has declared to be “the head over everything in heaven and on earth.” This is, quite simply, the Great Sin.

Idolatry is easy to define. It means elevating something to a place of honor or influence that only God deserves. Idolatry is not just a failure to obey God. It means setting our hearts on something that is Not-God. An idol is anything apart from the Lord that we depend on to be happy, fulfilled, or secure. Eugene Peterson says it well: Idols are “gods with all the God taken out so we can continue to be our own gods.”

Some idols are clearly horrid. But many others represent good things, in and of themselves. A joyful marriage, kids who stand out from the crowd because they are super high achievers, a well-paying job, a perfectly manicured lawn, continually upgraded furniture, or doctrinal accuracy in our small group are not inherently wrong. It’s just that so often we want these things too much.

Idolatry is not somebody else’s problem. We can never say, “Those poor other people who struggle with false gods.” Idol worship is universal. How can you identify your own rival gods? Ask these questions: What is the first thing on my mind in the morning, and the last thing I think about when I’m falling asleep? What is the one thing, if I had it in hand right now – if I just had that – would mean that my life was going really well? Is there something I desire so much that I am willing to hurt or disappoint other people in order to have it?

Christians have a special and diabolical struggle with idolatry. We may tell ourselves that we don’t sin this particular sin because after all we follow Jesus, the one-and-only Lord of Life. But in some manner every one of us falls prey, if only in subtle ways, to a reality that may be described by the words Jesus and _______. I look to Jesus as my Lord and Savior. And…I am also counting on this to be happy.

Last fall when I resigned as senior pastor of ZPC, my statement to all of you included a specific confession of idolatry. I look to Jesus and I love him. But I also found myself pursuing the ideals of a church that would always be growing, and a pastoral reputation that would always be glowing. I wanted those things too much. In effect I was pursuing rivals to Jesus in Jesus’ name! Through a variety of circumstances – essentially through severe mercy – God compelled me to face my idols, and he eliminated all their glitter. We must either abandon ourselves to Christ, “the head of all things in heaven and on earth,” or God will abandon us to the misery of life under the tragic lordship of gods which are no gods at all.

Most of us have a mental image that we associate with idolatry in a biblical context. We picture people placing treasure and property on the altar of some grotesque and demanding false god. In the extreme, there is even human sacrifice. These realities were entirely accurate when it came to the worship of ancient Near Eastern deities like Baal and Molech. But they are also entirely accurate today. I took my wife and my children and I put them on the altar of ministry success. Without ever speaking the words, I was actually saying, “I will risk losing the most precious people in my life so I can work harder. So I can put in more hours. So I can get more done, and therefore be happy with a kind of happiness that I apparently don’t believe Christ alone is able to give to me.” 

We always fool ourselves. We think that our idols are there to serve us. But we always end up serving them. And in the process we may lose everything. In his book Counterfeit Gods, Tim Keller suggests, “We may not realize how idolatrous our career has become to us, until we are faced with a situation in which telling the truth or acting with integrity would mean a serious blow to our professional advancement.” If we believe the empty promises of money, sex, and power – if we simply have to have certain things or life will not go well for us – our idols will ultimately devour us.

Idolatry is our greatest spiritual challenge. How do we eliminate it? It’s tempting to take the Nike approach: Just do it. Just throw down anything in life that is less than God. But Satan is both subtle and patient. He is more than willing to see us attempt this in our own wisdom and strength, and thus end up worshipping a new idol of self-sufficiency. Scripture would have us follow a different strategy. Let’s look at a trio of healthy steps.

First – and this must come first – we either establish for the first time or reaffirm our identity in Christ. As an act of faith we declare, “All the fullness I need is found in Christ alone.” Ephesians 1:3-14 is an extended declaration of what it means to be “in Christ.” We are blessed. We are chosen. We have been predestined to be adopted as God’s children. We are loved. We are forgiven. We don’t have to earn or deserve anything that the world promises, because God has already given us everything through his Son.

All we have to do is watch two hours of TV or stand for 10 minutes in front of the magazine rack to realize that our culture has utterly renounced such promises of God. The philosopher Ernest Becker coined the phrase “apocalyptic romance” to describe our society’s desperate hope that sex and love and being in just the right relationship with just the right person will somehow save us. I will find life’s true fullness or pleroma only if I am deeply in love with someone, and that someone is deeply in love with me. In the words of that other famous philosopher, Dean Martin, You’re Nobody ‘Till Somebody Loves You. Our culture literally believes that. You don’t have an identity until you’re ravished by someone else’s affection. No wonder we look back on high school and shudder.

Maybe we can establish our identity through achievement. Madonna recently said: “I have an iron will, and all of my will has always been to conquer some horrible feeling of inadequacy… I push past one spell of it and discover myself as a special human being and then I get to another stage and think I’m mediocre and uninteresting… Again and again. My drive in life is from this horrible fear of being mediocre. And that’s always pushing me, pushing me. Because even though I’ve become Somebody, I still have to prove that I’m Somebody. My struggle has never ended and it probably never will.”

Here’s the Bible’s incredible news: You already are somebody if you are in Christ. You are God’s infinitely loved child, and nothing can ever take that away from you. Paul writes in Colossians 3:3-4, “Your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” If knowing and relating to Christ becomes our actual life, the way we are really living, we will never need to live in fear again.

Here’s the second step to de-idolizing our lives: Replace what is false with what is true.  In Tim Keller’s words, “The only way to dispossess the heart of an old affection is the expulsive power of a new one.” False gods cannot merely be thrown down through an act of the will. We must replace them with devotion to the true God. Only the blessing of God is sufficient to re-order those places in our hearts that crave what is less than God. All of us are people who have spent our lives looking for blessing in all the wrong places. The only true way to be blessed as God would have us be blessed is by receiving the fullness of Jesus Christ, just as Paul describes it in verse 23.

Third, and finally, only after we know our identity in Christ and only after we have made a commitment to rely on him alone, we must ruthlessly turn our backs on every known idol. If you knew there was a cancer growing in your body, wouldn’t you do everything possible to eradicate it? Accept the Bible’s diagnosis that idolatry is nothing less than spiritual cancer. God calls us to live apart from things that we never thought we could live without. We must be able to say to our idols, “Because I have Jesus, I can live without you.”  

In truth, many of the things we pursue as idols can and should remain in our lives. After all, God wants us to work hard. He is pleased that we love our children. He is willing to bless us financially. But all such ideals must be demoted to their proper place. They are all less than Christ.  By God’s grace I am still married to the same remarkable woman. I am walking well with each of my children. I didn’t have to do some amazing thing in order to be happy and fulfilled. Jesus had already done all of that for me – and he has done the same for you. He is able and willing to secure your life…if only you are willing to accept your full security in Christ and Christ alone.