So if idolatry is more than just manmade figurines like we saw in National Geographic when we were kids and profanity is more than just using swear words, what are they?
In Jesus’ day, there were plenty of people walking around saying they were fully devoted to God. They spent lots of time doing spiritual things, like praying and going to synagogue (their equivalent of our modern-day church meetings) and even giving to the poor. They were careful not to break any of the Ten Commandments, including and especially the two commandments dealing with making “graven images” or idols and with taking God’s name in vain.
And, yet, after all that, Jesus tells these religious people that their righteousness is as filthy rags (which has a rather vulgar connotation, I might add) and that God won’t even recognize them when they try to get into heaven, thus implying that they won’t be able to do so.
Now, why are their attempts at doing right so wrong? Much of it has to do with motive, with intent. You can do all the right things for all the wrong reasons. Their righteous behavior was actually a form of idolatry.
Today there is much talk in the secular world about spirituality. By “spirituality” people mean something that is other than material, but also other than religious. There is a great recognition in our day and age that materialism in all its many forms is wholly inadequate for satisfying the spiritual hunger of us mortals. So people are returning to a search for spiritual fulfillment. But in doing so they are looking for avenues other than the traditional religious ones, recognizing, rightly so, that these routes can be as useless as material pursuits.
The problem such people are having is that they are attempting to build a spiritual “house” without a God-foundation, something that cannot be done. For any attempt to be other-focused apart from God will inevitably turn into self-focus, which as we’ve said is the spiritual equivalent of a black hole in outer space.
Oddly enough, religious people are attempting the same thing. They are trying to use the secular spiritual terminology to appear contemporary, but it feels very inauthentic to their nonbelieving neighbors, and sometimes rightly so. For that secular spirituality is a spirituality that tries to bypass God and you can’t have a God-centered spirituality that at the same time bypasses God. Such is the definition of a non sequitor, something that doesn’t line up.
So these attempts at spirituality, by religious or by nonreligious people, are just as idolatrous as the attempts by religious people to appear religious for selfish reasons. The least that can be said for the nonreligous attempt at spirituality is that it can at times be a more honest attempt.
An honest nonbeliever is a whole lot more pleasing to God than a dishonest believer. An agnostic who says she really doesn’t know and yet is earnestly seeking to know is headed in the right direction. A self-proclaimed atheist and a smug Believer are two peas in the same pod. They’ve stopped asking questions and in so doing are deeply dishonest and have fallen into the worst form of self-deception – idolatry.
Smugness, by the way, is a very intense form of idolatry, for it says that I am right beyond all doubt. In other words, it is a rightness which cannot be questioned. By removing my rightness from questioning, I put myself in grave danger of being very wrong and not having any awareness to reverse direction. I therefore damn myself beyond hope. Thus the reason Jesus says that some very highly devoted religious people will lose it all in the end.
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