I saw my friend Mike at a conference recently. Mike's a dear Christian brother who's had a long and successful career on Wall Street. But these past months have felt like a Category 5 hurricane in his life and his business.
When I asked Mike how all the turbulence and uncertainty were affecting him, he responded with an answer I've been chewing on ever since. "It's exposed my idols."
I'm quite sure my friend does not have a graven image in his closet. But not all idols are carved out of stone. An idol is simply something we put our faith in - to give us security, to give us identity, to give us significance, to give us love. As Mike told me not long after the financial tsunami of September 2008, "If you'd asked any of us marketplace Christians where our security was, we would have told you we were definitely trusting the Lord. But what's happened has shown us what we were really trusting in."
God will do what He has to do to "expose our idols" and show us what we're "really trusting in." It usually means shaking whatever we've trusted instead of trusting Him. In Old Testament times, the Philistines put their faith in a god they called Dagon. When they captured the ark of God's covenant with Israel, Dagon had some problems. "When the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, there was Dagon, fallen on his face on the ground before the ark of the Lord!" They put old Dagon back in his place, but the next morning they found that "his head and hands had been broken off" (1 Samuel 5:1-4).
Every "idol" will ultimately fall on its face and break. It doesn't matter if it's your career, a boyfriend or girlfriend, a house, or a bank account. Even very good things can become idols - your children, your church, your ministry. They're false gods when we need them to give us our worth, our identity, or our security.
But many times we can't recognize an idol until it's shaken or gone. The First Commandment is still first. "You shall have no other gods before Me" (Exodus 20:3).
Jonah revealed the high price of diverting our trust from the true God to another god. "Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs" (Jonah 2:8). If we only knew all we could have from God...but for the idol.