Idol Hands
By Audrey Stallsmith
We all know the old saying about idle hands. But the Old Testament story of the finned Dagon’s downfall recently got me to wondering about the significance of idol hands being lopped off, along with the image’s head, so that only its fishy torso and tail remained.
That, as you may recall, happend when the Philistines made the mistake of bringing the captured Israeli ark of the covenant into their god's temple. The commentaries I consulted tell me those severed pieces mean the hollow Dagon had neither wisdom nor strength with which to protect his worshippers.
And, though we may think we have eliminated idols in the centuries since, they keep creeping back. Much like the—fortunately somewhat groggy—hornets which sneak in when I forget to close the unscreened kitchen windows during these September evenings.
We’ve found that those buzzers don’t actually sting unless we accidentally lean against them. Still, I throw out as many as I can catch on the assumption that less hornets mean less chances of getting zapped. But I’m guessing that, just as I overlook some of the hornets, even we Christians overlook some of the idols that we unconsciously harbor until we attempt to lean on them—with painful consequences.
As for non-Christians, it is my contention that everybody worships something, even people who claim to be atheists or agnostics. Unfortunately, those who “show reverence or adoration for” things other than God shortly find those things can’t measure up.
For example, just as sports nuts may become obsessed with certain teams, some avid readers become oddly preoccupied with fictional characters. Normal fans, of course, keep their admiration short of obeisance. But others seem to make their devotion tantamount to a religion.
The most extreme examples include Star Wars fans, Sherlock Holmes fanatics, or the devotees of the Arthurian saga. Granted, Arthur may have been based on a genuine king, but his story got considerably embellished over the years. Doyle reportedly derived the character of Holmes from a doctor he knew, but that man definitely wasn’t a consulting detective. So, fans’ attachment to such characters is attachment to personalities which, like the Philistine idol’s, never really existed except in the realm of imagination.
Speaking of which, Jimmy Stewart once played the role of a man who had an invisible rabbit named Harvey for a friend. And he reported that afterwards he often had people ask him, in all seriousness, “Is Harvey with you today?”
Do people really have that much trouble distinguishing fiction from real life? Or is it just that they want to believe there is an invisible friend like Harvey who will accompany them everywhere, a brain like Holmes’ which has all of the answers, or a kingdom like Arthur’s where chivalry reigns supreme? If only they could see that we have all that when we have God!
Holmes creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, actually is an example of one of those people who had odd obsessions. He wasn’t infatuated with Holmes himself—and, in fact, eventually came close to hating his own creation because he thought his other books were better than the mysteries, an opinion apparently not shared by the public.
However, in later life he went in for spiritualism and sprites and an insistence that Houdini’s tricks weren’t really tricks at all. So, the agnostic who said he wouldn’t believe anything which couldn’t be proven eventually came to believe in ghosts, fairy tales, and magic!
Speaking of which, I recently was trying to pin down what “spirit” means. A paragraph our church connection wanted to add to the discipline—and on which we members were supposed to vote—implied that non-Christians had no spiritual life. I found that doubtful. After all, the most decadent persons are said to be inhabited by evil spirits, so they definitely have a spiritual life, though not of the right kind.
A Bible dictionary I consulted noted that spirit actually means “breath,” as in the life that God originally breathed into man. In that sense, it could mean the body’s animating factor, since we talk of the spirit departing during death. But, according to that dictionary, spirit can also refer to the soul when it is separate from the body or to angels or demons—the latter of which can inhabit human bodies while the former apparently aren’t allowed to do so. It also may mean “inclination.”
So perhaps what we worship is that toward which our spirits incline. In Counterfeit Gods, Timothy Keller suggests that “an idol is something we cannot live without.” He mentions, as an example, a woman he knew who waited years to have children. The success of the two she finally managed to conceive became, therefore, much too important to her own happiness.
And no child can bear the weight of having to be someone else’s god. Keller believes this accounts for the story of Abraham and Isaac on the mountain of sacrifice, since Abraham too had waited so long for that son. “If Isaac had become the main hope and joy of Abraham’s life,” Keller writes, “his father would have either overdisciplined him. . .or underdisciplined him. . .He would have become overly angry and cruel. . .when his son disappointed him.” So, in forcing Abraham to choose who His deity really was, God actually was trying to save Isaac.
People who get their sense of worth from a spouse or lover instead of from God put the kind of weight on a romantic relationship that it can’t support either. Others invest themselves so completely in their careers that, if those crumble into ruin around them, they have nothing left. So, before we weigh down relationships or vocations under unrealistic expectations to the point of their breaking, we need to ask ourselves a question. “Am I in this relationship or vocation for what it can give me or for what I can give it?”
I suspect most people’s idols eventually are going to end up destroyed for them in some way, as Dagon was. You would think that would have made the Philistines disillusioned with their favorite god, who was supposed to be Baal’s father.
However, they apparently continued to worship Dagon. They just avoided stepping on the threshold where his severed head and hands had once lain. In the same way, modern people often will cling to their idols as long as they can, even after they have been disillusioned with them—because they have nothing else to provide them with any sense of purpose. They just have to avoid anything that reminds them of their god’s failure.
And, perhaps like the Philistines, they prefer ineffective deities like Dagon who stayed where he was set to One they cannot control. One who is capable of shaking their safe world to pieces.
The Israelites initially were overjoyed when the “cowed” Philistines meekly gave back—via ox cart—the ark of the covenant which represented Jehovah’s presence. However, even those Israelites shortly became dismayed about Jehovah’s return when he killed some of them for looking into that ark. The survivors in that town, like the Philistines, shortly began looking for someone else to take Jehovah off their hands.
What they should have remembered is that God is God, not a celestial chum whose laws we can casually disregard without paying for that defiance. Even an earthly monarch has to command respect for his/her rule to be effective. I believe the late Queen Elizabeth of England knew that, which is why she preserved all the pomp and circumstance of her office.
Those in Great Britain who want to pull everybody down to the same level are shortly going to realize that is no monarchy at all. Of course, the British government these days actually is constitutional, meaning that all of the real power lies with the Parliament.
But the simplest and best government really is a good monarch. Unfortunately, not many humans remain good when invested with that much power, so we’ve had to come up with systems of government which curb power. But some day those of us who choose to be part of it will enter an incorruptible kingdom where an all-powerful God is in charge.
So, what will keep us from straying after other gods in the meantime? We need to acknowledge that nothing, no matter how good, can ever take God’s place in our lives. As Keller expresses it, “no matter what we put our hopes in, in the morning, it is always Leah, never Rachel.” When I recently heard of a local married pastor abandoning his church and family for another woman, I could only think “She is so not going to be worth it!”
But such things are going to keep happening until we accept the fact that we were made to worship God, nothing smaller. And that anything less than God never is going to satisfy us. Although most of us church goers have been informed of this from our youth, we often don’t seem to buy it until everything else that we buy or buy into turns out to be a disappointment.
Keller doesn’t believe we need to eliminate all the idols from our life, as long as we can dethrone them instead. After all, you don’t want to kick your spouse, children, or career to the curb just because your love has morphed into a more self-centered neediness.
Instead, we must learn to put the full weight of our dependence and trust on God rather than on other people or things, so that we can love without smothering and live without those other people or things if we have to. As Keller concludes, “We have to know, to be assured, that God so loves, cherishes, and delights in us that we can rest our hearts on him for our significance and security.”