Counterfeit Gods
COUNTERFEIT GODS
by
TIMOTHY KELLER
A counterfeit god is anything so central and essential to your life that, should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living. (p. xviii)
Many look to these things for the hope, meaning, and fulfillment that only God can provide. (p. xix)
What many people call “psychological problems” are simple issues of idolatry. (p. xxiii)
If anyone puts a child in the place of the true God, it creates an idolatrous love that will smother the child and strangle the relationship. (p. 7)
Notice, God was not asking him to walk over into Isaac’s tent and just murder him. He asked him to make him a burnt offering. He was calling in Abraham’s debt/ His son was going to die for the sins of the family. (p. 10)
The Lord is saying, “Now I know that you love me more than anything in the world.” That’s what “the fear of God” means. (p. 13)
If Isaac had become the main hope and joy of Abraham’s life, his father would have either overdisciplined him (because he needed his son to be “perfect”) or underdisciplined him (because he couldn’t bear his son’s displeasure) or both. (p. 16)
The Bible is filled with stories of figures such as Joseph, Moses, and David in which god seemed to have abandoned them, but later it is revealed he has dealing with the destructive idols in their lives and that could only have come to pass through their experience of difficulty. (p. 20)
In the same way, we know a good thing has become a counterfeit god when its demands on you exceed proper boundaries. (p. 23)
It has always been possible to make romantic love and marriage into a counterfeit god, but we live in a culture that makes it even easier to mistake love for God, to be swept up by it, and to rest all our hopes for happiness upon it. (p. 24)
Even people who completely avoid romantic love out of bitterness or fear are actually being controlled by its power. (p. 31)
When you finally realize this, there are four things you can do. You can blame the things that are disappointing you and try to move on to better ones. That’s the way of continued idolatry and spiritual addiction. The second thing you can do is blame yourself and beat yourself and say, “I have somehow been a failure. I see everybody else is happy. I don’t know why I am not happy. There is something wrong with me.” That’s the way of self-loathing and shame. Third, you can blame the world. You can say, “Curses on the entire opposite sex,” in which case you make yourself hard, cynical, and empty. Lastly, you can, as C. S. Lewis says at the end of his great chapter on hope, reorient the entire focus of your life toward God. He concludes, “ If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world [something supernatural and eternal].” (p. 39)
“Lovers of money” are those who find themselves daydreaming and fantasizing about new ways to make money, new possessions to buy, and looking with jealousy on those who have more than they do. (p. 57)
God’s salvation does not come in response to a changed life. A changed life comes in response to the salvation, offered as a free gift. (p. 63)
Some people are strongly motivated by a desire for influence and power, while others are more excited by approval and appreciation. Some want emotional and physical comfort more than anything else, while still others want security, the control of their environment. (p. 64)
When your achievements serve as the basis for your very worth as a person, they can lead to an inflated view of your abilities. (p. 76)
The family is no longer what Christopher Lasch once called a “haven in a heartless world,” a counterbalance to the dog-eat-dog areas of life. Instead, the family has become the nursery where the craving for success is first cultivated. (p. 79)
He [Naaman] had just learned that this God is not an extension of culture, but a transformer of culture, not a controllable but a sovereign Lord. (p. 87)
Of all the subjects we obsess about … success is the one we lie about the most – that success and its cousin money will make us secure, that success and its cousin power will make us important, that success and its cousin fame will make us happy. (p. 92)
How can we break our heart’s fixation on doing “some great thing’ in order to heal ourselves of our sense of inadequacy in order to give our lives meaning? (p. 93)
The increasing political polarization and bitterness we see in U.S. politics today is a sign that we have made political activism into a form of religion. How does idolatry produce fear and demonization? (p. 100)
Rather than accept our finitude and dependence on God, we desperately seek ways to assure ourselves that we still have power over our own lives. (p. 101)
Ninety-five percent of what sets the course of their lives is completely outside their control. This includes the century and place they are born in, who their parents and family are, their childhood environment, physical statute, genetically hardwired talents, and most of the circumstances that they find themselves in. In short, all we are and have is given to us by God. We are not infinite Creators, but finite, dependent creatures. (p. 110)
Among younger people, the older flag-waving “America first” mind-set is out. Now life is about creating a self through the maximization of individual freedom from the constraints of community. (p. 130)
Western, secular cultures make an idol out of individual freedom, and this leads to the breakdown of the family, rampant materialism, careerism, and the idolization of romantic love, physical beauty and profit. (p. 130)
Idolatry functions widely inside religious communities when doctrinal truth is elevated to the position of a false god. This occurs when people rely on the rightness of their doctrine for their standing with God rather than on God himself and his grace. (p. 131)
Another form of idolatry within religious communities turns spiritual gifts and ministry success into a counterfeit god. (p. 131)
Making an idol out of doctrinal accuracy, ministry success, or moral rectitude leads to constant internal conflict, arrogance and self-righteousness, and oppression of those whose views differ. (p. 132)
Why, then, had Jonah himself so badly missed in his understanding of God’s will and heart? The answer is – his idolatry. His fear of personal failure, his pride in his religion, and his fierce love of his country had coalesced into a deadly idolatrous compound that spiritually blinded him to the grace of God. (p.139)
Jonah stands as a warning that human hearts never change quickly or easily, even when a person is being mentored directly by God. (p. 144)
Just as idols are good things turned into ultimate things, so the desires they generate become paralyzing and overwhelming. (p. 148)
When idolatry is mapped onto the future – when our idols are threatened – it leads to paralyzing fear and anxiety. When it is mapped onto the past – when we fail our idols – it leads to irremediable guilt. When idolatry is mapped onto the present life – when our idols are blocked or removed by circumstances – it roils us with anger and despair. (p. 149)
As with Jacob, we usually discover this only after a life of “looking for blessing in all the wrong places.” It often takes an experience of crippling weakness for us to finally discover it. That is why so many of the most God-blessed people limp as they dance for joy. (p. 164)
If you uproot the idol and fail to “plant” the love of Christ in its place, the idol will grow back. (p. 172)