Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Do You Resist Idolatry? | Torah | Exodus 20:4-6

Episode Date: June 16, 2022

We live in a culture that worships self and stuff. Are you able to resist the worship of consumerism? In today's episode, Patrick discusses how the Second Commandment still applies to our lives in 2022. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Exodus 20:4-6 Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller, and right now we're going through the Book of Exodus. Do you worship gods represented by statues and a shrine that's inside your house? Okay, probably not. How about this? Do you have a shrine to your ancestors with their photos and past possessions? Okay, again, probably not.

Do you know anyone who does any of those things? If you do, you're probably not in a Western country. context. And in many ways, you might actually be closer to the original context of the Bible. But for most people in the West, the Second Commandment actually sounds a little bit bizarre, or at least the easiest of the Ten Commandments to keep. Let me read it to you. You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any lightness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God,

iniquity on the fathers of the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. Okay, so you following that commandment? Check, I'm all good. I haven't made any idols lately. Let's move on to commandment number three. Not so fast. In his commencement speech at Kenyon College, the late author, David Foster Wallace, gave a profound speech on the topic of worship, despite the fact that he's not even religious at all. He opens up his talk with a story of two young fish swimming through the ocean. An older fish comes up to them and he asks them, hey, how's the water, boys?

The two younger fish stare at him, confused until he finally swims away. And then one of the younger fish looks to the other younger fish and says, what the heck is water? Wallace is making a profound point. If you spend your whole life in water, it's really hard to see. It's always been there. It's always been obvious. It's just a given part of reality. But with age comes wisdom and the realization that the way things are is not a given.

Seeing the water around you is the first step towards understanding. Am I living in the right reality? Or maybe the older fish would put it this way. How's the water in your country, in your generation, in your house? Let me give a small example. Consumerism. Now, back in my day, you used to have to drive to a mall to get something that you wanted. And malls were really temples of.

consumerism, monuments to our insatiable need for stuff. And if you paid attention to the signs and the advertisements in a mall, there was something religious, even therapeutic about the whole thing. Let me give you some examples of things that you might see in a mall today or you would have seen even 10 years ago. You might find a clothing store with a sign saying, you deserve this, as though buying clothes affirms your dignity and your worth. In the mall, you're not made in the image of God. You buy your way into the image of the poster. Or maybe you'd see a drool or store and it would say give the gift of forever. Who needs eternal life when you have diamonds, right? Or maybe you'd go to bedbath and beyond and see an ad that says restore, renew, and reclaim yourself.

As though purchasing lotion and body wash could soothe your soul's hurt and satisfy your longings. Or maybe you'd see a sign at the sports goods store showing a rift athlete saying stop making excuses. It's a call to repentance with the implicit promise that buying exercise equipment would absolve you of your sin. I mean, your belly fat. I can go on and on. Of course, these days, those ads are on your phone. They're not just in the mall. And rather than going to the temple of the mall, we go to the temple of the Infinite Scroll. The stuff we want online promises us happiness and fulfillment. It promises to wipe away our fears, our insecurities, maybe even our wrongdoings. The power of shopping algorithms on Google and Facebook and YouTube, they promise to give you exactly what

you want exactly when you want it. The psalm of the Facebook or Google ad might go like this. Search me and know my heart, oh algorithm. Teach me how to walk in your ways and to know what to buy to make me happy. Now, I get it. I'm being a little bit over the top right now. But if we got down to the core of how we spend and save and give, what would we learn about ourselves? If we got down to the core of why we spend all of that time online shopping, looking at houses, looking at cars, looking at vacation spots, looking at clothing, looking at equipment, looking at tech, looking at books, looking at whatever it is that you like to look at online, what would we see about our heart and what we truly worship?

Maybe what we would see is the water, the water we swim in, but often don't see. And perhaps we discover that even though we haven't carved little gods and idols out of stone, maybe we haven't set up literal temples to those idols to worship them in, nonetheless, we do have a worship problem. We've built malls and websites as temples to our gods of stuff. We give them our money. We give them our time. We give them our hope. As David Foster Wallace continued his speech, he went on to say something even more profound. This is a quote. He says, there is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice is what to worship. He's right. As it turns out, the first two commandments, which are both about worshiping,

being God and God alone, they might be the hardest commandments to obey of all the 10. Because before you ever steal or lust or hate or covet or lie, you've already broken the first and second commandments. You've worshipped something other than God that leads you into sin. There's a good chance that you broke the second commandment when you entered the temple of a false God, whether it's pornography, Netflix, Amazon, the mall, cars.com, Zillow, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, whatever it is that's leading your heart to worship something other than Jesus. And yet, I want you to know this. There's good news.

You see, back in that Second Commandment, God warns that if you worship idols, there will be consequences in your life and in the generations to follow after you. And yet he also says that he shows love to a thousand generations. In other words, when we repent of our idolatry, when we repent of worshiping the stuff in our life, God is good. God is gracious. He forgives, and he forgives at the cost of his own son's life. So I know you might not have any idols hiding in your house. I know that you might not have any secret shrine set up to false gods. And yet, maybe those things exist inside of your heart.

And so I want you to ask yourself a question. Do you see the water in your life? Do you see all the things that everybody else around you worships and lives for? And do you resist them? Do you reject them? Do you say, Jesus, I want nothing to do you do? with those things because I know that at the end of the day, they cannot satisfy, they cannot fulfill, only you can. Worship the one true God. Give him your life and you will know the true path to happiness. Before you forget, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talks newsletter. Hit the link in the show notes and you'll get an email every Wednesday that's going to help you beat that midweek slump and go deeper in your walk with Jesus. Thanks for listening.