Pharisee & the prostitute 2

Read Part 1 of the Pharisee and the Prostitute

Let’s rewind back a couple thousand years and pick up at Mt. Sinai.  Moses was on a mountain meeting with God while the people waited. Apparently, he took too long so they decided he was dead and built a golden calf. After a massive orgy and 3000 dead, Moses shows them God’s 10 commandments. We would hope at this point people would start figuring out worshiping other gods is not a good idea, not a chance. As you look at Israel’s very sad history, they never could stay faithful to God. They continually forsook God and His commandments. God starts talking through prophets, who compare Israel to prostitutes because they can never stay faithful. It’s a repetitive cycle that lasted for hundreds of years.

Many people have these misconceptions about the way God responded to disobedience in the Old Testament. I’ve heard people say, “How could God be good, if He would kill his own people because they bowed down to a wooden pool or stone statue?” Or “God seems pretty uptight, He made all these rules so people would be miserable.” This would be a very incomplete understanding of the spiritual practices at that time. The first two of the Ten Commandments talk about worshiping God only. It goes on to say, not only should you not worship any other god but don’t make images to worship as God. God was setting a different worship practice from every other nation Israel had seen.

Why did this even matter? What was the big deal with a wooden statue? Well, for one thing some of the other nations gods had some pretty steep requirements. Certain nations would require self-mutilation as a proof of dedication. Or even worse, they would have to kill and sacrifice their own children to please their god. When you see things that way, the God of Israel was setting himself apart. The second thing was God had saved them; He had destroyed Egypt, the most powerful nation in the world because Israel asked him. He was showing them that He was a lot more powerful and merciful than all the other gods being toted around, and He was alive.

God rescued Israel not because they sacrificed enough kids or because they were all amputees, but because He was good. He gave first and most, and asked only for total allegiance. Israel was a nation of nomads; they had no home and no massive army for security. It was a nation of slaves, rescued by the Power of God and they desperately needed God’s constant help. It was important that Israel didn’t forget God or His commandments, or eventually they would be slaves to another nation.

Once Israel had taken the place God had promised as their home, they got lazy. They got fat, bored and stupid. They started watching all the other nations around them, and starting complaining about all the restrictions God was placing on them. The other gods didn’t seem so uptight or hard to see, and eventually Israel forgot God, what he had done for them and starting acting like everyone else. They wanted to be free to do what they wanted, when they wanted and God was just getting in their way.

I’m pretty sure most of you aren’t struggling with the desire to bow down to Baal. So, you might have the tendency to read this story confused and uninterested, but you would be missing the point of why the Bible highlighted these events. The wooden statue they worshipped wasn’t pulling them away from God….it was the gods set up in their hearts.

The Prostitute

“Our hearts are idol factories”

-John Calvin

You probably don’t own a statue of Baal, or worship Molech but I can say with sure conviction: We are slaves to many gods. Our gods are entertainment, relationships, money, food, or sex. I know how cliché’ it can be for someone to use this as an opportunity to stand on their soapbox and shout about all their pet sins…that is not my intention. All that yelling and bible beating isn’t going to tear those idols down. It is the Holy Spirit that highlights the false gods in our hearts. I believe if we look closely at our thoughts, the way we spend our money, our time and what gets us most excited, those gods will surface.

I’m also not implying that doing anything other than activities that are overtly “spiritual” is wrong. But you need to know anything you worship other than Jesus will control you. You become a slave to something when it starts to require more and more time, or money or you find yourself miserable without it. Every sacrifice you make; it could be your integrity or family or your future, will not silence the demands of these gods. They will always want more.

The second thing people do when God seems absent is to do nothing until fire falls from heaven into our hearts. We have seen the Pharisee Christians, their lack of joy, a mere logical Christian choice and want nothing to do with it. We want to experience God! But when things get stale, you quit. You start to question everything, because you can no longer “feel God”. Typically this drives us to something other than God, something to make us “feel” alive again.

It’s easy to see that the time and space in which we live places the odds against our conjuring up motivation for spiritual fervor or any other discipline. The more frightening revelation is that we are slaves to our feelings. I imagine many people; like myself, despise the idea of going through the spiritual motions. I want my religious disciplines to come from a pure motivation. Unfortunately, as we all know too well, the motivation dies quickly.

Just like Israel, we abandon God for something we can see or touch, even if it is only an imposter. Or just like the Pharisees, we try to save ourselves. Time has gone by, but our sins and struggles do not change. Looking at my own life, I have been both the Pharisee and the Prostitute. But talking to people today, it seems we are more of idol worshippers than self-righteous churchgoers. Maybe it is a pushback from the past generation, but we have swung too far the wrong way.

May we be like Josiah, who after reading the law and heart of God tore down the idols and burnt them to ashes. May we lift up the Name of Jesus and the mission of the Church as supreme in our hearts.

And may we be like Nicodemus, the pharisee and religious leader; who when he met truth, left his empty rituals and self saving life and followed Jesus.