I once took a class that focused on the religious practices prevalent during the height of the Roman Empire, practices that included mystery cults, the primary version of worship within the larger cities of the Empire. It was one of those classes that was truly eye-opening for I had always applied my own understanding of worship within the church to those activities that took place during the worship of the gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome. I would substitute the name of one these deities for God and Jesus. In that class, we even examined records of the construction of the idols within those temples, records that revealed how the idols appeared to be able to move and speak. I began to see how people came to believe what they did at that time.
As the prophet Joshua approached the end of his life, he gathered all of the Israelite people to Shechem. There he renewed the covenant the Lord had made with His Chosen People, seeking to ensure that they would remain a holy nation. After reminding the Israelites of the works of God that had led up to that moment, Joshua encouraged them to “throw away the gods your ancestors worshipped. . . and serve the Lord.” If you’ve read beyond the book of Joshua in the Bible, you know that they failed and continued to fall victim to the worship of other gods. A seemingly never-ending series of kings were the chief instigators of that poor behavior. While it’s easy for many of us to scoff at the idea that the Israelites, who had been led out of Egypt into the Promised Land by God, would turn their backs on the Lord, the hard reality is that we too can succumb to this same practice.
I do not mean that we have fashioned for ourselves idols to the Ba’als or raised Asherah poles in our yards as the Israelites did. But we often allow things to distract us from the worship of the Lord. When we are honest about our lives, we can see the places where we become, in the words of John Calvin, “a perpetual idol-making factory.” I do not mean that we make physical images for our worship, but we do find things we like and enjoy (or the ones that we fear and despise) and allow them to distract us from keeping our minds and our hearts focused on God. While it is easy for us to join our voices with Joshua and say “as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord,” living out this promise is indeed difficult to achieve.