As much as most of us don’t like to admit it, we have a serious problem in our lives that John Calvin described when he wrote that “the human heart is a perpetual idol factory.” We know God. We know that He is the one who created all that we can see and know and experience, yet because we cannot see our Creator directly, we tend to understand Him through creation itself. While being able to see the amazing power that is our Lord through the world around us is a wonderful blessing, the challenge occurs when we swap out the Creator for the Creation.
Without Christ, who is fully human and fully divine, we cannot hope to see God in a way that makes sense to our human minds, so many of us can begin to blur the line between Creation and Creator. When this blurred line occurs, we begin to worship the things that are not God. While I don’t often hear of people making physical idols into gods these days (and I’m happy to have a discussion about Buddha statues with you in person), we turn other aspects of the world into our idols. We may do this to our families, our jobs, our wealth (or desire for it), and even our preferred college football team or political affiliations.
None of these idols of our hearts and minds are God, so like people throughout history, our foolish hearts become darkened. It is only by seeing the Lord in a way that we are able to understand, in the person of Jesus, that we can grasp this fact, yet even then our minds struggle to understand how the man Jesus can also be the eternal and all-powerful God who spoke all of Creation into existence.