“You are guilty of idolatry.”
The whisper of the Spirit was sharp, cutting me to the quick. I reeled back from the intensity of the revelation, wishing I hadn’t just asked “What lack I yet?”. But even as I was pierced by the truth, I was incredulous, offended even. How could that be true?! I didn’t view myself as overly materialistic; I couldn't care less about being wealthy or having the best of the best. I was extremely put off by the cult followings of many celebrities, so I doubted I was worshiping at the feet of the latest, big-name superstar. And I certainly couldn’t think of any ‘graven images’ in my home or other personal spaces. If I was an idol-worshiper…what exactly was I worshiping?
“Marriage is your idol.”
What made this accusation extra painful was the fact I had (pridefully and incorrectly) believed I had kicked that mentality years ago. Through deeply personal struggle and intense spiritual wrestles, I had finally, genuinely, come to terms with the possibility of remaining single for the rest of my mortal existence. While the desire to be a wife and mother was still ever-present, and the idea of not attaining those roles in this life left a deep ache in my soul, I was prepared and willing to accept God’s will. I was finding healing and solace in my new role as a first-time aunt to my beautiful niece. I had rededicated myself to my callings in my local congregation. I was hitting my stride professionally. I was back on track, in many different ways, spiritually speaking. Then I started seeing someone…and without me even noticing it, my priorities shifted. I was still diligent and dutiful in my religious habits, but the majority of my time and energy, my attention and focus, my heart and soul, was being poured into pursuing this potential relationship. God, unbeknownst to me, had taken a back seat to this man and the possible future he represented. And so when I kneeled down one evening, ready to find out what I could work on to improve my relationship with God, the Holy Spirit did not hold back.
What I have learned over the last several months as I worked (and continue to work) through this is that perhaps our mortal existence's main, overarching trial is overcoming our natural tendency towards idol worship. During the pre-mortal existence, as God was laying out His plan for creating the earth and sending His children to live upon it, He said, “...we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them” (Abraham 3:25). When anything, and I mean anything, takes a higher priority than our obedience to God, we are crafting idols for ourselves. During this period of my life, my struggle with idolatry centered around marriage and family. I am sure even once/if I manage to tear down this idol, there will be other potential idols to take its place on the pedestal. Putting God first and foremost in my life will have to be a constant, daily, proactive choice. I recognize I will fall short, I will sin, and I will fail many, many times before my life is over. But by recognizing this personal struggle with idolatry in my own life I am now better equipped and prepared to continue fighting against it.
I felt impressed to share my thoughts and experiences in this particular battle because I firmly believe every one of us has personal idols in our lives that are vying for our attention and trying to replace God as our top priority and focus.
So…what are the idols in your life right now? And what will you do about them?
NO Other Gods…Zero, Zilch, Nada
The command to worship God and God alone was expressly stated in the ten commandments Moses received on Mount Sinai: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). As Elder David A. Bednar of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles is fond of reminding us, “Sequence is instructive!” There is an obvious reason this was first on the list given to the children of Israel after they escaped from Egypt, a land rife with a multitude of other gods and goddesses for their consideration and possible adoration.
Much to our consternation and perhaps sometimes our disbelief, it is the natural tendency of us as human beings to worship. We crave giving our time and attention to…something, sometimes anything. One could argue in a way it is a demonstration of our innate desire to love and be loved. In the 2012 Marvel film The Avengers, Loki, the god of mischief from another realm, hell-bent on ruling somewhere (anywhere!) uses a powerful display of his magical powers to force a crowd of people on Earth to bow before him. During his moment of temporary triumph, he begins to wax eloquent on the human condition, concluding, “It’s the unspoken truth of humanity, that you crave subjugation…you were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel.” [1] It was a bit of a disconcerting moment in the movie theater to find myself realizing there seemed to be some gospel truth being preached from the mouth of a comic book character. But I do think Loki was on to something there. And it seems like both the Apostle Paul and Presbyterian Pastor Timothy Keller would agree:
“He [Paul] shows us the inevitability of idolatry. Because he says in verse 25 [of Romans 1], ‘They exchange the truth of God for a lie…’ you see, ‘and worship and served created things rather than the creator.’ Notice: they worshiped and served and created things rather than the creator. There are only two options: you either worship the creator or a created thing. But there is no possibility of not worshiping or serving anything, in spite of the fact that plenty of people say they don’t worship or serve anything. It’s not possible. Why? Paul says it’s impossible. If you do not worship the true God, and nobody does apart from the power of the Holy Spirit, then you have to be worshiping something else. Well, how could that work? Well, like this. Some philosophers and thinkers have said it this way: human beings are telic creatures. Telic is from the word “telos” which means purpose. So, in other words, human beings have gotta live for something. … Something has to capture your imagination. Something has to capture the highest allegiance of your heart. Something has to be the resting place of your deepest hopes. Every human being has to look at something deep in their heart, semi-consciously, unconsciously, and say, ‘If I have that…if I have that, then my life is worthwhile, then I’ve got meaning in life, you know, life will have been worth living and then I’ll know that I’m somebody. If I have that.’ And whatever “that” is, wherever your hopes are, your deepest hopes, whatever your highest allegiance is, whatever your ultimate concern is…that’s what you worship. Because that’s what worship is! And therefore, the inevitability of idolatry.” [2]
The inevitability of idolatry. If we are not proactively seeking to put God first, something or someone else will take His place. I think many of us Christians find it very easy to accept placing “bad” or “sinful” things in front or ahead of God is wrong. We may primarily equate “modern-day idols” with addictions or addictive behaviors associated with things like alcohol, pornography, greed, lust, etc. I don’t think this is inaccurate, in fact, Dr. Keller went on to explain that “idolatry is a form of spiritual addiction.” [3] However, I believe this is an incomplete understanding of idolatry. Both Paul and Dr. Keller make it clear that anything can become an idol, and they mean anything. Again, from Dr. Keller, we learn:
“Idolatry is looking to something to give you the kind of hope, the kind of value, the kind of safety that only God Himself can give you. If you love anything more than God, if you rest your security in anything more than the providence and wisdom and sovereignty of God, if your imagination is captured by anything more than the greatest of God, if your value is rooted in anything more than the grace and love of God, if you love anything more than God, and you do, you are looking to a created thing to give you what only God could possibly give you and therefore you have set up an idol.” [4]
Dr. Keller does not differentiate between “good things” and “bad things” when it comes to idols. Anything that takes priority over God becomes a “bad thing” because it diminishes our spiritual capacity to have a deeper relationship with Him. And that can include concepts we typically associate with good, like love and family.
Reflecting on the sacrifice God asked Abraham to make, Charles Martin asks us to consider the following:
“You can’t pick up your cross if you’re carrying your Isaac. … What I’m asking you to consider is the same thing God asked Abraham: Who (or what) do you love, are you holding onto tightly, are you unwilling to trust Him with, and will you offer it up to Him? … Think about it this way: What if Abraham had not offered Isaac? What if he had clutched him tightly to his chest and said, ‘Nope. Too painful. Waited too long. I can’t live without him. Ask me anything but that. I’d rather die than…’ What would Isaac then represent in the life of Abraham if Abraham had not offered him up? … Like Abraham, like Jesus, this is a decision of your will, not your emotions. Will you deny yourself and sacrifice what you love for the One who loves you more?” [5]
What Martin seems to be describing here is how Abraham had the potential opportunity to make an idol of Isaac, to put his son above God. Familial relationships are beautiful, important, and meaningful, but even those most foundational of human relationships, as demonstrated by this Abrahamic test, are meant to come second to God.
During His mortal ministry, Christ re-emphasized the necessity of having God as our number one priority when He taught, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment” (Matthew 22:37-38). Again, the first (and great!) commandment. Sequence is, indeed, instructive. President Dallin H. Oaks reminds us that the order of the commandments was no coincidence, especially when the second commandment is to love our neighbors, and that “our zeal to keep this second commandment must not cause us to forget the first, to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind.” [6] The first two commandments are both rooted in our capacity to love, but the order instructs us in how to prioritize our love appropriately. This concept can be further extrapolated to include how we prioritize the righteous longings and desires of our hearts as well. We can also tie this back into President Oaks framework for appropriately distinguishing between the good, better, and best priorities in our lives. [7] Just because something is “good” does not justify putting it ahead of God. Doing so inadvertently distorts the good thing into something harmful to our well-being and spiritual progression.
Wrestling with My Personal Idol
This is what I had unintentionally done with my desire to be married. I have a deep and abiding testimony that marriage is ordained of God, it is part of His plan, and it is something worthy of our endeavors to obtain in this life (albeit at the right time, in the right place, and with the right person). The companionship of marriage is a wonderful opportunity and can be an incredible blessing in our mortal journey. Growing up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, I remember seemingly countless lessons and activities centered around preparing us, as girls and young women, for marriage and motherhood. It was something I dreamed about often. I had every intention of following in my mother’s footsteps in getting married young and starting my own family as soon as possible.
But God had a different plan.
Despite proactively dating, I graduated from college unmarried. It left me feeling more than a little bit lost, confused, and hurt. I couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong…was I not righteous enough for that particular blessing? I tried to salvage some self-respect and deflect the awkward questions about my post-college plans as a single woman by declaring I was go on a mission. I served faithfully and diligently, convincing myself that perhaps my exact obedience would qualify me for an eternal companion upon my return. I had succumbed, unknowingly, to a logical fallacy Dr. Keller had warned about in his book The Prodigal God:
“Careful obedience to God’s law may serve as a strategy for rebelling against God. ...religious people commonly live very moral lives, but their goal is to get leverage over God, to control him, to put him in a position where they think he owes them. Therefore, despite all their ethical fastidiousness and piety, they are actually rebelling against his authority. If, like the elder brother [in the parable of the prodigal son], you believe God ought to bless you and help you because you have worked so hard to obey him and be a good person, then Jesus may be your helper, your example, even your inspiration, but he is not your Savior. You are serving as your own Savior.” [8]
In hindsight, it is not surprising to me that I was not blessed with a spouse immediately after completing my missionary service. There was so much left for me to learn and become on my pathway towards true discipleship. A serious boyfriend or husband at that time would likely have hindered me from the spiritual progression I so desperately needed.
After my mission, I spent a year working full-time, then attended a master’s program to continue my educational career. A few years later, I began my professional career in government service. And the whole time, again despite a fairly robust dating life, I remained perpetually, painfully, obviously single. I used to joke that I was either fantastic at dating, because of the plethora of dates I had gone on, or awful at it, because, despite the high quantity of dates, I couldn’t seem to progress to anything more serious.
As the years continued to roll by, I found myself in an intense spiritual wrestle, coming to terms with the genuine possibility I was just not destined to be married in this life. Could I find a way to live a happy and fulfilling life without being married or having children? This question forced me to deeply reflect on my priorities and it was at this point I recognized my preoccupation with marriage had distanced me from God. The hyper-fixation on my singleness had taken time and attention that could have been better spent strengthening and deepening my relationship with my Heavenly Father. I thought about the hours I had spent mindlessly swiping through dating profiles, rather than on my knees in prayer or feasting on the scriptures and I cringed. This is not to say I shouldn’t have been dating or socializing, but the amount of time I spent in those pursuits was out of proportion to the other, more important areas of my life, and I hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t noticed because I hadn’t been forced to evaluate my priorities.
In my mind, I was doing fine because there were no major red flags in my behavior. I had remained dutifully diligent in maintaining my religious habits. I went to church every Sunday, attended the temple regularly, and continued to read the scriptures and pray daily. However, these actions had still been more in line with the “elder brother” mentality, seeking to earn my desired blessings through continued obedience. These religious actions had also become mostly habitual, aligning more with a to-do list mentality than true devotion. This was reminiscent of falling into what Michael Cevering refers to as the “Religion-as-Duty” sphere in his book Three Spheres:
“The dutiful individual tends to say a lot about religious ‘habits’, and tends to treat those habits as little more than an opportunity for her to do her duty. She doesn’t conceive of those habits as opportunities to worship the Godhead. She conceives of them as daily commitments. … she inadvertently worships the habits themselves....she is using her dutifulness to distract her from knowing God!” [9]
I had never technically gone “inactive”, but I now saw my heart was far from God. Upon realizing this, I recommitted myself. I wanted to increase my devotion to and strengthen my personal relationship with God. I wanted to pull myself away from religion-as-duty and fully enter into religion-as-worship, to love God fully and completely, as described by Cevering:
“The third sphere is religion-as-worship: the life of adoring God like a Psalmist. It is the purpose and goal of the believer to find themselves in this sphere: to climb upwards out of the addictive grip of religion-as-sentimentality, and fend off the misleading vision of religion-as-duty, in order to bask in the beauty and majesty of the Godhead in the sphere of religion-as-worship.” [10]
For too long my priorities had been out of order and I needed to rearrange them. I wanted my obedience to stem from a place of genuine love and devotion to God, divorced from a blessing-seeking mentality. I wanted to know God and love Him, to trust Him fully with and in every aspect of my life. Hence began a more earnest and dedicated approach to my religious life and observation. With spiritual progression and improvement came a better attitude, a more positive outlook, and a great capacity for handling life’s disappointments with grace. Over the years, as I grew closer to God and relied on Him and Him alone for my fulfillment, I could feel a deeper sense of joy in my life. I felt I had come to fully accept His will and timing and I was content with where I was in life and where I was heading. It was as President Ezra Taft Benson had promised: “When we put God first, all other things fall into their proper place or drop out of our lives. Our love of the Lord will govern the claims for our affection, the demands on our time, the interests we pursue, and the order of our priorities” and we will be happier for it. [11] It was a hard-earned, long-sought season of peace and I savored it. For the first time in my life, I was comfortable and at ease in my singlehood. I was prepared and confident in my ability to move forward as a single sister indefinitely.
And then I met someone special and the possibility of marriage resurrected the idol I thought I had destroyed.
I want to be clear, this individual was an incredible and dedicated disciple of Jesus Christ in his own right. He inspired me in so many ways to continue seeking spiritual improvement and development. He was not the problem. The problem was centered on how I quickly I unconsciously rearranged my priorities (again), unintentionally putting fostering this new romantic relationship above my relationship with God. We had only been dating a few months when the Spirit made it very clear to me that I was slipping back into old harmful habits. Dr. Keller had warned about relying on someone other than God for our personal fulfillment when he said:
“We look to sex and romance to give us what we used to get from faith in God. … If I look to my marriage to fill the God-sized spiritual vacuum in my heart, I will not be in a position to serve my spouse. Only God can fill a God-sized hole. Until God has the proper place in my life, I will always be complaining that my spouse is not loving me well enough, not respecting me enough, not supporting me enough.” [12]
So, on that night, a few months into dating, when I dared to ask the Lord where I could stand to improve…I learned about the personal regression to which I had been blind. Along with this revelation, the Spirit brought to my mind a Sunday School lesson during my time as a graduate student when our bishop announced he was going to be teaching lessons out of the church’s addiction recovery manual to the whole ward for the next several weeks. [13] In response to the confused and skeptical looks, he testified that the program was beneficial to all members, regardless of what our addiction may be. He further emphasized all sin could be considered an addiction of sorts, whether an addiction to our own way of thinking or a desire for instant gratification. He went on to explain that he was calling this impromptu course the “Natural Man/Natural Woman Recovery Program”. This bishop’s thinking was aligned with Father Richard Rohr, who said:
“We are all addicts. Human beings are addictive by nature. Addiction is a modern name and honest description for what the biblical tradition called ‘sin’ and medieval Christians called ‘passions’ or ‘attachments’ They both recognized that serious measures, or practices, were needed to break us out of these illusions and entrapments; in fact, the New Testament calls them, in some cases, ‘exorcisms’! They knew they were dealing with non-rational evil or ‘demons.’” [14]
With this experience freshly brought to my recollection, I decided to work my way through the manual, focusing on my addiction to idol-worshiping the concept of marriage. Honestly, I could write an entire essay on that experience alone. It was eye-opening and life-changing. One of my biggest takeaways from the experience was learning again how to turn everything over to God, to put God first and foremost in my life. I learned that doing so is the continual work of my mortal existence and I will need to constantly evaluate myself in terms of my priorities. Putting God first requires daily effort; I thought I could just put Him first “once and for all!” but found that without the daily emphasis on His primacy in my life, my attention quickly wandered.
So…what?
I think each of us has been and/or will be tempted to place something ahead of God on our priority list. Do you know what in your life is vying for first place over Him at this moment? It can be scary to face that question with openness and transparency and to come to a real honest conclusion, but it is the kind of spiritual work that makes our mortal existence so rich with opportunities for development, improvement, and progression.
I dare you; ask yourself “What lack I yet?” and see what the Spirit has in mind for you.
NOTES:
[1] Referenced scene can be found on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQQd3Tq5iDE, accessed on 23 March 2024 [Back to manuscript].
[2] Keller, Timothy. “The Heart of Darkness” (February 2009), https://podcast.gospelinlife.com/e/the-heart-of-darkness/, accessed 23 March 2024. [Back to manuscript].
[3] Ibid. [Back to manuscript].
[4] Ibid. [Back to manuscript].
[5] Martin, Charles. What If It’s True?: A Storyteller’s Journey with Jesus (Thomas Nelson: 2020). [Back to manuscript].
[6] Oaks, Dallin H. “Two Great Commandments” (October 2019), https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2019/10/35oaks?lang=eng#title1, accessed on 23 March 2024. [Back to manuscript].
[7] Oaks, Dallin H. “Good, Better, Best” (October 2007), https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2007/10/good-better-best?lang=eng, accessed 23 March 2024. [Back to manuscript].
[8] Keller, Timothy, The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith (New York City: Dutton, 2008), 43-44. [Back to manuscript].
[9] Cevering, Michael, Three Spheres: Short Thoughts about Worship (self-published, 2008), 32 and 37. [Back to manuscript].
[10] Ibid., 4. [Back to manuscript].
[11] Benson, Ezra Taft, “The Great Commandment - Love the Lord” (April 1988), https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1988/04/the-great-commandment-love-the-lord?lang=eng, accessed 23 March 2024 [Back to manuscript].
[12] Keller, Timothy. The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God (Penguin Publishing: 2013). [Back to manuscript].
[13] The Addiction Recovery Program manual can be found here https://addictionrecovery.churchofjesuschrist.org/addiction-recovery-program-guide?lang=eng, accessed 23 March 2024. [Back to manuscript].
[14] Rohr, Richard. Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps (Fransican Media: 2021). [Back to manuscript].
Full Citation for this Article: Alley, Ashley (2024) "Marriage as an Idol," SquareTwo, Vol. 17 No. 1 (Spring 2024), http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleAlleyMarriageIdol.html, accessed <give access date>.
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