I’ve been reading a super book… Doctrine:What Christians Should Believe, by Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears. I’ve just completed the chapter on worship. One of the most enlightening moments in my reading of this section of the book points out how to know if someone has an idol in their life. There are multiple markers but one really caught my attention. The bottom line… If we idolize something then we demonize something else. A few sentences from the book read like this… “One of the great evils of idolatry is that if we idolize, we must also demonize, as Jonathon Edwards rightly taught in The Nature of True Virtue. Tim Keller reminds us that if we idolize our race, we must demonize other races. If we idolize our gender, we must demonize the other gender. If we idolize our nation, we must demonize other nations. If we idolize our political party, we must demonize other political parties.” He goes on to say, “This explains the great polarities an acrimonies that plague every society. If someone other than God’s loving grace is the source of our identity and value, we must invariably defend our idol by treating everyone and everything who may call our idol into question as an enemy to be demonized so that we can feel superior and safe with our idol.”
