An IDOL Mind is the Devil’s Workshop

Daniel 3

A very religious man decided that he would purchase a statue of Jesus for his home.  He set it on the coffee table in the living room.  His wife was somewhat distressed, not feeling it went exactly with the decor that was there, and so removed it to the den.  Later on, the husband moved it again to his office, which prompted his three-year-old to say, “Can’t you decide what to do with God?” 

There are a lot of people in the world who can’t decide what to do with God.  “What are we going to do with God?” is the question, really, of chapter 3 of Daniel.  In our text there was one man who did not know where to put God and three men who did. 

Man is incurably religious.  That’s very obvious as you go around the world.  You find that all peoples, and ethnic groups have some substance of religion.  Man is a naturally religious creature.  He inevitably bows at some shrine.  It is either the worship of the true God or some false substitution, but man is incurably religious.

Romans chapter 1 tells us this, saying that when man “knew God, he glorified Him not as God.”  And turning his back on the true God, he began to worship the creature more than the creator.  And he made gods out of wood and stone, and he began to worship man, and beasts, and creeping things.  When he turns his back on the true God, he does not go into a vacuum as the atheist claims, he will create other gods out of something or out of himself.  He usually becomes like his god.  This way he accommodates his sinfulness.  You see, the difficulty with worshiping the true God is you have to face the reality of your inadequacy and your sinfulness.  So if you reject that, you invent a god who is a lot like you, and it’s a lot easier to live with that kind of a god.

Psalm 115 says, “Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands.  They have mouths, but they speak not:  eyes have they, but they see not:  they have ears, but they hear not:  noses have they, but they smell not:  they have hands, but they handle not:  feet have they, but they walk not:  neither speak they through their throat.  They who make them are like unto them:  so is everyone who trusteth in them.”

The Bible says, “God created man in His own image.”  But man creates gods in HIS own image - the ultimate rebellion, man inventing his own gods.

In reading the Old Testament you come repeatedly across a god known as Baal, B-A-A-L.  Now Baal is not really a proper name.  It is a word that simply means “lord,” and there were many baals, many lords, many pagan gods.  And as you study the baals of ancient history, you find that they inevitably carried out the sinfulness of men in their character.

For example, it was believed of the Canaanites and the people around Israel that Baal was the force behind sex.  All sex relations, then, according to those who worshiped Baal became sacred acts because they then became demonstrations of this great force of the god Baal.  Now, the temples of Baal were then occupied by priestesses who were known as “sacred prostitutes.”  They actually were considered to be holy women because Baal was believed to be active in the sexual act itself, and so worship, then, became a sexual act with a temple prostitute.  To have relations, then, with a temple prostitute was to be united in power with Baal, an act of worship.

Idolatry in the Old Testament even goes under the name of a-whoring.  It says Israel went a-whoring.  It is spiritual adultery.  Idolatry, then, is the corruption of true worship. 

Consider the first and the second commandments.  The first one, have no other gods before Me.  The second one, make no graven image.  The foundation of the commandments is that there is to be no god substituted for the true God. 

“Like the flow of a river which cannot be stopped but which can be diverted, the yearning of man’s soul for an object of worship can easily turn from the true God to another god.” – Leslie Flynn

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego had a big choice to make.  We need to understand why they stood the way they stood. They knew that idolatry was unacceptable to God.  They knew that they could not please God and bow down to the image of gold erected in chapter 3. 

In the Bible, idolatry is described in these terms.  It is an abomination to God, in Deuteronomy 7:25; it is hateful to God, in Deuteronomy 16:22; it is vain and foolish, Psalm 115; it is bloody, Ezekiel 23; it is abominable, I Peter 4; it is unprofitable, Judges 10:14; it is irrational, Romans chapter 1; it is defiling, Ezekiel 20:7.  You kind of get the picture that it’s not good, don’t you?

Idolatry makes men forget God, go astray from God, pollute the name of God, defile the sanctuary of God, estrange themselves from God, forsake God, hate God, and provoke God.  And the Bible says that idolatry will be punished with:  Death, exclusion from heaven, and eternal torment.

        I John 5:21, “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.” 

We are a society literally filled with idols. Idolatry may be external in some societies, but in other societies it is internal.  There are millions of people in our society who would never ever think of bowing their knee to a stone thing.  You know, that would just seem ridiculous to them, or bowing down to some wood, or bowing down to some metal.  But they spend all their life bowing down to some empty, useless god established in their own mind or in their own heart. And an idol is anything you put before God.  Let’s name some idols. It can be your car, it could be your hobby, your house, your wife, or anybody else, or any other item - your bankbook, your phone, your TV. Colossians 3 says covetousness is idolatry.  When you covet it, you worship it. 

And then there’s pride.  I guess the main god of our society is the love of self.  And we could say people are a god in our society.  Some people idolize a child.  They literally worship their child.  It becomes perverse, the attitude they have.  In contrast to that, don’t you love to see Hannah, who all for so long had prayed and just begged God to give her a son, and God gave her a son, and then she didn’t worship the child so that the child took the place of God.  She gave the child to the Lord.

And I think about Abraham, who waited, and waited until he was 100 years old to have a son, and then God said, “I want that son, and I want him on an altar, and I want him dead.”  And Abraham said, “All right, God, I love that son.  But I don’t worship that son above You, and if You say, ‘slay him,’ I’ll slay him.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t be committed to your family, your children, and your wife. But what do we live for, and who is our top priority?

And pleasure is a god in our society.  We worship the God of entertainment.  In a quest for non stop excitement…in an effort to never be bored, we are never still enough to pray, and sit silent, communing with the Lord.

And then there’s prominence.  Some people live to get in Who’s Who, what’s what, and why’s why, and where’s where.  They want a chief seat in the banquet.  They want attention, and social media is just their ticket.  They love to see their name in the paper.  They cut out every clipping that you can imagine.  And all of these gods end up in the trash heap of an empty, burned out life.  Man is incurably religious.  He will worship something, believe me.

A parable tells about an idol-burning ceremony in the backyard of a church.  They each brought their most cherished possession and put it on a heap and they said, “We’re going to burn all our idols.”  Some put their worldly music / phone / trophies / a gadget / golf clubs / jewelry / clothes.  They found everything they could and put it on the pile.  But nobody could find a match. 

And the parable says they discussed it and all agreed that just because they couldn’t burn them didn’t mean they weren’t willing to give them up.  Their hearts were right!  Slowly, the group drifted back to their homes with one or two backward glances.

Well, one lady didn’t sleep well that night.  She convinced herself that what she had given up was no idol at all.  And early the next morning she sneaked back behind the church, hoping not to be seen, and when she got there she found her idol was the only one still left.  Oh, how we cling to our idols.

Let’s take it a step further.  It’s not only wrong to worship something other than God, but it’s wrong to worship God through the wrong method. 

You remember Saul, when he was told by God not to take anything, but to kill the king and all of the army, and take absolutely nothing.  He came back with all those sheep, and all of those animals, and when Samuel came to him and said, “What’s going on?”  And, “Why do I hear the bleating of the sheep?  You weren’t supposed to take anything.”  And he says, “I’ve taken them in order to worship God.”  And Samuel says to him, “The throne is removed from your family.  God wants you to worship Him the way He says to worship Him, not the way you choose to worship Him.”

Idolatry is worshiping the wrong god and worshiping the right God in the wrong way. 

Numbers 21:6, you remember how the Lord sent the fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and many people of Israel died.?  This was when they were with Moses.  And the people were being disobedient to God.  The Lord sent fiery serpents, and they bit them.  “Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord, and against thee; pray unto the Lord, that He take away the serpents from us.”

And Moses stood in their behalf.  God said, “Make a serpent, set it on a pole:  look and live.”  I believe the pole was symbol of God’s power.  There was no power in the pole.  The power was with God.  To look at the pole was simply an identification of their faith.  And I want you to see what happened.  In 2 Kings, chapter 18, along comes Hezekiah later in the history of Israel, and he brings about a great revival.  And one of the things he does in the revival is in verse 4.  “He removed the high places, - ” now watch this “ - and broke the images, and cut down the idols.”  He wiped out idolatry.  But notice the next one.  “And he broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made:  for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it.” 

In other words, something started out as a symbol and it became an idol.  And that is always a danger of an icon, that man will twist the symbol into an idol.  So, whether you’re talking about worshiping a false god, or worshiping the true God in a wrong way, or worshiping God to a wrong image, it is all forbidden in Scripture.

vv. 1-3     Nebuchadnezzar makes this huge image.  This is an idolatrous act.  And it seems very strange in the light of 2:47.  Look back at that.  Daniel had told this tremendous dream to Nebuchadnezzar.  He had this dream about an image.  And he goes through all this marvelous interpretation of the dream and the meanings behind this statue. Two verses later, he’s building an idol to himself. 

Even the demonstration of the power of God couldn’t override his unbelievable ego.  Incredible.  The man is an egomaniac.  In fact, I believe when Daniel started telling him that dream he said, “The top is a head of gold and thou art that head of gold - ” right there, Nebuchadnezzar tuned out and thought, “I’m the gold.  Everything else is inferior to me.”  And so, he built a whole image of gold, and just extended the gold all the way down.

“Nebuchadnezzar the king made an image of gold.”  60 cubits would be 90 feet high.  That’s really high.  I guess a telephone pole is about 60 feet high, so it would be half again as high as that.  And it was six cubits wide, which really isn’t very wide.  That’s 9 feet wide, which means it was a great big long skinny thing.  That would make it a ten-to-one proportion, and most human beings are four-to-one or five-to-one.  Real skinny people are six-to-one and some are three-to-one.  Actually - I’ve seen some two-to-one, come to think of it.  Or, maybe it had a high pedestal in which a normal five-to-one ratio man might have stood on.  But it’s a 90 foot high image.

Now, it’s also fascinating to me that it is 60 cubits by 6, and I see two sixes there.  This first king in the times of the Gentiles made an image of himself in sixes and if you read Revelation 13, you will find that the last ruler of the times of the Gentiles will also set up an image of himself, and he has the number of a man, which is 6, as opposed to God’s number of 7.

He will make an image and the people will bow to the image, and the number will be - ” what? “ - six, six, six.”  Nebuchadnezzar is like a preliminary picture of the antichrist.

Now, you’ll notice in verse 1 that it says, “he set it up on the plain of Dura in the province of Babylon.”  Now the plain of Dura, as far as we know, was maybe six miles southeast of Babylon.  A French archaeologist named Julius Oppert was doing some digs down southeast of Babylon and he came across, in his diggings, an absolutely huge brick foundation that must have held some gigantic statue or obelisk. And as they began to do a little more study on the plain of Dura, it was the conviction of this French archaeologist, that that is in fact the base of Nebuchadnezzar’s image still remaining underneath the soil of the centuries that have covered it over.  The image was long gone, however.  Why?  It was made of gold!

The plain of Dura is a flat area where it would be visible.  Sticking up in the plain of Dura, the sun in the Babylonian area would be so bright that that thing would sparkle and shine in an incredible display of grandeur.

Now, what is Nebuchadnezzar doing?  He was a smart man.  He was one of the world’s greatest architects.  He was one of the world’s greatest statesmen.  He was one of the world’s greatest soldiers and strategists.  This is not the village idiot.  This is a very intelligent man.  What’s he doing?

Well, what he’s doing is pulling together his nation in an act of unity.  He wanted all of them to bow down to him.  By the way, the Caesars did exactly the same thing.  They tried to get the whole Empire to worship them as a unifying factor.

Not only that, he wanted the allegiance of his leaders.  He wanted to make sure they were loyal and faithful to him.  He wanted a single religion because he was afraid that because religion is so deep in the heart of man, if they split over religions they would fracture the empire.

This guy had an incredible ego, and sought self-glory, and he just lost control of himself and decided to go whole hog and make himself an image so that the whole world would worship him.

He’s like Herod in Acts 12.  Herod gave a great speech, put on his fancy robe, and stood up, you know, in Acts 12 at Caesarea, and he gave a great speech and the people said, “Oh, it is the voice of a god and not a man.”  And he just loved it.  He just ate it up.  And the Bible says immediately he was eaten by worms and died, because he gave not God the glory.

Well, Nebuchadnezzar didn’t get eaten by worms, his punishment comes in chapter 4.  We’ll see that later.  But he sought the glory.  And the whole thing, then, poses a conflict throughout this chapter between worshiping the true God and worshiping this self-centered, humanistic egomaniac.

This is the choice everybody makes.  You either worship God or false gods.  Even as a Christian, listen, we can be lured to the worship of false gods, can’t we?  We really can.  Where are we going to put God?  We’ll see the exciting conclusion next time.