The Lurking Presence of Idolatry

Growing up in South Africa as a child, we often went to the poultry farm of my uncle and aunt, usually on a Sunday morning after church. My cousin, however, was a bit of a ratbag and would often get us into the most ridiculous trouble when we went there. Of course, as the heathen devil kids we were, my brother and I loved participating in all the ridiculous things that he would come up with. One afternoon, we happened to sneak away from the parents after our Sunday lunch with an air rifle around our shoulder, and we decided to go down to the chicken coops. My cousin was going to show us, however, and it wasn't gonna be as bad as you think it is. We were going to shoot rats.

Being a chicken farm, there was plenty of food for those rats to feed on—food that was meant for the chickens. But the funny thing is, on the farm, as some of us may know, some of these rats had so much food that they became as big as cats. They were massive, and would sometimes take on the chickens themselves. These rats would often be found scurrying along the roof or climbing up and down the beams, scampering across the ground.

But what we discovered that afternoon was that my cousin was an amazing shot. He'd be able to pick them off with the air rifle like he was born to do it. There's one running across the gutter, bang. One climbing through that hole, bang. There's another one, you know, trying to escape. That rat doesn't have a head anymore.

I wonder if he were to give us some sort of an account of how often he would do that, that over the course of his life, how many rats my cousin would have shot. Because it was a never-ending problem on the farm. You can take out ten today and be guaranteed that another ten would be replacing them tomorrow. Well, this morning we look at a moment in the book of Acts where an entire city's idolatry becomes threatened by the gospel of Jesus Christ. And we're going to see just how pervasive, dangerous, and difficult the reality of idolatry is to get rid of.

Whether enslaved to idolatry as a non-Christian today—which I need to say upfront, you are, if you are not a Christian—whether enslaved to idolatry today or wrestling against it and its entangling power as a Christian today, you and I will soon see how it comes up like rats on my cousin's farm. You can take it out today, and you can be guaranteed another one will be raising its head tomorrow. So it is good and proper for us as Christians to every now and then do a quick walk through our chicken coop of life and take out those rats of idolatry every now and then. If you have your Bibles with you, let's turn to Acts chapter 19.

And you will be familiar with the context if you were here last week, because we're following up with part B of Acts 19, of Paul in Ephesus. Acts 19, and we're gonna begin from verse 21. Now after these events—and this is the events of the huge bonfire of all the sorcery and witchcraft scrolls in Ephesus—now after these events, Paul resolved in the spirit to pass through Macedonia and Achaia and go to Jerusalem, saying, after I've been there, I must also see Rome. And having sent into Macedonia two of his helpers, Timothy and Erastus, he himself stayed in Asia for a while.

About that time, there arose no little disturbance concerning the way. For a man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no little business to the craftsmen. These he gathered together with the workmen in similar trades and said, Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth. And you see and hear that not only in Ephesus, but in almost all of Asia, this Paul has persuaded and turned away a great many people, saying that gods made with hands are not gods. And there is a danger, not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis may be counted as nothing, and that she may even be deposed from her magnificence.

She whom all Asia and the world worship. When they heard this, they were enraged and were crying out, Great is Artemis of the Ephesians. So the city was filled with the confusion, and they rushed together into the theatre, dragging with them Gaius and Aristarchus, Macedonians who were Paul's companions in travel. But when Paul wished to go in among the crowd, the disciples would not let him. And even some of the Asiarchs who were friends of his sent to him and were urging him not to venture into the theatre.

Now some cried out one thing, some another, for the assembly was in confusion. And most of them did not know why they had come together. Some of the crowd prompted Alexander, whom the Jews had put forward. And Alexander, motioning with his hand, wanted to make a defence to the crowd. But when they recognised that he was a Jew, for about two hours, they all cried out with one voice, Great is Artemis of the Ephesians.

And when the town clerk had quieted the crowd, he said, Men of Ephesus, who is there who does not know that the city of the Ephesians is temple keeper of the great Artemis and of the sacred stone that fell from the sky? Seeing then that these things cannot be denied, you ought to be quiet and do nothing rash. For you have brought these men here who are neither sacrilegious nor blasphemers of our goddess. If therefore Demetrius and the craftsmen with him have a complaint against anyone, the courts are open, and there are proconsuls. Let them bring charges against one another.

But if you seek anything further, it shall be settled in the regular assembly. For we really are in danger of being charged with rioting today, since there is no cause that we can give to justify this commotion. And when he had said these things, he dismissed the assembly. This is God's word. Before we dig into our passage this morning, we need to define the aspect of idolatry happening here in Acts.

What we will see this morning from not only what happens here in Acts 19, but also a review of the truth of the whole unfolding narrative of the Bible, is that idolatry is a reality. It is the sin beneath every sin. In the beginning, according to Genesis 1, we were created to worship God. Instead, we fell into something called sin, which meant that we turned against Him. When Christians talk about this idea of the Fall, it means that we walked away from God, that we turned our backs against Him, forsaking a good relationship with Him.

Practically, it meant that instead of worshipping God, we have so distanced ourselves from Him that, apart from His direct intervention, we will choose to worship anything in all of the universe apart from Him. Romans 1:23-25 puts it this way, and we read just the beginning of that earlier. Paul says, We exchanged the glory of the immortal God for a lie. We worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator. In essence, what's wrong with humanity is not that we think Married at First Sight is a good TV show, because it's not.

Amen. The thing that's wrong with humanity is that the intended purpose of our entire existence has been reversed. We worship and we serve the created things rather than the Creator. The great theologian John Calvin said that the human heart is a perpetual idol factory. We churn out idols like Apple churns out iPhones.

And all throughout the story of the Bible, we see God continually needing to stamp out idolatry amongst His people. He warns His people again and again to turn away from these worthless dead fabrications, to turn to Him, the living God. But you would be mistaken if you assumed idolatry was a problem firmly tucked away in biblical times. Christian author Richard Keys writes this: A careful reading of the Old and New Testaments shows that idolatry is nothing like the crude simplistic picture that springs to mind of a sculpture in some distant country. As the main category to describe unbelief, the idea is highly sophisticated, drawing together the complexities of motivation in individual psychology, the social environment, and also the unseen world.

Idols are not just on pagan altars, but in well-educated human hearts and minds. The apostle Paul associates the dynamics of human greed, lust, craving, and coveting with idolatry. The Bible does not allow us to marginalise idolatry to the fringes of life. It is found on centre stage. In other words, the human heart today, as it was in ancient times, is a perpetual factory of idols.

And idolatry finds centre stage in the story of humanity's war against sin. Ask yourself, why do we lie? Why do we steal? Why do we live selfishly? Why do we refrain from even basic good things, like attending church every week?

We might answer because I'm a sinner and I'm weak. But the more specific answer is because there's something besides Jesus Christ that I'm choosing to follow. Idolatry says, although God is good and is important, I cling to something that I value even more for my satisfaction and my joy. And it can be anything. It can be even things that seem very good, like family, like health.

So last week, we saw Paul preaching in Ephesus, this very same city, and his ministry caused people to forsake their pop culture of magic. And they come to a place of repentance, and they believe in Jesus Christ that He is the living Lord of the universe. Today, we're still in chapter 19 and in Ephesus, and we see what the consequences of that repentance meant. People were beginning to forsake their idols. And the idol makers like Demetrius didn't like that at all.

It's hard to imagine, isn't it, how revolutionary this must have been in the city. From our passage, we see that the city is in an uproar. Verse 26, Demetrius the silversmith, who crafted these little silver statuettes of the goddess Artemis, he says that in Paul's preaching, he was declaring that man-made gods are no gods at all, which is absolutely outrageous to him and the other Ephesians. Now, it's possible that Demetrius himself was a very devout believer in Artemis, but probably also, he stood to lose a lot of money. There was an element of greed in this, because people were not buying his idols anymore.

When Paul says that gods made with hands are not gods, He is stating the central truth of Christianity, which says that there is only one God, and that God came to us in the form of Jesus Christ. Paul preached unapologetically that if there is only then one living God, then everyone needs to stop the charade. They must believe in this one living God. And so, friends, the first thing we need to see, the thing I want to highlight to you this morning, is the underlying theology from Scripture that idolatry isn't something stuck in the first century. Idolatry really is what Tim Keller describes it as being the sin beneath all sin.

It is real, it is corruptive, and it is vicious. Because as soon as our loyalty to anything causes us to ignore God's prime, prominent place in our lives, we have crafted an idol. When any finite created thing—whether that is a statue, or whether that is an ideology, or a philosophy, or an object, a person—whenever something is elevated to being the final source of the meaning, of the purpose of my life, my identity, my satisfaction, then you've created a god that is different to the God of the Bible. The second thing we see in Acts is just how deeply rooted idolatry can be, and just the response that it can invoke in us when we are threatened to lose it. It's not simply something in a person's private life.

Idolatry is most often connected to the society in which we live as well. Our second point, idolatry and worldview, it can be the same thing. So we see the goddess Artemis is worshipped by the entire city of Ephesus. Contextually, it housed the great temple of Artemis, one of the great wonders of the ancient world. There is this funny sort of statement there about a stone that fell from the sky.

Scholars believe that this was a meteorite, and people believed that this was somehow sent to them by the goddess Artemis, and so on. And so, everything about Ephesus was built on the identity they formed from who the goddess Artemis was. The crowd is riled up into this hysteria where they shout in verse 28, Great is Artemis of the Ephesians. She is ours. But we shall soon see that the idols we worship and the way that we view ourselves is also inseparably linked to the way it works out in our society around us, in the actions we adopt.

I don't know if you've heard about this recently, but there is a quiet murmur in the medical world, in the health world, about another pandemic in Australia, and it's not COVID-19. It is the health pandemic of sexually transmitted diseases, which is steadily but alarmingly on the rise. Experts are thinking that the latest uptake in those horrible dating apps like Tinder and Grindr are contributing to this problem. Easy hookups for lonely people. I won't go into all the details, but research is showing that STDs like syphilis is on a dramatic increase in Australia.

I mean, syphilis. It makes you think of like the fifteen hundreds, right? Now as I read this article, I thought to myself, you know, if only one single generation decided to live according to God's will, if an entire generation would stop sleeping around, would wait before having sex, would save themselves for their one husband or their one wife, then syphilis, gonorrhoea, AIDS, and you name it, would disappear from the face of the earth. It would be gone in one single generation. But in all the talk, in all the expertise, with the scientists and the academics and the doctors, not once was there a mention that celibacy or monogamy is an option.

Why? Well, I'm sure people would say it's because of our Western freedoms. It's our built-in belief that we are free to choose our sexuality. It is free to choose our level of promiscuity, to do with our bodies what we please. In other words, it's our worldview about sex and sexuality.

But held up against the truth of Scripture, and the glaring reality rises to the top. What people call a philosophy or a worldview is deep down, the idol of sex. And people will try to defend it, like Demetrius and the silversmiths of Ephesus, for dear life. We will throw millions of dollars into education programmes just so we can keep this. And Christians, unfortunately, are not immune because we constantly breathe in the idolatry of our society.

We are like the Christians in Ephesus who constantly live under the shadow of the Temple of Artemis. And because our worldview is so linked to what we idolise and worship, society, humanity, can get religiously protective of any fetish that is out there, every inclination of the human heart. But if you think long enough about all of it, you'll see all the connections that are tied with them all. For example, people get very protective of the right to an abortion, but never realise that the underlying problem of someone becoming pregnant in a context where they can't have a baby is that they have 99 per cent of the time wilfully engaged in an activity where they can't afford to become pregnant. And so we will legalise the death of babies for the idol we worship, which is sex.

Can you see what we are willing as a society to do to protect that thing we love, the thing we worship? We are completely distracted from questioning the goddess of sex that has swallowed us whole. Why aren't we talking about choices of abstinence or monogamy in Australia? Because our Artemis today is sex and sexuality, and every horrible consequence thereof, we will try very hard to fix as long as you don't take our goddess away from us, so that we can continue worshipping at her feet. It's probably ironic that the goddess Artemis was the god of reproduction, fertility, and sex.

It was for the Ephesians not simply a religion. It permeated everything right down to what we see here, the economy that the Ephesian people relied on. The silversmiths of Ephesus were world-renowned for their statues. And so what we see here, even as I chant this nationalistic sort of statement, we love Artemis of the Ephesians, idolatry, we are shown, goes very deep. It's not a sideshow. The fear that grips the people is the same fear that grips people today.

If Artemis, if our God is not worshipped anymore, then who are we? What does it mean to be an Ephesian then? What does it mean to be so-called a freedom-loving Westerner today, if we don't have these choices? What am I without sex? What am I without alcohol?

Can I be a true Aussie bloke without a beer? What would I be without my money? What would I be without my family? What if I don't find a husband? What if I don't have a girlfriend?

Who am I? And what will other people tell me I am? So even as Christians, we must check our hearts. And you will know that something is an idol when you are willing to bite, and claw, and fight, and scratch to protect that one thing. We see even here in Ephesus, they were willing to kill those who were threatening their idols.

Now, many of us will listen to this, and this may be such an abstract concept where we think, surely, I'm nowhere near those fundamentalist extremes about those things. I don't have a problem with idolatry because I'm not that extreme, and nothing in my life is as self-destructive as those things—alcohol abuse, drug abuse, sex and sexuality. But the Bible tells us that even things that seem good or healthy can become idols. Because it's not so much about the destructive consequences of those things. The question is, how ultimate is that thing in your life?

We can make good things ultimate things and fall down the same trap of idolatry. So a helpful test is what Tim Keller actually says in one of his books, where you have to ask yourself, if this thing—if this thing, whatever it may be, is taken from me, will I be able to live joyfully without it? How would you feel if you could never have an alcoholic drink again? To never have its stimulating effects coursing through your body at social functions, if you couldn't have that beer in your hand to stop you feeling awkward in conversations? What if you lost your smartphone?

Or your social media account? Would your life crumble if you lost your introverted nest at home? To really twist the knife now, how would you feel if you lost your entire family? If you lost your husband or your wife? Could you live joyfully without those things?

Ask yourself, would it be a gut-wrenching moment? Would I be deeply saddened for a long time if those things were taken from me? And even if you find yourself answering maybe, you might have an idol loose. Our third and our final point, overcoming idolatry. The aim is to be able to identify and then replace those idols.

Thankfully for Paul and the other Christians in Ephesus, an unnamed town clerk steps into the crowd to give a speech calling for order. He wisely recognises that Gaius and Aristarchus, two Christians from Ephesus, are both innocent of inciting violence, and declares the riot unjustified. But he naively states that the Christian criticism of idolatry through the gospel will have no real significant impact on the worship of Artemis. I mean, where is Artemis now? But for now, the riot is ended and the Christians are set free.

This morning's lingering question surrounding this passage is, how can we be set free? Ephesians of the first century and the Aussies of the twenty-first are really no different at all. We were all created to worship something. We will always have our hearts yearn for worship. It means you'll never be able to stop idolising something.

You won't be able to stop giving your heart away slavishly to things like relationships, or to comfort, or to entertainment. You can't simply turn it off like a tap. You were hardwired to worship. And idols, because of that, will keep popping up like rats on my cousin's farm. The question is, if you are able to identify an idol, how do you overcome it?

Well, the great comfort of the gospel is that, yes, at one time your heart would have been held ransom by every created thing that your heart could find to worship. But now, you've been set free by the reality of Jesus Christ and what He has done for you on the cross. You have been set free. You found the living God who overcomes and destroys all the opposition that comes up against Him. And this is what happens in Ephesus.

Jesus Christ is the same King that caused people in Ephesus to burn, like we said last week, millions of dollars worth of idolatrous rubbish in order to be tied to, to cling to Jesus Christ. Through that, it begins bankrupting the entire idol-making economy of Ephesus. And Jesus Christ is the same King who today has turned chronic alcoholics away from the drink overnight. Jesus is the same King who can overcome the greatest idol of our age, the god of sex and sexuality. And I know a brother or two who have wrestled with same-sex attraction, and for the sake of Christ, have given up that lifestyle because they know that Jesus Christ is worth much more.

He is eternally more satisfying than those things. They have found true freedom even when the world tells them that what they were pursuing was freedom. The good news of the gospel is that the bondage of sin is broken when we begin to believe the message that Jesus Christ has achieved a salvation for us on the cross. Paul would go on to write in Romans 6:14, Sin shall be your master no longer. Sin shall be your master no longer.

Having entered into a perfect relationship with God, with full access to that generous love, we can, as Psalm 34 says, taste and see that the Lord is good. And if you've become a born-again believer, the joy in knowing Him becomes as tangibly good as good food tastes. The knowledge and the worship of God is rich, it is deep, it is lasting. It doesn't fade, it doesn't wear out. It doesn't once you have it, you need something else. It doesn't fade. It is repeatedly refreshing, constantly new.

Why exchange all of that for a guilt-ridden, sinful relationship? Why exchange that for a brain-numbing night on the booze? Why give it up for the toys that will never ultimately satisfy? How do we overcome those idols? How do we find lasting peace in Christ?

The only way to destroy an idol is to replace it. Ephesian Christians needed to literally burn their stuff and replace it with someone worth worshipping, and that was Jesus Christ. If you know you have idols in your life, things in your life that take precedence over God and rob you of lasting joy, I encourage you to do this. It's also some practical advice I've learned from Tim Keller in one of his books. Firstly, do we have that?

Identify and name. Identify and name your idols to God. Take stock of where your heart is at and pray, Lord, these things are the things that I've built my life on. In that moment, think carefully about your life and list those things that you've come to realise you are worshipping, and mention them. List them to God.

The second thing is to repent, to turn your back on those idols before God. When you pursue an idol, you are saying, Lord, You are not enough. This thing, this thing is more fulfilling to me. It is more joy-filled than You are to me. That is what I've come to believe about it.

And in that confession, you resolve in your heart to stop believing that lie, that these things will ultimately please you and satisfy you. Stop believing that and say to God, Lord, this might even be a good thing in my life, but I have made it an ultimate thing. Lord, what are these things when compared to You? What are these things when compared to You? This does not give me lasting joy.

Only You can. And Lord, You remain my eternal joy. So we are to repent, turn our backs against those idols in the presence of God. And then lastly, and really importantly, we have to work to replace those idols with a love for the only idol worth worshipping, and that's Jesus Christ. The one thing that we are drawn to worship, we must worship.

We have to take regular time to reflect on how Jesus has provided for you what your idols could never. He has given you eternal reconciliation with the living God, and you have received adoption into His family because of Jesus. So don't simply stop trying to give up on idols. Don't, don't, don't simply try and turn off the tap. You must replace those idols with the only one in the universe that is worth worshipping.

Remind yourself of the great promises of Scripture like Psalm 16: Lord, in Your presence only is there fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. Your idols are temporary pleasures that wear off very soon, and the wealth of knowing God lasts forever. And so you can pray, Lord, when I am tempted to feel anxious, envious, and wanna clutch at things for comfort and self-worth, I know that ultimately, I don't deserve anything to go right for me. And yet in Jesus Christ, nothing will ever go truly wrong for me either. Because I know that You are working all things in my life for the good of those You've called.

So reflect and believe, and then rejoice in what Jesus Christ has given you—reconciliation with God, the living God, and adoption into His family. And you will find that the more and more you remember and replace those idols with a deep and sincere love for Christ, the less power those idols will have over you until they completely lose their grip on you. And it can happen, and it will happen. Let's pray.

Father, as we think about very deep and perhaps philosophical ideas of the purpose and the meaning of our life, and we know, Lord, the joke about how difficult it is, how it's impossible to figure out what the meaning of our life is. Lord, we all have created meanings because we exist for meaning. Help us, Lord, to honestly identify what that meaning is. And Lord, if that meaning is not to know and glorify the living God, if that meaning is to know Him, but also other things.

Oh God, convict us this morning. Oh God, reveal to us those things this morning. And where those things have a stranglehold, and where those things must fall away, lose their grip on us, Jesus Christ, through Your Spirit, will You cause our eyes to see how precious You are? Will You cause us to see or to remember those times where we have simply trusted in You and You have always been enough? You've been more than enough.

When we have simply trusted in You, we have found eternal joy—a joy that cannot die, that cannot be lost, no matter what our circumstances are. And so who of us will exchange that joy for rubbish, like silver and gold, for a one-off event that will cause us to feel horrible afterwards? Go and do the work that You must do in our lives. Help us to have clarity, help us to have discipline, both practically and mentally, in finding and replacing these things with the only knowledge that will ever lead to satisfaction.

In Jesus Christ's name, we ask it. Amen.