What could be a greater insult to the holy God than for His image bearers to exchange His glory for the worship of created things? Today, R.C. Sproul illustrates the grave wickedness of idolatry.
Think of it this way, I know that my wife would love to have a mink coat and I don’t have enough money to buy a mink coat. But I love my wife and so I want to get her a mink coat. So I scrape and save and work overtime, do menial tasks and degrade myself and do everything else. Try everything in my power to save up enough money for a mink coat, and finally the day comes where I buy her to mink coat and I present it to her on Christmas morning. And she says, “That is beautiful.” And then she takes that mink coat and she goes to the garbage dump and throws it in the banana peels and the rinds from oranges and the tomatoes and the rotten eggs, and she just takes that mink coat and throws it into that. And then roots down into the garbage and finds the dirtiest, smelliest, crummiest, rottenness, putrid, rancid rags she can find and wraps them all around herself and comes home and says, “Look at my new coat.” She went in and exchanged the coat for these rags. I would call a doctor. There’s something wrong. That’s insane to do something like that.
But you see that’s a poor analogy, because the difference in glory between rags and a mink coat is infinitesimal, in comparison, in glory between a totem pole and the God who made heaven and earth. But this is what man does. He takes the truth of God and exchanges it for a lie. He takes the glory of the incorruptible God and exchanges it for the corruptible things like men, and buildings, machines, and all the rest—bee trees, idols. And we sit around and think that God is pleased by all that. God looks to us, “Okay, at least they’re worshiping something.” Do you see that the fact that men are religious at this point, and have religion and worship compounds the felony? It’s one thing to refuse to worship God at all. It’s another thing to not only deny His existence, but then to set up something in His place that isn’t worthy to compare with Him and begin to worship that in His place. That’s insult to injury.
