Lent will soon be upon us and already I have been quietly fretting over the gentle and practically imperceptible marriage between guilt and idolatry. This is the usual place for me, but in Lent, it often comes more sharply and painfully into view.
First, what is idolatry? And who is the idolater? The answer, if you haven’t thought about it before, will depress you. Idolatry is any single moment that you don’t worship God as he is, that you worship yourself or something that looks remarkably like you. It is all human religion, all human efforts to find a god that won’t bother the interior person, that will confine himself to external actions and postures. And so who is the idolater? Why, everyone. Every single person has fallen short, has fallen into the worship of the creature rather than the creator.
And so lent is a propitious moment. Because for a few short weeks, the church offers the Christian the encouragement to face the problem of the inward idolater through the troubling difficulty of giving up something that the outward person enjoys and maybe depends upon for solace and meaning. In trying to face something you are doing with your hands or mind or lips, you can sometimes see the reflection, the trouble, the true problem in your heart.
So what then is guilt? Well, again, guilt can be the interior sharp sensation of pain when you have sinned against God, or guilt can be an extra burden you carry around to distract yourself from your own idolatry. You can spend time fretting over your failure to do the task you commanded of yourself, and still avoid the fact that you are worshiping a god you created for yourself.
This is one reason why, I think, I have such a problem getting through the book of Jeremiah. The language is so plain, and clear, and God’s voice is by turns so plaintive and angry. As you listen, or read, you have to work very hard to convince yourself that he is only talking about the foul hideous broken idolatry of Israel, and that you aren’t anywhere in the picture. If you let your guard down, you can be in for various moments of personal devastation. Take these two verses, for example,
“Be appalled, O heavens, at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate, declares the LORD, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.” Jeremiah 2:11-13
Have I forsaken the Lord? Well, yes, I am constantly doing it. He is the fountain of living water but I stand afar off, parched with thirst, trying any which way to find a drop of water from anyone else. I gather what I can, in a poverty of disgusting pride, and am angry, then, at God, for not giving me water to drink in the receptacle I have fashioned for him.
So God calls on the heavens to mourn, to be shocked by the ugliness of who I am and what I have done. Of course I can’t really face it. Of course we flinch when we try to look at the holiness of God. Of course we settle for something a lot more comfortable and familiar to pour our life’s worship into. How could any of us face him?
For me, the greatest sorrow of lent is that the one I’m trying to face, the Living Water who gives life to the world, the perfect holiness of God, stands there so marred by my ugliness, abused by my sin, broken by my idolatrous transgressions, that I want to look away even from the cross. The fact that the Son would endure all that, for me, is undoing, and I am yet again tempted to look away.
How gracious, then, that he looks at me, when I cannot look at him. What a perfect mercy that the various measures of true and false guilt, the jumble of inward and outward hiding, the myriad, innumerable idolatries are forcibly removed by the life blood of the One who destroyed death. Blood and water flow mingled down and I drink it out of the cup of blessing, a well that bears no cracks, that doesn’t tarnish and fade, that is poured out without ever being emptied.
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