This Week's Pastor's Cut
Sunday, June 21st, 2026
The problem with idols is that they almost never look like idols.
The golden calf in Exodus was an exception — obvious, visible, something you could point to and name. Most idols don't work that way. They don't announce themselves. They arrive as things that are genuinely good — a relationship, a career, a reputation, a family, financial security, even a theological tradition — and somewhere in the ordinary accumulation of days, they quietly move into the center. Not by force. By degrees.
That is why Exodus 20:4 is not a command about religious statues. The Hebrew word pesel — often translated "idol" or "carved image" — describes anything shaped by human hands and placed in the position that belongs to God alone. The prohibition is not primarily about art or aesthetics. It is about where a thing is positioned in relation to everything else. An image doesn't have to be made of wood or stone. It can be made of ambition, or security, or approval. The material doesn't matter. The position does.
Paul, writing to Colossae, brings the same idea forward with more precision. He defines the members of the earthly nature not as exotic sins but as recognizable ones — sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires — and then pauses on the word that names their common structure: greed, which he calls idolatry. He is not being dramatic. He is being diagnostic. Greed is the habit of the heart that says: this thing, more than God, is what I need to be whole.
The honest question this passage presses is not whether you have idols. Everyone does. The question is whether you have named yours — and whether you are willing to let the passage do what it was written to do: not produce guilt, but reorient.
Before we go further: Is there something in your life that, if it were threatened or taken away, would destabilize you more than losing God's presence would? That is a diagnostic question worth sitting with honestly.
