Isaiah 44:19 Worshipping a Block of Wood

 Ancient peoples had a hard time figuring out what to think about God.  You may say, why didn’t God reveal Himself to them like He revealed Himself to the Israelites?   It seems the Israelites had the same problem even after God did reveal Himself to them.

Ancient people were closer to nature than most of us are, so they were more aware in their everyday lives of human’s small place in the world.  They created idols to represent the various powers behind what they saw in nature, but the idols in their minds became what they represented.  So that in Isaiah 44:19, God mocks them as though they are saying to themselves: “I have burned half of [this tree] in the fire and also have baked bread over its coals. I roast meat and eat it. Then I make the rest of it into an abomination, I fall down before a block of wood!”

We may look back them with a smirk, but we do a similar thing today.

We may talk of Mother Nature as though nature itself is a thinking entity that consciously behaves in certain ways.  We don’t see anything higher than nature itself, as though nature was able to bring itself into being.

We see this today in our attitude toward science.  We forget that science is on a journey and is not the destination.  Science is our investigation into all that there is, but it can never know all that there is. 

But with it, we no longer feel the need for anything more than that, as if science can answer every question.  Science can tell us where we are but not where we should go.  It can describe what something is in substance, in incredible detail, but not its essence or significance.  I have a lot of paper in my house with ink on it, but science can’t tell me its value.

Our country is going through an extraordinary crisis right now, but we never think to look any further for answers than other human beings.  We don’t create idols out of wood, stone, or metal anymore, but we worship anything but the One who created all of this.