Guard Yourselves
Rev. Res Spears
Walking in Truth and Love • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Transcript
Well, this week we reach the conclusion of our study of the Book of 1 John.
I hope this series has been helpful to you as you think about what it means to live in fellowship with God in Christ Jesus.
Some of what we’ve covered in these five chapters has been straightforward and even self-evident. Some of it has been repetitive. We shouldn’t be surprised if either of those things is true.
After all, even though he wrote under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, John was still a simple fisherman at heart. Certainly, he’d learned from Jesus, and I believe the Holy Spirit guided him in the very words that he wrote.
But it’s clear throughout Bible that the God-breathed inspiration of Scripture still left room for the personalities and personal experiences of the human writers to shine through.
John, the apostle, who was caught up both by the message of love that Jesus taught and the experience of Jesus’ love toward him. So it shouldn’t surprise us that he would focus so much of his attention on the subject of love.
Indeed, much of what John wrote in this letter SHOULD seem self-evident and even obvious to us as believers.
And yet both John and the Holy Spirit seem to have considered the love-God-and-love-one-another theme that permeates this letter to have been at some risk of being lost, or he wouldn’t have written the letter in the first place.
And, like a carpenter driving home a 16-penny nail, John hammers at this theme over and over again. Clearly, he’s concerned that somehow we’ll miss the point if he doesn’t reinforce it enough.
If the nail isn’t driven home, perhaps everything will fall apart, and John wants no part of that.
So, we’ve seen a lot of repetition. We’ve seen deep teaching on what we might have expected to be elementary issues. And we’ve also seen some hard passages.
I’ve tried to be transparent about my struggles with some of the passages in 1 John. God is still revealing things to me about His Word, and there are still some parts of it that are hard for me to grasp.
There are still some problem passages for me, where I scratch my head and wonder, “How am I going to preach this passage? What am I supposed to do with THIS text?”
And I’ve appreciated the grace you’ve extended to me as I’ve tried to work through those difficult passages with you here.
So, we come to the end of John’s first letter to the churches of Asia Minor — probably delivered first to the church at Ephesus.
It’s full of deep teaching on what might seem at first glance to be elementary issues. It’s full of repetition. And it has a sprinkling of tough passages that often appear themselves to be elementary, at first glance.
However, I never expected that the last sentence — the last verse — of this letter would turn out to be all of those things. But here we are at verse 21 of chapter 5 and that seems to be just the case.
It seems like a basic, obvious lesson for believers. It’s a new concept in this letter, but it echoes a theme John already has spent a great deal of time on.
And even though it’s a simple statement we can read once and then simply move on, when we begin to apply it to our modern lives as believers, we can very quickly find ourselves in a minefield.
Let’s read this short verse together, and then we’ll see how it fits each of the three types of teaching we find in this letter.
21 Little children, guard yourselves from idols.
It seems so simple, doesn’t it? Six words. And none of them are even hard words. You needn’t have graduated from seminary to understand the words or the verse.
Guard yourselves from idols. It’s a milder form of the second commandment.
4 “You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. 5 “You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, 6 but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.
God gave the people of Israel this and the rest of the 10 Commandments as they stood at the base of Mt. Sinai after He had rescued them from slavery in Egypt.
He spoke to them from the top of the mountain with thunder and flashes of lightning. And it’s significant that their response to Him was one of terror. They were afraid that if they listened to Him for long, they would die.
And so, they sent Moses into the thick cloud from which God’s voice had come booming down to them. They told him to go and hear the rest of what God had to say and then come back and relay it to them.
And while Moses was gone, they waited. And waited. And finally, they grew tired of waiting for Moses — really, they grew tired of waiting for God — and they demanded of Aaron, the priest, that he make an idol to go before them in the wilderness.
We see this in Exodus, chapter 32.
1 Now when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people assembled about Aaron and said to him, “Come, make us a god who will go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”
You might recall Aaron’s response. He SHOULD have smacked some sense into the people. He probably SHOULD have done some smiting. But instead, he told them to give him their gold, and then he melted it all down and made a golden calf. Look at verse 4.
4 He took this from their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool and made it into a molten calf; and they said, “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.”
Now, Aaron’s not saying the golden calf he’d just made in the sight of all the people had ACTUALLY led them out of Egypt. Nobody there that day was THAT dumb.
What he was saying was that the calf REPRESENTED the God who had brought them out of Egypt. You can see that in the next verse.
5 Now when Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord.”
If the golden calf represented some pagan god, it seems unlikely that they’d then plan to hold a feast to the Lord — to Yahweh — essentially at its feet.
Instead, what seems more likely is that the people of Israel were taking a page from the Egyptian religions and those of other pagan cultures around them.
They had made a representation that suited them of the invisible, one TRUE God whom they worshiped.
And, as with the other pagan cultures of that time and place, they expected this idol would become the conduit through which they would experience God’s presence among them.
Think about it this way: They’d been terrified of God when He came to them on HIS terms, so they were attempting to rein Him in, to bring God under THEIR control, to confine Him to the space THEY were willing to give Him.
That was the thing about idols. They could be kept in their place, brought out whenever someone wanted help, and then put back away so that people could go on about their business of eating, drinking, and playing, as the next verse puts it.
But God had wanted a relationship with the people of Israel. He had wanted fellowship with them. “I will be their God, and they will be My people.” That’s how God describes His desire for Israel — and, indeed, for all humanity — throughout Scripture.
From the beginning, God has desired for people to have their affections directed toward Him, for people to TRUST Him. And from the beginning, those are the things we’ve found hardest to really do.
Think of the story of Jacob running away from his father-in-law, Laban, after he’d served Laban for 20 years in order to win Laban’s daughter Rachel’s hand in marriage.
Quite frankly, it’s a weird passage in Genesis that raises more questions than it answers.
The scheming Jacob had been out-schemed by Laban, who essentially tricked Jacob into serving him for 20 years.
During that time, Jacob was tricked into marrying the ugly sister, Leah. Then, he was allowed to marry the beautiful Rachel, the one he truly loved. And during his time in Laban’s house, Jacob became rich, and so did Laban.
But finally, Jacob had had enough of Laban’s one-upmanship, and he took his wives and left in secret. What he didn’t know was that Rachel had stolen the so-called household gods that Laban kept, his idols.
And I bring all this up to point out for you Laban’s response to finally losing his daughters. It’s in Genesis, chapter 31.
30 “Now you have indeed gone away because you longed greatly for your father’s house; but why did you steal my gods?”
You really have to read the whole chapter to get a feeling for just how disingenuous a person Laban is. He makes a show of being incensed that his daughters have been taken away like captives.
And he says he wished he’d known they were leaving, so he could’ve given them all a big send-off. But if you read the whole story, it’s clear that Laban only cares about Laban.
And then, what we see in verse 30 is, perhaps, Laban’s first truly vulnerable statement. Why did you steal my gods? Why did you have to take my household idols?
And I think one of the lessons here is that idols capture the affections of those who keep them. More even than daughters, apparently.
God knew that graven images — even graven images that were made to represent HIM — would capture the affections of His people. He wanted them to love HIM and not some version of Him the people concocted in their minds and with their hands.
And that brings us to the repetitive mode of John’s teaching. He has said again and again in this letter that one of the marks of a person in fellowship with God is that person’s love for God. A love that’s characterized by righteous living and love for one another.
And so, John’s warning at the end of this letter is to guard yourselves from idols.
And that would have made great sense in Ephesus, home of the great temple to Artemis, the Greek goddess of fertility, magic, and astrology.
Christians in this part of the world would have been surrounded by neighbors who made sacrifices there and who kept idols in their homes.
It made perfect sense for John to warn them against getting involved in those pagan practices, because he knew their affections would be drawn away from God if they weren’t careful.
But this is also where the verse becomes one of those problem passages I talked about. And here’s the problem. We don’t live in first-century Ephesus.
We live in one of the most advanced cultures of the 21st century. When’s the last time you saw someone worshiping a golden calf or a household idol?
But I fully believe in what Paul wrote to Timothy about the Word of God: “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.”
In short, there was a lesson for the church at Ephesus, but there is ALSO a lesson in this verse for us today, in the 21st-century Western church.
And I think the key to the lesson for US is letting go of the notion that idols must necessarily be physical manifestations.
If we remember the tendency of idols to draw one’s affections away from God and remember the Israelites’ desire to confine God to their own little box by making an idol to represent Him and control when and where He’d show up in their lives, I think we can come up with a definition of the word “idol” that better fits out modern context.
An idol is anything that steals the affection God deserves, anything that comes between Jesus and me.
Now, think about that definition for a moment. Close your eyes and look around your heart. Do you see the minefield? Look carefully, because I’d be surprised if it isn’t there.
After all, John says to GUARD yourselves against idols. We wouldn’t have to guard ourselves if the threat weren’t real.
The president has the Secret Service to guard him, because there are real threats to his life. I DON’T have security guards, because nobody cares enough about me to take a shot at me.
So, take a close look. Do you see the minefield? Do you see the idols primping themselves to get your attention and then your affections?
Politics. Sex. Comfort. Sports. Entertainment. Wealth. Influence. Family. Nature. Beauty. Youth. Careers. Self-reliance. Even religion. These and many others are the names on the mines in that field.
Now, none of those things are inherently evil. In fact, many of them are blessings from God, just as was the gold the people of Israel gave Aaron to make the golden calf.
But the blessings are given to remind us to give praise and honor to the one who GAVE the blessings. And when we allow ourselves to become consumed by the blessings — when we allow them to capture the affection that is due only to God — then they become idols.
And the sad part is that, just as with the people of Israel and that golden calf, we often fool ourselves into thinking that the idols we’re building for ourselves are actually going to bring us CLOSER to God.
How many politicians have ridden Christ’s coattails into office only to slam the door on Him once they’ve been elected?
How many people have taken that promotion as a blessing from God only to bury themselves in the new work and slowly forget about their first love?
How many people have embraced the morality of Jesus and forgotten the love He calls us to have for even their enemies?
In fact, Jesus was all about smashing these idols and others. Listen to what Steven W. Smith writes about the Sermon on the Mount.
“Those who worshiped their own nationality, he warned that the salt might lose its savor and be useless. Those whose idol was money, he encouraged to lay up treasure in heaven. Those whose idol was their spiritual reputation, he warned not to pray and give just to be seen. Those whose idol was comfort, Jesus encouraged not to worry; God would take care of them.
“Jesus is after anything that steals my affection, anything that I hold as precious,” Smith says. “Whether it is a reputation, a status, a friendship, or an approval, anything we think we can’t live without, that is the thing God is most interested in showing [us] that [we] can [live without]. Once we realize God is all we have, we learn he is all we need.” [Steven Smith, Exalting Jesus in Jeremiah, Lamentations (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2019), 63.]
Some of the most devoted Christians I’ve known — the ones with the most riveting testimonies and the strongest desire to tell others about Jesus — have been former drug addicts and prisoners. And I suspect that has something to do with what Smith said here.
They’d had everything they loved stripped from them. The drugs had destroyed their bodies. Careers were lost and family and friends had deserted them. They’d found themselves alone and helpless.
And then, Jesus found them. And they finally learned that HE is what they needed all along.
And in this regard, idols are a lot like drugs. Nobody becomes a junkie the first time they do drugs. But little by little, the drugs take over. Little by little, what once could be controlled becomes uncontrollable.
Some commentators believe Laban’s household idols were a form of ancestor worship, because that was common in that part of the world then.
He’d have either inherited these little trinkets or had them made simply to honor his ancestors. But by the time Rachel stole them and hid them under her camel’s saddle, they’d become his gods. Why have you stolen my gods?!
Just as with drugs to a junkie, idols tend to present themselves as something completely innocuous or enticing or even good.
The drink that helps you relax. The politician who promises to bring back Christian values. The promotion that’ll come with a big raise. The boat that’ll give you many Saturdays of fun with the family. The beautiful new church building that will be a monument to faith.
But soon, you find you need to relax more and more. Soon, you find yourself making excuses for that politician’s ungodly behavior. Soon, that promotion requires you to be at work on Sundays.
Soon, those Saturdays on the boat turn into weekends away from your brothers and sisters in Christ. Soon, you find that, instead of serving others, the church is serving the building’s needs.
Soon, you find that the pretty little trinket on the ground is actually a mine.
And if the danger weren’t real, the Apostle John, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wouldn’t have felt the need to tell us to guard ourselves.
John Calvin, the great Reformer, thought of the human heart as something of an idol-making factory. In our sinfulness, we have a tendency to fashion pretty, new things that will take the place of God, that will help us to keep Him at arm’s length.
In a sense, to the degree that we FAIL to guard ourselves against idols, we’re constantly setting new mines in the minefield.
I’m not telling you not to vote. I’m not telling you not to get the boat. I’m not telling you not to take the promotion when it’s offered.
What I AM telling you is to proceed through this minefield VERY carefully. Not everything that glitters is gold. And sometimes, even gold isn’t worth having.
Set your affections on God and on His Son, Jesus Christ. Don’t allow the blessings He gives you to steal those affections, but rather let them be the catalyst for greater love for Him. And guard yourselves closely. There is danger all around.