All sin is false worship. We worship what we love – and we become like it. We can become consumed and transformed by gluttony or envy or lust. We can make work or money or sex our god. And we worship these things. Our sinful desires really destroy the way we were meant to be: “Idols redefine reality and morality. But in so doing, they also redefine us. Partly, this is what we wanted: idols create a rewritten reality designed for us.” Today’s idols of sex, freedom and self are destroying all three of these things.

John Calvin once said that the human heart is an idol-making factory. If we do not worship the God who created us, we will worship anyone or anything else. And we inevitably become like these objects of worship. We love our sins and we love our idols, and we move further and further away from who we were meant to be.

Back in 2008 the American New Testament scholar Greg Beale released a volume on idolatry called We Become What We Worship (IVP). In it he said this: “All of us are imitators, and there is no neutrality. We should disabuse ourselves of the notion that we can be spiritually neutral. We are either being conformed to an idol of the world or to God.” And this is serious business, given how often we find in Scripture idols and idolatry related to the demonic.

The truth is, if we get God wrong, we get everything else wrong. Our understanding of who we are and why we are here gets fully distorted and twisted if the one true God is not our focus and our sole object of worship. Being image-bearers of God, our proper sense of identity and self-worth is fully bound up in him. When we worship false gods of any sort, our identity gets radically warped and disfigured.

Today in the West everyone seems obsessed with identity. But unless they are in right relation with the one who made them in his image, their identity will always become ever more messed up. We see this so clearly in the distorted (and yes, demonic) assault on human sexuality.

The radical homosexual and trans revolutions are a classic case in point. These folks are obsessed with identity, but it is all focused in the wrong place. Sexual identity becomes an obsession and an idol and takes us away from God and freedom and into satanic bondage.  

These matters are all covered very nicely indeed in a new book by Matthew Roberts: Pride: Identity and the Worship of Self (Christian Focus, 2023). Here in Australia, we just had the 46th annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras over the weekend in Sydney. They call these things “pride marches”. They are all about finding identity and meaning in one’s sexuality.

But as Roberts explains so well, the worship of anything other than God will NOT give us our real identity and will only further entrap us in a downward spiral. Idolatry always does that. This book is well worth quoting from, so let me offer a number of choice remarks found in it.

Early on he writes: “The argument of this present book is that Christianity provides an answer which secularism cannot; indeed, the fundamental tenets of secularism are the problem. Since who we are is defined by our duty to worship God, our crisis of identity is at root a crisis of worship.” p. 16

He continues:

We do not know ourselves by focussing on ourselves; we know ourselves by focusing on God, for we are created to display Him. In this sense, all of Christian theology has been about ‘identity’, but it is deeply Christian that Christians have not thought of it that way. Christianity has the answers to identity-obsession, but we will not find them by indulging in it ourselves. It is of our very essence to direct our minds and hearts towards God. The more our being is filled with the knowledge of God, the more God is imaged in us, and the more we truly are and know what we are supposed to be. pp. 19-20

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