There’s something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there’s also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions. It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a fiercer devil. C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce
Trending: trading the transcendent for the trivial.
This is the essence of idolatry – to embrace a deflated form of or wholesale alternative to divine love in a futile attempt to satisfy the inner longings of the soul.
And when the idol doesn’t deliver, our thirst drives us to double down. We either increase our obeisance or turn to another and settle for whatever fleeting hint of satisfaction we can find before we are back where we started.
Parched. Desperate. Bereft.
So pervasive is this paradigm that it permeates our entire purpose and everyday practice.
We trade transcendent truth for trivial trinkets. We exchange the presence of the God for the study of God, leaving the landscape of our souls littered with crumbling idols of dogma. And eventually, when all conceivable idols fashioned in the image of God fail to satisfy, we abandon all hope in God altogether and wander even further into the desert.
And in that desert, as we encounter other divine beings created in the image of God like ourselves – we create idols of them as well.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in our pursuit of a husband or wife to share a lifetime of love.
Rather than embrace the presence of the divine one created in God’s image, we spend years developing an idol that potential candidates must conform to. And when they don’t – we send them away, whether literally or metaphorically. We cancel them. We disassemble the relationship with them in favor of maintaining the relationship we have with the idol.
Today, we will seek to escape this paradigm, casting aside our idols so that we may instead embrace the divine God of the Universe himself, along with the one he brings to us in the relationship of marriage.
Source Scripture
Matthew 5:27-32; Mark 9:43-48; Luke 16:18
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Extras
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Read Malachi 2:10-16. How does this Old Testament passage, written 400 years earlier than the Sermon on the Mount, compare to Jesus’ words?
Read Mark 10:1-12. What was the motive for the Pharisees asking Jesus this question? What motive did the disciples have for following up Jesus’ response with their own questions privately?
If you have suffered loss due to divorce, there is hope. Read Psalm 147:3. What is God’s attitude toward you? What does he intend to do for you?