We are all guilty of putting things before GOD. I'm not disputing that. But doesn't the term "idolatry" lose its usefulness is we start saying all sin is idolatry?
In Ephesians 5:5 and Colossians 3:5 he equates certain sins with idolatry. But did he intend on equating EVERY sin with idolatry?
I think this involves a deeper dive into what sin is.
In Lutheran circles there is a Latin expression we use to describe the fallen human condition:
homo incurvatus in se. It translates to man curved or bent inward upon or into himself; that the direction of our desires is turned inward, toward ourselves.
The words in Hebrew and Greek usually translated as sin often carry the meaning of "missing the mark" or "error". In Hebrew we have
chata, a word that indicates failing to hit one's target, such as if firing an arrow and missing the bullseye. In Greek we have
harmatia, a word that means error, or flaw; in the stories of Greek epic legendary figures, the hero's downfall is because of a fatal flaw, harmatia, such as Achilles infamous heel in Homer's Iliad.
Scripture speaks of, for example, also of the "lusts of the flesh", and more broadly of "the flesh". This is not an attack on our physical forms, of our material composition as flesh and blood creatures. Our material composition is actually good, created by God. What this idea of "the flesh" and its lusts (or desires or appetites) is getting at is the waywardness of our natural inclinations, it's that our desires, our inclinations, our drives are distorted, perverted, there is something deeply, deeply wrong with us. And that deep wrong cuts all the way to the core of who and what we are. This is what early Christian theologians like St. Augustine of Hippo were getting at when talking about Original Sin. To describe the deep wrongness present in each and every one of us as the common, inherited wrongness of Adam from when he fell.
That is what
homo incurvatus in se is getting at. That we are, in our deep deep wrongness, innately directed toward ourselves; so that the natural bodily drives are twisted, jumbled, confused, messed up in all kinds of ways. The natural desire of human beings to procreate and form intimate bonds--sex--is not a bad thing. It's a very good thing, God declared "Go forth and multiply", love, intimacy, and procreation are good things and part of God's good creation. But what happens when sex gets twisted and perverted? Where we view other human beings made in God's image with lustful eyes, objectifying them, viewing them as something to be possessed for our own selfish pleasure and satisfaction? What happens when we seek to dominate? We violate the other person, we harm them, we create misery. Relationships are broken, intimacy fails, people engage in horrid and repugnantly wicked acts like rape and sexual assault. There is adultery and infidelity, there is abuse of all different kinds. Add to this things like envy, and jealousy, and malice, and myriad forms of violence and it is multiplied time and again. Resulting in trauma, destruction, and death. We can talk any natural inclination and its perversion, even things like hunger or thirst or the desire for safety and shelter. The resulting hoarding of food, creating conditions in which some have plenty and many are lacking in basic necessities; or the creation of unjust and evil social conditions in which homelessness, hunger, poverty, and many don't even have access to clean drinking water. All of these things stem right from the wicked and debased heart of human beings broken and cursed by the distorted, perverted, appetites of the flesh.
That's sin.
And at the core of all of that sin is this: We are not in a state of right order with God and all other creatures; the human vocation to bear the Divine Image, to reflect God, to bear God's beauty and goodness in creation is fundamentally broken.
We can also talk about what it means to worship.
To speak of human beings created for worship we should not imagine that this means that human beings were created to attend a temple and engage in particulare religious rites, to construct shrines or altars, etc. The meaning of worship is to bear the true reflection of the Creator God.
Consider this idea "the image of God", and how ancient people thought of images of the divine. In Pagan cultures that involved making literal idols, taking stone and wood, carving a depiction, and understanding that these images in some way reflected the god or goddess' likeness and power--a way for the god to be present in the world, to be interacted with, engaged--such as offering a sacrifice or libation or something.
Now consider how, when God decides He is going to dwell among His people after bringing them out of Egypt, He commands them to make no image at all, and yet He tabernacles with them--quite literally--in the Tabernacle (and then later the Temple). God's Temple has no image--or does it?
"In the image of God He made them" reads Genesis.
There is an image of God, it's human beings, not literal representations of God as though God has a face, eyes, ears, a nose, two arms, etc.
And yet, God became flesh, became human, in Jesus Christ. Jesus is also what? He is also the Temple, and the Great High Priest.
What the Tabernacle of old foreshadowed, God dwelling among His people, is given fullness in Jesus, the God-Man; and the Church comprised of people united to this same Jesus by Grace by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. And we are pointed toward the Day when God will be all in all, new heavens and new earth, where God dwells in fullness. In the Revelation of St. John, John notes that he sees no temple in the great city.
This is all about worship. What it means to worship God. As Jesus says to the Samaritan woman, it's not about Mt. Gerizim as the Samaritans thought, or even the Temple Mount as the Jews (rightly) said; instead the Day is coming, Jesus said, when true worshipers of God worship in Spirit and truth. That can only happen when human beings have been born anew, and brought back into the healing and restoring and redeeming power of God, bringing them out of the Exile of sin and death, through a new Exodus into the Life of the Resurrection in Jesus Christ.
Sin is, at its heart, the distortion of what it means to be human, what it means to be the Image-bearing creation of God; and that infects and twists and distorts the whole human enterprise--and thus worship. To worship the Creator God by being a fully human person, alive with God's Life, filled with God's Life and Goodness, working and living and being the true reflection of the Creator in the world, serving and ministering in the Holy Place of God's Creation. Where our day-to-day, in-and-out ordinary life is praise and honor of God's Beauty and Glory as the Maker of Heaven and Earth, the One who loves and is loved; who made us to love and be loved; who brought all things into existence out of His love.
-CryptoLutheran
