The Idols In Our Hearts

Now some of the elders of Israel came to me and sat before me. And the word of the Lord came to me, saying, "Son of man, these men have set up their idols in their hearts, and put before them that which causes them to stumble into iniquity. Should I let Myself be inquired of at all by them? Therefore speak to them, and say to them, 'Thus says the Lord God: "Everyone of the house of Israel who sets up his idols in his heart, and puts before him what causes him to stumble into iniquity, and then comes to the prophet, I the Lord will answer him who comes, according to the multitude of his idols."'" (Ezekiel 14:1-4)

This is a scary passage of scripture when you understand what God is saying here. Ezekiel was the voice of God to the nation of Israel at this time in history. The elders (government officials) came to him to find out what God was saying to them. Before they could say anything, God told Ezekiel these men had set up idols in their hearts. They had caused themselves to stumble into sin by doing so. Then God asked a rhetorical question. He asked if He should let them inquire of Him at all when they have done that. Then He told Ezekiel what to say to the elders. He said to tell them, "Everyone...who sets up idols in his heart, and puts before him what causes him to stumble into iniquity, and then comes to the prophet, I the Lord will answer him...according to the multitude of his idols." God is going to answer him as his idols would. That is scary.

Generally when we think of idols, the first things that come to mind are physical things or fleshly desires. Many people think first of money or things money can buy. Some people have made education or position idols that God must not touch. We even sometimes prize relationships with other humans above our relationship with God. These could all be idols, but idols in our hearts are often much more insidious than we have thought.

My pastor recently wrote to me in an email reminding me that our hearts are deceptively wicked. (Jeremiah 17:9) His reminder goes right along with this passage. God is saying that if we come to Him looking for the answer we want, He will answer us according to our desires. To say it another way, if we have put something between us and Him when we come to ask Him anything, He will tell us what we already want to hear. That being the case, we would be in jeopardy of not knowing whether an answer we receive in prayer is what God wants us to hear or what we want to hear. How then would we know if anything we hear from God is really what he wants us to hear and not the product of our own desires?

Thankfully and graciously, we have two things the elders of Israel did not have at the time of Ezekiel. We have the completed cannon of scripture, the Bible, and we have the Holy Spirit. Jesus said of the Holy Spirit, that he would lead us into all truth. (John 16:13) Unfortunately, that does not make us error proof. It should, but we often operate in our souls rather than in our spirits. You remember the soul, our mind, emotions, and will. The soul is, in fact, the greatest idol most of us have to deal with when coming to God regardless of whether we are born again or not.

Some people think whatever God says to them has to make sense. Let us go by the numbers. Sense is the domain of the mind. The mind is part of the soul. When we say what God tells us has to make sense, we have made our mind an idol. It is something that we value more than God. God will answer us according to what makes sense to us. We could tell story after story of God directing something that did not make sense until we saw the final result. Then we understand why He directed it. These are not only our stories, but are corroborated by many people who have passed through our lives. God's will does not always make sense initially, but it will always make sense ultimately.

Perhaps you are one who has to feel something passionately to overcome inertia and get started with it. Feelings are emotions and are, once again, the domain of the soul. We probably do not need to go into any more detail on that. If it feels good do it would not be the guiding rule here.

Of course, we also have our will to deal with when God tells us to do something. Yes, soul again. We may actually know beyond all reason or feeling what it is God wants us to do and the will can still veto any action on our part.

The idols in our hearts can keep us from hearing from God. We are hesitant to give concrete examples of things we have seen because to do so might offend some readers now or in the future. However, throwing caution to the wind in this case for the sake of illustration, let us tell of the pastor who stood in front of his church on a Sunday morning and, mistaking a move of the Holy Spirit for emotionalism, quenched the Spirit that day. It is a mystery as to what he was thinking. We might also tell of the pastor who for fear of financial difficulty spent eighteen months preparing the sale of a portion of the church property only to find out when the transaction was completed, there was not enough land left to build the facilities the church needed. Another example that comes quickly to mind is the pastor whose church was floundering due to his own lack of spiritual perception. He blamed another for the problem on what he thought was good evidence. As of this writing there has been no perceptible change.

Whenever we operate in the soul rather than the spirit we have placed an idol between us and God. He will answer us according to what we think, how we feel or what we have determined beforehand we want to do. The result will be the best we can do, far less than what God would do were we able to stay out of his way.

We are not sure our will would have allowed us to take on the task of exposing and fighting the religious spirit over Santa Maria had we considered our feelings or thought twice about it. Sometimes it works to fly by the seat of one's pants. God uses all kinds of people. Let him use you. You will find the peace beginning to rule in your heart as you find your place in His kingdom. God bless you.

The Image of God--Spirit, Soul, Body

This could easily be part 5 of "The Workings of a Religious Spirit" because one of those workings is the inability to distinguish between the works of the spirit and the works of the soul. It seems better to use a couple posts to discuss what it means to be created in the image of God. Most of what we have learned about the distinctions between spirit and soul we learned from the great Chinese theologian, Nee Tu-sheng who ministered in China before and after that country's fall into communism. For greater detail and greater insight, we highly recommend his book, The Spiritual Man which is now available in one volume. The book is written under his more famous pen name of Watchman Nee.

There are whole segments of the evangelical church that believe man is bipartite (two parts), having a corporeal (flesh) part and an incorporeal (not flesh) part. This understanding is not incorrect, it is simply incomplete. Anyone who cannot understand this simple truth from 1 Thessalonians 5:23 and Hebrews 4:12 will probably not understand our explanation either. Our incorporeal part is really two parts, spirit (the part of us that connects us to God) and soul (mind, emotions, and will). We really have three parts to us just as God has, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Thus, this is at least a part of what it means to be created in the image of God. The reason for this misconception is largely historically, bad teaching, but there is more to it.


When Adam and Eve sinned in the garden of Eden, they chose their will over God's will. The result was their souls came between their spirits and God's spirit which effectively meant their spirits died. They were unable to connect properly with God's spirit due to interference from the soul. They passed that condition down to the rest of the human race. The end result for us is that we are born natural men who cannot understand the things of God. They are foolishness to us. (1 Corinthians 1:18) This is why Jesus told Nicodemus we must be born again in order to see (perceive, understand) the kingdom of God. (John 3:3) Being born again returns our spirits and souls to the proper attitude (double meaning intended) so that we are able once again to have individual, direct contact with God through our spirit. It is usually better to move from a known area to an unknown area when attempting to understand something, so before we discuss the spirit, let us detail the workings of its worldly counterpart, the body.

Our bodies really only have one primary function. While it is true they house the spirit and soul during our earthly pilgrimage, their real function is to give us contact with the world. By world, of course, we mean the physical world, everything that can be perceived with the physical senses. Our bodies were created to see, hear, taste, touch, and smell this world. Were we in a different world with a different atmosphere, different light spectrum, different gravity, etc., our bodies would be ideally suited to that world. We might say the body is situated so that it receives input from this world. This information is then relayed to the soul where we process it according to what we think (mind) about it, how we feel (emotions) about it, and what we will do (will) about it. We then send that information from the soul back to the body to act on it. This is the whole of what the natural man does. The man who has been born again, however, has another factor to consider when evaluating input from the world.

The spirit is the God part of man. When it is working properly, the spirit keeps us in constant and direct contact with God. Our spirit has only this one function, communion with God. Like the body, our spirit takes in information, but the only information it receives is from God. Do not be confused here. Evil spirits do not work in our spirit. Their playground is our soul. It is in the mind and emotions they do their evil work. In fact, one of their primary methods is to attempt to convince us the entire spiritual world is nothing more than a figment of our imagination. To be a little more complete, there are also demons that affect our bodies, but we are outside the scope of this teaching.


The information our spirit receives from God is then sent to the soul for processing. We determine what we think about it, how we feel about it, and what we are going to do about it. That sounds hauntingly familiar. The problem is, even after we are born again and our spirit is functioning properly, we do not always know whether the information in our soul came through our body or our spirit. We also cannot ever discount demonic influences in the soul. Once we have processed the information we have received we decide what we will do about it. Primarily there are two options--do something or do nothing. Doing nothing is the easiest of the two choices, unless the information truly came through our spirit to do something. Then doing nothing becomes a very uncomfortable choice. If we decide to do something, we formulate what it is we want to do and send that information from the soul to the body to take action.


We could almost call this next item a mystery since a mystery in the New Testament is something that was heretofore hidden, but has now been revealed to us who operate in the spirit. The mystery that has been revealed is that Jesus is the body part of God, if you will. His earthly body was just like ours, but his resurrection body is different. However, put your thinking cap on, because while Jesus is now in the heavenly throne room in his resurrection body, he also left his body behind to continue his work on earth. We are Jesus' body on earth. He works through us. Of course he can intercede in any circumstance at anytime without our help, but when he does that, on the earth side we call it a miracle. In heaven, God works the same way we work. Wait, reverse that. On earth, we work the same way God works in heaven. He receives information from the world, processes that information, and acts on it. When he chooses to act via his body, that is us. We do the work. That is our job. We were created in the image of God to be his body on earth, to do his works. If that does not make you want to treat yourself (and other Christians) will a great deal more respect, there is not much else we can say to you about it.