Idols of Silver and Gold

Passage:Isaiah 2:6-22

Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road chronicles the travels of a lone man and his young son across a decimated American landscape.  Some unnamed apocalypse has permanently blocked out the sun and laid to waste the natural world.  Humanity is on its last legs, subsisting on whatever preserved food can be scrounged from the ruined stores and cellars of a dead civilization.  In one passage McCarthy describes the man’s passage along a highway full of burned cars.  The shoulder is littered with debris – old laptops whose batteries have long since run out of juice; MP3 players and video game consoles; CDs and DVDs – the once-cherished trappings of a lost era, now useless junk devoid of any capacity to preserve and sustain life.

The prophet Isaiah depicts another apocalypse: the “Day of the LORD”.  The day on which God shows up in person and sets the world straight.  In his second chapter, Isaiah describes a humanity that has exchanged God for idols of silver and gold – cherished objects intended to give people significance and make life worth living.  When the real God shows up, these false gods are exposed for what they are: mere trinkets, devoid of any capacity to preserve and sustain life.  For the hapless idolators, there’s no recourse.  They’ve invested everything in a currency that is temporary and ultimately useless.  They flee before the coming refiner’s fire, tossing their junk out the car window as they go. 

What’s the currency of your life?  Where are you investing your time, your money, your emotion and your devotion?  Can those things sustain and preserve your life, or will they ultimately end up in a landfill or a fire or discarded at the side of the road?  God gives us the opportunity now to trade our idols of silver and gold, paper and plastic and pixels.  He will sustain your life now; and preserve your life forever.  God will never discard you or let you down.  Hold onto him.