Falling Away from God: Idolatry in the Old Testament—and Today
The story of salvation history is a tale of humanity’s desire to draw close to God after falling away from Him through idolatry and sin. This begins right at the beginning—in the third chapter of Genesis we see God’s orderly, perfect world thrown into turmoil.
Despite being given full graces of divine communion with their Creator, of being granted the ability to walk with God in the Garden and to share fully in His presence (Gen 3:8, RSV), the first man and woman transgress God’s single command when He told them that “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Gen 2:17). This prideful transgression, in which mankind attempts to deify themselves and to separate from their natural dependence upon their Creator, results in a twisted and distorted view of God and His world.
Taking his inspiration from Psalm 106:20, St. Paul states that although “ever since the creation of the world His invisible nature, namely, His eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made,” fallen humanity lost their vision of God and instead “Became futile in their thinking … they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles” (Rom. 1:20, 21b-23).
This fall from God’s will, which resulted in mankind being “driven out” of the Garden (Gen. 3:23), gains even more theological import when considering the fact that the Hebrew word for “driven out” or “sent out” is garash, which is one of the Hebrew words for divorce.1
In other words, humanity has divorced itself from the Creator, thereby divorcing itself from its true nature, the tselm and demut (image and likeness) of God in which all mankind was made.2 This creates the promised death of Genesis 2:17. “In the day you shall eat [of the forbidden fruit] you shall die” indicates a spiritual wilting, the death of the soul resulting in animosity and separation from God. As biblical scholar N.T. Wright points out, “The primary failure of the human race was idolatry, a failure of worship.3
We end up resembling what whatever it is worship. If we idolize things of this world—whatever form that may take—we become worldly, increasingly disinterested in the security of God and more interested in the false “security” of material goods. If on the other hand, we worship the True God, we exemplify the image of God within; we polish, so to speak, the divine image and likeness we were graced with at our creation, so that it gleams outward for all to see.
Like Moses, who shone so brightly with the light of the Divine that he had to veil his face before others, worship of the One True God makes us truly human, shining with the light of God’s goodness, grace and pure charity.
Just as worship of the True God finds its expression in the external, visible life of the faithful, so too does worship of idols find an external expression amongst those who follow such paths. In the words of theologian N.T. Wright, “Worship money, power, sex, security, prosperity, political advancement, and it will most likely show on your face sooner or later. It will certainly show in the way you treat yourself, and in the way you treat other human beings.”4
Those who are hungry for power become like Athaliah, the Baal-worshipping daughter of queen Jezebel who, after the death of her husband (King Jehoram of Judah) and her son (King Ahaziah), decided to usurp the throne by ordering the original “massacre of the innocents” (echoed in Matt. 2:15-18). In Athaliah’s story, she sought to appease her idolatrous hunger for power by attempting to kill her entire family—anyone who could make a claim to the throne, “all the royal family” (2 Kings 11:1), including children.
Yet Athaliah’s idolatrous attempt to put power before God ultimately failed, as all such attempts are destined to do (2 Kings 11:13-20).
The story of Israel’s infidelity to the Lord is the story of human sin. Idolatry—whether it be the worship of false gods as in the Old Testament, or the idolatry of putting ourselves and others above God—causes a break from our Lord, a rip and a tear away from His presence. It is not He who leaves, as if He has turned HIs back on His people; rather, it is His people who turn from Him, who serve Him divorce papers.
The stories in the Old Testament reflect our own story, both collectively and individually. When we follow our personal desires, neglecting God’s path in favor of a vision of our own making, things go awry; yet when we shun the idolatrous actions of putting other things before God and instead allow our lives to be ruled by His word, even the most tragic-seeming circumstances work toward His good in our lives.
This is brilliantly shown throughout the entire Old Testament, such as in the story of Joseph and his brothers. Betrayed and sold into slavery by his own siblings, Joseph’s faithfulness to YHWH and his upright moral character allowed God to work fully in his life, for the ultimate benefit of all. “And the LORD was with Joseph and he was a successful man (Gen. 39:2, Alter translation).5
Paganism is still blatantly apparent in today’s world. Whether it is the explicit New Age deification of nature as gods and goddesses or the implicit idolatrous culture of money, sex, power, or wokism, the implications of the age-old “worship of Baal” are obvious and still crippling much of humanity.
It’s time to truly wake up. It’s time to take a look at the history God has given us and learn from the errors of the past lest we, too, end up in a form of Babylonian captivity.
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Robert Miller II, Catholic Distance University N022 Genesis course, Lecture 2. See also Strong’s Hebrew, https://biblehub.com/hebrew/1644.htm.
Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch, Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: Genesis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010), 19.
N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion (NY: HarperOne, 2016), 297.
N.T. Wright, Spiritual and Religious: The Gospel in an Age of Paganism (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2017), 32-33.
Robert Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary (NY, NY: Norton & Company, 1996), 224.
Amen, yes, indeed!!!