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| Modern Idolatry series |


* Can Society Be An Idol?
* Have We Idolized Reason?
* Why is Good So Good?
* Why is Faith the Answer to Sin?







We don’t often find ourselves tempted to bow down to a wooden statue but make no mistake, idolatry is very much alive and well in our culture. Idolatry happens any time that we allow something other than God to take on one of His roles in our life. As I’ve said before, because God plays so many roles in our lives, the temptations for idolatry are endless.



In this series we identified one of the most important roles that God has in our life: the definer of good and evil. In fact, we saw that the sin in the Garden was exactly this form of idolatry. When Eve chose to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she did so to become “like God, knowing good and evil”. Every time we sin, we choose our own evaluation of good and evil over God’s, repeating the serpent’s words: “I will not surely die”. In this way, this form of idolatry is perhaps the most fundamental: making an appearance every time we sin.



Studying the knowledge of good and evil (a subject called ethics) sounds virtuous on the surface, but the story in the Garden demonstrates that it leads to death. Today we’re going to explore why our reason cannot define good and evil for us.



The Problem with Ethics



I can recall sitting in my college ethics class discussing how to make the right decision. The purpose of the class was to present tools we could use to help us decide between right and wrong. The main tool we were given was analysis (reason). We were taught to consider everyone who was affected by the decision and to weigh how the decision would affect them.



Here’s the problem: This type of analysis is where we use reason and knowledge to decide between good and evil. Sound familiar? It’s when we chose our own knowledge of good and evil, that we chose sin for the first time. Fundamentally, this is because we are choosing to reject God and put ourselves in His place. To make matters worse, when we choose for ourselves what is good and evil, the only possible option is that we will get it wrong. Why? Because we are not God.



To make matters worse, when we choose for ourselves what is good and evil, the only possible option is that we will get it wrong. Why? Because we are not God.



When we rely on our own definition of good and evil, we often so badly misunderstand something that’s good (beneficial) that it becomes evil (harmful). When we serve as our own guide, something valuable becomes harmful because wisdom is simply beyond our grasp. Let me give one example: