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An idol is anything we place between ourselves and God. It may be a product of the imagination that has no objective existence at all (Jeremiah 2:11); it may be an artifact made by human hands (Romans 1:23); or it may be part of God's natural order (Romans 1:25). No matter what kind of idol is worshiped, it is always something with which the worshiper hopes to establish a contractual relationship that he can then manipulate for his own benefit and glory.
In contrast, a righteous relationship with God is covenantal. God and God's actions are not contingent on anything we say or do, so God owes us nothing. God gives because of his unfathomable love for us, not as an obligation incurred by worship or incantations. Even when we ask things of God in true prayer, we are not seeking to cajole him into conforming to our desires. We are, in fact, praising his glory, for we are expressing confidence that he loves us because of who he is and not because of what we are or what we do. Furthermore, we are confessing our certainty that he can accomplish whatever he wills.
When we worship truly, we do so with a joyful understanding of the gospel as the best of good news. The Bible is the very instrument through which that understanding is transmitted to us, and it is the word of the living God. The Bible is not a mere set of rules or stories or theological statements. It is all of these and more. It is not just a book, but a library, for it is a collection of many literary genres that form an internally consistent and self-explanatory whole. These Scriptures teach us that we have broken our relationship with God and that we cannot fix it. Most gloriously, they reveal to us that God in Christ has done what we cannot, having conquered once and for all time our self-imposed state of sin and death.
It is true that the Bible can be made into an idol, but only if its content is first distorted by the sinful human heart and mangled into a grotesque caricature of itself. Most commonly, we do this by half-truths. For example, we allow the law to convict us, as it should, but we stop there, pretending to ourselves that we can keep the law next time, ignoring the Biblical truth that only Christ can save us from our distorted nature. In so doing, we make the law into our idol. Sometimes, we treat the Bible as if it were of a piece with the musings of the worldıs sages or with writings about false gods or that its insights into God and ourselves are limited by the customs or scientific ignorance of its writers. In doing so, we fail to recognize that Scriptural truths do not concern the mundane but are about God and human nature, are from God, and are timeless. Too often, we recklessly tease apart and destroy the wholeness of the Bible, picking and choosing within the detritus to fashion a false chronicle of a pseudo god, one made in our own image and likeness whose ethical standards we derive from our own. Still others are misled into pretending that the Bible is a science text, divine revelation of what we can discover on our own rather than what we could never accurately deduce from the world around us.
Finally, we are always tempted to use the Bible as if it were a mirror to reflect our own prejudices rather than a lens to see things about God that we otherwise could not. Doing any of these things is not idolizing the Bible. It is, in fact, idolization of self, for we seek to put words into God's mouth to rationalize our own sin.
We must, then, use the Scriptures as they were given to us and preserved for us. We must read them as a gift from God transmitted through inspired humans and serving as a collective pointer to God and to righteousness. It is true we must not idolize the Scriptures, but it is also true that to treat them as less than God's word is to fall into idolatrous worship of a tawdry artificial god we conjure up in our own minds, one that cannot teach us or love us or save us one that dies with us, never to rise again.
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