Idols for sale

When we took my father for a Sunday drive and ended up 45 minutes north in a town called New Hope, he assumed a Christian founding by Puritan types, as in “new hope in Christ” or “new hope in the New World.” (In actuality, the place was originally called Coryell’s Ferry, after the owner of the ferry who offered transportation across the Delaware River to New Jersey. It was renamed after a large fire that destroyed several mills.) So it struck my dad odd to find a tourist haven full of “pretty” people preening.

Among the tie-dye clothing shops, restaurants, tarot card–reading store, and Wiccan shop we walked past on Main Street, my husband spotted a showcase window featuring African sculptures about a foot high, and he pointed them out to me and said, “Idols.” When I tried to give the benefit of the doubt and responded that they may just be art, he said, “Look at the faces and look how hideous they are.” He seemed grieved.

Six hundred years before Christ, the prophet Ezekiel took a kind of “tourist trip” in the Spirit. He was transported from the banks of the River Chebar in his people’s exile home in Babylon to the temple of God in Jerusalem. God had a few things he wanted Ezekiel to see.

First stop, the northern entrance to the temple and “this image of jealousy,” evidently a statue or sculpture egregious enough for God to dub it one of the “abominations” on this sightseeing tour of abominations. The next stop was hidden inside the bowels of the temple: Ezekiel first saw it through a peephole and was told to dig into the wall for a better look. There he found engravings on the walls of “creeping things and loathsome beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel” for your worshipping pleasure. If you have ever visited the ruins of Pompeii, you will recall abominations on the inside walls of houses, silent relics of a city wiped out in A.D. 79 by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

I am struck by the Lord’s question to Ezekiel at the end of the tour: “Have you seen this, O son of man? Is it too light a thingfor the house of Judah to commit the abominations that they commit here? …”

When I read those words I remembered that it had been “a light thing” in my eyes that this New Hope store was selling idols, whereas my husband found it grievous. Idols from Africa (or anywhere) are not cute. They are not art and they are not “a light thing.” In the next chapter of Ezekiel, God shows His pleasure with those who grieve as He grieves, for stores and temples and a nation full of idols.

God tells a cherub: “Pass through the city, through Jerusalem, and put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in it.”

This marking is for the grievers’ protection—from the destruction that is soon coming upon the rest.

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