Hey, everybody, welcome to Ask Me Anything.

I'm Matt Love. I'm here with Pastor J.D. Greer.

J.D., the question today is a very simple one, so I'm just going to get right to it.

What is an idol? Yeah, Matt, you know, I got to ask that question just the other day by a new

Christian. It's one of those Christian-Ease kind of words that we can use inside the church.

And sometimes we know what we're talking about,

but people on the outside, it's definitely, you know, a concept of them. Like, what do you mean?

Because we think idle and we think a little statue that you bowed down to. It's actually a very

important biblical concept. It's the first two of the Ten Commandments to have no gods and

no idols, no graven images. Martin Luther said, if you learn to

keep those two commandments, you would keep all the rest instinctively. A lot of people think, well,

because I don't have any gold statues I bow down to, no little amulets, I pray to, I must be good on

this one. I don't have any idols. But the concept of idol is much bigger and much more foundational,

such that it would be the first two of the Big Ten, the Ten Commandments. In Romans chapter one,

Paul says ultimately the original sin of mankind was a sin of idolatry. Now, you look at the

Garden of Eden and you say, well, I don't get that because you don't see them in the Garden of Eden bowing down to a statue or even bowing down to the tree of knowledge

of good and evil. But when you understand that an idol is anything that takes the place of God in

your life, they had thought that what the tree of knowledge of good and evil offered them

outside of God's will was better for them,

more essential for life and to be wise and to have happiness was more essential than the

presence of God himself. You know, one of the Hebrew words for worship in the Old Testament is

the word Cabode. And Cabode literally means a weight. So you could think of an idol as anything

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