The Idol of Food

What comes to your mind when you think of an idol?  Do you think of statues and pagens bowing down to worship them?  The Bible records the Israelites worshipping idols made of wood, clay, and/or animals made of gold, such as the golden calf.  Yet, an idol is any thing on which we set our affections; that to which we indulge an excessive and sinful attachment – Noah Webster’s 1828 Dictionary.

An idol can be a person or thing that we adore excessively; a creature, a work of our own hands, or even a human desire that we give precedence over God and his will for our lives. Have you ever considered that food can  be an idol in your life?

Idolatry is anything that we put before God; that to which we indulge an excessive and sinful attachment.  Do you eat food to excess on a regular basis?  Excess, as defined in Noah Webster’s 1828 Dictionary, in the moral sense, is any idulgence of appetite, passion or exertion, beyond the rules of God’s word, or beyond any rule of propriety.  Do you eat to satisfy your physical hunger or do you go to food to satisfy your spiritual and/or emotional hunger?

God put a spiritual hunger inside each of us so that we will go to him to be filled.  Are you going to Him or are you going to food in an attempt to meet your spiritual needs?  If you are going to any thing beside God to meet your spiritual needs, have you considered that idolatry?  Only God is able to satisy your spiritual hunger.

The Bible instructs us in Colossians 3:5 KJV, “Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry….”and 1 John 5:21 KJV, “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.”

Have you, like the brethren of Thessalonia, turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God?  If not, why not? God has put a hole in your heart (and in your stomach) that only he can fill.  Will you be filled with Him today?