RELIGIOUS LEADERS ARE IDOLS
God also calls religious leaders “kings, queens and princes”. This symbolism characterizes God’s view of the relationship between people and the leaders they choose to rule over (i.e. judge) them and fight their battles for them. When people choose to have kings over them, God sees their choice as an act of outright rejection of himself. It is not surprising, therefore, that he gave Israel stern warnings of the consequences of choosing to have religious leaders (i.e. kings, queens, princes) govern them. These consequences still apply to people who, ignoring God’s commands about trusting men, kings and princes, choose to follow and listen to religious leaders they can see instead of following and listening to God whom they cannot see.

Given God’s view of false prophets, their adulteries and idolatry, it is easy to understand why he has warned his people about them and the judgement they will receive. Jews should know enough to apply prophecies about false prophets to themselves, because those prophecies were written to their spiritual fathers. Christians, should also know enough to apply those prophecies to themselves, but they do not because they arrogantly consider themselves to be more righteous than the Jews and dismiss Old Testament prophetic warning as not applicable to them because they have Jesus. They do this to their own detriment while ignoring New Testament scriptures that also warn about false teachers.

The Religion Detox Network will appeal to people who have rejected the human kings they have been following and to whom they have been listening in favor of following and listening to God.

To characterize religious leaders as kings, false prophets, magicians and sorcerers will be offensive to all Christians and Jews. But it must be remembered  that God uses natural, human terms to symbolically represent spiritual truths and that all scripture– even the scriptures that offend us — are useful for training in righteousness . And the truth is that religion is deception and that religious leaders deceive people into believing that a lie is truth. Since the people think their leaders speak for God, God takes it very personally when they misrepresent him. That is why God gave the Third Commandment and warned about “profaning ” and “polluting” his name.

Reading the literal words of the Bible, false prophets with all kinds of titles  (e.g. pastors, priests, rabbis, etc.) take human words and concepts and re-package them in pretentious, flowery religious language (i.e. smooth talk) that makes them appear spiritual as they interpret God’s word for the people. And the people love it because it sounds so spiritual and provides religious sound bites that they can quote and upon which they can meditate. It is all very offensive to God because man’s simple teachings about God can never compare to the truth that God reveals about himself through his spirit speaking directly to the heart.

Religious leaders have been creating religion this way forever. God represents this process as making an idol out of wood or metal. Using the imagery of a craftsman making a physical idol, God symbolically represents false prophets as religious leaders who make tangible religious idols (e.g. buildings, music, liturgy, sacraments, etc.) for people to worship. This process is symbolically represented in the story of the sin of worshiping the Golden Calf where Aaron yielded to Israel’s desire for idols like those they knew if Egypt. From this story we learn that any religion created by men is sin.

Beginning with the raw material (i.e. the literal words) of the literal Bible, countless generations of Jews and Christians have reshaped truth by cutting out the parts that they do not understand and adding their own doctrines to create a theology of God that seems reasonable to them. To make their theologies understandable, they use their imaginations and visions out of their own minds to embellish (i.e. overlay it) with beautiful words symbolically represented as gold and silver. In effect, they use human language to create mental images of heavenly (i.e. spiritual) concepts. When these images take shape as doctrines and religious practices, they are, in God’s eyes, idols. They are man’s creative efforts to represent God with words, buildings and religious behaviors. They are violations of the first commandment.

In God’s view, the result of this process for the false prophet is the same as for a craftsman who works with wood, metal or clay: They create a lifeless item (i.e. idol which cannot see, speak, hear or walk).

False prophets work hard trying to use human language to represent  spiritual truth. But it is a fools errand. God calls this practice “divination” and he criticizes them along with spirits, sorcerers and false prophets of creating doctrine out of the imaginations of their minds to deceive people who will listen to them. These smooth-talking false prophets use their intelligence to find doctrines in their literal interpretations of the Bible that they can present as truth without fear of contradiction because they develop their teachings from the literal words of the Bible.  But, in God’s view, they all speak lies because they have hardened their hearts and have not listened for God’s voice to explain the spiritual meaning of scripture.

Human words can never communicate spiritual truth as effectively as God’s voice spoken to the heart by his spirit. False prophets will try sincerely, but they will always miss something that is important and will always add something that is not truth (i.e. a lie). This is why the New Covenant provides that God will do all the teaching through his spirit without a human mediator. The only way that God can assure that he will not be misrepresented is when his people listen to his voice and not to the voice of false prophets.

It is bad enough that false prophets present themselves as idols who speak for God, but worse yet is the fact that those who cannot discern good from evil end up worshiping, obeying and serving the prophets when they are seduced and ensnared by the persuasive words of the false prophets’ pseudo wisdom and clever speech.

To call all religious leaders false prophets and idols seems harsh and unreasonable until we understand that God wants to teach his people directly — not through a human mediator — as he makes very clear in the terms of the New Covenant where God instructs New Covenant disciples by his spirit. Thus anyone (e.g. pastor, priest, rabbi, shepherd, apostle, etc.) who presumes to speak authoritatively for God, and never instructs people to listen to God’s voice directly, has willfully inserted himself/herself as an idol between God and his people. Similarly, anyone who tries to embellish the literal Bible with the silver and gold of human wisdom, while supposedly speaking the oracles of God, misrepresents God.

Honest examination of the relationship between clergy and laity leads us to God’s definition of an idol or another god: Any person or organization that interferes with God’s deep desire to speak to his people directly. This kind of intimate communication is symbolically represented in the term “face to face.”

Anyone who listens to the teachings of such people and honors them with respect, money and obedience has violated God’s commandments about making idols and worshiping other gods. Understanding of these commandments hinges on God’s definition of an idol: A likeness of a created thing. This definition considers an idol to be any person or anything (including a religious institution) that a person creates (i.e. a work of his intellect and hands). Thus, those who seek out and follow religious leaders so they can listen to them and follow them, exchange the glory of the invisible, incorruptible God for an image in the form of visible, corruptible man.

Since men and religious institutions are created things, they fit the definition of idol (i.e. something physical and observable created by man). When anyone places a man-made idol in the position of a god (i.e. one who rules) to teach others about God, that person has practiced idolatry.

Religious people typically comfort themselves about their obedience to God’s commands about idols with the belief that they have not constructed a physical idol of wood or metal. This is wrong thinking that ignores the fact that wood and metal symbolically represent people who have been made (i.e. fashioned by human effort) into an idol that looks good (i.e. covered with gold and silver) and is positioned in places (i.e. high places) for other people to see and worship. Thus anyone who assists in the training or placing of a religious leader in a position of authority over other people practices idolatry.

Religious leaders who claim authority to teach about God set themselves up as gods/idols in religious systems (e.g. churches, denominations, synagogues, ministries, etc.). When people go to them for teaching about God and for participation in religious activities (e.g. worship, sacraments, etc.) they effectively worship/serve them as gods/idols. Again, they all practice idolatry.

Religious leaders, commonly called clergy, are valued as spiritual experts in their respective religious communities. They are able to teach and lead because of a stronghold of thinking that says, in effect, that God does not speak to his people directly and that people need a human teacher to learn about God and direct them in worship. This thinking is Old/First Covenant religion and is the exact opposite of New Covenant principles.

These Old/First Covenant practices are all the essence of idolatry. Idols of wood, stone or metal are not usually involved in these modern times, but the religious organizations and their leaders are idols for several reasons:

These are all the substance of religion because they can be seen and replicated. They are not the substance of faith which cannot be seen.