"Does being good at spotting evil mean I'm holy?"

Image by Joe Penniston via Flickr

To the pure, all things are pure; but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their mind and their conscience are defiled.
- Titus 1:15

This verse doesn't mean that we should close our eyes and hum and pretend everything is beautiful. Rather, this points to the truth that not all things are pure, and neither are all things evil.

Again, we deal with extremism. In order to simplify life, some say "it's all good". (You need to say that in a high pitch, shrug your shoulders and spread your hands, palms up.)

On the other side, there are some who see demons under every rock, behind every tree and lurking within every object of popular culture.

I was having a conversation with the wife the other day, and we were talking about this. Specifically, someone was taking issue with idolatry - the antiques in a friend's house were "idols" and should be destroyed. In my teenage extremism, I would have said, "Duh. 'fcourse", and fixed a date in my filofax for the destruction party.

Today, I have more thoughts on the matter.

1. The Ten Commandments command us not to worship anything created by hands. There is no Eleventh Commandment telling us to destroy said objects we happen to find along the road of life.

However, there were specific incidences in the Old Testament where God did command the destruction of idols. We also see the New Testament precedent in the Acts of the Apostles.

My take-away? It is very important to God that we do not bow to idols. It is not so important to God that we go around smashing idols.

2. I came from a tradition that believes that there is a spirit behind every object of worship. I say that it is a "tradition" that "believes" so, because, honestly, you won't find a statement in the Bible that there is a spirit behind every object. (You will find this in Plato, however.)

I began to think about the little plastic deities churned out by the thousands in factories. Is there a demon attached to every single one of them? Or does a demon latch on only when someone takes the plastic/wood/metal object and bows to it?

And just because someone bows to one image of Deity X, does that mean all images of Deity X are idols with demons attached? What happens if someone bows to a stuffed Barney the purple dinosaur? Does that mean all Barneys become idols and must be destroyed? Sweep your kid's room!

I'm not being facetious here. Near my apartment, there is an altar with a huge Mashimaro squatting next to the more traditional gods.



3. What did Paul the great apostle mean, when he said, "An idol is nothing"? In my tradition, an idol was something, baybeh. An idol was a lot of things. To some people, an idol was everything.

Ironically.

In their zeal to vanquish idols, they ended up "worshipping" them. (Pouring lavish emotions and attention on them.) A friend of mine had a sarong with a hole in it because he'd cut out a picture of an elephant that was on it, and some clever zealots had told him that it was an ancient god.

It was the manufacturer's logo.

I was told to burn a shirt because the three-petaled "flowers" were actually the devil's trident. Nowhere in Scripture have I found the devil carrying a trident. I kept the shirt and wore it like a sermon.

To the wive's chagrin. It was an awful, loud shirt.

Nike is a Greek goddess. Sprite is a spirit. The Apple logo, God help us, has A Bite Taken Out Of It! Some zealots refuse to wear Nike, drink only 7 Up and... Thank God I haven't met anyone yet who eschews Apple because of that bite. But that may be because I stopped running around in those circles before Apple became prominent.

Prominent. That's the thing. For some, it seems that anything that sticks its head above the crowd is fair game for being labeled evil. Rock and Roll. Heavy metal. "Contemporary Christian Music." (Queen Victoria, guardian of virtue, called Handel's Messiah "vulgar".) Novels. Beehive hairdos. Video games. Exposed knees. Bare shoulders. Beer. Spider-Man. Tellytubbies. (Detestable, yes. Demonic? I don't know.)

Some zealots find the devil in logos of common products, in designs on money, in the map of a city, etc, etc, etc. If you look hard enough, you can find the devil everywhere. But if you do, you're looking too hard. You're looking with wrong eyes.

Jesus said that the eyes are the lamp of the body. If you have good eyes, your body is filled with light. If you have bad eyes, then even the light you think you have is darkness.

Isn't it true that many watchdogs, crusaders, inquisitors do their dastardly acts in what they believe to be the service of God? The good news is that they can number in the ranks of such eminent people as Paul - if they turn, on the road to destruction.

Of course we need watchmen (not watchdogs - Paul said "beware of dogs") and guardians who will sound the alarm when things go awry. But if the alarm they sound turns bitter, spiteful and, well, evil, then are they not redundant, worse than redundant, adding to the ranks of those they warn against?

According to Titus 1:15, those who find evil everywhere have a mind predisposed to evil. To be fair, those who find evil nowhere are delusional. The truth is, some things are evil, some things are good, and most things are neither.

Once again, the straight and narrow path of truth is the hardest of three choices. And because it's neither this extreme nor that extreme, most of us can convince ourselves that we're walking in the truth, and not in either extreme.

So, be careful. We must hold our beliefs in a firm but light grasp.