April 23, 2011 – Wisdom 14

Idolatry leads to perversion.  This is what you are suppose to take from this reading and is somehow connected to tomorrow’s.  This entire chapter is about the idols that are created by man and worshipped.  I enjoyed the evolution it takes you on in the middle of the chapter.  A man loses a child, so he creates an image of the child and prays to it.  If the man is wealthy, his subjects began to pray to it.  As time passes, generations spread, this idol becomes spread.  Someone in the family tree becomes a leader and forces people to worship the idol, maybe not even knowing where the whole things started.  This comes from something not sinister, but out of sadness, but by the passing of time, people are born into it and become immune to thinking anything is wrong. 

Then you have the leaders that want to be worshipped as Gods in their presence.  Soon, they have enough land that not everyone can be in his presence, so they build statues to worship when they can’t be with him.  I especially liked those on a boat in a storm that pray to a wooden idol that is probably made of worse wood than the boat.  If you are going to pray to a piece of wood for help, might as well just pray to the wood of the ship which you have bet your life on.  The whole chapter just deals in the waste people put into manmade idols when nothing can come from it.  We must think about the idols in our lives that we use to try and fill the hole only God can fill and why we are so curious when they never seem to satisfy.  We always will come away empty when we try to fill the place in our life God made for Himself with something that is a counterfeit, manmade. 

7 – “ For blest is the wood through which justice comes about”.  This really brings to mind Easter and the Cross, but appears to be out of place in a chapter talking about the harm that comes from wood when used to create idols.  I couldn’t find anything really written about this other that people saying it appears to be a foretelling of the Cross.  I wouldn’t have thought there would be more.