“Among the sins to which the human heart is prone, hardly any other is more hateful to God than idolatry, for idolatry is at bottom a libel on His character. The idolatrous heart assumes that God is other than He is-in itself a monstrous sin-and substitutes for the true God one made after its own likeness. Always this God will conform to the image of the one who created it and will be base or pure, cruel or kind, according to the moral state of the mind from which it emerges.” (A.W. Tozer)
It seems as if most people think idolatry is bowing to a wooden or metal figurine of some sort. Tozer declares that idolatry is really of the heart and the “idolatrous heart assumes that God is other than He is.” He goes on to call this a “monstrous sin.” Notice what the heart does when it assumes that God is other than He is. It “substitutes for the true God one made after its own likeness.” Simply thinking of God other than He is, as Tozer says, is a monstrous sin. But the idolatrous heart goes even deeper and then substitutes for God one like itself. In other words, at the core of the idolatrous heart is a remodeling of the concept of God and that is a trading the true God for something like the fallen creature. This is a horrible blasphemy to think of God as being like a fallen creature. It is to make God in the image of fallen man.
Let us think of some rather “innocent” examples. Let us imagine a person denying the doctrine of hell because he cannot imagine a God of love sending people to hell. On the surface that rather common position does not sound bad at all. However, let us dig a little deeper. What standard do people go by when they think of God as love? What standard do people have of love? Ah, now it is clear. People determine what they consider as love based on themselves and perhaps the culture around them. So they are judging love by themselves and attributing that to God. Can this so-called innocent and common example really be anything but a case of vicious idolatry? It is simply man turning from the truth of God to another God of his own imagination and living by that. This can be nothing else but idolatry. But again, to refer to some earlier statements of Tozer, what drives our theology is really our concept of God. A weak and effeminate theology is really the result of an idolatrous heart.
Let us think of a second “innocent” example. People refuse to believe in a thorough God-centeredness in theology because of free-will. For example, many believe that God is so sovereign that He allows man free-will. A statement like that is, as Wittgenstein said, “language gone on holiday.” It is simply a ridiculous statement when looked at closely. For example, to say that God is sovereign is to say that He reigns and rules over everything to such an extent that nothing happens apart from His plan and will. To say that He is so sovereign that He allows free-will is to say that He is so sovereign that He is not sovereign at all. A free-will is a will that God is not really sovereign over. The word “free” means something in the term. A free-will is not free if it is free from the reign and rule of God, yet God is not sovereign if men’s wills are completely free like that. The root of that issue, however, is the desire for man to be free of God. It is not as crass as the first example above, but it is still idolatry. It is exchanging the clear declarations about a sovereign God with a view of God that allows for man to be sovereign. Any time man puts something or man in the place of God that is idolatry. The teaching of free-will gives man the freedom to access grace as he wants and the power to successfully resist the Almighty Himself. That is idolatry.
Let me quote from John Owen. “Our next task is to take a view of the idol himself, of this great deity of free-will, whose original being not well known, he is pretended, like the Ephesian image of Diana, to have fallen down from heaven, and to have his endowments from above. But yet, considering what a nothing he was at his first discovery in comparison of that vast giant-like hugeness to which now he is grown, we may say of him as the painter said of his monstrous picture, which he had mended or rather marred according to every one’s fancy, “Hunc populus fecit,”-it is the issue of the people’s brain. Origen is supposed to have brought him first into the church; but among those many sincere worshippers of divine grace, this setter forth of new demons found but little entertainment” (vol 10, p. 114). Owen thought of free-will as a horrible teaching and as that which was an idol. Why did he think this? Because the power attributed to free-will is such that it is a power that should only be attributed to God alone. The doctrine of free-will as taught by many if not most is indeed an assault on the character and rights of God. It is idolatry. Let me leave this with a bit of a teaser. If Reformed people practice evangelism in much the same way as Arminians, what does that say about their true belief in God and of the power of fallen humanity? Is God assumed to be something He is not in our very practice of evangelism? Could it be that not only is our worship idolatrous, but our evangelism is too? Are we the blind leading the blind?
God Loves... Himself 
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