No Other Gods: Purging and Protecting Our Hearts from Idols, Part 1

By Robb Brunansky

Published February 19, 2025

In the year 841 BC, the prophet Elisha’s messenger came to Jehu’s house and anointed him the next king of Israel. According to the Lord’s purpose, Jehu was to destroy the house of Ahab so that God might avenge the blood of His prophets.

Jehu executed this divine mandate with unprecedented zeal. His zeal to destroy those the Lord commanded be destroyed, including all the prophets of Baal, was astonishing.

Unfortunately, Jehu was not zealous against all idolatry (2 Kings 10:29). For almost a century, two abominable golden calves had stood in the land to ensure the Israelites did not travel south to worship in the temple and re-unify the kingdom. Rather than completing his eradication of idolatry, Jehu left these two graven images, largely to protect his own political interests.

This lesson from Jehu is a warning that it is possible to have great zeal against idolatry, and even to purge idols from our lives, but still to protect our most cherished ones.

As we close this series, we consider how Christians can be zealous against idolatry so that, unlike Jehu, we purge all the idols from our hearts and protect our hearts against idolatry.

So, how do believers zealously purge and protect their hearts from idolatry? To destroy the idols that threaten our submission to Christ, we must stand in three critical places.

First, we must stand in the truth of God’s Word.

Christians must be committed to the truth, to stand in and uphold the truth, and to believe and to declare the truth – even if the whole world says the truth of God’s Word is a lie, or is foolish, hateful, nonsensical, or anti-science.

The first act of idolatry in world history took place because the truthfulness of God’s Word was questioned (Genesis 3). Remember the serpent asked Eve, “Has God really said…?” In that moment, Eve, or better Adam, should have responded, “We will not question the Creator’s Word. You must leave the garden now, serpent!” Yet Eve expanded on God’s Word, and the serpent saw his opening and flatly contradicted the Word of God. Idolatry finds its root in soil that refuses to be nourished constantly and exclusively by the truthfulness of God’s Word.

The most common form of idolatry promulgated by the evil one in the world today is not worshiping statues, but false doctrine. The path to idolatry now is the same as in Genesis 3, which is rejecting the truthfulness of God’s Word. We see that Paul warned Timothy about the doctrines of demons that did not come from the Word of God (1 Timothy 4:1). These doctrines can be things found in Scripture that are twisted, perverted, and misinterpreted by demons and men to mean something different than what God intended, leading to idolatry.

Second, to purge and protect our hearts from idolatry, we must stand in our trust in God’s care.

Our stand on the truth of God’s Word must translate into a deep trust that His Word is true, that God is true, and that God loves and cares for us. Idolatry often creeps into our hearts when we doubt God’s providential control of our lives and the world.

There are two biblical stories of idolatry that occurred because people failed to stand on this truth about God’s providence. The first is when Israel made a golden calf for worship (Exodus 32). This whole sinful circumstance surrounding the idol happened because Israel failed to trust in God’s love and care for them and His providence in their lives. For the Israelites, God’s timing was different than their timing (with Moses delayed descent from the mountain), and they were unwilling to trust Him. All of us can relate to this picture.

We see this failure to trust God in King Saul’s life when the Israelites were panicking before battle with the Philistines (1 Samuel 13). Samuel did not come at the appointed time to pray for the people and send them into battle. Saul, then, offered the sacrifice in place of Samuel because he was terrified God would not preserve him. A similar instance in Saul’s life happened when he mostly kept the Lord’s command to destroy the Amalekites (1 Samuel 15). Saul again did not trust God’s provision and protection, giving into the idolatrous desires of the people to preserve his crown.

Like Saul, we often make decisions based on others around us, because we doubt the Lord’s care and find security in man’s approval. Whenever we take matters into our own hands apart from God’s Word and doubt the Lord’s love and care, we rush headlong into idolatry.

Believers have every reason to trust in God’s love. The Lord gave His only Son to die for our sins; He has given us His Spirit; He has been faithful to His Word, and He has promised that everything works for our good. We must stand firm in our trust of God’s care if we would purge and protect our hearts from idolatry.

Third, we must stand firm in our task as God’s image bearers.

One of the most fascinating things about the creation account is that God created us in His image. Original readers of this text would have had some understanding of the significance of the image of a god. When ancient people placed an idol somewhere, they essentially declared that place belonged to that god, and that image mirrored the attributes of the god it represented.

Moses, then, is indicating we were made to reflect the attributes of our God as created in His image. God designed men and women to be His representatives. We reflect Him in order to showcase His perfections, and to mark out that the place we exercised dominion was His space – the Lord in whose image we were created.

When Adam rebelled against God, he decided to become a god and reflect his own image. This rebellion is idolatry: man projecting himself as God, making images of himself, and claiming that he is god through the images he creates.

As God’s image-bearers, we are tasked with reflecting and representing God and His perfections to the fullest extent possible for a creature. Scripture repeatedly calls us to reflect the Lord’s glory as bearers of His image. In fact, the only reason God can command us to be holy as He is holy or to be merciful as He is merciful or to be forgiving as He is forgiving, is because we are made in His image. Being the Creator’s image-bearers is our privilege, responsibility, and task.

God’s great goodness can be seen in this task. The Lord could have created us any way He desired, yet He chose us to bear His image and to reflect His excellencies. There is literally nothing God could have done greater in creation than to create us in His image to reflect His glory. The highest privilege of any creature is to so wonderfully reflect God’s beauty, majesty, perfection, and glory.

The problem is we get lost in our own pride, or in the praise of men, leading to a failure to stand firm in our God-given task. Christians are not to reflect ourselves, but to reflect Him, and His glory and perfections. When we truly reflect the glory of our Creator, we become the people God created and redeemed us to be.

We purge and protect our hearts from idolatry by standing in the truth of God’s Word, in the trust of the Lord’s care for us, and in our task as God’s image-bearers. In the next post, we will look at the second step to accomplish this elimination of idolatry from our hearts: what we must pursue.

No Other Gods: The Sinister Nature of Idolatry, Part 1

No Other Gods: The Sinister Nature of Idolatry, Part 2

No Other Gods: The Devastating Destruction of Idolatry, Part 1

No Other Gods: The Devastating Destruction of Idolatry, Part 2