Observation: When the people of Judah are in Exile, it is especially important for them to remember exactly who their God is. The Lord, the Great "I Am," is no local tribal deity, but the one who stretched out the heavens and earth... including Babylon, where the Judahites now reside against their will. No idol from the past or present compares. God is still in charge, even here, and God is doing a new thing.
Application: Here's something to ponder, for what it's worth...the God we think we know is an idol. Why? Because God is YHWH, "The Lord." This translates to "I will be what I will be." Any God we think we know or can fully understand is by definition an idol. Any idea of God in our heads who is bound to a particular time, who doesn't live dynamically in this moment and do new things, is not God.
The picture of white Jesus from our Sunday School classrooms growing up? It's an idol. The concept of God as an angry white bearded dude sitting on a cloud? Idol. All our favorite hymns, all our beautiful buildings, all our memories from summer camps that might lead us to believe God is somewhere in the past, if we get so attached to those things that we can't hear God calling from the future, they are idols. Period.
On the other hand, if we receive these things humbly, as seeing through a glass dimly, if we know that all the gifts of our tradition are just a teeny, tiny fraction of a fraction of the Lord who is beyond our knowing, they can help us as we try to perceive the new thing God wants to do today.
Prayer: God, help us to move beyond the pictures of you in our heads, and to perceive the new thing you are doing. Amen.
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