In that day people will look to their Maker
and turn their eyes to the Holy One of Israel.
8 They will not look to the altars,
the work of their hands,
and they will have no regard for the Asherah poles
and the incense altars their fingers have made.
9 In that day their strong cities, which they left because of the Israelites, will be like places abandoned to thickets and undergrowth. And all will be desolation.
10 You have forgotten God your Savior;
you have not remembered the Rock, your fortress.
Therefore, though you set out the finest plants
and plant imported vines,
11 though on the day you set them out, you make them grow,
and on the morning when you plant them, you bring them to bud,
yet the harvest will be as nothing
in the day of disease and incurable pain.
God made things with purpose and with beauty. God made things to be used by humans for the flourishing of life.
But we have turned those good and beautiful things into objects of worship that steal our hearts from God. We worship other humans like celebrities or sports stars (just look at the number of tabloids in the grocery store and the billions of dollar industry of fantasy sports!). We worship our retirement plans and the homes that we buy. We worship our business or work projects.
Put simply: We worship the work of our hands. John Calvin, the famous reformer, put it this way: "Man's nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols."
But sooner or later those things will let us down. Maybe they will fall apart and break. The stock market will drop and our nest egg will lose thousands of dollars. We will lose our job because of uncontrollable market forces.
What happens when we get an unexpected diagnosis of a terminal illness? Will money change our diagnosis?
Nothing that we make or save or create can save us. Throwing more money at the problem might make it go away for a little while, but death is always creeping at our door laughing at our self-made salvation plans.
But God is far more powerful than death and far more capable of giving us what we need better than anything we can create. Because God created it in the first place! This shift in the way we see the world is huge! It is the between thinking that we are in control and trusting that God is in control.
Christmas is an invitation to stop worshiping the "work of our hands" and trust that God already came to do the work of living righteously for us. We do not need to create something to save us because we already have a savior! We do not need to earn our way into God's good graces or buy our way into heaven.
Advent is also a time when remember that God is still at work and that we are the work of HIS hands for the sake of righteousness, justice, faithfulness, truth and love. We remember that God is shaping us and making us into the people of His Kingdom and that His Kingdom we believe will come to reign.
In that day God will be our fortress and our lives will be the work of His hands.
Heavenly Father, we praise you for your creation and all that is good in it. We ask that you would work in us and shape us into the people you want us to be. Help us to remain humble and reject the temptation to worship the works of our own hands. Help us to wisely use the gifts that you have given us as a blessing for others. In the name of Jesus. Amen.
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