Half the Tree Went on the Fire and He Bowed Down to the Other Half

A man did not miss a single one in nineteen years.

He missed other things. He missed a cousin's wedding and most of a funeral and a school concert he had promised twice to be at, and every one of those had a reason attached that was true at the time. What he did not miss, not once in nineteen years, was the thing itself.

He would have been surprised to hear it described as devotion. He would have said it was his job, and that the hours were what the hours were, and he would not have been lying.

Here is the part that took him a long time to see. He knew, without ever having thought about it, exactly what he would sacrifice and exactly what he would not. That order had been settled years earlier and he had never once said it out loud, and it ran his life more reliably than anything he believed.

He had never called it an altar. He served it every day.

The prophet who followed the log

Isaiah has a passage about this that is almost funny, and he clearly means it to be.

He describes a man planting a tree, waiting for the rain to grow it, and then cutting it down. Follow what happens to the wood:

He burneth part thereof in the fire; with part thereof he eateth flesh; he roasteth roast, and is satisfied: yea, he warmeth himself, and saith, Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire: And the residue thereof he maketh a god, even his graven image: he falleth down unto it, and worshippeth it, and prayeth unto it, and saith, Deliver me; for thou art my god. (Isaiah 44:16-17, King James Version)

Same tree. Half of it cooked his dinner. The other half he is on his knees in front of asking to be saved.

Isaiah is not making fun of a foreign culture. He is showing what happens when something ordinary and useful, a thing that genuinely warms you and genuinely feeds you, gets moved into a seat it was never built for.

The thing you have been serving is not a rival to God and it never was one. That is Isaiah 44 as written. It is the Holy Spirit who lets a man see the whole tree at once instead of only the half that is working.

Scripture puts the idol in the heart, not on a shelf

The most useful verse on this subject is one that relocates the whole problem.

Son of man, these men have set up their idols in their heart, and put the stumblingblock of their iniquity before their face. (Ezekiel 14:3)

In their heart. Not in the house. Not carved.

And Paul, writing to a church, does not list the things you would expect:

Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth... and covetousness, which is idolatry. (Colossians 3:5)

Covetousness, which is idolatry. That is a straight equation, and it means the subject is not a category of objects. It is a direction of wanting.

Romans says it as plainly as it can be said:

Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator. (Romans 1:25)

Worshipped and served. Two verbs, and the second is the one that gives it away. Worship is what you feel. Service is what you actually do with your Tuesday.

You are not being asked to find a statue in your house. Ezekiel 14:3 and Colossians 3:5 both put it inside a person rather than on a shelf. It is the same Spirit rather than your own inventory who shows somebody what they have been serving.

The two evils, and only one of them is leaving

There is a sentence in Jeremiah that names the whole shape of it, and most people only ever hear the first half.

For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. (Jeremiah 2:13)

Two. Not one.

The first is walking away from the spring. The second is the digging.

Read that again, because it is the part that gets missed. God does not describe idolatry as laziness or as running off to have a good time. He describes it as work. Hewing a cistern out of rock is brutal labor, and these are people doing it, deliberately, on purpose, for years, to store water that leaks out anyway.

That is what nineteen years of never missing one looks like from the inside. It is not indulgence. It is enormous, disciplined, exhausting effort spent on something that cannot hold what you are putting in it.

You are not weak. You have been working extremely hard at something that leaks. That is Jeremiah 2 exactly as it stands, and it is the Spirit of God who can make a man set down a chisel he has been holding since he was young.

What it costs, stated without drama

The Psalms add one line about consequence, and it is not a threat. It is a description.

They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them. (Psalm 115:8)

The verses before that describe idols as having mouths that do not speak, eyes that do not see, ears that do not hear. And then: the people who make them end up the same.

That is the actual cost, and anybody who has served something long enough will recognize it. Not a punishment arriving from outside. A slow narrowing. Less able to hear things. Less able to see people. Harder to reach.

What you built is not too strong to leave, and you are not too far in to be reached. Psalm 115 describes the direction, and the Spirit of God is the one who reverses it in a person who has been going the other way a long time.

How John ends a letter about love

Notice how tenderly this subject gets handled by the man who wrote the most about love.

The letter of 1 John spends five chapters on assurance, on knowing God, on not being afraid. And then it ends, with no warning and no explanation, on this:

Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen. (1 John 5:21)

Little children. That is the tone he chooses for the last thing he says. Not a warning shouted from a distance. A short sentence from somebody old, to people he calls children, about the one thing that will quietly take everything.

You are being spoken to kindly about this, and there is no contempt anywhere in it. That is the register Scripture itself uses. It is His Spirit who makes a sentence like that land as care rather than as accusation.