The devastating price of false worship

David Foster Wallace was an American writer and university professor whose novel Infinite joke was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Another of his works, The Pale Kingwas a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012. The Los Angeles Times called Wallace “one of the most influential and innovative writers of the past 20 years.”

Certainly a man who seemed to have much to live for. Yet on September 12, 2008, at the age of 46, after suffering from depression for many years, Wallace wrote a farewell letter to his wife and hanged himself on the porch of his home in Claremont, California.

Just three years earlier, Wallace (who is not a Christian) had given a commencement address at Kenyon College that offered insight into the hollow and dangerous position he believed spiritually bankrupt people were in. If you worship the wrong things, Wallace said, you’re done for.

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This quote from him is long, but worth your attention:

“Because here’s something else that’s strange but true: In the everyday life of an adult, there’s actually no such thing as atheism. There’s no such thing as not praying. Everyone worships. We just have a choice about what we worship. And the compelling reason for maybe worshiping some kind of god or spiritual thing — be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some sacrosanct set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they’re the real meaning of your life, you’ll never have enough, never feel like you have enough. That’s the truth. Worship your body and your beauty and sexual attractiveness, and you’ll always feel ugly. And when time and age start to make themselves known, you’ll die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. At one level, we all know this already. It has been codified in the form of myths, proverbs, cliches, epigrams and parables; it forms the framework of every great story. The trick is to keep the truth present in everyday consciousness.

If you worship power, you will feel weak and fearful, needing more and more power over others to blunt your own fear. If you worship your intellect and are seen as smart, you will feel stupid and like a fraud, constantly on the verge of being exposed. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they are evil or sinful, but that they are unconscious. They are default settings.

It’s the kind of worship you slip into gradually, day by day, becoming more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value, without ever fully realizing that you’re doing it.”

So how did the false worship (and I include here the false spiritual gods he cited) that Wallace pointed to become our “default setting”? The Bible tells us so, and also the devastating price we all pay for it.

The natural and the unnatural

If you want to know how and why things have gotten so bad in our world, you need look no further than the first chapter of Romans. In it, the apostle Paul takes a sobering look at human nature and what has caused us to descend to the lowest rung of the ladder, where we find ourselves today.

Paul’s argument in Romans 1:18-32 can be summarized as follows: 1. We know that God exists, and therefore naturally what we can do is worship Him. 2. However, we have chosen the unnatural Position of worshiping other things; 3. So God has handed us over to unnatural behavior as a terrible and painful judgment.

A quick note: If you are not a Christian reading this, don’t be distracted by the word “worship.” It means “to value” – to give something value and importance, which we all do all the time. The problem arises when we give priority to secondary values. As the French philosopher Simone Vey wrote at the time, “The only choice is between God and idolatry. There is no other option. For the capacity for worship is within us, and it is directed either somewhere in this world or somewhere else.”

But as Wallace points out, our “default settings” lead us to worship wrong things. And when that happens continuously, we see God’s judgment, which Paul expresses this way: “For this reason God gave them over in the passions of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies were dishonored among themselves. … And because they no longer considered it right to acknowledge God, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do things that are not right.” (Rom. 1:24, 28)

What does a depraved mind look like? All you have to do is stroll down New York City’s 8th Avenue on any given day – also known as the “Strip of Despair” – where theft, stabbings, assault, drug use and public defecation are the norm.

Paul defines the corrupt spirit as follows: “They are filled with all unrighteousness, malice, covetousness, wickedness, envy, murder, strife, deceit, and maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, unreliable, without love, without mercy. And although they know God’s commandment that those who practice such things deserve death, they not only practice them themselves but also approve of those who practice them” (Rom 1:29-32).

Overall, this is a high price for false worship in a society, both for the false worshiper and for everyone around him. It is an infection that poisons everything and causes conflict everywhere.

CS Lewis uses the following analogy in Mere Christianity to explain this: “You can get the idea clear if you imagine us as a fleet of ships sailing in formation. The voyage will only be successful if, first, the ships do not collide and get in each other’s way; and second, if each ship is seaworthy and its engines are in working order. In fact, neither of these two things is possible without the other. If the ships keep colliding, they will not remain seaworthy for very long. On the other hand, if their steering gears are defective, they will not be able to avoid collisions. Or, if you like, imagine humanity as a band playing a tune. To get a good result, you need two things. Each player’s individual instrument must be in tune and, furthermore, each must jump in at the right moment to unite with all the others.”

The biblical antidote to these “collisions” in a culture is to direct our worship toward the real object – the God who created us and everything we see. Anything else falls short, as John MacArthur says: “The only faith that makes sense is the faith that has an object that can deliver what you expect.”

And last time I checked, there was only one. If that’s true, then do the natural thing and worship only God.