THE END OF IDOLATRY
Religious people are trained from an early age to practice idolatry. For most of them, their parents and grandparents were idolaters, so idolatry is hard to avoid and easy to accept as normal. Thus, children who reject idolatry will be identified as rebels who are lost and destined for eternal damnation.
We might wonder why God would allow this pattern to exist for so long. It seems counter-intuitive that a God who hates idolatry would tolerate it without taking radical measures to wipe it off the face of the earth so people would worship him alone. The truth is that God has never tolerated idolatry and that he has indeed been dealing with it by calling people out of religion one person at at time.
This quiet, invisible way that God works to deal with idolatry is all spiritual. It happens in the hearts of idolaters who have their eyes opened, have their minds transformed, and quit religion. He chooses to open the eyes of some and calls them out of Babylon.
Those who are called and have their eyes opened, confess that their practice of the sin of religion is based on their own wisdom which is based on intellectual interpretation of the literal words of the Bible by others and themselves. They also repent for worshiping the religious things they have created with our own hands (i.e. our idols).
After they have done these things, they re-read the Bible fully expecting God to reveal the spiritual Bible to them and write his spiritual laws on their hearts and minds. In Biblical terms, they are born again in the renewal of their minds every time God reveals new, spiritual truths to them when they read the Bible. This renewal will happen as long as they obey what they read and understand and as long as they do not yield to temptations to return to practicing old, dead religion that is based on the literal words of the Bible. In other words, they listen to God’s voice speaking to them as they read. They no longer to their own minds and the teachings of false prophets whose Bible interpretations they have adopted as their own.
After they are born again, men worship in spirit and truth and are no longer limited by time, space and physical objects in their worship of God. In other words, when they worship, no one knows what he is doing except God who sees all things spiritual and natural.
Until the time that God opens their eyes to the spiritual understanding that lies in the figurative, mysterious language of the literal Bible, religious people will hold to the belief that human mediators and physical things (e.g. buildings, music, sacraments, etc.) are necessary to the practice of religion. This thinking predisposes them to idolatry.
Until God opens their eyes to the truth that human mediators cannot be trusted and that all their fleshly efforts are worthless, religious people will continue to work at creating and managing their religion with sincere self-righteousness, while believing that they are serving God. And, while they continue to do religious work, they will have no peace nor rest. They will always be busy doing one kind of religious thing or another. This is as true for Jews and Christians as it is true for any other religion. The only difference is that Jews and Christians do what they do in the name of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob while other religions do what they do in the name of their gods.