MAKING AN IDOL AND SERVING OTHER GODS
Hard as it may be to accept, God’s view of religious leaders, past and present, is that they function as idols for those who submit to their teaching and follow their religious laws. They preach and teach with conviction and a kind of authority that is hard for unwise people to reject or deny. They quote the Bible often and mention God and Jesus liberally — but their ways are not God’s ways.

Leaders of all religions appear to be legitimate spokespersons for God because they have titles and degrees and because many other people who seem to be spiritual listen to them and do what they say to do. But, despite all of their apparent spirituality, they are deceivers. The same can be said for natural parents whom children tend to trust in all things and want to please with obedience.

Observing what others do and what they teach, however, is not a good way to judge whether they are following the right god or not. People make the mistake of judging the godliness of religious leaders based on natural facts that they observe with their natural eyes and process with their natural intellect. Because they do not judge by the heart like God does, they wrongly assume that what those religious people are doing is godly. They do not realize that the  activities they observe in others are nothing more than Pharisaical religion that people perform for a reward which is the praise of men. It is all flesh, religion and idolatry. None of it is spiritual. Jesus called these Pharisees hypocrites (i.e. play actors).

Anyone who takes his/her clues about God and his ways from human teachers/leaders by repeatedly listening to their teachings has made that human teacher a an idol. Pastors, rabbis, prophets and others like them preach and practice Old/First Covenant religion. They are not New Covenant disciples who understand that the only way to learn about God is by listening to God’s spirit speaking to their hearts.

Religion provides the environment in which idols are created and thrive.

God calls all of these creative activities conducted by human beings “works of their hands” and promises to destroy those idols and the high religious places where they put their religious works on display for public consumption. The people who participate in these activities like to think that they are doing God’s work like the Israelites built the Tabernacle of Moses. But, ignorant of the fact that the Tabernacle of Moses is only a physical copy and shadow of a spiritual, heavenly tabernacle where God makes his home, they create an obsolete Old/First Covenant structure. The earthly tabernacle they make by their own efforts is not comparable to the the greater and more perfect spiritual tabernacle created by God — not by man.

The result of all this human work is idols and idolatry set up in high places where people will worship them. People create religious organizations that create human idols (i.e. religious leaders) and then serve their idols (i.e. organizations and human leaders) in several ways:

God has made it very clear that he does not tolerate serving other gods and that he will punish people who do worship/serve other gods. He punctuates his strong feelings about other gods by saying that people who do serve other gods effectively break covenant with him. Old/First Covenant religionists serve other gods because Old/First Covenant religion always includes religious leaders who function as false prophets and as idols from whom people continually seek knowledge of God. But New Covenant disciples never follow other gods because they always and only listen to God’s voice.

It is especially instructive to observe that people who serve other gods are Old/First Covenant religionists — not New Covenant disciples. This distinction between covenants will not be — but should be — very important to Jews because their religion is based on obedience to the written laws of Moses and the Oral Torah (i.e. law.) We might expect that the distinction between covenants would be important to Christians because they profess to believe in and follow Jesus who is the mediator of the New Covenant that replaces the old, weak, useless, obsolete covenant based on written laws that are unable to make anyone perfect. But Christians’ claims are empty because they, like Jews, follow written laws (e.g doctrines, ceremonies, traditions, etc.) handed down from generations of religious leaders and take their religious instructions about those laws from human religious leaders.

Jews have the Law of Moses, their Mishnah and Talmud while Christians have their theologies written by Church Fathers and generations of theologians. Some of these writers have gone so far as to create a Systematic Theology of their religion. Essentially, what they have all tried to do is reduce God to words on a page — something God never instructed anyone to do because it is utterly impossible to capture God’s spiritual essence with human words. Anyone who tries to do this without instructing people to listen to God’s voice themselves will be exposed as a false prophet and an “other god”.