“But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? ‘Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, “Why did you make me like this?”’” —Romans 9:20
The clay doesn’t question the potter. The created thing doesn’t get to tell the Creator how it should have been created. Those of us who follow Christ understand this—or at least we say we do.
He is God. We are not.
That seems simple enough.
So why do we so often live as though the opposite were true?
We question the Creator. We decide for ourselves what we will believe and what we won’t. We behave as though we have the authority to determine the framework of the universe, the structure and meaning of life and death, what is good and evil, and even what is true.
God has spoken, and humanity responds, Well, here’s what I think.
The audacity of man.
Recently, while teaching No Other Gods, I spent some time in Isaiah 44. Isaiah is delivering the word of the Lord to Jacob—to Israel—and God makes the distinction between Creator and creation unmistakably clear.
And He makes humanity look, quite frankly, ridiculous.
Isaiah describes two craftsmen: a blacksmith and a carpenter.
Both are mere men created by God. They work with strength and creativity that God gave them, use tools fashioned from materials God created, and work within a world God made.
They use those things to make a god.
Isaiah describes the carpenter in particular detail. He takes a tree—a tree he did not create. He cuts it down. Part of the wood he burns to warm himself. He builds a fire and cooks his food over it.
With the leftovers he makes a god.
“Half of it he burns in the fire. Over the half he eats meat; he roasts it and is satisfied. Also he warms himself and says, ‘Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire!’ And the rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, and falls down to it and worships it.”—Isaiah 44:16–17
Read that again.
Part of the tree cooked dinner.
Part of the tree became a god.
Same tree.
And somehow the carpenter believed that because he declared the thing in his hands to be a god, it was one.
Isaiah calls it foolishness.
I think it’s just ridiculous.
Except perhaps I shouldn’t laugh too hard because we still do it.
We Still Make Our Own Gods
We may not carve a face into a leftover piece of firewood and bow down in front of it, but we haven’t abandoned the carpenter’s fundamental mistake.
We still believe we have the authority to decide what is true.
We take what God has created and redefine it.
We take what God has said and reinterpret it according to what seems right to us.
We take something God has called good and decide it isn’t.
We take something God has called sin and decide it isn’t that bad.
We take something God has established and decide we would structure it differently.
We take something God has revealed about Himself and decide that isn’t the kind of God we want to believe in.
And perhaps most audaciously, we sometimes believe that our declaration makes it so.
This is my truth.
This is the God I believe in.
I don’t think God would…
My God wouldn’t…
I just can’t believe that a loving God would…
There is a subtle but enormous difference between struggling to understand something God has said and deciding that God must be wrong because I don’t understand or agree with Him.
The former is a creature seeking to understand the Creator.
The latter puts the creature in the Creator’s chair.
It is the thing formed asking the One who formed it, “Why have you made me this way?”
And it is the carpenter holding something he fashioned in his own hands and declaring, “You are my god.”
Another Carpenter
When the people of Nazareth encountered Jesus in Mark 6, they asked:
“Is not this the carpenter…?”—Mark 6:3
The carpenter.
And suddenly Isaiah’s picture becomes even more striking.
In Isaiah 44, a carpenter takes something God created and tries to make a god out of it.
In Jesus, God Himself becomes a carpenter.
Isaiah’s carpenter makes his god.
Jesus made the carpenter.
In fact, Jesus made the tree.
John tells us:
“All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.”—John 1:3
Every piece of wood Jesus ever held in His hands came from a tree that existed because of Him. The hands that measured and shaped the wood were the same hands through which that tree had come into existence. The carpenter standing in a workshop in Nazareth was the Creator of heaven and earth, yet He humbled Himself to enter His own creation and work with the very materials He had made.
That makes what God says in Isaiah 44 even more striking. After describing a carpenter who takes God’s creation into his own hands, shapes it, and declares that what he has made is now his god, the Lord turns the entire picture upside down:
“I formed you; you are my servant.”—Isaiah 44:21
God was speaking through Isaiah to Jacob—to Israel—but the truth reaches far beyond them. It applies to every person He has made, including the carpenter Isaiah had just described. The man who believed he could take a piece of God’s creation and form a god had forgotten the most fundamental truth of all: he was the one who had been formed.
The carpenter says, I formed my god.
God says, No. I formed you.
Maybe that is the fundamental problem underneath all our idolatry.
We forget which one of us is God.
When we forget that, we don’t necessarily stop believing in God. Something much more subtle happens: we begin creating a version of God who agrees with us—a God who shares our priorities, approves our choices, and whose Word is authoritative when we agree with it but negotiable when we don’t. Instead of accepting God as He has revealed Himself to us, we shape Him according to our own preferences, much like the carpenter shaped his piece of wood. We haven’t stopped making idols; we’ve just gotten considerably more sophisticated about it.
One More Piece of Wood
The cross.
Our Savior was “nailed to a tree.” Pieces of wood, fashioned into a cross, became the instrument upon which our redemption was accomplished. Jesus of Nazareth—God incarnate, the Creator Himself—allowed His own creation to nail Him there. The One who made the tree and made the men who fashioned it into a cross willingly gave Himself upon it for the very people He came to save.
And that brings us back to Isaiah’s carpenter. He fashions a god from a piece of wood and then cries out to the thing he has made:
“Deliver me, for you are my god!”—Isaiah 44:17
What an extraordinary contrast. Isaiah’s carpenter creates his own god and then asks that god to deliver him. But the Carpenter of Nazareth does not need us to create Him, define Him, improve Him, reinterpret Him, or approve of Him.
He is God.
And He came to deliver us.
That leaves me with a much more uncomfortable question than whether I have any idols in my life:
Do I accept God’s truth as He has revealed it—or am I still trying to decide for myself what is true?
Because I am not the Creator. I am not a carpenter making my god. I don’t establish truth or determine good and evil. I don’t get to redraw the boundaries of creation, and I don’t get to decide who God is.
He formed me.
He defines reality.
He has spoken.
He is God.
I am not.
