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In Genesis 31, Jacob is preparing to flee from Laban with Rachel and Leah. While he is rounding up his livestock, Rachel steals her father’s household idols (v. 19). She then places the idols in a saddle and sits on them in an effort to hide them from her searching father. She tells him that she can’t stand up because ‘ “the manner of women is with me’ ” (v. 35). According to Leviticus 15:20, everything a woman sits on during this time is unclean. Thus, it may well be that Moses is, among other things, making a comment on the nature of idols: They are simply not fit for places of honor.
Commenting on this passage, John Calvin notes that the “use of idols [is] a common vice” and “hence we may infer, that the human mind is, so to speak, a perpetual forge of idols” (Institutes, 11.8). Scripture agrees, saying that natural man has the innate tendency to change “the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things” (Rom. 1:23). Calvin continues, “the human mind, stuffed as it is with presumptuous rashness, dares to imagine a god suited to its own capacity; as it labours under dullness, nay, is sunk in the grossest ignorance, it substitutes vanity and an empty phantom in the place of God.”
But why do we seek to be idol factories? The Puritan Samuel Bolton, in The Arraignment of Error, cites many reasons. His first point is that many fall into error due to a weakness of judgment. They lack the mental tools necessary to challenge wayward theology. But even those who may have better discernment may not be so established in truth that they can defend their minds against deviant teachings. We seek comfort and peace, but in our spiritual ignorance we accept poor substitutes. We are blown around by every wind of doctrine.
Not only are we idol factories, we are “ideology factories.” Many among us see their political groups as the saviors of our culture, their diet pill as the way to happiness. These are all false idols. The foundation of their faith is not Christ but the pseudo-worldview that they’ve built up to give them a false sense of comfort.
In all cases, however, there is not one error that does not profane a doctrine of the Word of God. In order that the error might have some similitude of truth, the teacher must contort Scripture and mock the holy. “Error, indeed, is never set forth in its naked deformity, lest, being thus exposed, it should at once be detected. But it is craftily decked out in an attractive dress, so as, by its outward form, to make it appear to the inexperienced (ridiculous as the expression may seem) more true than truth itself” (Irenaeus Against Heresies 1.2). Therefore, let us pray for discernment.