One of Calvin’s oft quoted sayings comes to us from Chapter 11 section 8, “From this we may gather that man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.” The context of this statement is in his writing on the origin of the images man worships in seeking to make a tangible deity for himself. He believes that public opinion, of his day, would have it that the “originators of idols were those who conferred this honor on the dead, and thus superstitiously worshiped their memory.” This public opinion was gathered from the Apocryphal writing which reads, “For a father afflicted with untimely mourning, when he hath made an image of his child soon taken away, now honoured him as a god, which was then a dead man, and delivered to those that were under him ceremonies and sacrifices. Thus in process of time an ungodly custom grown strong was kept as a law, and graven images were worshipped by the commandments of kings.” Calvin rightly asserts from his reading of the Old Testament, “that idols were in use before this eagerness to consecrate images of the dead prevailed.” He cites the story of Rachel stealing her father’s idols and the fact that Abraham’s Father and Uncle were idol worshipers in the land of Ur. Therefore Calvin says, “Man’s mind, full as it is of pride and boldness, dares to imagine a god according to its own capacity; as it sluggishly plods, indeed is overwhelmed with the crassest ignorance, it conceives an unreality and an empty appearance as God.” It is the blind mind, blinded from the glory of God that does not wait or seek for God to reveal Himself, so that he knows how to worship Him in Spirit and in truth. And so “the mind begets an idol; the hand gives it birth.” The machinery of the blind mind and the hard heart restlessly grinds on until its gears engage some likeness to itself that seems to produce a harmonious working as an likeness of God. Calvin’s argument is piercing and though we may worship in churches where we have not erected images, pictures or icons that lead us to the worship of God, we carry into those churches our own factories producing idols of the heart. Therefore in the midst of this industrialized muck we need an agrarian cure.
We need not men who will pound from metals or ship from China images that we can fix our eyes upon so that the gears of our hearts can turn in peace with God. We need not men who can paint us pictures or video technicians who copy and paste for us natural revelation to stir up our hearts to sing Kumbaya, and other heart wrenching melodies before God’s throne. We need agrarian men who will sow the doctrines of God’s Word in the fallow soil of hearts of repentance and faith. We need men who will die like seeds in the earth in order to produce a crop hundred fold through the gospel of Jesus Christ. We need men who die and live having had the light of the glory of Christ shine in their faces, having been washed in the waters of baptism, and who now as branches, abide in the vine, Jesus Christ and his Word. And through this agrarian cure our industrialized hearts that mass produce idols will be made well and find the God of peace for true and spiritual worship. Pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest, laborers who preach and teach sound doctrine.
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