Wisdom 14:12-15. "The idea of making idols was the beginning of fornication, and the invention of them was the corruption of life." Idols have not existed from the beginning and will not exist forever. They entered the world through man's vanity, creeping in with instances like a father mourning a son's death and having an image of the child made. The image then takes on a place of honor that should only be given to God. The passage goes on to show how man moves from small idolatries such as this to the worship of kings as gods through the creation of larger than life images of them.

We are in a time of great idolatry, so it is very good to hear that it will not last forever. As I am reading this about how we come to create images of people that exaggerate their good qualities and ignore their bad, and how this creates "gods" of them, I am thinking of social media and how it is really just an idolatry factory. People are creating idols of themselves - they take doctored selfies in the best settings possible, they pose and act for the camera, they play up and exaggerate their good times and good qualities and anything negative is completely ignored. Our brains on social media come to think that this is reality, and so there must be something wrong with us if our lives are not as perfect as everyone else's. Thus we fall into the "hidden trap for mankind" (Wisdom 14: 21) and try to mold ourselves and our lives to fit these unrealistic expectations. We sacrifice our attention, our money, our labor, even our families, for the sake of creating the perfect image of ourselves for public consumption. It is the very definition of an idol, and it is what Satan did - thinking of ourselves as gods - able to mold reality around us and ignoring anything outside our self-created narrative.

This is one reason I truly believe that part of what is coming will include a major disruption in tech. The silence that is needed for us to hear God again can only happen if we can't bury ourselves in our phones and our feeds.