Baruch 6:8-16. A description of the ultimate worthlessness and powerlessness of idols. God is warning his people that they will be in exile in Babylon for several generations. While there they will see gods made of silver and gold carried about by men and meant to inspire fear in the heathen. God says that these "gods" have tongues which have been smoothed by craftsmen but cannot speak. The people often make golden crowns for these gods and the priests sometimes take some of the silver and gold left for the gods and spend it on themselves, sometimes even on harlots. These gods are dressed like men but they cannot even save themselves from dust and corrosion. They have scepters, but they cannot punish anyone; they have daggers and axes, but they cannot save themselves from war and robbers. They are very clearly not gods at all and they are nothing to fear.

The only thing that gives our idols any power at all is us. We put our trust in them and begin to worship them, pursuing them as the answer to our problems, but they are just things and they cannot help us at all, in fact we have to take care of them. Our idols can be anything, although they are not so much statues anymore, but things like money, status, our homes, our families, and even nowadays, medical care and life itself ("He who finds his life will lose it." Matthew 10:39). When we start to think that we could not possibly be happy, or healthy, or safe, without something other than God, we have created an idol of it and have given it power over us. It will start to suck away our thought, our work, our effort, and our time. Eventually, we will be adorning our idols, making an offering to them of our gifts instead of offering those gifts in service to the God who gave them to us.

We also start to expect other people to worship our idols, like the men carrying the Babylonian idols around in the street to instill fear in the heathen. We can see that nowadays with masks and vaccines, people have put so much trust in them that they have created idols out of them and want to force other people to engage in the same reliance. Their fear has caused them to forget God and look to human means for salvation (of this life at least). They now project that fear onto others who are not masked or vaccinated, and demand those others reach for the same comforting idols they reached for.

Finally, this passage reminds us of the danger of being around others who have idols. We can easily come to think that they might be onto something and start worshiping those idols as well. The holiest of people can and have been lured away from God by earthly things, especially when the culture itself is worshiping these things. So we must keep our eye firmly on God and ignore the temptation to seek after the things that people who are not pursuing God are pursuing. Even if it seems like everyone in the culture is pursuing those things. Those things are not God, and they are powerless over us when we put them in their proper place. Then our God, who loves us, will give us the things that he wants us to have, which may be the things we throught we wanted in the first place, like money, family, medical care, or long life, and we will enjoy them properly because we will be rightly ordered.