שמע ישראל Who needs an idol?

What is Avoda Zara (Idol worship)? Idol worship is not just a plastic Mary on the dashboard of a taxi in Mexico city. Idol worship is coming into the presence of a holy God on your own terms, not on God’s terms. Doing what you want because your god loves you and changes His standards as you go along. Idol worship is placing your faith in a thing of God and not in God Himself. This thing could be a Mezuzah, an ornament or a specific piece of clothing you wear. Idol worship also means that you have to recreate Biblical characters in your own image. Mohamed believed that Avraham Avinu (our father), King David, and even Maran Yeshua the Jewish Messiah were Muslim, and they worshiped and believed as he did. In general Christianity believes that their jesus did away with the Torah (Law) and now we live in an age of grace without Torah (no true).

We know that our holy Rabbi, Maran Yeshua was a Torah Jew, an Israelite, named Yeshua not Jesus (he never heard that name), born and raised in Israel. He is returning to the Holy Land (not to Rome) for the people of Israel, to rebuild the Holy Temple and to teach us Torah from there. Making the holy Jewish Messiah into someone he is not is idol worship. We are not to pray to him, but through his holy merit, we are to acknowledge that he is the one send from HaShem. He is the second Adam, the one after Moses, suffering like Yosef (suffering, but at the end saving the Jewish people), coming back as King David, to fight the wars of God. This is our holy King!

Idol Worship is:

Idol worship is sometimes referred to as “star worshiping,” because the original concept of idol worship began thousands of years ago when people began worshiping stars in the sky instead of God Himself. They figured, “Well, if God created them to demonstrate His power, they must be quite powerful themselves!” And they would stand outdoors at night and worship the stars as mighty knights of God. From outdoor ceremonies it went to indoor ceremonies, and from indoor ceremonies it went to indoor ceremonies using stone or wooden symbols of the stars and their “powers,” which were worshiped as “representatives” of the stars. Over the years, the stars were gradually forgotten, and the symbols themselves began to be viewed as self-contained powers in their own right, creating the concept of idols and idol worship. Ceremonies ever increasing in complexity were built up around the idols and their indoor housings, and they soon spawned whole cultures, which regularly worshiped these man-made physical objects as gods.

What does idol worship mean today? Idol worship begins in the mind—it starts with an incorrect perception of God. It says you can turn an abstract (God) into a concrete (or wood or plastic), which of course, is impossible. Idol worship doesn’t just mean singing and dancing and bowing in front of funny-looking little statues—it means believing in any force, object or item outside of the infinite God Himself: an angel, a constellation, a force of nature, a living creature—or a funny-looking little statue. Everything is created by God, and to designate any piece of physical matter as “God” or a “Higher Power” is idol worship.

Not worshiping idols takes on several forms: besides praying to an idol, or bowing or otherwise showing obeisance to an idol, a Jew is prohibited from sculpting, building, shaping or otherwise creating the image, form or likeness of a human being, heavenly body (such as the sun or moon) or angelic creature (animals are generally fine), whether for his personal use or not.

Idolatry can take many shapes, in my opinion. It’s not only bowing to a representation of a deity, it’s giving up your faith to anything else than God. One can also worship a car, a job, a woman, etc. It doesn’t have to be a deity per se. You commit this sin if you ever come to consider something in your life more important than God.

Praying or worshipping some one else than God is also worshipping.

Our Rabbi, Maran Yeshua HaMashiach said in Mattityahu / Matthew 4:10, "You shall worship the Lord your God and Him only shall you serve." If we worship God in spirit and in truth, we cannot worship anyone or anything else. Anything we worship, other than God, is an idol.

We must only worship God and our worship must be in spirit and in truth.
BethHaDerech