“Baals and Ashteroths”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, June 22, 2025
Reading: Judges 2:11-23
The story is told of two soldiers leaving a chapel service. The sermon had been on the Ten Commandments, and the soldiers looked grim: it was hard to find one they’d not broken. One turns to the other, shrugs, and says, “Well, I don’t think I’ve worshiped any false idols.”
When I think of idols, I think of the great Indiana Jones hunting for treasure in the jungles of South America. I loved his wise cracking, whip cracking cool. As an image of an idol that’s not too bad—a thing a people treasure as life-giving, that shapes them as a community. Today we likely think we don’t worship any such thing. I’m not so sure. Think of how we all walk or drive with faces glued to screens, ignoring the life and other drivers around us. The fact that it’s hard to imagine going without a cellphone for any length of time means it’s more like an idol than a phone. Ask some of my fellow Americans how they feel about the second amendment to the constitution, and you’ll learn about idolatry. In our current political divisions, I find the right idolizes the military and business, and in commonwealth countries the royal family; the left idolizes academia and certain visions of justice. All of us idolize modern medicine—just imagine living without it. And we all seem to have a thing for celebrities for some reason—people famous for being famous. An idol is anything that makes us say, ‘if I had that my life would be full.’ Our idols are harder for Indiana Jones to steal; harder for us to get rid of.
The passages we’re hearing this summer come from the book of Judges. They reflect a time in Israel’s life between Joshua leading people into the promised land and Saul the first king. It’s a tragic time, the people without clear direction, so ‘Everyone did what was right in their own eyes.’ Judges is prone to a storyteller’s exaggeration—Samson kills hundreds of Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. All his strength being in his hair, susceptible to mere scissors. These are great stories, morally troublesome, but great. And they show us how we misrule ourselves. The beginning of our text groans, “The Israelites did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals.” If you worship the wrong thing, instead of the one living God, watch out, bad news follows.
I heard an interview with the great Denzel Washington once. He’s a churchman, knows his scripture. He was asked why he plays so many villains, whether his world is really that bleak. He responded simply, with scripture, “because the wages of sin is death.” He plays evil characters to show how they end up: either getting what they deserve, or sometimes, receiving a mercy they don’t deserve. Judges shows Denzel’s comment in story form: the wages of sin is death. Look how badly we need a saviour.
The Baals were the gods of the Philistine people; the Astartes their tall poles. The Baals were thought to control the weather and were associated with storms. The Astartes brought fertility among people and animals and crops. And if you think about it, there is something godly in planting seeds that become food; caring for animals that give life, giving away love to another human being and more humans getting born. If we were voting on gods, I’d campaign for these divinities. But the God of Israel is no idol. God makes us, not the reverse. And the one true God has no form or body, that’s why we can’t have a statue or image of him. God is known by empty space: the Holy of Holies in the temple is empty, like Jesus’ tomb. There’s a long tradition in the prophets of Israel of making fun of idolators:
All who make idols are nothing ... [The idol-maker] plants a cedar and the rain nourishes it. Then it can be used as fuel. Part of it he takes and warms himself; he kindles a fire and bakes bread. Then he makes a god and worships it, makes it a carved image and bows down before it. 16 Half of it he burns in the fire; over this half he roasts meat, eats it and is satisfied. He also warms himself and says, “Ah, I am warm by the fire!” 17 The rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, bows down to it and worships it; he prays to it and says, “Save me, for you are my god!” (Isaiah 44:9 & 14-17).
The rabbis tell a story of Abram’s father Terah being an idol-maker. But young Abram has a notion of the one true God. So, one day he smashes all the idols in the shop. Except one, the biggest—he puts the club in the hand of that big idol. Terah comes home and is furious—why have you done this to our livelihood? Abram insists it wasn’t me; it was the big idol with the club. But you know idols can’t move or think or talk. Then father, why do you worship them? Or make them? Israel is the idol-smashing nation. The only God there is will tolerate no rivals.
So why does Israel keep falling into idolatry? Why do we? We’ll see this pattern again and again in the book of Judges. Israel worships the Baals. God gives us up into our enemies’ hands. God sends anointed leaders to return us to righteousness and things get better. Till the judge dies and Israel is worse than ever. This cycle will be familiar to any addict, to anyone selling gym memberships, maybe to any human: from destruction to promises-to-improve to weak will and worse calamity. Historians figure Israel kept the Baals around to hedge their bets. Sure, I’ll worship the Lord, but I want a good harvest too, why not make a side-offering to Baal, just to be sure, keep all the divinities happy? This is why God keeps the nations around in the promised land—to test Israel. God declares, “I will no longer drive out before them any of the nations that Joshua left when he died. 22 In order to test Israel, whether or not they would take care to walk in the way of the Lord as their ancestors did.” The Baals look attractive. At least you can prove they exist: There’s the statue right there. The God of Israel has no statue at all. Human beings are his image, stories his likeness.
The reason idolatry is such a severe sin in Israel, in the church, is that we become like what we worship. A writer gives a superficial illustration: there was a camp counselor who was really popular with the girls in her charge. She sprained her ankle. And suddenly her whole cabin was limping. The younger girls so wanted to be like her they even walked like her—without actually being injured. Our culture treats violence like an idol; we think it solves things. Worshiping violence makes us violent—not just in my native US but writ large, we think missiles make right. A sex-crazed age like ours thinks more and better sex will leave people fulfilled. When John D. Rockefeller was the richest man alive and was asked how much money is enough, he said just a little bit more. We can never be satisfied with money, sex, power, or fame. Idols look promising but deal death. Jesus looks powerless but deals life. If we worship him, we become like him — self-emptying love.
That’s why I like the poem so much that our choir performed: Jesus at the gay bar. Gay people are often told they need to be repaired. In the poet’s imagination, Jesus insists otherwise: there is nothing in you that needs healing. Now take that with a grain of salt — we’re all sinners, there is much in all of us all that needs healing. In the poet’s imagination, Jesus is overstating a bit to make a clear point: your sexual desires do not mean you’re rejected. God wants to dance with you.
There’s an easy move we Christians make when we teach the Old Testament. Too easy, lazy even. These books are bad; Jesus comes and fixes them. For example, the anger of the Lord is a key theme in our story. God is angry that we serve the Baals. Speaking of the anger of the Lord sounds Old-Testamenty. Fundamentalist. Primitive. But anger is something that a dead idol cannot feel. A dead idol cannot feel anything. Anger is the flip side of love. God gets angry because God loves Israel and wants what’s good for her, and she goes and hits herself in the head with a hammer again. God’s anger is that of a parent who wants a child to stop doing harm to himself. It’s the anger of a jilted lover, an injured spouse. The great Elie Wiesel said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” The God of Israel is never indifferent. Jesus is never indifferent. He lets us know he’s angry. Because he wants life for us. And we keep choosing death.
Our culture is more sensitive than usual to idols at the moment. Monuments coming down, others going up, names changing. Who do we want to idolize corporately, now? Hard to find someone with no sin at all. I asked a relative who works in some financial product I don’t understand why he likes it so much: ‘Because it keeps the wolves away.’ Might be an idol. My own idols are clear enough: to be an exemplary scholar pastor, growing a church in a great city. Church can be an idol not less than anything else. I hope you’ve been thinking of some of your own idols. Because idols are usually good things or no one would be tempted to worship them. They just can’t save you from death or give you full life.
Judges isn’t just about our idolatry, our way of making gods and serving what cannot save. It’s also about God’s response. We groan in our misery. And God hears. Like when our Israelite ancestors groaned in slavery in Egypt and God heard and delivered. God saves us from making mini-gods, tiny godlets, serving them, growing miserable. God sends judges—anointed leaders—who lead us back to faithfulness. We’ll meet some of these judges in the series to come. Gideon, Deborah, Yael, Samson (Judges might be violent and bleak but it is egalitarian—women can do violence as well or better than men—and can be judges too). So, judges come, and things improve until the judge dies and we return to self-harming idolatry. What we need is a judge not susceptible to death, one, in fact, who conquers death.
I hope you see what I’m saying: the book of Judges is like a shadow. Here is humanity rejecting the living God and making faux gods for ourselves. The result is bleak. The dream of the Enlightenment in the 18th century was to remove religion, get rid of superstition and mumbo jumbo and people would act rationally. Enlightenment philosophers thought all religion was as “primitive” as Indiana Jones’ tribe and should be forcibly removed. Turns out that doesn’t work. If you remove religion, people don’t worship nothing. We worship everything. Enshrine idols everywhere. We keep Abram’s idol-making father very busy. Steven Adams, NBA player, was asked his view on some major world event. He looked at the reporter funny: “Man, what I do for a living is get rebounds.”
Why do we equate celebrity with wisdom or goodness?!
Thankfully God does not leave us on our own, to our own destructive vices. We have a God invested enough in us to get angry at our self-harm. A God who hears our groans and sends anointed ones to lead us back to God—judges and prophets and saints. And we have a God who will not just deputize work to others. He’ll come among us in flesh, suffer our worst, and then rise to give us his best.
So that’s the book of Judges: come back all summer to hear more. If Judges is a glimpse of humanity unhealed, in church, we are humanity being healed. Most people long for healing for themselves or for someone they care about. Prayer is opening up our longing to God. Healing is also what God wants. That’s why Jesus heals so often. But he doesn’t heal death immediately with a magic wand. We still all pass that way, and some too soon. But his resurrection shows death does not get the last word. We come to pray for healing today because sometimes God grants it when we ask. Sometimes God does not. But one day God will grant our deepest desires for life. These prayers are not unheard, forgotten. They are held in promise and God will make good on them one day. Make that day soon Lord Jesus, amen.