Tuesday March 10, 2015 “Exposing the Cultural Idolatries that Block the Covenant”

Idolatry is built into the woof and warp of all human culture, through our worldview, language, religion and history.

It is especially embedded in the attitudes, customs and habits of our family life These are modeled and inculcated in each generation, intentionally and not Formal instruction and education are added later on to the initial cognitive and value infrastructure

Children observe intensely, perceive, remember, reason (not always accurately) and conclude, making choices based on a rudimentary value system What they perceive in early life is normal (the norm) and “normative” for them All that happens around them IS for them “the way life works”

Racism, Sexism, Classism, the sexual taboo, a consciousness of an invisible (benevolent or fearful) God, are embeded early in life They are inculcated unconsciously by the spontaneous, behavior of their role models The fight/flight/ignore instinct develops at a very early age

The idolatries imbibed during our upbringing damage each individual’s personality, distorting our idea of love and authority, hence our significant relationships and ultimately the very social fabric That is how the “sins of the fathers” are passed on to their children to the 3rd and the 4th generation of those who do not know God

The antidote to Idolatry is the Covenant: An effectual, transformational relationship with God, with rules, promises and consequences

The Covenant is really a marriage proposal. God adopts a people for Himself, to whom He is “married:” To Israel in the Old Testament (Jer 2:2, 3:14, 31:32; Isa 54:5,6 and 62:4,5; Eze 16:8; Hosea 2:19,20; etc.) To the Church in the New Testament (Eph 1:22-23; 5:23,24,25-27, 32; Col 1:18, etc.)

There are numerous references to the “adultery” of God’s people (Jer 3:1, and 6-13) when they turn their back on Him The Apostle Paul also uses the marriage language saying that he has bethrothed us to Christ (2 Cor 11:2,).

The best human representatation of the Covenant is our Marriage in Christ

Christian Marriage: A three-way Covenant, a man, a woman and Christ covenanted to love one another exclusively for life replicated in a new generatio of Covenant keepers, set free by God’s grace to live freely under God’s law

The Covenant is God’s remedy to sinful man’s “marriage” (adherence, attachment, worship of) to wordly values, enshrined in our cultural idolatries

Unredeemed, unrenewed, unreformed, untransformed cultures are Pagan (or semi-Pagan) contaminated by the values of this world, opposite to God’s values

They enshrine idols, harboring ideas that are contrary to the Law of the Lord They are so universally accepted that they are sometimes hard to spot by the natives of that culture

Our Latin American Case

We must identify the idols in our cultures in order to denounce, renounce and counter their effects with a culturally contextualized Gospel of Grace

Cherished idols are the enemies of God They block the possibility of making full Covenant with Him Moses could not deliver the tables of the law to an idoltrous Israel