An idol is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your attention and affection more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.
Idols can take on many forms: money, success, power, popularity, or physical attractiveness. But idols can also take on human form.
When you look to a person for the kind of deep affirmation and acceptance that only God can provide, it results not only in pain but in bondage.
The Bible graphically illustrates this in the story of Jacob and Leah. Jacob had a twin brother, Esau. Esau was their father, Isaac’s favorite—his idol. Because of this, Esau grew up proud, willful, and impulsive, while Jacob grew up cynical, bitter, and conniving.
After Jacob deceived his father and received the blessing Esau desired, Esau vowed to kill Jacob. So, Jacob fled for his life.
He ended up in his Uncle Laban’s house, where he got a job tending sheep. There he met Laban’s daughters—Leah and Rachel. Leah had “weak eyes,” while Rachel was beautiful. Jacob was utterly smitten by the lovely Rachel. He had to have her. He would do anything for her. She became his idol.
This unhealthy desire consumed Jacob. Rachel was not just the wife he wanted; she was the savior he needed.
Jacob asked her father for her hand in marriage. But Laban deceived the deceiver, Jacob, and after working for seven years, Laban gave him, not Rachel, but Leah. Jacob had to work another seven years for Rachel.
Perhaps the greatest casualty in this story is Leah. The daughter whom her father did not want is now the wife her husband did not want. As a result, Leah had a hole in her heart every bit as big as the one in Jacob’s heart. And now she tries to fill it with a person. She sets her heart on getting Jacob’s love.
Genesis 29:31 says that “when the Lord saw that Leah was not loved, he enabled her to conceive, but Rachel remained childless.” The Lord gave Leah sons, and with each birth she thought, “Maybe now Jacob will love me.” But it didn’t work out that way.
Ironically, after all that pain, Leah is the one who shows spiritual progress in all this. When her last son is born, her response is, “This time I will praise the Lord.” It appears that she has finally taken her heart’s deepest devotion off of a person and put it on the Lord. She has dealt with her idol.
I look at what God did in Leah, and then I consider what God did for her. If you track the genealogy of Jesus, you will see that of all Jacob’s sons, He came through the line of Judah, Leah’s son.
God reached out to the girl that nobody wanted, the unloved one, and made her the ancestral mother of the Messiah. Salvation came to the world, not through the beautiful Rachel, but through the unwanted, unloved Leah.
No human can bear the burden of godhood. No person can meet the deepest needs of your soul.
Jesus is the only one who can live up to the hopes, dreams, indeed, the expectations that we all have. And only when we place Him in the temple of our hearts in a position of unrivaled prominence will we be in a position to love anyone well.
Text: Genesis 29
Originally recorded on December 5, 2010, at Fellowship Missionary Church, Fort Wayne, IN