What are you going to do when your false God cannot save you?

New International Version : 1 Samuel 12:21.
Do not turn away after useless idols. They can do you no good, nor can they rescue you, because they are useless.

The phrase false god is a derogatory term used in Abrahamic religions (namely Judaism, Samaritanism, Christianity, the Baháʼí Faith, and Islam) to indicate cult images or deities of non-Abrahamic Pagan religions, as well as other competing entities or objects to which particular importance is attributed.

Conversely, followers of animistic and polytheistic religions may regard the gods of various monotheistic religions as "false gods", because they do not believe that any real deity possesses the properties ascribed by monotheists to their sole deity. Atheists, who do not believe in any deities, do not usually use the term false god even though that would encompass all deities from the atheist viewpoint.

Usage of this term is generally limited to theists, who choose to worship some deity or deities, but not others.

The false gods in the Bible include all those foreign gods that were worshipped in the land of Canaan and other regions where the Hebrews lived.

"Your false gods cannot save you"

John Calvin famously said the heart is a veritable factory of idols. I used to think this was just typically dark, hyperbolic, Calvinist misanthropy. The older I get, though, the more I concede it to be a sober statement of fact. Idols are our specialty. We churn them out at a furious rate, an extravagant assortment of false gods, deities, and spirits that we’ve cooked up over the centuries. Zeus, Odin, Marduk—some real classics.

Our capacity to lie to ourselves about divinity is impressive and extends as wide as creation itself.

A False Image of God.

What is your image of God? What is mine? I think there are two false images (well, probably a lot more) that are opposites: the “good buddy” who is there to be my co-pilot (in which case He is only along for the ride—we still call the shots) or the far-away, unapproachable Being that is so very different from us that we can never understand Him. I’ll save that first false image for another time, perhaps, and focus today on the second one.

C. S. Lewis helps us to understand the image of God, not only through his published works, but in personal letters also. If you’ve never delved into those, you have thus far missed a treasure trove of insights, many of which do eventually show up in his books and articles, but some that may not, at least not in the exact words he uses when writing to a friend or acquaintance.

In one of his letters, he tackles this question of how we “see” God, and he targets the false image of the God who is so far away that He is untouched by human emotions and can’t possibly understand us. “God could, had He pleased,” Lewis begins, “have been incarnate in a man of iron nerves, the Stoic sort who lets no sigh escape him.” After all, He is God come down in human flesh. He might be unmoved by the human foibles that He sees all around Him.

He could have been The Great Lecturer, telling everyone what is wrong and what to do about it without getting involved Himself.

But that’s not what He did.

More impressive, though, is our pantheon of false images of the living and true God. It’s not for nothing the Ten Commandments quickly move from ruling out the worship of false gods to censuring the false worship of the true God.

Of His great humility He chose to be incarnate in a man of delicate sensibilities who wept at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane.

Otherwise we should have missed the great lesson that it is by his will alone that a man is good or bad, and that feelings are not, in themselves, of any importance.

We should also have missed the all-important help of knowing that he has faced all that the weakest of us face, has shared not only the strength of our nature but every weakness of it except sin.

While the first command is the most basic for a reason, the second is the more insidious and tempting for Christians to break. Satan’s been a liar and murderer from the beginning (John 8:44), and his first trick was to deceive Eve into thinking God is a miser (Gen. 3:4–5).

Our hearts still fall into that same satanic groove, quickly moving from confessing “I believe in God” to talking about “the God I believe in,” to making the most dire and pretentious utterance of all: “I could never believe in a God who...”

Of course, the sad joke is this “God” usually ends up being no more than our own shadows blown up to God-sized proportions. In that sense, Ludwig Feuerbach, a 19th-century philosopher and insightful unbeliever, was on to something when he said all theology is really projection—a roundabout way of describing our own best thoughts of ourselves.

Feuerbach can’t claim all the credit, though. The apostle John tackles this tendency by ending his first letter with the curiously abrupt command, “Dear children, keep yourself from idols” (1 John 5:21). This seems an afterthought until you recognize it’s what the whole letter has been about. “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all” (1:5).

John knows that the light that is God the Son “has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19). And so we lie to ourselves—and in such diverse and sundry ways!

John recognizes that some of us want to take sin lightly and so make up a God in our own image who minimizes sin, rarely judges, and never punishes. John tells us to stop hoodwinking ourselves.

There’s no such God: “No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him” (1 John 3:6). God is light—pure light, brilliant, fiery, holy light that will not abide darkness in his children.

Sometimes we conjure up a hateful, stony-hearted God, an unyielding prosecutor, a Javert-like jailer who longs to lock us up and throw away the key. And if God is going to be like that, why not settle in the shadows with our sins? But John knows this too, so he reminds us “if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Come clean and you’ll be cleansed by Jesus’ blood.

Why? Because God is merciful. He is faithful. He is just.

A crowd-favorite way to twist God to our liking is convincing ourselves that he’s on our side when we self-righteously judge our fellow believers, revile them, and break communion with them for being wrong about this tiny doctrinal nuance or that social cause.

But again, John reminds us to love one another—even the worst of us—for “whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8). And he made that plain in the Son, whom he sent to be a propitiation for our deepest, blackest, foulest sins on the cross (v. 10).

Over and over again, John corrects the myriad ways we are tempted to turn from the true and living God to the dead idols we’ve made of him. He points us to the Son of God, who came to destroy the deceptive works of the devil (1 John 3:8) and give us understanding, that in Jesus we might know him who “is true God and eternal life” (5:20).

The apostle instructs us still: Keep yourself from idols. Don’t fool yourself about your bent to fabricate a God out of falsehoods. If you say you’re without sin, you make God a liar (1:10).

Instead, ask yourself, “What idol am I tempted to make of God?” Humbly confess that sin and look to the cleansing of the Son. Let the light of him who is the truth shine upon you and dispel the darkness.

“True worship must worship God as He exists, not as we wish Him to be. The essence of idolatry is the making of images of God. An image is a shadow, a false representation. We may not bow before a statue or a figure, but if we make an image of god in our mind that is not in accord with God’s revelation of himself, then we are not worshipping in truth . “If we love Him and worship Him as He deserves, we will not dare to ‘edit’ Him to fit our desires.”

What we see in Jesus, God in the form of man, is what the Apostle Paul described:

Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus:

Who, existing in the form of God,
did not consider equality with God
something to be grasped,
but emptied Himself,
taking the form of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
He humbled Himself
and became obedient to death—
even death on a cross.

Philippians 2:5-8.

And as the writer of Hebrews informs us,

We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who was tempted in every way that we are, yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

Hebrews 4:15-16.

No, He is not some far-away God who doesn’t know what we are going through. He went through it, too. Now, by the Holy Spirit, He comes to our aid when we call upon Him. He is not untouched by our weaknesses; His sole goal is to make us more like Himself each day.

The Lord Challenges the False Gods.

Isaiah 41:21-23

21 The Lord, the king of Jacob, says, “Come, present your arguments. Show me your proof. 22 Let your idols come in and tell us what will happen. Idols, tell us what happened in the beginning. We will listen closely so that we can make a decision. Tell us what will happen in the future. 23 What signs did you give in the past to prove that you really are gods? Do something! Do anything, good or bad, so that we can see that you are alive. Then we might fear and respect you.