They have healed the brokenness of My people superficially. [Jeremiah’s description of the false priests and prophets of his day.] Jeremiah 6:14

As we saw last time, we could talk about many symptoms of losing our first love—the presence or absence of dozens of things might indicate our first love is history. And this is where a lot of Christians and Christian teaching get it wrong. Just like an illness, treating the symptoms can bring some temporary relief, but it won’t cure the problem. The problem is much more complex.

The Message puts today’s verse this way: “My people are broken—shattered!—and they put on Band-Aids, saying, ‘It’s not so bad. You’ll be just fine.’ But they are not ‘just fine’!”

The Christian self-help bookshelves are full of books proclaiming the answer to all sorts of problems, when a lot of the symptoms really stem from a first-love problem. All they do is treat the symptoms. And it looks like it works until some new symptom pops up. So we go after that and think we’ve got it solved—it’s like trying to rid your yard of dandelions by cutting off the stems. They’ll keep popping up out of the turf because the root and seed in in the soil. Cutting off the symptom will never solve the problem.

We can see this in the ancient Israelites. They had a big problem with idols—statues, places, celestial bodies, etc. God eventually sent them into the Babylonian captivity for that, and they never had the same kind of idol problem again.

That’s not to say they didn’t have idols. It’s just that their idols became more sophisticated after that… more self-focused… more spiritual-looking. So that by the time Jesus walked among them, they were just as far from God as their ancestors had been worshiping statues. Maybe even further…

Yes, they worshiped the temple, and the Scriptures (their understanding of them, at least), but most of all, they worshiped themselves. And it was that idol that caused them to rise up and kill Jesus. They could have laughed at his statements about the temple, argued about his understanding of Scripture, but what they couldn’t do was handle how He effortlessly exposed their spiritual bankruptcy just by being in the same region.

What about us? The hardest idol to destroy is the one that looks just like you. It might look like a younger you; it might look like a thinner you, a wittier you, a more talented you, a more admired you…but the resemblance is still obvious.

That’s what it’s like when we are still the center of our vision. It will blind us and shackle us to fruitless pursuits. It will superglue us to our second or third (or twelfth) love. It will build an insurmountable wall between us and our first love.

You see, the kind of idol doesn’t matter; it’s that Jesus isn’t at the bullseye of our vision. And only Jesus can keep us at the bullseye, because the bullseye is ultimately glory to Jesus.

We’ll pursue this more next time.