Marduk and the idolatries of modern times

Today, Australia’s Prime Minister has changed again. Five changes in the last ten years! Although Malcolm declared he remains optimistic about Australia’s future, I think something is very wrong here… I think the government system is becoming more and more dysfunctional and is falling apart!

Anyway, now we got Scott Morrison as PM. Interestingly, he is the first Pentecostal PM in Australia

https://www.eternitynews.com.au/australia/scomo-australias-first-pentecostal-pm/

Now, I don’t know whether that’s good or bad. I’ve had both good and bad experiences with the Pentecostals: each church has their strengths and weaknesses. Anyway, can’t do anything now but to keep praying for this nation.

The Taiwanese government isn’t doing well either. The US gave us some serious warnings. Something is happening in the South China Sea: China has been building military installations on reclaimed shoals and sandbars to reinforce its territorial claims in the sea. This is a region that some say could be the next flashpoint for global conflict! And we see Taiwan losing its diplomatic ties one by one. Good thing my mom retired before things look this shameful. But when she left Ireland, she couldn’t get the bank in Ireland to send her bank statements over to her home address in Taiwan because there is no “Taiwan” on the selection list for the country! And many airlines have already removed any references to “Taiwan.” Taiwan’s experienced lots of natural disasters too: we’ve had earthquakes and floods this year. And the society is also a mess, with many gruesome murders flooding the news headlines.

(Just as an aside: Paradoxically, the recent drought in Australia is devastating the farmers because the animals and crops are dying from the lack of water, while the recent flood in Taiwan is devastating the farmers because animals have drowned (thousands of pigs and 400,000 chicken drowned in the Chiayi area)!)

Anyway, some world powers are rising like horrific beasts, and some governments are just collapsing. I don’t know if there are many people placing trust in the government and political leaders these days, but I definitely don’t. The problems associated with human nature do not go away no matter which leader we change to.

Recently I read Ch.5 of Andrew Sloane’s book “At Home in a Strange Land,” where he talks about the idolatry mentioned in Isaiah 46. It helped me see more clearly the idolatries of contemporary times.

In this chapter, he was initially talking about technology and cloning. Then, he suddenly asked us to imagine a festival of Babylon worshipping the Babylonian idol Marduk. Initially I thought he was going off on a tangent, but later I realised it is part of the contextualisation process to help us understand the passage better. Here are some of the things he said in this chapter which stood out for me:

Ancient world ideology sees a connection between the strength of a nation, its fate, and its gods… “The gods of defeated nations were seen as vassals, submitting to their overlord, Marduk… The glories of these gods and their festivals represent the wealth, comfort, and security of this great world power… What did Yahweh have to offer?... Israel in exile is faced with the temptation to trust in this visible, seemingly successful system of power and control in the face of the call to trust in the promises of Yahweh.”

However, “idols are "manmade" deities… The objects that we choose-the particular kinds of human persons, or the type and form of animal-are chosen because they signify something we value. They depict particular aspects of human nature, or ways of living and acting in society or the world, or powers in the world or our projects, or characteristics of society that we value and want to claim for ourselves or others… These idols are, however, lifeless and powerless: for all their beauty; for all the power of the symbols and the social realities that they represent, the idols are in fact nothing, they do nothing. This is the force of the sarcastic portrait of idols in Isa 46… The gods that they represent cannot save even their own images, let alone the worshippers who created and depended upon them.”

And the part that stands out the most to me: “Idol and worshipper are equally helpless when their system falls. So it is when the gods fail.”

“All of this is in stark contrast to the reality of Yahweh, the one, true and living God, as the rest of the passage makes plain… The fall of Jerusalem is not the fall of Yahweh… God is not the projection of Israelite hopes, values, and aspirations. Yahweh is the creator, not the creation, of Israel… the demonstration that Yahweh is unlike any human god-has a clear and practical purpose: to call the people to trust Yahweh in the present and the future. The call to trust is real. It involves trusting God alone, embracing God's system of values, living as those created by God, in line with God's purposes.”

And then, on to the contemporary examples:

“We too face the temptation of idolatry, and this text speaks powerfully to us in that temptation… It calls us to examine the power of the cultural forces arrayed against us and to consider the temptations that we face… Some are obvious, such as social power, wealth, and the desire for control; others are less obvious, such as the idea that technology has a solution to every problem, from communication to conception, or the view that fame is what counts… Idolatrous cultural values are idols… They embody what we value: wealth, success, popularity, and control… So too is technology, which is increasingly becoming a means of controlling not just our environment but also our societies and our selves... Diet and exercise programs and cosmetics (and cosmetic surgery) augment (or reduce) what is counted as physical imperfection, all in search of beauty and control over the self, its appearance, its destiny.” And the creation of “designer babies,” where technology is used to impose parental reflection of these idolatrous cultural values on the very bodies and intellects of their chosen children. And using prenatal screening to select the gender and other traits which the parents desire.

However, “Even the fittest, best product of psychotherapy, plastic surgery, and "body sculpting" will end up a corpse, no more than a sculptured body. Our technologies, our myths of control, cannot stand in the face of death and economic collapse...”

So today, we still live in the midst of the "success of the gods."

“We have wealth, we have control. We have technologies that can control our world, information, even ourselves. This is our festival of technology. There may be no parades as such (like that of Marduk in the ancient near east), but there is real allure.”