Everybody Worships
There's an instinctual drive in all of us to reach for something beyond ourselves. Across history and every inhabited continent, people have searched for the eternal, the divine, the unseen force behind everything we experience. Everybody worships something.
Greek Gods and Sack Lunches
I've always had a fascination with religion. One of my all-time favorite Disney movies is Hercules. When my wife Katelyn and I studied abroad in Greece during college, we had to learn the Greek pantheon inside and out. Our professor would dock points off our mythology exam if he found out we'd watched Hercules to "help" study. Fair enough. But as far-fetched as the movie is, the real legends of the Greek gods are even more unhinged. I'll spare you the details, Wikipedia is free.
Traveling around Greece, we saw the remnants of countless shrines and temples. The Parthenon in Athens, honoring Athena, with a secondary temple to Poseidon nearby. The columns of the Temple of Apollo in Corinth. The hike up the mountain to the Temple of Aphrodite, where we ate our sack lunches overlooking the city. In Olympia, we ran a foot race in the original Olympic Stadium and stood at the site of the Temple of Zeus, once home to one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
You couldn't throw a stone in ancient Greece without hitting a holy place.
But here's what struck us most: these gods were worshiped mainly as a communal obligation. Cities held major feasts and festivals honoring their patron deity, and if you wanted in, you paid homage. Merchant-priests regulated the marketplace, and doing business meant paying tribute to the local god. There was no separation between religion and public, or even private, life. The gods governed everything – crops, weather, livestock, childbirth, all of it.
One God Among Many
The Greeks were far from alone in this. The Egyptians, Persians, Babylonians, and Romans all worshiped sprawling pantheons of their own. So when the Israelites, and later the Christians, came along worshiping only one God, other cultures actually considered them atheists. Refusing to acknowledge the existence of any other gods simply didn't compute.
Egypt even had its own brief flirtation with a version of monotheism. The pharaoh Akhenaten tried to reshape Egyptian religion around a single deity, the sun disk Aten, elevated above the old pantheon. It didn't survive him. Once he died, Egypt reverted to its traditional gods almost immediately.
Eternity in Every Heart
All of this points to something the Teacher says in Ecclesiastes 3:11, "He has planted eternity in the human heart."
Our religious impulse isn't a side effect of ignorance. It's not an emotional crutch or a mental trick to make us feel better about mortality. The search for the eternal is built into us.
Everybody worships. In today's mostly secular, Western culture, our gods have simply taken on new, and very old, shapes. We worship wealth, status, fame, politics, sports, leisure, pleasure, and comfort. Go people-watch at a political rally, a sporting event, or a concert sometime. Tell me that isn't worship: connecting with something bigger than yourself, following the rites and rituals, drawing lines between who's in and who's out, giving your time, money, and devotion to something you've decided is worthy of it.
From the Aztecs of the Americas to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, humanity has been seeking the divine since the beginning.
Religion Before Civilization
Maybe you've heard of Gobekli Tepe, an archaeological site in Turkey that upended a lot of assumptions about how civilization began. The old theory said permanent settlements grew out of agriculture, that once people started farming and raising livestock, they settled down, and religion developed later as a way to make sense of weather, harvests, childbirth, etc.
Gobekli Tepe complicates that story. Excavated structures at the site date back to roughly 9600 to 8000 BC, making it the oldest known monumental complex in the world, and researchers have found little evidence of farming or permanent housing from its earliest phases. Archaeologists are still debating exactly what the site was for and how it fits into the bigger picture, and more recent research suggests the picture may be more complicated than "temple first, town later." But the leading original interpretation, championed by the German archaeologist who excavated it, was that people gathered there for religious purposes well before agriculture took hold, not the other way around.
Whatever the final verdict, one thing is clear: our search for God stretches back further than we ever imagined.
Paul Names What They Already Knew
People today are no less religious than people in the ancient world. Our pantheon has just changed shape. That's what makes Paul's words to the men of Athens in Acts 17 land as hard now as they did then.
"Men of Athens, I notice that you are very religious in every way, for as I was walking along I saw your many shrines. And one of your altars had this inscription on it: 'To an Unknown God.' This God, whom you worship without knowing, is the one I'm telling you about.
"He is the God who made the world and everything in it. Since he is Lord of heaven and earth, he doesn't live in man-made temples, and human hands can't serve his needs, for he has no needs. He himself gives life and breath to everything, and he satisfies every need. From one man he created all the nations throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries.
"His purpose was for the nations to seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and exist. As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.' And since this is true, we shouldn't think of God as an idol designed by craftsmen from gold or silver or stone.
"God overlooked people's ignorance about these things in earlier times, but now he commands everyone everywhere to repent of their sins and turn to him. For he has set a day for judging the world with justice by the man he has appointed, and he proved to everyone who this is by raising him from the dead." (Acts 17:22-31, NLT)
Restless Until We Rest
God has planted eternity in our hearts. Augustine put it this way in his Confessions, "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."
We've been restlessly searching, from Gobekli Tepe to the Parthenon to the stadium lights of a Friday night football game, and every stop along the way has been a stand-in for the one thing that can actually satisfy that ache. The eternity inside of us isn't looking for a better idol. It's looking for the God who made us, and he isn't hiding. He's not far from any one of us. He wants to be found.
Something to Sit With
What are you actually searching for when you chase success, comfort, or approval?
If a stranger watched how you spend your time and money for a month, what would they conclude you worship?
Where have you been seeking a fulfillment that only God can give?
What modern-day gods have quietly taken a seat above Christ in your life?
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