Author Stephen Fowl states that the “real problem with idolatry is that it misdirects love and attention that should solely be focused on God and focuses it on something or someone else.” Fowl goes on to write that “God seeks our wholehearted, single-minded love and attention. Anything that diverts one’s love and attention from God is, at least in principle, threatening to become an idol or to function as an idol.”
This diversion of one’s love and attention was certainly true for Ancient Israel. Ancient Israel rarely abandoned the worship of God in a wholesale way, but rather they tended to split their attention and allegiance between the Lord and the numerous other gods.
These are hard words to digest for any follower of Jesus in any epoch of time.
For us contemporary followers of Jesus who live in an attention economy, wholehearted and single-minded love and attention to God present unique challenges for us.
The attention economy is made up of anything trying to capture our limited attention. Social media apps are incentivized, or motivated, to develop increasingly persuasive techniques – notifications, targeted content, personalized feeds, and more – to:
- Keep you coming back
- Get your friends to use them
- Collect more data about you so that they can get better at capturing your attention and influencing your behavior
The principle is simple, the things that grab our attention have the power to change the trajectory of our lives.
In this messae, Pator Daniel explores this theme in greater detail as we talk about the idol of approval, sometimes called the fear of man.
