by Isaac Overton
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The subway car lurched and hissed as it pulled out of the station. Liam paid no attention to it, his train was still 15 minutes away. Fluorescent lights flickered above. He didn’t notice the cold cement, or the peeling advertisement for dental implants stuck to the tiles above his head. He just stared into his cracked phone screen, his face lit with a ghostly glow.

He scrolled. His thumb moving automatically, avoiding the cracks that would otherwise roughen and cut his fingers. His eyes barely registered the blur of images sliding past his vision. An engagement photo. Someone’s trip to Bali. Someone pushing weights. A plate of food splattering on the ground. Paints mixing and blending. Someone dancing. Some creepy clown chasing a person. A stream of faces trying to get his attention. Liam was both addicted… and bored.

He kept watching the screen with blank, tired eyes. The phone was warm in his hand, a tether for his soul that he couldn’t cut, because he couldn’t see it. It just drained him, but he never really knew why he felt drained. A guy standing nearby coughed into his sleeve. A teenager sitting beside him chewed with earbuds in, her head moving to music no one else could hear. No one looked at each other. No one ever did.

There is a certain kind of madness that drives idolatry. In Jeremiah 2:13, God says: “my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.” What would you choose, a flowing fountain of living waters? Or a broken cistern that holds no water?

I wonder, maybe the broken cistern of yesterday has been traded for the cracked phone screens of today. How many times have you scrolled your feed, and actually found fulfilment and satisfaction? Our life seeps out, moment by moment, as we search for satisfaction, but we ultimately only losing ourselves looking for a life that isn’t there in our screens. A phone is a wonderful tool of dominion, but it is a life-sucking vampire if we allow it to master us. Maybe your cistern isn’t your phone. Maybe it’s something else.

We look to money, applause, sex, career, reputation, sport, and all manner of other things, hungry for joy and satisfaction. As Calvin so colourfully put it, our hearts are “factories of idols.” That life and fulfilment, however, exists in God alone. This is what his aseity means: there is no other place we can go to find life, and life abundant (Jn 10:10). Fullness of joy. “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17). If we turn our back on him, what can we expect? If we don’t seek our satisfaction in him, what will happen? We can expect to wither and die.

Have you ever felt the weight of futility in your own life? That gnawing dissatisfaction? That sense that no matter how much you chase, or achieve, or gather, or build, it’s never enough? That’s the vacuum left by turning from the only one who has life in himself. There is an infinite eternity of desire in the human heart (Ecc 3:11), and there is only one who can satisfy that desire. Even as believers we know this experience, the feeling of death that comes with being lax and neglectful in our spiritual life.

When we cling to the idols of our lives, we are forsaking all hope. “Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love” (Jonah 2:8). As time progresses, we also begin to resemble the dead idols that we worship. “Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see. They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell. They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk; and they do not make a sound in their throat” (Ps 115:4-8).

The Lord invites idol worshippers, like Abram, like you, like me, to follow him and walk with him. To delight ourselves in God alone. And he invites his straying people to come always, again and again. God is complete in himself, yet nevertheless he delights in you, his adopted child in Christ. The fountain is still flowing. “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which does not satisfy?” (Isaiah 55:1–2).

SDG.

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