"One aspect of college life that got me thinking recently was how every student worships different gods."

I know that sentence may come across as weird, especially with fellow college students. Many of you are probably thinking "I don't worship gods!" That may be true: you might not worship a specific character or being that has a specific mythology behind it. But I believe that in reality, we college students do worship gods.

But let's back up: even if we were "worshiping gods" as I claim, why would that be a bad thing? What is the harm in that?

To answer that question, we have to start on the very first page of the Bible. There are two differing accounts of creation at the very beginning of the Biblical story, each exploring and emphasizing different aspects and truths of God and His creation.

In the first creation story, God "created mankind in His own image / in the image of God He created them/male and female He created them" (Genesis 1:27, NIV). Now, this would have been an incredible philosophical claim for readers within the creation story's original, Ancient Near East context: typically a king or god would have statues made of themselves for everyone else to respect and honor. It would be a statue that "bears the image" of its respected king/god.

But notice the deeper truth this specific story is getting across: every human being is an "image bearer," we are God's physical representatives.

The implications of this are huge: to honor and serve and respect each other is to serve God, and to honor and serve and respect God is to serve each other.

A little bit later in the biblical story, God brings a Nation of people out of slavery, as He had promised that through them the entire world would be blessed and restored and healed. This Nation (Israel) agrees to be God's people, to live and serve and represent Him to every other Nation. So he lays out a "terms of agreement" (a covenant). One of the laws this people group agree to is that they "shall have no other gods besides [God]" (Exodus 20:3, NIV).

There are multiple reasons this is important, but let's continue this theme of respect and honor. Through all of the laws God lays out for this Nation of Israel to follow, it is His heart for them to show other nations what it looks like for God's people to live and represent Him within their historical and cultural context.

By making it a law for Israel to have/worship only the one, true God, the hope is that this Nation would demonstrate absolute honor and respect and dignity for each other. This is (essentially) a respectful, egalitarian community where the "image bearers" representing and requiring of respect and honor and serving is each other! If Israel bowed down to and served and honored other gods, they would disrespect and hurt and dishonor God and His people.

In fact, this does happen... throughout the entire Old Testament! Countless stories of God's people turning to other gods shows that when people value and seek false gods and idols above God, they bring ruin and destruction upon themselves and community. (The book of Judges is a perfect example of this, where God's people are shown to totally fail in respecting God, and each other as image bearers of Him.)

And this all may seem very detached to talking about idolatry among college students, but it's not.

In a letter written to an early community of Jesus followers, 1 John ends with this plea: "Dear children, keep yourselves from idols" (1 John 5:21, NIV). Why does this command serve as the punctuation for this letter? And why does this theme of idolatry/worshiping other gods span the entire story of the Bible?

Idolatry is such a harmful poison to Jesus followers because it coerces us into devaluing God and those He made in His image (everyone).

We can try to claim that we don't serve false gods/idols, but we do! In fact, the way we worship sex and war and power is just like how these early Jesus-following communities were doing, especially the ones that were immersed in the Greco-Roman culture. We worship sex, war, and power, we just don't have the mythology attached to it, so we don't notice it as glaringly! In fact, we try to rename these areas of false idols because we are so attached to them, and have rooted our identity in them: instead of sex, we call it experimenting/exploring; instead of war, we call it politics and national security, and instead of power we simply write it off as popularity (that "apparently" has no effect on us).

We must recognize just how poisonous this is: when we seek to honor and respect and serve these other cultural aspects, we are led to devalue and disrespect God and His people. Idolatry leads us into acts of pleasing our own self and flesh, and we know that these acts are "hatred, jealousy, selfish ambition, and factions" (Galatians 5:20, NIV). Idolatry will only ever lead to us degrading and harming our communities, no matter what we "worship" or seek to find our identity in.

But there is Good News: our identity is found in following Jesus, allowing us to overcome selfish idolatry and discover the true identity and aspects of our character in Him!

In following Jesus, we can rest and trust in who He worshiped (God), what He taught (to obey the overarching wisdom of the Old Testament Scriptures), and how He lived (loving and serving all peoples, recognizing them and Himself as "image-bearers").

And by trusting in Jesus and following Him, He offers His Spirit and His Power, which will transform our hearts and desires, allowing us to turn away and reject these idols, these false sources of identity, and to turn instead to Him and our true source of identity! "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, and faithfulness" (Galatians 5:22, NIV).

In following Jesus and trusting Him, we can overcome our false senses of identity.

Instead of idols, we can allow God's Spirit to transform ourselves, and to truly work to become the honoring and respecting image bearers God created us to be from the beginning!