Plastic Fruit and a Perfect God

**I'm quite happy. Quite content...**

God is the perfect God. How gracious of Him to extend to us not only mercy, but also grace. To not only withhold the terrors and troubles, but also to shower the love in tangible, touchable, real ways. How gracious of Him to not be just, and just alone, but also love. Either one without the other would be a thing of terror, we would not want a just God without love, nor a loving God without justice, but the entirety of both, expressed in one being- this is how great our God is.

Jeremiah, chapter one, states that Israel was "worshipping what their hands have made." Derisive criticism and laughter at such blatant stupidity is often how we greet this centuries-old idolatry. Until we remember the things that we ourselves have created and subsequently worshipped- money, possessions, careers, families, relationships... the list continues. We ourselves have made gods with our hands. And we worship them, almost without knowing, subconsciously. They worm into the fiber of our lives, insidiously affecting the way we think, talk, and live. We worship "what our hands have made."

And we've never dreamed, created, or made a god who could be both eternally just and eternally loving. We worship things that are weaker than we are. Of what value is that? It's as though we are a child is content with the "lunch" he or she has made- with plastic fruits on little play plates, while over in the kitchen sits a delicious feast (with goldfish crackers!) created by a parent. No child would argue that their lunch is more fulfilling. No child would argue that their lunch would make them feel full while tasting superior to the parent's offering. No, the simple value found in those plastic replicas is that they, the child, made that meal in and of themselves. Such it is with our false worship of our "gods" and the ignoring, or minimizing of The God. The God perfect in justice and love. The God who can alone fulfill and bring true joy. The God who is so vested in us that before He "formed you in the womb" he knew you. Yet, despite such knowledge, we continue, content "in worshipping what our hands have made."

How very, very sad for us, and our plastic fruit.