The Dead Weight of a Do-It-Yourself God Text: Isaiah 46:5-7
Introduction: The Great Chasm
We live in an age of comparisons. We have comparison websites for insurance, for hotels, for electronics. We are constantly measuring, weighing, and ranking. We want to know who is the greatest of all time in basketball, what is the best brand of truck, or which political philosophy delivers the most prosperity. This impulse to compare is not entirely wrong; it is part of how we make sense of a world full of created things. But this impulse becomes disastrous, it becomes the very engine of idolatry, when we turn it toward God.
The modern secular man thinks he is too sophisticated for idolatry. He pictures a loincloth-clad native bowing to a block of wood and chuckles at such primitive superstition. He does not realize that his own heart is a far more efficient idol factory than any jungle workshop. He simply makes his gods out of more abstract materials: "the arc of history," "social justice," "personal autonomy," or "the science." But the principle is identical. Man, the creature, fashions a god in his own image, a god he can manage, a god that serves his purposes, a god that will not talk back.
In our text today, God, through the prophet Isaiah, throws down a gauntlet. He issues a challenge that is at once a searing mockery of all idolatry and a profound revelation of His own nature. He exposes the fundamental absurdity of worshipping anything that is on this side of the infinite Creator/creature distinction. There is God, and there is everything else. And the distance between them is not a matter of degree, but of kind. It is the distance between being and non-being, between the potter and the clay, between the one who carries and the one who must be carried.
This passage is a divine taunt. God is not being insecure. He is not worried that we might actually find a worthy competitor. He is lovingly, and with devastating logic, showing His people the sheer foolishness of trading the living God who bears them up for a dead god they must bear on their own backs. This is not just an ancient problem; it is the central problem of the human heart in every generation.
The Text
"To whom would you liken Me And make Me equal and compare Me, That we would be alike? Those who lavish gold from the purse And weigh silver on the scale, They hire a goldsmith, and he makes it into a god; They fall down, indeed they worship it. They carry it upon the shoulder and bear it; They set it in its place, and it stands there. It does not move from its place. Though one may cry to it, it cannot answer; It cannot save him from his distress."
(Isaiah 46:5-7 LSB)
The Un-Comparable One (v. 5)
God begins with a series of rhetorical questions designed to shatter our comparative frameworks.
"To whom would you liken Me And make Me equal and compare Me, That we would be alike?" (Isaiah 46:5)
God is asking, "Who is in My league?" The answer, of course, is no one. He is in a category of one. To even attempt the comparison is to make a category error of infinite proportions. It is like asking how many inches are in a gallon or what color the number seven is. The question itself is nonsensical. God is not the biggest thing in the universe; He is the one who created the universe. He is not the strongest being; He is the source of all strength. He is not the wisest; He is the author of all wisdom.
The verbs here are telling: liken, make equal, compare. This is the process of idolatry. First, we find a likeness. We say God must be something like that powerful king, or that beautiful sunset, or that brilliant idea. Then we make them equal. We begin to treat the created thing with the reverence due only to the Creator. Finally, we compare them, and we usually do it in a way that makes God manageable and the idol more immediate and useful. We domesticate God. We want a god we can get our heads around, which means we want a god smaller than our heads.
But the true God refuses to be put in our lineups. He is transcendent, which means He is utterly distinct from His creation. This is the bedrock of all true worship. If we get this wrong, everything else will be wrong. We cannot worship a God we have figured out, because a God we can figure out is, by definition, not the true God. He is an idol of the mind, fashioned by reason instead of by hand, but an idol nonetheless.
The DIY Deity (v. 6)
Having established His own uniqueness, God now turns His attention to the rival gods and exposes their ridiculous manufacturing process.
"Those who lavish gold from the purse And weigh silver on the scale, They hire a goldsmith, and he makes it into a god; They fall down, indeed they worship it." (Isaiah 46:6)
Notice the chain of production. It begins with human wealth and effort. Men take gold out of their own pockets. They weigh out their own silver. This god does not exist until they fund it. The first act of devotion to this god is to pay for its existence. This is high comedy. You are subsidizing your own deity.
Then, they hire a specialist. They need a craftsman, a goldsmith, to make the thing. Think about the absurdity. Your god is dependent on the local economy and the availability of skilled labor. What if the goldsmith is sick that day? What if there is a metal shortage? The creation of this god is subject to market forces and supply chain issues. The idolater has to check the budget before he can commission his object of worship.
And what is the result of all this expense and labor? "He makes it into a god." The creature makes a creator. The finite makes an infinite. The man gives birth to the god. And then, in the final act of this lunatic play, the manufacturer bows down to the product. "They fall down, indeed they worship it." The one who just a moment ago was giving orders to the goldsmith is now prostrate before the thing the goldsmith made. This is the essence of what Paul describes in Romans 1: exchanging the truth about God for a lie and worshipping and serving the creature rather than the Creator.
The Dead Weight of False Worship (v. 7)
The final verse in our text drives home the utter impotence and pathetic nature of this man-made god. It is a burden in every sense of the word.
"They carry it upon the shoulder and bear it; They set it in its place, and it stands there. It does not move from its place. Though one may cry to it, it cannot answer; It cannot save him from his distress." (Isaiah 46:7)
This god is not a carrier; it is cargo. It has to be hauled around. The worshippers must bear the weight of their own god. What a perfect metaphor for all false religion. Every religion outside of biblical Christianity is a religion of works, a religion where man must carry the burden. You must carry the burden of your own righteousness, the burden of your own atonement, the burden of appeasing your god. It is exhausting work, and the god you are carrying cannot help you one bit.
This god is completely inert. "They set it in its place, and it stands there. It does not move." It has no life, no will, no power of its own. It is utterly passive, entirely dependent on its handlers. If you want it to be somewhere else, you have to pick it up and move it. This is the opposite of the living God, who is pure act, who moves history, who parts seas, who topples kings, who raises the dead.
And because it is inert, it is useless in a crisis. "Though one may cry to it, it cannot answer." It has a mouth, but cannot speak; eyes, but cannot see; ears, but cannot hear. It is deaf to your prayers. It is silent in your suffering. And the bottom line is this: "It cannot save him from his distress." This is the ultimate test of any god. Can it save? Can it deliver when everything is on the line? The idol, whether it is made of gold or of ideology, will always fail this test. It is a broken cistern that can hold no water. It is a dead weight.
The God Who Carries You
The devastating critique in these verses is set in sharp contrast to the rest of the chapter, where God describes Himself. Just a few verses earlier, God says this to the house of Israel: "Listen to Me... who have been borne by Me from birth and have been carried from the womb; even to your old age I will be the same, and even to your graying years I will bear you! I have done it, and I will carry you; and I will bear you and I will deliver you" (Isaiah 46:3-4).
Here is the fundamental choice set before every human being. Will you worship a god you have to carry, or will you worship the God who offers to carry you? Will you bear the dead weight of your own self-salvation project, or will you rest in the strong arms of the God who has borne you from the womb and promises to bear you all the way home?
This is the gospel in Isaiah. The pagan lavishes his gold to create a burden for his own shoulders. But our God lavished His own Son, the uncreated gold of heaven, not to make an idol, but to make a sacrifice. Jesus Christ did not stand still, fixed in one place. He walked the dusty roads of Galilee, He moved toward Jerusalem, and He was carried to a cross. But unlike the idol, He did not stay there. He got up. He moved out of the tomb under His own power.
And now, He is the God who saves. We cry to Him, and He can answer. We are in distress, and He can and does save. The great invitation of the Christian faith is not, "Work harder, carry your god more faithfully." The invitation of Christ is, "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28). He is not the burden; He is the burden-bearer. He does not ask us to carry Him. He commands us to cast all our anxieties on Him, because He cares for us (1 Peter 5:7).
So look at the gods you are tempted to build and carry. The god of financial security. The god of your children's success. The god of political victory. The god of your own reputation. They are all heavy. They are all inert. They cannot answer you in the day of trouble. Lay them down. Let them fall. They are not worth the sweat. Turn to the only God who is not a liability, but an infinite asset. Turn to the God who does not stand still, but comes to you. Turn to the God who carries His people.