There’s a phrase our culture repeats so often we’ve stopped noticing how much it’s actually asking of us. Follow your heart. Live your truth. Do what makes you happy. Be true to yourself, you get to define who you are. It sounds like freedom. It’s actually just Babylon with better marketing.

Jeremiah already answered the first one a long time ago. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Following it uncritically was never the safe advice our culture treats it as. Jesus answered the second one too, and He didn’t leave room for competing versions of truth. He said He is the truth, singular, not one option on a shelf of personal truths we each get to pick from. Paul answered the third, telling the church at Galatia that walking in the Spirit and following the flesh are directly at odds with each other, not two paths that happen to lead to the same good place. And Paul answers the fourth as well, warning the church at Rome not to be conformed to this world but transformed by the renewing of the mind. Not self-defined. Renewed.

Self has become the image our culture bows to now, and it’s a genuinely clever substitute, because worshiping yourself doesn’t feel like idolatry from the inside. It feels like healthy self-esteem. It feels like empowerment. It feels like the exact opposite of bowing to anything. But any culture that teaches people to worship themselves will eventually grow hostile toward the authority of God, because the worship of self and submission to Christ cannot occupy the same throne at the same time. Jesus said if anyone wants to follow Him, the first step is denying yourself. Our culture says the opposite. Exalt yourself. Celebrate yourself. Build your whole life around yourself. Those two instructions cannot both be true, and eventually every one of us has to choose which voice we’re actually listening to.

Here’s what should sober us. Psalm 115 describes idols with mouths that don’t speak, eyes that don’t see, hands that don’t handle, feet that don’t walk. And then the psalmist adds the line that should stop us cold. Those who make them become like them. So does everyone who trusts in them. Idolatry doesn’t just misdirect our worship. It deforms us in the direction of whatever we’re worshiping. People who worship power become harsh and controlling. People who worship pleasure become enslaved to their own appetite. People who worship money slowly lose their compassion. People who worship self become spiritually blind to everyone and everything but themselves.

What you bow before shapes what you become. That’s why this fight over worship matters so much, and why Babylon has always fought so hard to win it. This isn’t really a story about ancient statues and ancient kings. It’s the same ancient war being fought in every generation, including ours, over who or what actually sits on the throne of the human heart.