The Bible describes how the ancient Israelites, despite being strictly warned not to do so, repeatedly engaged in idolatry and were therefore punished severely by the Lord.
[5] Many of the stories in the Bible from the time of Moses to the Babylonian captivity are predicated on the choice between exclusive worship of the Lord and false gods.
[6] The Babylonian exile, itself a punishment for idolatry, seems to have been a turning point after which the Jews became committed to monotheism, even when facing martyrdom before worshipping any other god.
[7] The Jewish prayer Shema Yisrael and its accompanying blessing/curse reveals the intent of the commandment to include love for the Lord and not only recognition or outward observance.
[8] In the Gospels, Jesus quotes the Shema as the first and Greatest Commandment,[9] and the apostles after him preached that those who would follow Christ must turn from worshipping false gods.
Christian theologians teach that the commandment applies in modern times and prohibits the worship of physical idols, the seeking of spiritual activity or guidance from any other source (e.g. magical, astrological, etc.
The Bible presents Daniel and his companions as distinct, positive examples of individuals refusing to worship another god, even at the price of their lives.
[21] The central prayer of Judaism is the Shema Yisrael in which the belief in a single god is reaffirmed: Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one.The prayer is found in printed form in the mezuzah, the small, tubed case on the doorposts of homes of observant Jews (Most non-observant Jews also observe this command.
[23] This form was chosen to fulfill the mitzvah (biblical commandment) to inscribe the words of the Shema "on the doorposts of your house.”[24] “Thousands of martyrs did not go to their deaths muttering a numerical truism.
During the early days of the Maccabean revolt, for example, many Jews were martyred because they refused to acknowledge the claims of Seleucid deities.
[27] By the time the Talmud was written, the acceptance or rejection of idolatry was a litmus test for Jewish identity:[28] “Whosoever denies idols is called a Jew.
[32] This apparently originated in ancient times, as some of the several Hebrew words from the Tanakh translated as “idol” are pejorative and even deliberately contemptuous, such as elilim, “powerless ones,” and gillulim, “pellets of dung.”[33] Although Jews have characteristically separated themselves from the worship of physical gods and statues or persons claiming divinity, since the Babylonian exile, the tendency toward and practice of magic arts (chants, spells, charms, amulets, healing devices, special foods, lucky and unlucky days, magical numbers and a vast array of secret rituals) has continued to be found among some who claim Judaism as their faith.
[34] This has been true since ancient times, when the Israelites, having spent 210 years in Egypt, where magic was pervasive, wrongly thought that carrying the Ark of the Covenant into battle would guarantee victory.
[35] Such practices, though forbidden, were not surprising since “the ancient Israelites were not immune to the desire to control God.”[36] However, Maimonides warned that special objects (e.g. a mezuzah) and prayers (e.g. the Shema) in Judaism are meant to remind people of love for God and his precepts and do not in themselves guarantee good fortune.
[45] In his letter to the Philippians, he refers to those whose “god is their stomach.”[46] In several New Testament scriptures, including the Sermon on the Mount, the term idolatry is applied to the love of money.
[47] The apostle James rebukes those who focus on material things, using language similar to that of Old Testament prophets: “When you ask [in prayer], you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.
[50] The apostle Peter and the Book of Revelation also refer to the connection between the worship of other gods and sexual sins, whether metaphorically or literally.
[58] Such practices are forbidden even if one has “good” motives, such as seeking to restore someone's health, and “recourse to so-called traditional cures does not justify either the invocation of evil powers or the exploitation of another's credulity.”[59] All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to "unveil" the future (see for example, Deuteronomy 18:10; Jeremiah 29:8).
[62] Agnosticism as a way of life is portrayed as a lazy flight from the ultimate question of existence and as “all too often equivalent of practical atheism.”[63] Rev.
This incontrovertible fact reveals the genesis of idolatry.”[65] Morgan goes on to argue that thus “idolatry” is not defined by geography or culture but by the object(s) of worship that are not God, which may be spiritual or physical.
[66] In Luther's exposition of this commandment, he explains: [Idolatry] consists not merely in erecting an image and worshiping it, but rather in the heart, which stands gaping at something else, and seeks help and consolation from creatures, saints, or devils, and neither cares for God, nor looks to Him for so much good as to believe that He is willing to help, neither believes that whatever good it experiences comes from God.Like the ancient writers and Jewish theologians (see above), Luther considered occult or magic practices to be in violation of this commandment, explaining that those who seek benefit in such ways “make a covenant with the devil, in order that he may give them plenty of money or help them in love-affairs, preserve their cattle, restore to them lost possessions, etc.
In the first and second of his Quatre Sermons, Calvin also discouraged believers in Christ from simulating religious acts that are not worship of the true God in order to avoid persecution.