Idols.
I. Let us glance at three forms of idolatry against which we must ever be on our guard. (1) There is the worship of other gods, or false gods: the worship of Moloch, and Baalim, and Ashtaroth, gods of gold and jewels, of lust and blood. (2) There is the worship of the true God under false and idolatrous symbols. The golden calf was meant as a visible symbol of God's unseen presence. It was a cherubic emblem, like those woven on the curtains of the temple on Sion, or those which stretched their wings over the mercy-seat. And yet calf-worship was idolatry; it was a violation of the second commandment. (3) The third form of idolatry is the worship of the true God under the guise of false notions, false conditions.
II. Every one of us is an idolater who has not God in all his thoughts, and who has cast away the laws of God from the governance of his life. I know not that it is a much worse idolatry to deny God altogether, and openly to deify the brute impulses of our own nature, than it is in words to confess God, yet not to do, nor to intend to do, never seriously to try to do, what He commands or to abandon what He forbids. If you do not worship the public idol of the market-place, have you no personal idol of the cave?
III. But St. John will not leave us to what is abstract: he will point us to One whom he has seen and heard, and his hands have handled, even the Word of life; to One who is the brightness of God's glory and the express image of His person. "This," he says, "is the true God and eternal life." If you rely on religious teachers, they may offer you a dead Christ for the living Christ; an agonised Christ for the ascended Christ; an ecclesiastical Christ for the spiritual Christ; a Christ of the elect few for the Christ of the sinful many; a petty, formalising, sectarian Christ for the royal Lord of the great, free heart of manhood; a Christ of the fold for the Christ of the one great flock; a Christ of Gerizim or Jerusalem, of Rome or of Geneva, of Oxford or of Clapham, for the Christ of the universal world. So long as we worship idols, so long as we take pleasure in unrighteousness, so long as we love the darkness rather than the light so long we cannot see God, neither know Him. And because to know Him is life and eternal life, and because there is no other life, since all other life is but a living death, therefore St. John wrote as the last word of his epistle, as the last word of the whole revelation of the New Testament, "Little children, keep yourselves from idols."
F. W. Farrar, Sermons and Addresses in America,p. 164.