Isaiah moves on to describe in further detail the folly of idolatry. For one thing, it belittles the one true God and moves Him out of the main focus of life. Idolatry exalts some thing or person or idea or lifestyle and puts that into the place which should be held by God. Isaiah’s purpose for doing this is so that Israel (and we) will have no illusions about the vanity of idolatry. After all, idols in his day were just blocks of wood or stone fashioned by human hands and so useless to help in times of need except as fuel for cooking or heat.
We may tend to minimize the concept of idols because of the way Isaiah described them. The idols then were objects and people no longer really worship such things as statues or images. But we don’t have to look far to realize that this is not true. Many people do pray to statues and pictures and treat them with great honor and respect as they would do to a divine being. Many of those people would claim that they are not worshipping the image or representation but adore the spirit which it represents or which inhabits that image. Apparently these spirits cannot operate apart from the image nor can they be approached in prayer in any other way. How can they really help us then? Our God is a Spirit who can be reached anywhere, anytime for He does not need a statue or image, temple, shrine, or church.
When we think of an idol today we usually adopt the version that the media has popularized: a person, a celebrity whom people admire with great passion almost to the point of worship. No man must ever occupy our attention or passion so much that he or she usurps the place of God as our authority, driving force, counselor, guide or reason for living. No man can provide the guidance or the salvation that Jesus can give.