The Irony of Idolatry

“Be careful. There were times, lifting my hands in worship, I had to make sure I wasn’t worshipping my husband.”

These were the words of caution offered by my middle-aged, widowed friend one Wednesday night during a prayer meeting. My 19- or 20-year-old self, enamored with my husband-to-be, had received advice like this before. “It’s very easy to make an idol out of your husband” was an oft-repeated warning in my circles, and knowing the human propensity for idolatry, it was not hard for me to imagine how this could be the case.

The problem was, no one told me what it looked like, in practice, to commit such a sin. Idolatry, as I had roughly defined it, was loving something or someone more than God. It was giving inordinate affection to a creature that belonged to the Creator. So, I reasoned, if I were to avoid such a pitfall in my marriage, the love I felt for my husband must be guarded and measured, lest I exceed the acceptable limits of love for a created being. “Don’t make an idol out of your husband” to me sounded an awful lot like, “Don’t love him too much.” While that seemed reasonable and Biblical enough at the time, it still left me confused as to the proper response and remedy for such a pitfall.

Was it idolatry to prefer his company to anyone else’s? Was it idolatry to crave physical connection with him? Was it idolatry to miss him desperately when he traveled? All of the instincts of primal, romantic love seemed to cross this dangerous line of “loving too much.” Did I love my husband more than I loved God? And how was I to discover it if I did?

I went to the Scriptures to see what commands it offered me in regard to my husband. Wives are commanded to submit to their husbands, to honor them, to respect them, and in Titus 2, the older women are instructed to teach the younger women to love their husbands.

No where are wives commanded to guard against idolizing their husbands, and none of these commands are presented with a qualifier:

“Love your husband, but not too much.”

“Honor him, but not too much”

“Respect him, but not too much.”

The utter lack of qualifiers with which these commands are given suggests that humanity’s problem is rarely an excess of love, honor, and respect in our marriages but often a deficit of it.

I began to ponder what idolatry might actually look like in marriage, if it wasn’t giving excessive love and affection? I discovered an answer to this question far earlier in my marriage than I had hoped to. While guarding against the elusive “loving too much” I had been warned against, I fell into a far more prevalent form of idolatry. Ironically, it manifested itself as a lack of love, honor, and respect for my husband.

In my experience, we are tempted to idolize our spouses not by loving them too much, but by placing expectations on them to meet needs that only God can fulfill. In other words, we want them to love us too much. When a wife does this, she may find herself resenting her husband for his failure to live up to her standards, and she might become bitter, resentful, and discontented. For many of us, idolizing our idea of what our spouse should give us leads us to treat them with disrespect, anger, and a demanding spirit.

To make this more tangible, let us consider the human longing to be understood. Not just acknowledged or acclaimed, but fully and thoroughly known. Movies and TV shows portray relationships in which the romantic couple share a super-human, almost telepathic connection. The protagonists, misunderstood by everyone else around them, at long last experience deep interpersonal vindication in their relationship when they find their “soul mate.” They know and are fully known. Of course, marriage is designed to provide deep knowing for both parties, physically and emotionally. Yet, being finite beings made for union with the Infinite, the transcendent bliss of being fully known can in truth only be satisfied by God. If we enter marriage, expecting our spouses to embody this God-alone attribute, disappointment is the inevitable result. Then, when our idols inevitably fail us, we turn on them. We demand divine perfection from our spouses, whether through ignorance or willful disobedience, and we grow angry when they prove as human as us.

This tension between infinite longings and finite capacities, is, I believe, at the heart of almost all idolatry in marriage. It is an idolatry born of misplaced expectation, and it doesn’t only happen in the marriage relationship. We may look to friends, children, parents and pastors alike to meet our deepest transcendent longings. When we find ourselves frustrated by their inability to do so, we must resist the urge to accuse them of fault and realize instead our heart’s propensity to turn away from God as our first love.

Of course, relationships involve earnest efforts to meet the needs that can be met. The solution is not to expect nothing of our spouses and ourselves, suppressing all blissful expectations of connection and healthy compromise. But we must do so with the knowledge of the heart’s tendency to so easily stray from reasonable hopes into God-sized demands too lofty for any human to attain.

In looking back at my friend’s advice, I do not doubt the sincerity and wisdom of her warning. I know the immense pressure of striving to be the “perfect” wife, to seek my husband’s accolades more than God’s. I know the temptation to make my performance as a wife the chief metric by which I rise or fall, and this is idolatry. If I give everything I am to earn the pleasure and avoid the displeasure of a human being, then that person has taken the place of God. Perhaps my friend’s test was to realize that ultimately, God alone is judge, and he did not hold her to the impossible task of perfectly pleasing her husband. Her generation may have felt that pressure far more keenly as women’s roles were more emphasized and discussed in culture at large.

I think the test of my own generation is different. We daughters of the feminist revolution have more likely been taught to be selfish, to worship ourselves, and to demand that others meet our expectations, whether explicitly or implicitly through the entertainment we consume. No doubt this message became so strong and so loud partly because of its opposite having been pushed on women before. Unfortunately, the opposite of one sin is not another sin, and here we stand again beholden to the philosophies of the age.

I have been married five years now, and I am continually challenged to live up to the commands to love, respect, honor and serve my husband, since my instinct is to first measure how well he is loving, respecting, and honoring me. Now, I consider the performance of these duties not as idolatry but as worship to God, since they are done in obedience to Christ’s commands. What I need to guard against is the resentment, bitterness, and discontent that flow from the idolatry of looking to a created being to love me as only the Creator can.

So, what advice should we be giving our young people as they enter marriage? Serve God first, seek to please Him alone. In obedience to Him, lay down your life in extravagant love for your spouse, as He commanded us to. You won’t always please your spouse, and your spouse won’t always please you. This is a gift, because it takes your eyes off yourself and your spouse and places them on Christ as our sole sufficiency. Take your failures and your disappointments to God, allowing Him to purify you, and know that He alone offers the soul’s satisfaction you seek.

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Anneliese is a wife and mother living in Arizona, who found her voice in 2020 when she began writing @Feminine_Not_Feminist on Instagram. She hosts a podcast under the same name and talks about subjects relating to marriage, wise Christian living, and ideas that make life more interesting.