Perhaps you are familiar with the films of J.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy or you have read the books. According to the timeline in J.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, the year was 2463, according to the third Age of Middle Earth, when a young Hobbit by the name of Sméagol killed his brother Deagol in order to possess the Ring. Almost five hundred years later another hobbit by the name of Bilbo Baggins meets Sméagol, but Sméagol has changed. Sméagol no longer looks like a Hobbit but now, under the influence of the Ring he has begun to be transformed into a ghoulish creature with green skin. As he is depicted in the film, he has lost virtually all his hair, he only has a few teeth left and his eyes have become bulging, pale and luminous.
The Ring virtually consumed his mind but it did not destroy him totally. It transformed Sméagol…into Gollum. The Ring brought a strange twist of misery and delight to Gollum. He called it his “precious” but he both hated and loved it at the same time. In J.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit he tells the story of how Bilbo Baggins ended up finding the Ring and tricking Gollum into showing him how to get out of the tunnels beneath the Misty Mountains. As Bilbo leaped over Gollum to escape, Gollum cried out in a bone-chilling shriek, “Thief, thief, thief! Baggins! We hates it, we hates it, we hates it for ever!”
In J.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books, the Ring has power over the one who bears it. It corrupts whoever tries to use it, regardless of how good or evil their intentions. J.R. Tolkien scholar Dr. Tom Shippey calls the Ring, “a psychic amplifier” because it takes that which the heart desires or is most fond of and amplifies it to evil proportions. Whether the hearts desires are good or bad, the Ring turns them into inordinate desires, the word the Bible uses for lust.
The Ring in Tolkien’s writing is a picture of how the idols in our own hearts work. Pastor and author Tim Keller wrote, “The Ring makes [the possessor] willing to do anything to achieve [their objective], anything at all. It turns the good thing into an absolute that overturns every other allegiance or value. The wearer of the Ring becomes increasingly enslaved and addicted to it, for an idol is something we cannot live without. We must have it, and therefore it drives us to break rules we once honored, to harm others and even ourselves in order to get it. Idols are spiritual addictions that lead to terrible evil.”
The Ring transformed Sméagol into Gollum. What is your Ring transforming you into? It has the power to turn you from being Sméagol one minute and Gollum the next. Whether our desires are good or bad, they can be idolatrous. An idol is anything that is more important to us than Jesus. One way to find out what serves as your Ring is to ask, “What is operating in the place of Jesus Christ as your real, functional Savior? What are you looking to in order to justify yourself?”
Many of you may be thinking at this point, “This doesn’t apply to me, Jesus is my Savior.” So my questions to you are, “When do you get most angry? What are you most afraid of?” When your idols are challenged, you will react either with anger or fear or some other explosive emotion. At that moment, you are basing your value, your righteousness, upon your idols. They have become your “functional Savior.”
In Colossians 3, verses one through four Paul tells us that the only way to break the power of our Ring(s) is to set our hearts, our minds, and our eyes on Christ. Paul says the only thing, the only one; strong enough to break the grip of these “over desires” is the person and work of Christ. It is because Jesus took on flesh and lived the life we should have lived and died the death we rightly deserved that the power of our idols has been broken.
May we find our identity more and more, in the person and work of Jesus and may that new identity enable us to throw our great Rings of idolatry into the flames to be consumed.
Ed Dunnington is the Senior Pastor at Christ the King Presbyterian Church in Roanoke. Visit their website at www.ctkroanoke.org.