By Robert Slane
A certain football manager, upon hearing someone suggest that the game seemed to be a matter of life or death to him, replied that this was not so - football was actually far more important than life or death to him. There may well have been a certain irony in his reply, but over the past few weeks it has often seemed that football does indeed occupy a place of life or death proportions in the hearts and minds of millions.
Many examples of the hysteria surrounding the game could be cited, but a couple will suffice. On the day of the quarter final match against the Portuguese team, the main headline on BBC Radio 4 at 6 o'clock was that the game had gone into extra time. One might reasonably have supposed that anyone tuning into Radio 4 at that time did so because they had no interest in the football, yet still the BBC thought that such people urgently needed to know what was happening in the match. And so they accorded it a position of greater importance than the second item, a report about sixty people dying in a car-bomb in Baghdad. The second example of hysteria is even sadder still. A church in Salisbury showed all the England team's matches on a big screen inside the church. And if this were not bad enough, on the day of the final, which fell on the Sabbath, they held a World Cup 'celebration service', followed by the screening of the game.
When trivialities such as football are given positions of such importance in a nation, it is a sure sign that the nation has lost all sight of God, all sense of purpose and is in a serious state of decline. Furthermore, when a people become so hooked on something that it influences their state of happiness and takes over their lives, there can be no doubt that that something has become a mass idol. The mania surrounding the game over the last few weeks has surely shown once again that football is now one of this nation's greatest mass idolatries.
Before proceeding, we should make it clear that it is not football itself which is idolatrous, but rather the current attitude to it. As a simple game, football, like most other sports, is a perfectly harmless recreation. It is clear that God has given man the ability and desire to participate in sports, as well as a desire to watch them. But in recent years, especially since the proliferation of television channels in the 1990s, which led to enormous sums of money being pumped into the game, football seems to have taken on a whole new nature and now often resembles a vast marketing enterprise more than it does a sport. And as more money has been pumped into selling the game to the public, so the audience has grown both in numbers and in obsession. So great has this obsession become that millions now consider a person who professes to care nothing for the exploits of the England team to be unpatriotic (this is surely the strangest definition of patriotism the world has ever seen). It is this attitude to the game, rather than the game itself that we call into question.
So how does the attitude towards football constitute idolatry? To answer this we must first consider what idolatry is. We can quite easily have an inadequate view of this sin, and a common error is to suppose that it chiefly relates to the breaking of the second commandment i.e. the making of and bowing down to graven images or idols. The reason for this perception probably lies in the fact that in the Old Testament, the Jews are charged time and time again with the practice of bowing down to images, which is said to be idolatry. Whilst this is true, to associate idolatry solely with the use of images and therefore with the breaking of the second commandment is to misunderstand the nature of it entirely. Idolatry is literally anything that we place above or in rivalry with God in our affections, regardless of whether we make a physical image of that thing. In a sense, image-making is merely a visual representation of the idolatry we have already committed in our hearts. So if anything, idolatry can be seen to relate primarily to the breaking of the first commandment, rather than the second because although idolatry may involve the bowing down to images, it always entails placing something in God's position.
For a full grasp of the sin of idolatry, we therefore need to study the first commandment. The translation in the Authorised Version, 'thou shalt have no other gods before me' (Exodus 20:3), could quite easily be interpreted as relating merely to the order of importance we afford God in our lives. One might conceivably take these words to mean that as long as God is accorded position number one, anything coming after Him is acceptable. But the words might be even more literally translated 'before (or against) my face', and the New Testament translation produced by William Tyndale in 1530 gives the proper and powerful interpretation of this commandment, stating that, 'thou shalt have no other gods in my sight'. In other words, we are not merely to give Jehovah preferred status over a number of rivals, we are commanded simply not to have any other rivals in our hearts.
By failing to grasp the full scope of this commandment, it is perfectly possible for us to avoid idolatry in an outward sense, by heeding the second commandment, but nevertheless to commit the same sin in our hearts. For example, were we to set foot in a Roman Catholic church, we would no doubt be appalled at its crucifixes, its statues and its images, and we would have no trouble identifying it as a place of gross idolatry, to be avoided like the plague. Having beheld such a scene, we might be tempted to fancy that in a Reformed church, where no such images exist, that there is no idolatry. But the fact is, though we clear the church of every graven image, we may just as easily commit idolatry in our worship services as the Romanist does in his. All we have to do is have our affections and desires on something other than God and the deed is done.
What has all this to do with football? Well, over the past few weeks, the majority of people in England have set their highest affections and desires on the England football team and have therefore committed idolatry. And their making an idol of a simple, harmless recreation ought to serve as a warning to us that we too can find ourselves guilty of the same thing. And so whilst there is nothing wrong with watching the game (although the behaviour and bad language of players makes it increasingly difficult to justify even this), we should check ourselves to see whether we, like the rest of the nation, have set up football as a rival to God in our hearts.
The acid test of whether we have succumbed to the idolatry of football is this: if the England football team had made it to the final of the World Cup, they would have been playing during the Sabbath Day evening service. Had this been the case, where would your heart and mind have been - on the worship of God, or on the worship of football? Unlike football, the answer to this question is indeed a matter of life or death.