Among These Dark Satanic Mills

“And did the Countenance Divine,/Shine forth upon our clouded hills?/And was Jerusalem builded here,/Among these dark Satanic Mills?” 

Well does the Bible describe us as sheep. And not as sheep only, but sheep who are prone to wonder—to wonder from Him who made us, saved us, and loves us most. The hymn, Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing, acutely diagnoses our fickle hearts:

“Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,

Prone to leave the God I love;

Here’s my heart; O take and seal it;

Seal it for Thy courts above.”

I don’t know about you, but I feel it. I sense the weight of my fickle heart each and every day, ever prone to wander—O!, for even when my heart burns hottest for Him, I must admit that my affection for the Lord is not worthy of His name. I ache for that day, as I’m sure you do, when I will worship Him as He deserves.

What’s especially interesting about the moniker of ‘sheep’ is that the name applies well to Christians both before and after they come to know the Lord. The Apostle Peter seems to be indicating this very reality when he says in 1 Peter 2:25,

“For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.”

Indeed, before the Lord made us His own we were all “straying like sheep,” but as believers, we have now returned to Him who is the Good Shepherd. Though in both cases—before we knew Christ the Shepherd and afterwards—sheep we yet remain. Far be it from anyone to say that God lacks a sense of humor, for He knew precisely what He was communicating when labeling us as sheep. For though they are cute, docile, and fuzzy little creatures, sheep are nonetheless exceedingly stupid—just as we all are anytime we entertain even the slightest sin.

Make no mistake: to sin is the stupidest thing we can possibly do.

And yet, for as exceedingly stupid as sin is, it is also exceedingly deceptive. To lie and deceive is the nature of sin: just as it is at the very heart of Satan, the father of lies, to breathe falsehood and wreak destruction wherever he finds himself.

While the stupidity of sin can take on many forms, I think the clearest way to describe it is simply this: sin is anything that the human heart desires above God Himself. That is, all sin can in some way or another be categorized as a form of idolatry—desiring or delighting in something, anything, more than the Lord.

Not all sin we commit has to do with the flesh or the hands or the lips or our possessions; but all sin does have to do with the human heart. “The heart,” as John Piper recently put it during his eulogy for John MacArthur, “is a valuing organ.” As the innermost part of our inner man, the heart is that spiritual organ with which we give honor and worship to those things we most value. Every decision we make is an act of the will,—a choice made deep within the heart—whether it be for righteousness or wickedness. For God and His good pleasure, or against it. When we sin, we cannot say of ourselves that in the moment of our disobedience we wanted to please God above all things but ultimately fell short. No, no, let us be honest with ourselves and with the Lord: when we sin, we do so because, in that moment, we wanted to do it. And because we wanted to sin, we did.

When our affections are rightly ordered, God alone reigns on the throne of our hearts and every decision, affection, and thought flows from this proper ordering of things. And when we sin, we betray a tragic misalignment in our hearts between that which is and that which ought to be. The reality that sin is ultimately a heart issue is one of the crucial distinctions Jesus made when speaking with the Pharisees—“Hear and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person” (Matthew 15:10-11).

What makes the sin of idolatry especially cunning is that it is not relegated only to that which we would call ‘bad.’ You can commit the sin of idolatry both with things that God loves and with things God hates. Doubtless this grim reality prompted John Calvin in saying,

“Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.”

The natural man is utterly boundless in his ability to make a god out of whatever lies before him. Effortlessly twisting anything and everything in God’s good design for his own selfish purposes. Truly, as Calvin put it, the heart of man is an idol factory.

Whenever I think of Calvin’s words—“idol factories”—my mind is drawn to the poem Jerusalem by Romantic writer William Blake. Railing against the predations of the Industrial Revolution, particularly the victimization of young children as chimney sweepers, Blake penned these words:

“And did the Countenance Divine,

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?”

During the Industrial Revolution, shadowy smokestacks loomed over the expanding horizon where white clouds and farmland once painted the land. These Blake called “Satanic Mills”—the factories of industry that served as the epicenter for every manner of abuse, greed, and, quite literally, idolatry over material gain and profit. Indeed, “idol factories.”

On this side of eternity, we walk among these same dark Satanic Mills; among endless perversions and distractions that are vying for our attention with the sole purpose of drawing our hearts away from Him, our First Love. For even after the Lord wakes us from our cold, dead slumber and gives us both new life and a new heart, we must ever be on guard against the deceitfulness of idolatry.

For indeed, sometimes it is the very best of things that we can make into an idol; giving weight and worship to the creature and created rather than to the Creator. The desire for rest and leisure can become an idol just as, on the opposite side of the spectrum, work and sheer busyness can consume all our thoughts and priorities in the other direction. The freedom afforded by singleness can be an idol, just as a selfish desire for marriage can be an idol; the fear of having children can become an idol as readily as children themselves can become idols, and so on. Unfortunately, nothing is off limits. The longer I walk with the Lord, the more I’ve come to distrust my own heart and its uncanny ability to attach itself to even the very best of things the Lord has given me over and against fellowship with God Himself.

And sometimes, if you’re anything like me, the Spirit convicts you of an idol in your life, and upon turning from it you steer too rigorously in the other direction where, there also, lies an idol in waiting. The path is indeed narrow! The Christian life isn’t a matter of simply ‘doing this’ and ‘not doing that,’ but rather it is all a matter of the heart. The Lord would have us thoroughly converted, with the entirety of our person, both inwards and outwards, in complete submission to Him. This begins and ends in the heart.

I was reminded how subtle idolatry can be only this past week as I was reading through the book of 2 Kings. Throughout the history of Judah and Israel, her kings were described at the end of their lives in only one of two ways: “And he did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, according to all that his fathers had done,” or, “And he did what was right in the eyes of the LORD and walked in all the way of David his father.” Unfortunately, though unsurprisingly, most of her kings were of the former characterization—that is, wicked.

There were, however, some kings who did a number of ‘good’ things only to fall short gravely in those areas which were most important. For example, there were a few kings who tried to fix the temple and direct some form of worship towards the true and Living God—only to preserve the high places in Israel where demonic worship of other gods took place. These kings foolishly attempted to weave together devotion to the LORD with devotion to demons, forgetting altogether that light cannot have fellowship with darkness, that,

“You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God” (Exodus 20:5).

Then in 2 Kings 18, we are introduced to Hezekiah, one of the most godly and well-spoken of kings in the entire history of Judah. He was a righteous man after the heart of his father David, who himself was described as a man after the very heart of God. Hezekiah’s devotion to the Lord was such that there arose no other king in Judah like him after his passing—except, that is, for the Lord Jesus Christ of whom Hezekiah was a dim, fleeting shadow, an echo. Hezekiah’s tolerance for idolatry among the people, in line with that of the Lord’s, was utterly nonexistent: he removed the high places of demonic worship, he broke down pillars and tributes to the false gods of the nations, and most interestingly, it’s written that Hezekiah “broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it” (2 Kings 18:4).

The rampant idolatry among the people prior to Hezekiah’s reign was such that, in complete forgetfulness of God’s past faithfulness, they began to worship that which was only meant to serve as a mere symbol of the Lord’s mercy. They mistook the symbol for the substance. The idolatry of the people was so great that, upon seeing this dusty relic from generations ago hid in a corner of the Temple somewhere, they didn’t so much as think twice before sacrificing to it—“What’s that over there?” one man asked another, to which his friend responded, “Not sure... do you suppose we should worship it just in case?” “But of course,” replied the first.

Rather than the bronze serpent saving all those who looked upon it (see Numbers 21:6-9), the people were instead consumed as they gave it undue honor. A dreadful reversal took place on account of their sin. What was meant to commemorate the goodness and steadfast love of the Lord towards the people of Israel during their time in the wilderness became corrupted and warped. The bronze serpent—in the hands of the serpent, the Devil—became twisted from its original purpose; reflecting the image of man on its shiny, bronze surface rather than pointing beyond itself to the everlasting God.

That, my friends, is idolatry. Not only the mere act of bowing down to that which is a dumb and deaf idol,—which is, of course, still sin—but the wicked leaps in willful decision making within the human heart that lead to such an act. The physical act of worshipping an idol was brought forth by the initial, embryonic spiritual act of lending weight to that which is not the Living God. For, in many respects, that is what idolatry is all about: giving the weight of your heart’s posture towards anything other than the Lord.

Therein lies the obvious deception with the Roman Catholic idea of ‘veneration.’ “No, no, no, you misunderstand,” they say, “we don’t worship Mary and the saints, we venerate them. We don’t worship relics and icons, we venerate them.” I suspect Hezekiah would think differently. The obvious question is again one of weight: in that moment of so-called veneration, wherein lies the center of gravity? That is, where is the attention centered? Is it upon the Lord or upon created things? Indeed, never underestimate the proclivity of the human heart to turn even good things bad. Tony Reinke goes on to say,

“And as Luther discovered in the text of Scripture, the golden calf was fashioned with a stylus, a ‘graving tool’ originally meant to write truth about God, but instead used to shape a golden lie (Exodus 32:4).”

We’ve now come to the end of what I realize is a rather heavy and challenging article. However, my utmost intention has not been to discourage, but rather to convict and encourage. Indeed, on this matter I write to myself as much to any of you. And if you do find yourself pricked by these words, then praise the Lord: His Spirit is at work.

In pleading that we turn from idolatry, His desire is not to dampen our joy, but to increase it. God knows that false gods and dumb idols cannot possibly satisfy our souls. That is why He commands us to repent of any and all sin—for His glory and for our eternal good. Thus, be careful and watchful lest you rob God of any honor due Him; and by consequence, rob yourself of that joy which is best.

And as ever when we sin, the Lord stands by ready to cleanse and forgive completely those who draw near to Him in humility and repentance. Though we all stray like sheep and grieve Him when we entertain lesser joys, Jesus yet remains the Good Shepherd. For He is the One who journeys out into the howling abyss among the Satanic Mills in search of the one sheep who has gone astray—truly, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep... I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of My hand” (John 10:11-28).

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Photo by The Cleveland Museum of Art, Unsplash

Author’s Note: If you were encouraged by this article, I would recommend reading a post I wrote recently for The Gospel Coalition Canada, titled Thoroughly Converted. In many ways, it serves as a helpful companion piece to this article. You can access it through the link below:

“Thoroughly Converted: Enslaving the Inner Man for the Glory of Christ”

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