The Lord spoke a powerful sentence in the middle of His confrontation of the people’s ability to create idols who cannot perform or stand on their own, “I have prepared you even though you do not know me” (Isaiah 45:5). All of our life is a preparation to believe in something greater that only God can provide.

That preparation is a progressive strengthening of our faith for a time in the future when we will choose to abandon our idols, trusting in God alone above all others.

When we think of idols, we imagine statues like Buddha or Shiva or some other representation of a false god. But our idols can be the mindset we worship, a pastor we follow in blind obedience, or a politician who makes promises, causing us to believe they will provide us with safety and security.

All aspects of our lives are used by God as our preparation, even in the times when we do not yet love God and choose to follow lies and deceptions – idols of our own making.

God uses everything to prepare us. The Lord uses our successes and our failures to bring us to a place where we will agree with the Lord’s statement about Himself because our idols failed to perform what they promised, “I am the Lord, and there is no other” (vs.18).

That statement becomes more impactful when we reflect back on our history when we worshipped false images and false ways of thinking that became our idols. God uses all of our history to bring us to a place of worship where we will bow before the Lord and say, “You are the Lord, and there is no other.”