If They’re Only Wood and Stone, Why Is the Bible So Alarmed?

Walk through a market in almost any part of the world and you’ll pass them: carved figures, painted faces, garlanded stones. We may shrug. It’s only wood. Or stone. Someone shaped it with a chisel last Tuesday. And sold it for a fair price.

The Bible agrees. It says exactly that, with more force and more mockery than any sceptic ever has.

And yet the same Bible says people who sacrifice to these carved things are, in fact, sacrificing to demons.

That’s a startling claim, and it’s no slip of the pen. Both statements come from the same apostle, in the same letter—two chapters apart. So which is it? Is an idol nothing at all, or is there something dark behind it? Scripture gives a careful answer, and once we see it, much of the Old Testament falls into place.

Nothing—and Yet Not Nothing

Here are the two verses side by side. Paul’s writing to Christians in Corinth, a busy port city where temple meals were part of ordinary social life.

The resolution is this. In terms of what actually exists, the idol is nothing. There’s no being answering to the name Zeus. There’s no Baal sitting somewhere in the sky. The god the worshipper imagines is fiction, and the statue is a piece of the created world, dressed up in paint.

But worship offered to what’s fiction doesn’t simply disappear. It’s intercepted. The worshipper aims at a phantom and hits a fiend. John Calvin makes precisely this point in his comments on 1 Corinthians 10: the idol is nothing in itself, yet Satan stands behind the deception and helps himself to what was intended for a god who never existed.

Think of a letter carefully written and posted to an address where no such person lives. The person is imaginary. The letter isn’t. Someone at that address opens it and reads it, and he was never the one you meant to write to.

That’s the biblical picture of idolatry. The god is imaginary. The devotion is real. And it’s intercepted by someone real—an unintended recipient.

“They Sacrificed to Demons”: The Old Testament Verdict

Paul didn’t invent this idea. He was reciting Moses.

“They stirred him to jealousy with strange gods; with abominations they provoked him to anger. They sacrificed to demons that were no gods, to gods they had never known.” (Deuteronomy 32:16–17)

Notice the deliberate self-correction in that sentence: demons that were no gods. Moses will not allow his readers to turn demons into a lower class of deity. The demon isn’t a small god. It’s a creature, a fallen spirit, a squatter in a house that was never his.

The Psalmist takes the same line and shows us where it ends:

“They served their idols, which became a snare to them. They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons.” (Psalm 106:36–37)

That escalation matters. Idolatry doesn’t stay at the level of harmless folk custom. In Israel’s history it ended in blood.

The Hebrew vocabulary for idols is worth pausing over, because the words themselves carry the argument.

That third entry is striking. What Mesopotamia called protective spirits—the winged bulls guarding its palace gates—the Bible calls shedim, demons. The nations thought they were being guarded. Scripture says they were being farmed.

One more line seals the connection. Psalm 96:5 says “all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols”—and in the Greek version of the Old Testament that the first Christians read aloud in church, that word for “worthless idols” is translated daimonia, demons. Paul’s argument to the Corinthians was already ringing in their ears before he wrote it down.

Why the Bible Also Laughs at Idols

If we stopped there, we’d end up frightened of every carved object we passed. Scripture doesn’t allow that. Alongside the demon texts runs a second strand: sustained, deliberate mockery.

• Psalm 115:4–8 Idols have mouths but cannot speak, eyes but cannot see. Then comes the sting: “Those who make them become like them.”
• Isaiah 44:9–20 A man cuts down a tree, burns half of it to roast his dinner and warm his hands, and bows down to what’s left. The prophet lets the absurdity speak for itself.
• Jeremiah 10:1–5 Idols are scarecrows in a cucumber field. They cannot walk, so they must be carried. “Do not be afraid of them, for they cannot do evil, neither is it in them to do good.”
• 1 Samuel 5 Dagon is found face down before the ark of God, then found again with his head and hands broken off on the threshold.
• 1 Kings 18 On Mount Carmel the prophets of Baal call from morning to noon. “But there was no voice, and no one answered.” Elijah suggests, drily, their god may be relieving himself.
• Isaiah 46:1–2 Bel and Nebo are loaded onto weary animals as cargo, while the living God says of His people that He has carried them since birth.

Hold the two strands together and the balance is exact. There’s a demon standing behind Baal—and that demon couldn’t produce a single spark on Mount Carmel. Demons are parasites on false worship, not the powers their devotees imagine them to be.

Gregory Beale puts the whole matter in a memorable line: what people revere, they resemble, either for ruin or restoration. Idolatry isn’t merely a wrong opinion about the universe. It’s the slow transformation of the worshipper into the likeness of a lifeless thing.

Paul’s Ruling: Two Tables, Two Cups

Now let’s read 1 Corinthians 10:14–22 slowly. Paul is quoting Deuteronomy 32 throughout—including the warning about provoking the Lord to jealousy—and his argument moves in three steps.

First, he establishes what the Lord’s Supper is. The cup and the bread are a real participation (the Greek word is koinōnia, sharing or communion) in the blood and body of Christ. Believers are not merely remembering; they are feeding on Christ by faith and are joined to Him and to one another.

Second, he draws the parallel. If our table is real participation, then the pagan table is real participation too. The sacrificial meal in a temple is not a neutral social occasion. It joins the eater to something.

Third, he names what it joins them to. “I imply that food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God.” The idol remains nothing. The transaction is not nothing.

The New Testament fuses both strands into a single verse near its close. Those who refuse to repent are described as continuing to worship “demons and idols of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood, which cannot see or hear or walk” (Revelation 9:20). Demons behind them; blindness and deafness in them. Both true at once.

Four Things Demons Do With Idolatry

If demons don’t live inside statues, what exactly are they doing? Scripture describes four activities.

• They deceive. Every human being already knows God exists (Romans 1:19–21). The work of the deceiver isn’t to create atheism from nothing but to supply a plausible substitute object—something visible, manageable and undemanding—to a heart already looking for a way out.
• They receive. Worship stolen from God is worship gained by the thief. This was the very thing Satan asked of Christ in the wilderness: “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me” (Matthew 4:9). The offer tells us what he wants.
• They counterfeit. Occasionally there is real power. The magicians of Egypt reproduced some of Moses’ signs. A slave girl at Philippi had a genuine spirit of divination and made real money for her owners (Acts 16:16–18). Not everything unexplained is a trick.
• They enslave. This is where idolatry always heads. Children burned to Molech. The prophets of Baal cutting themselves until the blood flowed. In Romans 1, the exchange of God’s glory for images is followed by moral disintegration. What begins as a shortcut ends as a chain.

Demons Are Creatures, Not Rivals

Because this subject attracts extremes, four boundaries need to be marked clearly.

Herman Bavinck insists the devil and his angels remain creatures under God’s complete government, able to act only within limits He sets. That’s why the Christian can take this subject seriously without becoming superstitious. We’re not looking at a rival kingdom of equal weight. We’re looking at defeated rebels who still recruit.

Idols of the Heart—How Far Does This Go?

So far we’ve spoken of carved images. But Scripture pushes the category further inward. God says of certain elders in Ezekiel’s day that “these men have taken their idols into their hearts” (Ezekiel 14:3). They had no statue in the room. They had one in the chest.

Paul does the same, calling covetousness idolatry outright (Colossians 3:5; Ephesians 5:5). Calvin’s famous summary is that the human heart is a perpetual factory of idols—always in production, never short of raw material. Timothy Keller drew on exactly this line in describing our modern counterfeit gods: money, achievement, romance, family, nation, and the self.

Puritan David Clarkson pressed hardest, arguing that soul idolatry—the inward giving of trust, love and fear to something other than God—is far more common than the outward kind and no less deadly.

But we must be careful here, and precision matters. Extending idolatry to the heart doesn’t mean every bad habit has a particular demon attached to it. The honest reading is this: disordered love serves the deceiver’s purposes and follows his logic, because he is the spirit now at work in the sons of disobedience (Ephesians 2:2)—without every case involving direct demonic activity. A man doesn’t need a demon to love money. He needs a fallen heart, and he already has one.

Food, Objects and Christian Freedom

This is where the doctrine meets daily life, especially for believers living among temples, shrines and festivals. Paul is remarkably practical, and his ruling isn’t what nervous Christians expect.

Notice what Paul does not say: that the meat carries a spiritual residue to be cleansed. He says the opposite: the earth and its fullness belong to the Lord, so buy your dinner and eat with thanks. What he forbids is joining a rival table—sitting down as an act of devotion to something that isn’t God.

The difference between those two things is the difference between superstition and obedience.

Turning From Idols to the Living God

Paul once described the conversion of a whole congregation in a single sentence: they “turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God” (1 Thessalonians 1:9). Notice the order. The turning from follows the turning to. Nobody puts down an idol in a vacuum. An empty hand simply reaches for the next thing.

Notice also what’s absent here. There’s no ritual method, no formula of release, no specialist required. The risen Christ has already disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public spectacle of them (Colossians 2:15). “He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4). The way out of idolatry is repentance, faith, the preaching of the Word, the Lord’s Table and the ordinary life of a congregation—not a technique.

So, are idols demonic? Here is the whole answer in one breath. The idol is nothing. Its god doesn’t exist. And the devotion poured out before it is quietly collected by an enemy who cannot make fire fall on Carmel, cannot stand upright before the ark, and cannot hold a single soul that Christ has claimed.

That’s not a reason to be afraid of wood and stone. It’s reason to give our worship to the One who made both—and who is the only truth worth dying for.

Related Reads

• What Is the Divine Council? Psalm 82 and the Unseen Realm
• Kinds of Spirits in the Bible—How Many Are There?
• Curses, Hexes and Black Magic: Can These Impact the Christian?
• Did the Witch of Endor Actually Raise Samuel from the Dead?
• Standing Firm: A Biblical, Reformed View of Spiritual Warfare
• Are Demonic Strongholds Real? How Do We Overcome Them?
• Spiritual Warfare: A Believer’s Guide to Complete Battle Armour