Feeding on Ashes

“He feeds on ashes; a deluded heart has led him astray.” Isaiah 44:20

Isaiah watches a man walk out to the woods and cut down a tree. He carries it home. Half of it he burns. He warms himself at the fire and says, ah, I am warm. He bakes his bread over it, roasts his meat, and eats until he is full. Then he takes what is left of the same tree, the other half, and he shapes it, and he bows down to it, and he says, deliver me, for you are my god.

The strange part is not that he worships. The strange part is that he watched himself make it.

You will not be tempted by a wooden idol. But you will be tempted by something you built with your own hands and then knelt to. A reputation you assembled. A political certainty you carved. A family you love so much that you have quietly begun asking it to save you. A retirement account. A rightness. A routine. You watched yourself make it. You remember the labor. And still you find yourself asking it for deliverance.

Isaiah says the man feeds on ashes, and that is the exact accounting. An idol does not starve you all at once. It feeds you. It gives you something real. Ash has substance, it fills the mouth, and you can go a long way on it before you notice that nothing in it is keeping you alive.

But here is the line that should stop you where you stand. No one stops to think. No one has the knowledge or the discernment to say, half of it I burned in the fire. He does not ask the question. Not because he could not answer it. Because he never asks it.

So ask it.

What is the thing you are asking to deliver you? And do you remember making it?