… "an idol has no real existence,"…
When Israel made the Golden Calf, they were not transferring their worship of God to the worship of another deity. In their mind, they were still worshipping the Lord, albeit in a synchretized form (Exodus 32:4: the Hebrew says: this is your God who brought you out of Egypt). They just associated their Almighty God with the image of something familiar, in this case the calf, one of the gods of Egypt, which happened to also be prevalent in Canaan. This is what made the God of Abraham different from any of the claimed deities of the day, being the Creator of all things, He did not want to be represented through the mere medium of one His creations.
Religion today is guilty of very much the same sin. As Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox Church are a mixed bowl of ancient Jewish Messianism with their respective pagan cultures, Protestantism has adopted a form of religion that is very reminiscent to Hellenist ascetism, transcendentalism, along with an anti-Biblical capitalistic philosophy that glorifies independence, wealth and prosperity.
There is also a form idolatry that glorifies words, astral bodies and geometric shapes, giving them power through acknowledgment. God created all languages, geometry, and the astral bodies, all in order to glorify Him (Revelations 4:11). That is why the enemy is intent on high-jacking creation for his own purposes. Witches today center their worship around new moons, and call some of their feast days ‘Sabbaths’. Does it mean that we should stop obeying God’s commandment to sanctify the new moon and remember the Sabbath just because the devil perverted these things (Numbers 29;6; Exodus 20:8)? Should we stop recognizing God’s Holy Days just because pagans also had special days (Colossians 2:16)? In the Bible God used a brazen snake on a pole to heal His people. They were told if they just gaze at it they will live. Several hundred years later, a Judean King Josiah had to destroy it because people had made it an object of worship (Numbers 21:8; 2 Kings 18:4).
As a French-born naturalized American, as long as I am on American soil the laws of France cannot affect me. In the same manner, having renounced allegiance to the enemy, as long as we remain on spiritual God’s territory, none of the devil’s trinkets have power over us. Idols, astral bodies, and geometric shapes only have the power we allot them through fear or ignorance.
Judaism teaches that when we use an element of creation for the glory of God we capture it from the hands of the enemy. Wood can make an idol, but also an Ark to house a Torah scroll. Metal can make money, the love of which is the source of all evil, but it also can be fashioned into a head piece to crown the King of Kings. Mathematics, Geometry, physics and astronomy are all related as sciences proving God’s ownership of creation.
It is high time we recapture God’s creation and give it back to him, along with our own hearts, minds, souls, and sprits.