Identification

I am intrigued by the way that people identify with sports teams in the regions where they live. When the local team wins, they say, “We had a great win last night”. When the team loses, they say, “We played badly”. Speaking about an upcoming game, they say, “I hope we can win”.

I never use the pronoun “we” when referring to a sports team. I always say “they” because they are not me. If the local team wins, I am not entitled to take any credit for it. I did not play a single second of the game. I did not give them wise plans about how to play. I did not contribute to the cost of running the team (unless I bought one of their sponsor’s products by mistake) so I cannot take credit for their achievements. If they have won a tough game, the team and their management are the only ones who can take credit. They won; I didn’t.

It seems that people have a deep need to identify with something bigger and more powerful than themselves. For some, it is a sports team. For others, it is a nation. However, the danger with this drive is that it can easily slip into idolatry. I have found that my need to identify with something bigger than myself is fulfilled by God. He does it for me, so I don’t need to identify with a sports team or a nation.

This need to identify with something bigger and more powerful seems to have had the same emotional and spiritual drivers as the loyalty of the Old Testament Israelites to their local “high place”. The following is a common expression in the Old Testament,

Yet the high places were not taken away; the people continued sacrificing and burning incense on the high places (2 Kings 12:3).

The high place was a local geographic feature to which the people were attached. They often placed a Baal there because it represented power and control. These people were not stupid, so I presume they knew that the power of the high place was not real. When Gideon cut down his father’s idol, he was not scared of what the idol would do to him. He was afraid of what his father and the other people in the village would do (they had real power).

The people were attached to these high places because they had a need to identify with something bigger and better than themselves, but God saw it as idolatry.