The Stars — Hollywood

The Altar

A Stars Study — The Golden Statue and the God Who Gets Thanked

Once a year the industry stops working and gathers itself for its high holy days. There is a season leading up to it. There are vestments, and they are discussed for weeks. There is a procession. There is a hushed hall, a sequence of readings, and a moment of revelation. And at the center of the whole rite there is a golden figure of a man, handed to the chosen, who lift it over their heads while the assembly rises.

Describe that ceremony to someone who has never seen it, leaving the names out, and he will tell you what it is before you finish. Then he will be surprised to learn it is broadcast.

I. The Golden Figure

Begin with the object, because the object is not a metaphor. It is an actual golden statue of a human form. It is manufactured. It is given as the highest honor the house can bestow. It is held up. It is kissed on camera. It is carried home and set in a lit place where visitors will see it.

There is no reading of Exodus 20 under which that is a neutral object.

“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.”

Exodus 20:4–5

Now, be careful and fair here, because the case does not need to be inflated. Nobody prays to the statue. Nobody claims it hears. The command is not violated the moment a man carves a shape — Yahuah Himself ordered images made for the tabernacle. The line in Exodus is about what the figure is for.

So ask what this one is for. It is made of gold and shaped like a man. It is the visible proof that the house has judged you worthy. It is pursued for years, campaigned for, wept over, and thanked. Men reorder their lives around obtaining it, and the getting of it is spoken of as the meaning of a career. Whatever word you want to use for that relationship, indifferent is not it.

This study does not rest on any claim about who the statuette was modeled after. Those stories circulate and cannot be established. It does not need them. The plain, undisputed facts of the ceremony are heavy enough.

II. The Thanks

Then comes the part that should stop a believer cold.

One after another, the winners step to the microphone, hold the golden figure, and thank God.

It is said warmly and it is said constantly. First on the list, usually, ahead of the agent. The hall applauds. And nobody — not the winner, not the room, not the tens of millions watching — stops to ask the one question the whole scene is screaming.

III. Which God?

It is not a hostile question. It is the most basic question in Scripture, and the Word asks it constantly. Israel never had trouble being religious. Israel had trouble with which.

So: a house whose entire product is convincing illusion. Whose craftsmen are paid to be persons they are not. Whose highest skill — the very skill the golden figure is awarded for — is making the false feel true. That is not an insult; it is the job description, and the house says so proudly.

Does that house answer to the Elohim of truth?

Yahushua drew the line so plainly that it takes effort to miss it. He did not say He taught the truth. He said He was it.

“I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”

John 14:6

And He named the opposite, and He did not name a force or an idea. He named a father.

“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.”

John 8:44

The father of it. Lying is not something he does. It is something he generates — he is its source, and everything downstream carries his paternity.

A kingdom of skilled lying therefore has a father, and it is not Yahuah. The god thanked from that golden stage may borrow His name. It is wearing a mask too — which, in that house, is not an accusation. It is the craft.

IV. The Arithmetic

And the Messiah was blunt about how this resolves. There is no arrangement in which a man keeps both.

“No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve Yahuah and mammon.”

Matthew 6:24

Notice He does not say a man should not, or that it is unwise, or that it is difficult. He says he cannot. It is not a moral warning. It is a statement about how a man is built — the same kind of fact as saying he cannot walk in two directions at once.

So the thanks from the stage is not a small thing, and it is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. It is the enemy’s favorite arrangement, running perfectly: a house that serves one master, saying the other master’s name into a microphone once a year, while a hundred million people watch and conclude that the two are on friendly terms.

That conclusion is the product. The ceremony sells it better than any film in the room.

V. His Glory to Another

There is one more line, and it settles the matter without any help from us.

“I am Yahuah: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images.”

Isaiah 42:8

Read both halves. His glory will not go to another. His praise will not go to graven images. Now look at the stage: a golden image, held up, and His name spoken over it in thanksgiving.

Both halves, in one gesture, in prime time, to applause.

VI. The Honest Question

This study is not asking you to be angry at a ceremony, and it is certainly not asking you to police anyone’s speech from the stage. Those people are doing precisely what the house trained them to do.

It is asking you to stop letting the scene work on you.

Because the reason the thanks matters is not what it does for them. It is what it does for you. It is the thing that lets a believer sit in front of that house for a lifetime and never once ask whether he should. He heard the name. Something in him relaxed. The house has His name on its lips, so surely it is not the enemy’s house.

That is the whole trick, and it is very old. The enemy has never needed you to renounce Yahuah. He only needs you comfortable — and there is no anesthetic on earth like hearing the right name said by the wrong mouth.

So ask it. Not angrily. Honestly, once, and let the answer stand: Which god just got thanked?

← Back to Hollywood