The God of Contemporary Christianity
by A. W. Tozer These things you have
done, and I kept silent. You thought that I was altogether
like you, but I will rebuke you and accuse you to your face.
Psalm 50, 21 The god of contemporary Christianity is only slightly
superior to the pagan gods of ancient Greece and Rome, if indeed
he is not actually inferior to them, in that he is weak and
helpless, while they at least had some imagined power. Among
the sins to which the human heart is prone, hardly any other is
more hateful to God than idolatry. For idolatry is at bottom a libel
on his character. The idolatrous heart assumes
that God is other than he is, in itself a monstrous sin, and
substitutes for the true God, one made after its own likeness. Always this God will conform
to the image of the one who created it. and will be base or pure,
cruel or kind, according to the moral state of the mind from
which it emerges. The essence of idolatry is the
entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him. Wrong ideas about God are not
only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry
flow, they are themselves idolatrous. The idolater simply imagines
things about God and acts as if they were true. If we insist
upon trying to imagine Him, we end with an idol, made not with
hands, but with thoughts, and an idol of the mind is as offensive
to God as an idol of the hand. Before a Christian church goes
into a decline, there must first be a corrupting of her scriptural
thoughts of God. She simply gives a wrong answer
to the question, what is God like, and goes downhill from
there. Though she may continue to cling
to a sound nominal creed, her practical working creed has become
false. The masses of her adherents come
to believe that God is different from what He actually is, and
that is heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind. The heaviest
obligation lying upon the Christian Church today is to purify and
elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him
and of her.