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What would
you say is the most important thing about you?
Your gifts? Your accomplishments? Your looks?
Your education? Your job? Your family? Your mutual
fund portfolio? I believe that what comes into
our minds when we think about God is the most
important thing about us. The most important thing
about any human being is not what he may say or
do at a given time, but what deep in his heart
he thinks about God.
Why is
that? Because what we think about God determines
everything else that we think or do or become.
There is a supernatural law of the soul that says
that we tend to move toward our mental image of
God; we tend to become what our conception of
God is like. If our God has no standards, we will
have no standards. If our God has no absolutes,
we will have no absolutes. If our God is cruel
and uncaring, we will become cruel and uncaring.
If we have no God, we will become godless. If
our conception of God is pure and holy we will
become pure and holy. If our God is loving and
kind, we will become loving and kind. If our God
is true and eternal, we will live forever. If
our god is false and temporary, we will be temporary
and die eternally.
Almost
all of life's problems and their solutions are
theological. The person who comes to a right
belief about God will relieve himself of a million
other problems in life. The person who has a wrong
concept of God will add a million other problems
to his life. There is hardly an error in doctrine
or a failure in ethics that can't be traced back
to imperfect and unworthy thoughts about God.
It is impossible for an individual to keep their
moral practices sound and their values and attitudes
right when their idea of God is erroneous or inadequate.
Almost
everyone has become aware that our society is
in serious trouble. Over the past forty years
there has been a dramatic decline in education
and morals, and an equally dramatic rise in crime,
murder, abortion, drugs, divorce and other societal
ills. The experts are struggling to understand
the reasons for this sudden decline. Is it economics?
Is it the fault of the special interest groups?
Is it the result of Big Business? Is it politics?
Is it caused by the Republicans? Is it the Democrats
who are at fault? The truth is that almost
everything that is wrong with our society is due
to the fact that as a nation we have been losing
the knowledge of God.
Before
our society started declining, a corruption in
simple basic theology took place. Our churches
and synagogues came up with the wrong answer to
the question: What is God like? When a lofty concept
of God declined, the Church and the Synagogue's
standards, morals and worship declined, and society's
standards and morals declined. I believe that
a major part of the blame for our nation's decline
lies with our synagogues and churches. Both the
Church and the Synagogue have been losing the
concept of the holiness and majesty of God. In
many of our nation's churches and synagogues God
is portrayed as a non-judgmental friend, or your
"good buddy," or as a doting old grandfather,
or as a therapist. But this is not who God really
is.
One of
the most common sins in our society today is the
sin of idolatry. Idolatry does not consist only
in bowing before statues, or kneeling before visible
objects of adoration. The essence of idolatry
is the entertainment of thoughts about God that
are unworthy of Him. The idolatrous heart
assumes that God is other than what He really
is. It substitutes a god after its own image for
the true God.
A god
created in the imagination of our hearts will
be worthy or pure, cruel or kind, according to
the moral state of the mind from which it emerges.
This is what God says to the wicked in Psalm 50:21:
You thought that I was just like you. A god
created in the darkness of the fallen human heart
cannot possibly be in the likeness of the true
God.
You may
be guilty of idolatry when no obvious act of worship
has taken place because idolatry begins in the
human mind. The human heart is prone to the sin
of idolatry, and it is a terrible mistake to believe
that civilized people are free from it. Rabbi
Paul informs us that early in the history of man,
although mankind knew God, they did not honor
Him as God or give thanks; but they became futile
in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were
darkened. It was only after mankind became foolish
in their thinking about God, that the worship
of idols made in the image of men and birds and
animals and crawling creatures followed. Then
came horrible, ungodly, immoral, wicked, self-destructive
and society-destructive behavior. This entire
degrading series of events began in the mind of
man with wrong ideas about God. Not honoring God
as God and entertaining wrong ideas about Him
are the fountain from which the polluted waters
of idolatry flow and which end in the cesspool
of self-destructive human behavior.
This decline
of the knowledge of God has brought on almost
all of our troubles. A rediscovery of the majesty
of God will go a long way toward curing them.
The most important obligation for the Church and
for the Synagogue today is to purify our concept
of God until it is once more worthy of Him. If
we would bring back true spiritual power to our
lives and health back to our nation, we must think
about God as He is, not as we think He is.
THINKING
CORRECTLY ABOUT GOD BY KNOWING HIS ATTRIBUTES
One way
to think correctly about God is to learn about
His attributes (midot in Hebrew). An attribute
expresses God's true nature and being. God's attributes
are whatever God has revealed as being true about
Himself. An attribute is not a part of God. It
is how God is.
GOD'S
INCOMPREHENSIBILITY
Even though
this series of messages will try to answer the
question: "What is God like?," at the very beginning
we must acknowledge that ultimately we cannot
answer this question. The closest that we can
come is to say that God is not exactly like anything
or anybody that we know. The prophet Isaiah asked:
To whom then will you liken God? Or what likeness
will you compare with Him? To whom then would
you liken Me that I should be his equal? says
the Holy One. In other words, God is ultimately
incomprehensible. We can never fully know Him.
When the
prophet Ezekiel saw visions of God, he found himself
looking at something that he had no adequate language
to describe. What he saw was completely different
from anything he had ever known before. The nearer
he came to the throne of God, the less sure his
words became: Above the expanse that was over
their heads there was something resembling
a throne, like lapis lazuli
in appearance; and on that
which resembled a throne,
high up, was a figure with the appearance
of a man. Then I noticed from the appearance
of His loins and upward something like
glowing metal that looked like fire all around
within it, and from the appearance
of His loins and downward I saw something
like fire; and there was a radiance
around Him... such was the appearance
of the likeness of the glory of the
Lord (Ezekiel 1). God is entirely real but
alien to anything that men know on earth. In order
to convey an idea of what he saw, the prophet
had to use words such as resembling, likeness,
something like, appearance, the likeness of the
appearance.
We learn
by using what we already know as a bridge to what
we do not know. It is almost impossible for the
human mind to create or imagine something out
of nothing. Our problem when it comes to God is
that when we try to imagine what God is like we
must of necessity use that which is not God as
the raw material for our minds to work on. We
have to picture God to be something He is not,
for we have constructed our image out of that
which He has made, and what has been made is
not God. If we insist on trying to imagine
Him, we end up with an idol, an idol not made
with hands, but an idol made with thought. And
an idol of the human mind is just as offensive
to the Lord as an idol made with the hands.
When the
Scriptures state that man was made in the image
of God, we dare not add to that statement an idea
from our own head and make it mean "in the exact
image" of God. There is a wall that is infinitely
high that separates God, that-which-is-God from
that-which-is-not-God. To think of the creature
and the Creator as alike is to rob God of most
of His attributes and reduce Him to the status
of a creature. Left to ourselves we tend to reduce
God to manageable terms. We want to get Him where
we can use Him. We want a God we can control.
For the average person God is a composite of all
the religious pictures that they have seen, all
the best people they have heard about, and the
best ideas they have entertained. But this is
not God.
The Scriptures
affirm the helplessness of the human mind to know
the great mystery which is God. God cannot be
fully known by man, unless the unknowable could
be known, and the invisible beheld, and the inaccessible
attained, the incomprehensible understood. Such
knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is too high,
I cannot attain to it admitted King David.
God is ultimately unknowable by created things.
He can never be comprehended as He is in Himself.
He dwells in unapproachable light (1Tim. 6:16).
No human can see Him face to face, fully revealed
in all His awesome glory and splendor, and survive
that holy encounter.
If anyone
should set forth any concept by which God could
be known, it could not be a true concept, because
God is far beyond any concept the human mind is
capable of framing. This is expressed whenever
Jewish people recite the prayer called the "Kaddish."
"Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled
and honored, adored and lauded be the name of
the Holy One, blessed be He, beyond all
the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations
that are ever spoken in the world". This prayer
acknowledges that even when we are worshipping,
which is one of the highest forms of expressing
spiritual thoughts, we are totally inadequate
to express who God really is.
The desire
to know What can't be known, to comprehend the
Incomprehensible, to touch the Unapproachable,
arises from the image of God deep in the nature
of man. The soul senses its origins and longs
to return to its Source, and deep calls unto deep.
If what
we conceive God to be He is not really He, then
how should we think of Him? King David and Rabbi
Paul tells us that we can start to know Him a
little bit by means of creation. The heavens
are telling of the glory of God, and their expanse
is declaring the work of His hands. Since the
creation of the world His invisible attributes,
His eternal power and divine nature have been
clearly seen, being understood through what has
been made. We can know something of God through
His creation, just as we can know something of
the artist through a masterpiece of art. We can
know there is a God who has vast wisdom, intelligence
and power.
But the
knowledge we can come to about God through His
creation is limited. We also see suffering, cruelty
and death throughout nature. Nature cannot answer
the questions: Is this God good? Is He kind? Is
He worth praying too? Is He worthy of my worship?
God has
revealed Himself even more clearly throughout
the Holy Scriptures. Through Moses and the prophets,
through the psalmists and the apostles, God has
clearly communicated to man what He is like. But
we have an even greater self- disclosure of God
than that which comes from the words of the prophets.
The greatest revelation of God comes through Messiah
Yeshua our Lord. In Messiah and by Messiah, God
effects complete self-disclosure to mankind. God
came to us in the incarnation of Messiah. No
man has seen God at any time. The only begotten
Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has
revealed Him. God, after He spoke long ago to
the fathers in the prophets in many portions and
in many ways, in these last days has spoken to
us through His Son. He is the radiance of His
glory and the exact representation of His nature.
Do you want to really know what God is like? Fix
your eyes on Messiah Yeshua No one knows the
Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the
Son wills to reveal Him (Mt. 11:27).
Isaac
Watts, a great songwriter of a couple of centuries
ago, penned these beautiful words: "The heavens
declare Thy glory Lord, in every star thy wisdom
shines, but when our eyes behold Thy Word, we
read Thy name in fairer lines." The full sun blaze
of revelation came at the incarnation when the
Eternal Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
By faith in God's Word and confidence in Messiah
Yeshua we can break through into God's very Presence
and come to know Him as He is.
Since
knowing God is the most important thing about
you or anyone else, make knowing Him better your
priority in life. Make time for Him. Eliminate
other things from your busy schedule. Read His
Word. Meditate on Messiah Yeshua. Contemplate
those four books that reveal Messiah most clearly:
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Spend more time
with Him and His Word, in His presence, worshipping
Him, asking Him to reveal more of Himself to you
than He ever has before. Make time for Him. You
won't regret it. He is the most wonderful, the
most exciting, the most challenging object of
human thought, contemplation, and worship. If
you do, you will become more like Him. You will
be transformed into His image and likeness. It
will be an investment that will pay off now and
throughout eternity.
I am indebted to The Knowledge of the Holy by A.W.
Tozer for this article.
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