“A god begotten in the shadows of a fallen heart will quite naturally be no true likeness of the true God. “Thou thoughtest,” said the Lord to the wicked man in the psalm, “that I was altogether such a one as thyself.” Surely this must be a serious affront to the Most High God before whom cherubim and seraphim continually do cry, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth” A. W. Tozer.
These words should burn in our hearts and make us approach God in His Word with the utmost care in humility and prayer. A god that comes from a fallen heart will be nothing like the true God. Part of the heart of sin is imagining something about God that is not true. We have seen earlier how this works from Romans 1:18-32. Man is always exchanging something true about God for something that is not in order to be hardened and slide into sin. So when fallen man comes to the Scripture to study it, he needs the help of the Spirit of God in order to be able to understand the truth of God. Man always wants to find a way to sin and get away with it. Man always wants to find a way to make himself feel good about himself. Man always wants to find a way to lessen the glare of the glory of God that shines on him every moment of every day. The only way to do this is to come up with a god that is not like the real one and in man’s arrogance he will determine what is right and true by himself.
The fallen heart hates the truth of the true God and simply wants to be its own god. So it invents aspects of god and attributes those to something it calls “god” and this so-called god is brought into the public consciousness by good and nice people. It is then accepted into the churches and thought of as orthodox because a word or words that the Bible attributes to God is also used of the false god but with a different concept or definition than the Bible uses. This is why man’s concept of God needs to come from Holy Scripture and not from philosophical speculation or cultural thinking.
Once the Church and churches have been infiltrated with the concept of a false god with the terminology or words of the Bible, the deception is hard to expose. What this means, then, is that orthodoxy has taken on the very concepts of heresy and that makes heretical thinking orthodox (in the imagination). This is very deceptive but somewhat common. Can we imagine, then, how many churches in our degenerate day think that they are orthodox in some way while their very worship is an affront to God? If we can picture it like Tozer did our hearts should sink to the pits of our stomachs. God is surrounded by angelic beings who sing to Him about His holiness all day and all night every day. He is perfectly holy and glorious and these beings find their complete joy in singing about His holiness with all of their time and effort. At the same moment some church that has not been careful is trying to sing the same words but is totally off with what those words mean. The dissonance between the angelic worship and that of the church is infinite. What a serious affront to God our worship is if we have based our thinking of Him from our own imaginations though we use terms from Scripture.
We can also know that it is a horrible blasphemy against God to try to form our ideas of Him from ourselves and our society when He has given mankind His perfect image in the outshining of His glory in Christ. Man is to be conformed to Christ in order to be holy as He is holy and yet man ignores the shining of the glory of God in Christ and tries to make God out to be like Himself. The self-centeredness, pride, and self-love of man will do all it can to retain its own godness (self as god) even in the light of the glory of the true God. This is why the true battle in churches, society, and in our own hearts is always for who is really God. Man will not have the true God reign over him and so he resorts to a god of his own imagination. It is truly a battle for God.
What is even more atrocious, however, is that when man worships the god of his imagination which he has made in his own likeness, man is actually worshipping himself. A god begotten from the shadows of the fallen human heart indeed has no likeness to God, but it does have a great deal of likeness to the fallen human heart. So when man pretends to worship God and is in fact worshipping an idol that he has manufactured in his own fallen image, this is nothing but idolatry and the worship of self. This is truly a serious affront to a holy God who will not share His glory with another. What has man become in order to become the object of his own worship instead of God? He has become a truly fallen creature with an idol factory for a heart. Man’s worship and righteous actions are really vile acts before God when he has idols in his heart.
God Loves... Himself 
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