God Loves… Himself

Jeremiah 17:9 speaks to how “The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?” It is a verse that most who have been to even a relatively conservative church have heard. It is a verse that many have heard of, but it is not a truth that we really deal with much at all. We don’t want to deal with our own hearts to discover the abyss of deceitfulness that is in them. We don’t want to see the desperate sickness of our own hearts. While it is true that the sinfulness of man can be seen by looking at how wicked people become without as they degenerate into all sorts of sinful behavior apart from God, it is not as easy for us to see how wicked people can become within the confines of religion. The Pharisees became very wicked even while upholding many orthodox beliefs. Let us not assume that our age (and perhaps ourselves) has escaped their error. They used religion and even their belief about God to excuse sinful behavior and hide sin from their own hearts. They denigrated God because they were dealing with the things of God. Without realizing it they (man) became the measure of God rather than God being the measure of man. Our age has done the same thing as well.

“In egocentric religion, we may say, man is the measure of all things-even of God. For God Himself is understood in the light of man. In theocentric religion it is God who is the ‘disposer supreme,’ the final arbiter of all things. Here, man is understood in the light of God. Expressing the difference in specifically religious language, we may say; in egocentric religion, man chooses or ‘elects’ God; in theocentric religion, God chooses or ‘elects’ man.” (Let God Be God! An Interpretation of the Theology of Martin Luther)

In the modern version or perversion of Christianity man has indeed become the measure of God. We will say hard things about the world as it does that, but we don’t realize that is exactly what we are doing as well. Our way of “doing church” is more about man than God. We want people to be comfortable coming to church and we will go to great lengths not to offend them so that they will like it and come back. What lengths do we go to in order that God may come to church and not leave? We just assume that God will be there since we have Bibles and offer things we call prayers. But should we just assume that? The church has become weak because it has made man the measure of a success. Let us not imagine that any particular denomination or theology has the corner on that practice. The standard of Reformed theology today is also that we are to be more concerned with being gracious and winsome than anything else. That can be nothing more than making man the standard and a tacit admission that we want to please men rather than tell them the truth about a God whose wrath they are under.

When people start churches, what is their focus? Isn’t it getting people in the door? They do evangelism to get people in the door. They do discipleship programs to get people to stay. They do worship a certain way to reach a certain group of people. They go to certain neighborhoods and try to fit in. The messages are watered down under the guise of making things practical or that people cannot understand theology or the deep things. What is this but making man the measure of all things? We are not evangelizing in order to make God acceptable to people, but it is to tell people the message of the living God and that they must repent of perish. We are to disciple because all are commanded to deny self and follow Christ. We are to worship because God is worthy and we can only truly worship if we love Him and our worship is done in spirit and in truth.

Man has become the measure of what sin is in the sense that sin is only bad if it hurts or harms another person. We have made man the measure of sin in the sense that we develop our own standard of what is right or wrong according to our own reason rather than the word of God. Man is the measure of sin when we ask how something can be wrong rather than whether it glorifies God or not. Man is the measure of sin when we think that if we are not violating any external commands we can do pretty much as we please.

Man has become the measure of Bible study when the Bible is studied with the main idea of helping man in life. Man is the measure of teaching when we focus our teaching on how man can overcome certain problems. Man is the measure when we tell him that he must esteem himself to do good rather than do all in the power of grace and to the glory of God. Man is the measure when he determines what is true about God based on what his fallen reason can come up with as a rational basis for God. In other words, God has left the professing Church and we have replaced Him with the idol built up in our own image. Such is the great danger of making the idol of self the standard. When we are there, we will always think God is here. The true God, however, has long since departed.

This entry was posted on June 6, 2009 at 5:37 am and is filed under Pride. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.