THE PRINCIPLE BEHIND THE PROTEST
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THE
PRINCIPLE BEHIND THE PROTEST
against the miniseries and the new movie, Son of
God
A. W. Tozer
said that the first step towards the downfall of the Christian Church is “a
wrong answer to the
question, ‘What is God like?’ and goes on 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.”
 | |||
| Author of "The Knowledge of the Holy\" |
“It is my
opinion that the Christian conception of God… is so decadent as to be utterly
beneath the dignity of the Most High God and actually to constitute for
professed believers something amounting to a moral calamity.”
The movie is
said to be an evangelistic tool. However, it is essential in evangelism that God
be presented rightly: “The multiple burdens of time may be lifted from (a man,
but) the one mighty single burden of eternity begins to press down upon him
with a weight more crushing than all the woes of the world piled one upon
another. That mighty burden is his obligation to God. It includes an instant
and lifelong duty to love God with every power of mind and soul, to obey Him
perfectly, and to worship Him acceptably. And when the man’s laboring
conscience tells him that he has done none of these things, but has from
childhood been guilty of foul revolt against the Majesty in the heavens, the
inner pressure of self-accusation may become too heavy to bear. UNLESS THE
WEIGHT OF THE BURDEN IS FELT THE GOSPEL CAN MEAN NOTHING TO THE MAN; AND UNTIL
HE SEES A VISION OF GOD HIGH AND LIFTED UP, THERE WILL BE NO WOE AND NO BURDEN.
LOW VIEWS OF GOD DESTROY THE GOSPEL FOR ALL WHO HOLD THEM.
Tozer prays
at the beginning of chapter one: “They that know Thee not may call upon Thee as
other than Thou art, and so worship not Thee but a creature of their own fancy;
therefore enlighten our minds that we may know Thee as Thou art.”
“The low
view of God entertained almost universally among Christians is the cause of a
hundred lesser evils everywhere among us. A whole new philosophy of the Christian
life has resulted from this one basic error in our religious thinking.
With our
loss of the sense of majesty has come the further loss of religious awe and
consciousness of the divine Presence. We have lost our spirit of worship and
our ability to withdraw inwardly to meet God in adoring silence. Modern
Christianity is simply not producing the kind of Christian who can appreciate
or experience the life in the Spirit. The words, ‘Be still, and know that I am
God,” mean next to nothing to the self-confident, bustling worshiper…”
“The forces
of religion are making dramatic gains and the churches are more prosperous… but
the alarming thing is that our gains are mostly external and our losses wholly
internal… our supposed gains are but losses spread over a wider field.”
“What comes
into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us… We
tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God… Always
the most revealing thing about the Church is her idea of God…
Were we able
to extract from any man a complete answer to the question, ‘What comes into
your mind when you think about God?’ we might predict with certainty the
spiritual future of that man. Were we able to know exactly what our most INFLUENTIAL
RELIGIOUS LEADERS think of God today, we might be able with some precision to
foretell where the Church will stand tomorrow.
Without
doubt, the mightiest thought the mind can entertain is the thought of God.”
“That our
idea of God corresponds as nearly as possible to the true being of God is of
immense importance to us. Compared with our actual thoughts about Him, OUR
CREEDAL STATEMENTS ARE OF LITTLE CONSEQUENCE… Only after an ordeal of painful
self-probing are we likely to discover what we actually believe about God... A right conception of God is basic not only
to systematic theology but to practical Christian living as well.”
A professing
‘Christian’, who delves into New Age and even spiritism cannot be trusted to
portray a true picture of God or His Christ: “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.
A god
begotten in the shadows of a fallen heart will quite naturally be no true
likeness of the true God. ‘You thought
that I was just like you,’ said the Lord to the wicked man in the Psalm.”
“Let us
beware lest we in our pride accept the erroneous notion that idolatry consists
only in kneeling before visible objects of adoration, and that civilized
peoples are therefore free from it. The essence of idolatry is the
entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him. It begins in the
mind…
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.”
“So
necessary to the Church is a lofty concept of God that when that concept in any
measure declines, the Church with her worship and her moral standards declines
along with it…”
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