God Is What We Think Him To Be

We give thanks to You

O God,

we give thanks!

For Your wondrous works

declare that 

Your name is near.....

But I will declare forever,

I will sing praises 

to the God of Jacob.

Psalm 75:1;9

     To be able to say that God is Sovereign we must and are coming to know that we can know God and His attributes as is revealed to us in His Word. We can have faith, not just any faith, rather we can have saving faith, that includes sure hope, and a sure belief that our Sovereign God is all that we know Him to be. Furthermore, we are so constituted by God in His creation of man that we can know that there is a God and that this God is more than a notion, an idea, rather it is our nature to know of Him and that He is a personal God. We bear the image of God, we understand Him by the fact that we in our language to describe Him can and do, and to do so we must anthropomorphize Him so that we can relate to Him without making Him us, or as some religions do, just another, maybe a higher, human. It is proper to use this method as proof for it is trustworthy because it is a law of our nature. Examining those whose god is nothing more than fetichism we will find that they assume that they belong to that which he worships. In fact they assume that this god has attributes like their own. Polytheism does the same for it gives to their gods attributes of them being intelligent personal beings. It is the philosophers that have done damage to the idea of God. These philosophers have substituted tό όν which is neuter to ό ών which means the "I am" and τό θεόν they have neutered God from ό θείος the God and further they use the neuter τό άγαθόν , good, for the one that is good ό άγαθος. For the philosophers God is place transcendental and is something known by man, but only in the mind of man. Most men believe that things are what they perceive them to be. Philosophers would deny that and state that man only affirms those things are not perceived in of themselves but only certain ideas or images of things. By this then they say we have no knowledge of what God is, we only know taht we are led to think of Him in a certain way, but we are not authorized to believe that our ideas of God corresponds to reality. Therefore, to the philosopher God is not what we take Him to be. 

     Is it true that we do not have the authority to believe or have knowledge that God is what we perceive Him to be? Our conviction of God rests on the same knowledge we have of the world, it is what has been revealed to us. This foundation, that which has been revealed, the same foundation that is used to believe that the world is and exists, is the same foundation for our belief and knowledge of God. This law is impressed upon our nature. If not impressed upon our nature then how in any sense could we have any impetus to believe in a God? It is those who have become so enamored with transcendental ideas or has become part of their religious experience that Man is the dream of a shadow. We can find this idea in the religion of Christian Science that all that we know is nothing more than a dream. The question then is: Are we invincibility led to think of God as possessing the attributes of our rational nature? We cannot deny this for universality proves invincibility of this belief. It is historically a proven fact that man universally have thought of God. It is foolish to dream or draw up thoughts of God as being only  some portrait that humans have drawn up for whatever reason. It is in our constitution that we think of God, it is our nature and we are forced by that nature to think of God and believe that it must be true. Now, it is true then, that God really is what we take Him to be, when we ascribe to Him the perfections of our nature, without limitation, and to an infinite degree. 

     Jonathan Edwards the great theologian who was most responsible for the Great Awakening in the mid-1700's states:

"It were to be wished that the enemies of religion would at least bring themselves to apprehend its nature before they oppose its authority. Did religion make its boast of beholding God with a clear and perfect view, and of possessing him without a covering or veil, the argument would bear some colour, when men should alledge, that none of the things about them do indeed afford this pretended evidence, and this degree of light. But since religion, on the contrary, represents men as in a state of darkness, and of estrangement from God; since it affirms him to have withdrawn himself from their discovery, and to have chosen in his word, the very style and appellation of Deus absconditus; lastly, since it employs itself alike, in establishing these two maxims, that God has left in his church certain characters of himself, by which they who sincerely seek him shall not fail of a sensible conviction—and yet that he has, at the same time, so far shaded and obscured these characters as to render them imperceptible to those who do not seek him with their whole heart; what advantage is it to men who profess themselves negligent in the search of truth, to complain so frequently that nothing reveals and displays it to them? For this very obscurity under which they labour, and which they make an exception against the church, does itself evince one of the two grand points which the church maintains, (without affecting the other) and is so far from overthrowing its doctrines, as to lend them a manifest confirmation and support."

He brought me to the

    banqueting house,

and His banner over me 

    was love.

                Song of Solomon 2:4

The Lord Will Be Your Help

Richard L. Crumb