Behold, God is great,
and we
do not know Him;
nor can the number
of His
years be discovered.
Job 36: 26
For now we see in a
mirror,
dimly, but then face
to face.
Now I know in part,
but then I shall know
just as I also am
known.
And now abide faith,
hope, love,
these three; but the
greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13: 12
-- 13
Throughout
all history man has tried to understand God.
As evidenced by the many archaeological findings relate that religion
has played a foremost an important part of human life. They design and need to know God which has
made cause for many peoples to develop and devise gods that they hoped would
help them to understand life and the circumstances of life. Religious practices ranged from simple
prayer and worship to the more horrendous practices of human sacrifice. Today, we see these practices as atrocities,
yet we have with them the Roman Catholic Religion many who will abuse their
bodies by doing such things as crawling on cobblestone to reach an icon that is
supposed to represent our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and this they do until
they bleed thinking that they are doing pious worship. Others in churches that call themselves
Christian reaches out into the supernatural attempting to duplicate some of the
things that our Savior did when he was here on earth; i.e., healing people
physically, raising the dead, and practicing such things as having to pass
through "tunnels of fire."
Many people do other things to be able to feel as though they have come
to know God and this they do by practices which are not appointed for
Christians to do in Scripture. Much of
today's practices come from those men, and women, who talked heresy, and in the
least false teaching.
God is
ineffable, that is, in a certain sense that there is an inability to express
God. The fact is that God is
unspeakable, but that does not mean that He is unknowable. There can be no completeness in our knowing
of His Greatness and to say more than what God has revealed in Scripture. These attempts to explain God outside of
Scripture must be avoided. What can be
known of God is that He has condescended to accept our worship of Him. Therefore, when we speak of God as the unspeakable,
we have spoken of Him and that He must exist.
When we say the word God our minds immediately perceive Him, of His Excellence which is His nature, and His eternal existence.
How are we
to understand that term God? There
are those religions that have surmised more than one God, although they also
place one God in a superior position.
This can be seen in Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism who conceive of many
gods and that's the superior guide has a physical body, and with Jehovah
Witnesses, who conceived of many gods, or that Jesus Christ is simply a created
god, and that God stands apart by some physicallity allowing Him His separateness from all other
things that is created which is simply an anthropomorphizing of God. Those who believe in gods and worship them
as gods, still conceive of a higher, more excellent, and exalted God above all
gods. Pantheism which holds to be
ideology that all things are God, and if they try to get beyond the existing
things; i.e., the heavens, which are pictured as infinite, a form that is
conceived as the most beautiful, even those, viz, Mormons, who represent a higher
being, God, in human form, they think this as being superior to all
existence. Therefore, this supposed and
speculative ideology which has become a theology has made a physical God to be
the object of their worship and yet this is not the God of scripture who is
ineffable. Those who claim that God is
above all things, invisible, not in bodily form, all intelligent, all knowing,
and in no way conjoined to anything that is changeable, strive to give
exultation, excellence, to no one's superior God. They all believe in this fact: God excels in dignity, and in
excellence, above all other objects. This is the revelation of God that can be
found in Scripture, and is what all Authentic Biblical Christians hold as the
doctrine that is to be found in the Word of God.
God is the
object that is above all else in as much as He is
unchangeable. To think of God is to
think of Him as a living being, what ever conception can be seen of God and to
think differently, that He can be known outside of Himself as revealed by Him, is to think of absurdity, and to consider Him to be
unworthy. For God to be understood even
in the least manner He must be considered as a living Being as He is creator,
and controller, of all things and must stand in difference to the created and He must be unchangeable, all knowing, all powerful, and life itself. If God does not live, then how does anything
live? If God is not superior of all
things and not to be a thing, then how would anything come into being that
exists, it is God who quickens life, animates life, for life is more than just
being a nutritive life, a life without sensibility, yet even plant life has
sensibility for when worn by the sun flowers will extend their petals to catch
the rays of the sun, and when darkness comes they close their petals, and
when winter arrives many of the plant life lose their leaves which fall
to the ground, and in those same plants that lost their leaves produce new leaves in the Spring, the cycle continues.
Thus the cycle of life is an exercise of wisdom. Wisdom can never be unwise. God is eternity, it is not that God resides
in eternity, He is infinite making him superior over all things. The fact that all things are created by Him
and that all things demonstrate that He is wise and is all wisdom. Why then would a person who is sentient and
has the ability to catch in the least a ray of His wisdom the desire any other
object to place their faith? To put
anything, and object, above God is to go beyond the nature that they claim to
be unchangeable, a nature that even when done meagerly, that is, to put their
confidence partly in Him the superior object, and to put a part of their
confidence in other objects, is a dichotomy of unreasonableness.
You and I
must come to know the ineffable God as he has revealed himself in Scripture and
to make him, the most Excellent of all excellencies of the universe as the
object that has the priority, and worship of our lives. We will continue to examine this subject and
then move on to the subject of signs which seems to be of most interest to many
people who flock to churches that revel in what is supposed as to be
supernatural signs.
In fact day the LORD of hosts will be
for a crown
of glory and a
diadem of beauty to the remnant
of His
people, for a spirit of justice
to those who turned back the battle at the gate.
Isaiah 28: 5 -- 6
Place God as the priority of your life
Richard L. Crumb
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