Creating God in our image

"To preach the Bible as
'the handbook for life,'
or as the answer
to every question,
rather than as
the revelation of Christ,
is to turn the Bible
into an entirely different book.
This is how the Pharisees
approached Scripture,
as we can see clearly
from the questions they asked Jesus.
For the Pharisees, the Scriptures were a source of trivia
for life's dilemmas.
To be sure, Scripture provides God-centered
and divinely revealed wisdom for life,
but if this were its primary objective,
Christianity would be a religion of self-improvement
by following examples and exhortations,
not a religion of the Cross."
Michael Horton

Creating God in our image:

Interesting little point about the ten plagues against Egypt…
The fifth plague against the Pharaoh and the Egyptians
was the plague on the Egyptian livestock. (Exodus 9:1-7)
One of the Gods of Egypt was Apis (Ah pees) (a sacred bull god)
he was in the figure of a calf…
He was their god of strength and fertility…
He was pictured as a golden calf
with the rays of the sun between his horns.
The Egyptians would have an actual live bull
that they selected as the personification of that god –
When that bull would die they would mummify him
and bury him in a grave of great spleandor.
They went through these enormously expensive rituals
to bury a dead bull.
(They should have just had a cook-out :-) )
If you go to Exodus 32
where it talks about Aaron making the golden calf;
it was made in the shape of that god, Apis.

The request of the people of Israel
was to make a god “that will go before us.”
In-other-words,
they wanted a god
to go where they wanted to go…
not where God wanted to go…

The other interesting thing is
they did not see this form of god as Apis…
they didn’t call him that.

What they were trying to do
is take the real God, Elohiym
and reduce Him to a form…
God doesn’t like that!

The problem was it says in Exodus…
they had ‘forgotten all the works of the Lord their God.’
‘They had forgotten all that Elohiym had done.’

They took that form
which they probably had grown up around for generations
(in the Egyptian culture),
and tried to adapt it into their own life and culture…

There is an obvious contemporanious application to all this…

They took the culture that they grew up around
and tried to form God in that culture…

Remind you of anything?...

This is where most of our society lives… (trying to do the same thing).
We try to take God…
and all the culture that we have,
and we try to ‘smoosh’ God into it somehow.
Rather than follow the dictates of God's Word,
we adapt it to fit our own sinful ideas of how we should live.

We try to form God in our image…
and we want God to go where we want Him to go,
we donot go, where He wants us to go!

God doesn’t aparently like that…
You can tell by the way He swallows things up when that happens…
The ground opens up and people disappear…
and no, they didn’t enter the witness protection program
they just disappeared!

In the studying of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Torah;
there’s an awful lot of contemporatry application to it.

There is nothing new under the Sun–
There is really nothing new…
We are doing the same stuff… this is about 3,480 years later…
that’s a long time ago, but, we’re still doing it.

There is very little today in our theology,
especially in modern American 21st century Christianity
of obedience or holiness…
when was the last time you heard a teaching or sermon on obedience or holiness?

We hear lots of teachings on miracles, and signs and wonders,
even more about the mercy and grace of God...
(not to belittle those things - they are important for us to understand)
but, do we hear things on holiness and obedience?...
No, not very often, because that’s not considered fun in our fallen state!
Holiness and obedience to God, however,
are the pathway to abundant life –
that truly where kingdom life is born.

The reality is that’s where the greatest power is!

We have a tendency to spurn anything
that requires obedience or the slightest bit of discomfort
or change to our comfort zone;
just like those folks did over thirty-five hundred years ago…
We have exactly the same tendencies.

We try to take our culture and superimpose it on God,
or make God move according to our culture.

That’s just not accurate -
not to mention it is dangerous to our spiritual health.
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