Making God Small

Jeremiah 32:27 "Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh. Is there anything too hard for Me?

There is an appalling lack of reverence for God in our society. His Name is used openly as a vehicle for swearing. Jokes are told about Him. Even a recent movie was produced to mock His power and His character. In early America such behavior would have resulted in arrest followed by severe sentencing. Today, blasphemy is so common that most people would be offended to learn that anyone would be offended by such impiety. How have we fallen so far?

No small factor in this declension is the popular doctrine of God that has prevailed in the church for the last fifty to seventy-five years. It is a doctrine of Divine impotence. The assumption, more or less, has been that God is only slightly wiser and more powerful than man:

Psalm 50:21 These things you have done, and I kept silent; You thought that I was altogether like you; But I will rebuke you, And set them in order before your eyes.

In particular, the doctrine of Divine sovereignty has been substantially denied. God is able only to do what man permits Him to do — that has been and remains the prevailing notion. "God will bless you if you allow Him", we are told. This kind of teaching places God under man's control. Supposedly, God can do anything that we give Him permission to do. However, without our "ok" God is hamstrung. Some suggest that God has placed these restraints upon Himself. Which would mean that the sovereign omnipotent God has decided not to be sovereign and omnipotent any longer, unless man grants Him permission. THAT IS IMPOSSIBLE! This would mean that God decided not to be God. Which of necessity means that He was never God.

These efforts to make God more palatable to the modern mindset, have had the effect of destroying a proper fear of God in the church and, inevitably, in the world. There is a decided cruelty in such teaching. The cruelty lies in the fact that while a proper reverence for God has been diminished and people have come to feel comfortable with their control over God, God has not changed in the least. He is still the same as He has been from all eternity. God still controls every aspect of His creation, including human beings. And while He assigns to humans the quality of responsibility and sufficient freedom to show the true desires of their hearts, He all the while sets the bounds of every person's habitation:

Acts 17:26 "And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings

God determines the condition of our births and of our lives. Because all men have suppressed the truth about God under their own unrighteous desires, God has justly permitted many to become swallowed up by lies. Consequently, people think themselves smugly in control and comfortable, while their lives are being destroyed by sin:

Romans 1:18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, (read on in Romans 1 to understand the present judgment of God on the human race).

God will not be mocked! The disintegration of our society is not happening despite God's best efforts to prevent it, it is happening under His control as He brings upon us the due results of our impiety.

Our hope is that those entrusted with Bibles, and some continuing respect for the Bible as the Word of God, will commence telling the truth about God. Perhaps if the proper respect for God as God is restored, folk will humble themselves in repentance and plead for the mercy stored up in Jesus Christ for all who believe on Him. I ask you, is there place in your personal theology for the following testimony concerning God? If not, I would humbly suggest that your theology needs to be revamped according to the whole counsel of God's self-revelation.

Romans 9:15 For He says to Moses, "I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion."

16 So then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy.

17 For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, "For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I may show My power in you, and that My name may be declared in all the earth."

18 Therefore He has mercy on whom He wills, and whom He wills He hardens.