Little Chats With God

“I am the Lord; that is my name! I will not give my glory to another or my praise to idols.” Isaiah 42:8Isaiah 42:8
English: World English Bible - WEB
8 I am Yahweh, that is my name; and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to engraved images.

Lord, I have heard people take verses like this and use them to suggest that You are some kind of egomaniac. I know that’s not the case, Lord … but I can kinda understand that reaction from people who don’t know You.

Why is it that You place such importance on people not worshiping other gods? After all, there are many today - as I’m sure there were in Isaiah’s day - who insist that there is only one god, and it doesn’t matter what you call him (or her), or how you represent him - we are still all worshiping that same god. You certainly don’t seem to share that viewpoint! You make it abundantly clear in Your Word that You do not consider Baal or any of the other deities worshiped in the ancient Middle East to be even remotely equal to You.

Could that be because all those gods turn the true order of things upside down? They are made by man - whether they are carved in stone or wood, or only in the minds and imaginations of people - therefore they reflect man’s image. You were not made by man: You are not the creation of either our minds or our hands. Rather, we were created by You in Your image.

There are a whole heap of problems when man creates god in our image. Firstly, we are finite, so a god created in our image cannot be infinite. We are temporal, so the god we create cannot be eternal. We are sinful, so god in our image cannot be holy. Our power is extremely limited, so god like us cannot be omnipotent. Our knowledge is limited, so the god we create cannot be omniscient.

Lets see … that leaves us with a god who is finite, temporal, unholy, and limited in both knowledge and power. Not much of a god, if you ask me! Not much use to mankind!

I guess that explains why You insist that we worship You, and You alone!

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This blog is © copyright Lynn Fowler.

There is one God, and one mediator between God and people, the man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:51 Timothy 2:5
English: World English Bible - WEB
5 For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,

 “But the king replied to Araunah, ‘No, I insist on paying you for it. I will not sacrifice to the Lord my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing.’ So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen and paid fifty shekels of silver for them.” 2 Samuel 24:242 Samuel 24:24
English: World English Bible - WEB
24 The king said to Araunah, No; but I will most assuredly buy it of you at a price. Neither will I offer burnt-offerings to Yahweh my God which cost me nothing. So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver.

Lord, I’m a little confused here. I can understand where David was coming from. He was the one who had sinned and brought Your judgement on the nation. If he had just accepted the threshing floor and the oxen and the wood from Araunah, the offering would not have been his but Araunah’s.

Yet when we come into the New Testament, that is exactly what You did for us - You gave Yourself as the offering on our behalf. And You make it very clear that the only way we can come to You is by accepting that offering, and not trying to pay the cost ourselves.

So why the change, Lord? Why was it right for David to pay the price for Your mercy, but not right for us?

But hold on - was that what David really did? Did his sacrifice change Your mind? It seems to me that Your response was to his repentant heart, not to the sacrifice. Without the repentant heart, David could have sacrificed a thousand oxen and Your judgement would not have changed the slightest fraction.

So I guess the sacrifice was more a matter of “putting his money where his mouth was.” When I look at it that way, I realize that the same is true for us. Even though You offer us salvation freely based on the sacrifice of Calvary, and even though we could never in a zillion years be good enough to deserve Your mercy or rich enough to buy it, You still require us, like David, to put our money - in fact, our lives and our whole being - where our mouth is.

Help me, Lord, both to fully embrace Your free gift of salvation, but also to respond with the costly offering of my life.

“God is spirit, and His worshippers must worship Him in spirit and in truth.”  John 4:24John 4:24
English: World English Bible - WEB
24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

Lord, I’m so glad You put a balance in Your Word. As humans, it is so easy for us to go screaming off to one end of the spectrum or the other, when often the two extremes are simply the two sides of the one coin.

I know, Lord, that You are not like the gods that mankind chooses to make for itself. You are far too big to be represented truly by stone or wood, and whilst in the days of the Old Covenant You chose Jerusalem as the place on earth where Your presence would rest, there is no way that any temple, no matter how great or glorious, could ever contain You. You fill the universe. When the Samaritan woman in this Scripture disputed whether the correct place for Your worship was Samaria or Jerusalem, she was completely missing the point of Your greatness.

But we do that so easily, Lord. Unable to come to terms with Your infinity, we try to put You in boxes: to say that You are here or there, that You must be worshipped this way or that. And of course, our place and our way is always the right one!

Help us to remember that You are spirit. The places, the rituals, the formulas of man just don’t cut it - only spirit to spirit does.

Yet You also said that You must be worshipped in truth. We cannot invent a god of our own making, shaped in our image and likeness, and pretend that it is You. We cannot say that any of the gods of this world are just You under another name. There is only one truth, and that is You, the eternal Father, who manifested Himself in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, who said “I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father except by Me.” Help us always to worship You as Who You are, and to reject the claims of false gods which do not live up to the truth.

 “When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have set in place, what is man that You are mindful of him, the son of man that You care for him?” Psalm 8:3-4Psalm 8:3-4
English: World English Bible - WEB
3 When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, The moon and the stars, which you have ordained; ⁴ What is man, that you think of him? The son of man, that you care for him?

Lord, You know those verses have always spoken to me, as has that old hymn, “How Great Thou Art”. Yet they seem so inadequate. Just how am I supposed to wrap words around Your greatness? You are far bigger than anything I can even begin to imagine. Your Word tells me that You measure the heavens with a span – in other words, You hold the universe in the palm of Your hand. That’s way too big for me, Lord! Sometimes I think about the difference between an ant and me, but that’s not even the tiniest fragment of the difference between me and You. And that’s only Your size!

The thought of Your power leaves me totally speechless. I can’t even begin to imagine the kind of power it took to bring this whole, vast, complex universe into being at a word. The kind of power that in the same nanosecond could craft the intricacies of the atom and the fathomless reaches of deep space.

I can’t get my mind around the kind of wisdom and knowledge that could produce the almost endless array of life on this planet, fashioning not only each kind to be different from all the others, but every individual to be unique within its kind. It blows my mind when I think that You know everything that has ever happened and will ever happen, every thought, word and action of every person who has ever lived, or will ever live – not to mention that You also know all the things that could have happened if at any given instant any individual had done something differently.

It’s waaaay to big for me, Lord. There is no way my mind will ever be able to grasp it. Instead, I will simply bow in worship. How great You are!