Seeing God As He Is

No religion has ever risen above its conception of God. If the heathen believe that God is tricky, sulky, nasty and deceitful, their religion will build itself around that concept. And they will try to be sneaky with their god and act the way their god acts.

If they believe, on the other hand, that God is one God, that He is a high and true and noble God, then even though they are not redeemed, their religion will tend to follow their concept of God upward, even though it is a pagan religion and does not carry redemption.

Christianity at any given time is strong or weak depending upon her concept of God. And I insist upon this and I have said it many times, that the basic trouble with the Church today is her unworthy conception of God. I talk with learned and godly people all over the country, and they’re all saying the same thing.

Unbelievers say, “Take your cowboy god and go home,” and we get angry and say, “They’re vile heathen.” No, they’re not vile heathen—or at least that’s not why they say that. They can’t respect our “cowboy god.” And since evangelicalism has gone overboard to “cowboy religion,” its conception of God is unworthy of Him. Our religion is little because our god is little. Our religion is weak because our god is weak. Our religion is ignoble because the god we serve is ignoble. We do not see God as He is.

The psalmist said, “O magnify the LORD with me” (34:3). “Magnify” may mean one of two things: “make it look bigger than it is,” or “see it as big as it is.” The latter is what “magnify” means as the psalmist used it.

If you want to examine a very small amount of matter, you put it under a microscope and magnify it to make it look bigger than it is. But it is impossible to make God look bigger than He is. When we say “magnify the Lord,” we mean try to see God somewhere near as big as He is. This is what I want to do. This is what, by His help, I have dedicated myself to do.

A local church will only be as great as its conception of God. An individual Christian will be a success or a failure depending upon what he or she thinks of God. It is critically important that we have a knowledge of the Holy One, that we know what God is like. Of course we can know from the Scriptures—that’s where we go to get our information. We can know some of it from nature too: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork” (Psalm 19:1). But while the pen of nature writes without too much clarity, the Word of God is very, very clear.

Excerpted from The Attributes of God, Volume 1 p. 40-42.