Honoring God as God

The most basic, primordial sin of fallen humanity that’s common to every one of us is the refusal to honor God as God, the refusal to honor Him with the worship His very being and nature deserves and requires. And that magnificent truth of His beauty, of His holiness, of His transcendent majesty, we swap, we trade for a lie. And we worship totem poles, idols made with men’s hands. We worship false gods. And even in the church, we can take the truth of God as it’s made even more clear in sacred Scripture and twist it, distort it, shape it to our own liking, and come up with a concept of God that is not the God of the Bible.

And this propensity is so deeply rooted in the human heart that conversion does not expunge it altogether instantly. It’s something we have to struggle with as long as we live because our very nature does not want to worship God as He is, but rather we want to worship a God who is the creation of our own hands.

Just in the last two days, I’ve had two people come to me and tell me that they grew up in a certain branch of the Christian church, and they embraced a certain theology all their life, and then suddenly, the truth of the character of God with respect to His sovereignty was made clear to them, and it turned their Christian lives upside down. And both of them used the same image: “The scales fell away from my eyes.” And I said, “You know, let me tell you what else happened. As soon as you saw it, you began to see it on every page of Scripture, and you began to see the sweetness of it, didn’t you?” And they say, “Yes.”

But how could you be a Christian so long and fight against the doctrines of grace? How can you be a Christian so long and fight against the sovereignty of God? I’ll tell you why. Because in your basic human constituent nature, you don’t want God to be sovereign. You don’t want God to be angry, or just, or holy because it’s our nature to reshape God the way we want to have Him.