THE LIVING GOD
John H. Paterson
"Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men's hands.
they have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but
they see not ... They that make them are like unto them;
so is every one that trusteth in them." Psalm 115:4-8
THERE were two classes of people for whom the psalmist felt unlimited contempt. One was the fools who say that there is no God, and the other was the kind of person who believes in a god which he has built for himself. In this familiar passage in Psalm 115, which is substantially repeated in Psalm 135, the writer was using the occasion to pour scorn on those in the second category.
In doing so, he was using an argument which was to occur elsewhere in the Scriptures. Nobody jeered more loudly than Elijah on Mount Carmel at the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18:27)! And in his more refined and academic way Paul made the same point to the Athenians. "We ought not to think", as he delicately put it to these arch-thinkers of the ancient world, "that the godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, [96/97] graven by art and man's device" (Act 17:29). Why ought we "not to think"? Because of the sheer lack of logic in doing so -- of setting up the idea of "God", and then building Him to our own specifications.
It is easy enough to feel either scorn or pity for those to whom "God" means nothing more than their own construction out of whatever materials they can lay their hands on. And it is not too difficult to sense the dreadful emptiness of that moment at Carmel when Baal had been invoked by every means at his priests' disposal, and nothing but silence followed. But while we give thanks for our own deliverance from idol worship and man-made gods, let us pause for a moment to ask what our God means to us.
For the psalmist clearly infers that our God can do all the things which the idols of the heathen cannot do. He can see, speak, hear and smell. He has hands to act and feet to move, and a host of Bible references under each of those headings will already have crossed your mind in support of the claim. They all add up to an impression of a God who is at work in His creation; who acts and reacts.
Is He Really a Living God?
But although this is the essence of our Christian view of God, it is under constant challenge from two separate directions, and it is to these challenges that I wish, for the present, to direct your attention.
The first challenge is this: that in our own society we are far too sophisticated to take a piece of wood or stone and label it "god" but what people do instead is to create their own gods as a product not of their hands but of their minds. They have a view of God which is just as much man-made as the wooden idol. How often have we heard someone betray this fact by saying, in the course of a discussion, "Oh, but that's not my idea of God!"? In a way, actually, the heathen with his idol is being more logical than the thinker because, having imagined his god, he sets out to give it a likeness -- to portray it -- whereas the thinker has nothing but a vague, amorphous Something to which he gives the name of God.
But we can go further. Not only does this Something lack definition, but definition is just what our thinker prefers not to give it. To him, crediting God with the ability to see, or hear, or move, only goes to show that we have made a god like ourselves. To him "god" is a force or a quality, not a person.
To think in that way is every man's privilege, if he wishes to do so. But believers everywhere must sound the alarm when they encounter this attitude not among their agnostic or humanist friends but among God's people themselves. You will not need me to remind you that it has become entirely fashionable to think of God as a Force -- generally identified simply as Love -- and to disavow any theology that could have Him make demands, or act in judgement, or react in any way to the condition of His people.
His seeing eye and hearing ear have long since passed out of account, for how is it possible that a God who really can see and hear should fail to react to the parlous state of His world? His hands and His feet, the instruments of His purpose, seem powerless or inert, and it is simpler, therefore, to believe that He has none -- which at least saves us the trouble of trying to believe in the miracles! He exists, if He exists at all, in our minds alone.
Reducing God to Nothing
And so we have the spectacle of a Church whose God has grown very small -- a God who has nothing to say, and who makes no response to the crying needs of His world; who can be out-classed, in fact, by an Irish singer who raises millions of pounds for famine relief without even stopping to have a shave!
So, here is my first point. We must be ready at all times to challenge one another over this spirit within the Church of what the philosophers will call "reductionism". That simply means a [97/98] tendancy to explain everything in terms of the basics of life, physical or rational, as when Scrooge in Dicken's Christmas Carol, tried to convince himself that Marley's ghost was not a ghost but simply "an undigested bit of beef, a blob of mustard, a crumb of cheese." The Church's critics have been explaining it in this way for centuries: let us see to it that we do not base our view of God on the same kind of argument!
For this is not just a question of how we look at the idea of God. On the contrary, consider what we lose if we have a God that does not see, hear and the rest of it. The implications are appalling, as many millions of people realise who have no other view and no other God. There are basically four attributes of God which the psalmist refers to here:
