I, the Lord, am your God,
who brought you from the land of Egypt,
from the house of bondage.
You shall have no other gods before me.
This is the first and greatest commandment. All of God’s commands are important, but this one is numero uno. Implicit in the commandment to worship the Lord our God and no other is the necessity of knowing God as he has revealed himself to us in creation and in the scripture. If our view of God is skewed, then it isn’t quite the one true God as he has revealed himself that we are holding in our minds when we worship and serve. Instead, we are “exchanging the truth of God for a lie.” To the extent that we view God as different than he has revealed himself to us, we are idolaters.
On Redefining God
Last Sunday I heard a young lady—more of a girl, really—speak positively of redefining God so that people can believe in him. I’m not sure what she meant by that. It could be that she simply meant something like “explaining the God-who-is to unbelievers in terms that they can understand.” But maybe she thought redefining God to make him more acceptable to people is a good strategy for fulfilling our mission to make disciples. Perhaps she even envisioned tweaking this redefined image of God upward, little by little, toward the one true God and bringing people to faith in the true God that way.
The girl was right about one thing: A redefined god is easier for people to believe in. That’s because it’s easier to live with a god who is more like us and demands less of us. This is what the imaging and reimaging of God throughout history has always been about: the redefining of God in an attempt to make him easier—easier for us to like and easier for us to live with.
But here’s one problem with this strategy for helping unbelievers come to faith in God: The God who exists and rules the universe doesn’t allow it. The God who created us is who he is, and he reveals himself to us in the created order and in his word, and it is that God that we are required to worship and it is that God we must hold before the unbeliever. Not a false god, but the one true God, and no other god. The only God we can rightly acknowledge is the real God who reveals his wrath from heaven against those who exchange what he has revealed of himself—“the glory of the immortal God”—for something less like him but more attractive to them. (See Romans 1)
Redefining God so that people can believe in him is idolatry because it’s crafting another god—a false god—to replace the one God who is. And holding out a redefined image and encouraging people to believe in this god is nothing short of encouraging them to be idolaters.