Five Dangers

It’s clear then.  All creation serves as God-evidence, revealing to us not only proof of His existence, but clues of His attributes… clues God wants us not to miss. 

Yet, while we dare not discount Romans 1:20 (For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse), we ought not to ignore the dangers of Romans 1:25 (They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised) either.

We need to be mindful of several dangers in looking at God’s creation for clues about His nature. 

Danger #1:  ignoring the essentiality of applying Scriptural truth to our human experience.  To our peril, we can become a truth unto ourselves and slide down the slippery slope of heresy, even idolatry.

Danger #2:  deifying Scripture rather than it’s Author.  Bibliolatry.  Dallas Willard refers to it as “Bible deism” (Hearing God). It is possible to make idols out of very sacred things… like church, like family, Scripture, even our own spirituality… elevating them to levels God doesn’t intend.  These things, essential as they are, can get in the way of knowing God, turning us into 21^st century Pharisees.

Danger #3:  Deifying the created.  In marveling at creation (as God wants us to do), we are baby-steps away from idolizing it.  The Enemy certainly knows this, and will use this fact to cause us to subtly slip into a pantheistic idolatry before we’ve recognize what’s happened.  Kempis, in his “Imitation of Christ” cautions that we not cling “to anything created with unmeasured affection.”

Danger #4:  Forgetting that the created is sin-tarnished.  If we forget or minimize the influence of sin on what God has made, we might, in turn, make wrong assumptions about God’s power and His nature.  We certainly aren’t reminded of God’s greatness when we see a smog-filled sky, for example.  Or a dying child.  What we see is evidence of how what God has created has been perverted by sin.

Danger #5:  Relativism.  We are but a few slippery steps from saying that all truth is God’s truth to saying that all versions of truth are true and, therefore, have originated from God.  We must be on guard for the lie of relativism.