Thinking Rightly About God

What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.

The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God.  Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts about God.

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Among the sins to which the human heart is prone, hardly any other is more hateful to God than idolatry, for idolatry is at bottom a libel on His character.  The idolatrous heart assumes that God is other than He is - in itself a monstrous sin - and substitutes for the true God one made after its own likeness.  Always this God will conform to the image of the one who created it and will be base or pure, cruel or kind, according to the moral state of the mind from which it emerges.

A god begotten in the shadows of a fallen heart will quite naturally be no true likeness of the true God.  “Thou thoughtest,” said the Lord to the wicked man in the psalm, “that I was altogether such as one as thyself.”  Surely this must be a serious affront to the Most High God before whom cherubim and seraphim continually do cry, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth.”...

The essences of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him. ...

Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which polluted waters of idolatry flow; they are themselves idolatrous.  The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.

A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, chapter 1.

When I read this, it made me think of two kinds of false gods presently being claimed: the various gods of the cults, and the god of those who claim God does not condemn homosexual behavior or same-sex fake marriage.  These gods are idols, and those who worship them are idolaters.