Deutero Q

One of the dangers of our busy age is that we can easily become too preoccupied with life to think much about God. On the other hand, when we do think about God there is always the temptation to disregard His self-revelation in Scripture and fashion a god of our own making, a deity who often looks and acts suspiciously like ourselves.

In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin said there exists in all persons an innate awareness of God, a "seed of religion." This sensus divinitatis leads to either piety or idolatry. Calvin defined piety as "that reverence for God which the knowledge of his benefits induces." As for idolatry, Calvin likened the human mind to a labyrinth, believing that "just as waters boil up from a vast, full spring, so does an immense crowd of gods flow forth from the human mind, while each one, in wandering about with too much license, wrongly invents this or that about God himself."

In a time when "an immense crowd of gods" flow from human minds (both within the church and without), how critically important it is, when thinking about God, to be informed by His self-revelation in Scripture.