The city of Ephesus thoroughly imbibed the spirit of Paganism. They were obsessed with idols and superstitious omens. They had mingled immorality and sexual perversion with their worship. They had embraced spiritualism and occult practices such as speaking to the dead and reading signs in the heavens, and in all of this, they thought they were having a relationship with God! Isn’t that amazing? The very things they imagined were drawing them closer to God were driving a wedge between them and God and making them His enemies!
I think we can see very clearly manifested here what Paul meant when he said, “Therefore remember that you, once Gentiles in the flesh–who are called Uncircumcision by what is called the Circumcision made in the flesh by hands–that at that time you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” (Ephesians 2:11-12) Jesus Christ came to reconcile the lost world of Adam’s race with their Heavenly Father God, and a great part of that was showing them who God was. In Romans 1 the Apostle Paul tells in awful detail how far separated mankind is from God without Jesus. He writes something that I think is very interesting in verses 22-25, “Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man–and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things. Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.” The Apostle here tells us of the great evil and abomination that is idolatry.
When God spoke long ago the Ten Commandments to the Children of Israel from the shining slopes of Mount Sinai, the first two were in reference to this great sin of idolatry. In Exodus 20:1-6 the Bible says, “And God spoke all these words, saying: I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.” The crime in creating other gods is in the fact that the one true God Jehovah is omnipotent and all-sufficient, no task is beyond his scope.
The idea of polytheism limits the power of God in that it imagines that many gods would be needed to oversee all of the tasks in operating the universe. The crime of idolatry, or of imagery, of statues and icons of holy and heavenly beings is that it attempts to capture the divine in a human or some other temporal form. God cannot be thought of in a mortal sense! He cannot be made finite and contained! There have been some truly beautiful paintings made by the great masters that would claim to be of Christ or of God, but all they do is profane His holy image. If we should go out and gaze upward into the vast expanse of space, and let our minds carry us beyond the atmosphere’s wreath to walk among the endless black where great orbs of gas and ice and fire soar in a never ending rotation, and as we look at all the wonders of this earth: its high mountains, its deep oceans, its great woodland areas and all of its many wonders, we are awed and enraptured by the overwhelming magnificence of it all! But greater than this beyond measure is the power and glory of God.
The prophet Isaiah said, “Thus says the LORD: “Heaven is My throne, And earth is My footstool. Where is the house that you will build Me? And where is the place of My rest? For all those things My hand has made, And all those things exist.” (Isaiah 66:1) But another great evil to idolatry is that it makes God like a man! When Elijah had the great prayer battle with the Prophets of Baal on the slopes of mount Carmel you remember that he mocked the Baals saying, “perhaps he is asleep or on vacation or busy” Of course, the God of heaven is never separated from the cries of His children, for, as he said through the Prophet long ago, “For I am God, and not man…” (Hosea 11:9) Many of the gods of paganism were petty, selfish and childish. This concept of God caused people to be unable to have the relationship with Him that he desired, but how were they to know Him?
Can We Know God Through Scientific Observation?
Science may be able to tell us something about the age of rocks but it can tell us little about the Rock of Ages. Now that is not to say that we learn nothing about God from the scientific or natural world. Paul says, “because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.” (Romans 1:19-20) That is to say that creation teaches us some things about the nature and power of the Creator. David wrote, “The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork.” (Psalm 19:1)
Many times the Bible speaks of the “Law written on the heart” or the “law of nature” I believe this refers to the fact that God has made His nature, and the moral code He would have mankind live by, visible in the natural world. But this only goes so far. In nature we can learn that God is, and that he is powerful, we can learn that he is orderly and that he is wise, but we cannot really know who He is. We cannot know His will, we cannot know how to speak to Him, or how to worship Him. Years of research in the most advanced labs could never find a cure for sin. The highest-powered telescope could never show the way to heaven. And in all his searching and study the scientist has never learned a thing about what happens after death. We need something else to understand these things.
Can We Know God Through Philosophy?
Many of the ancients believed that God might be known through philosophy and learning. The world of the New Testament was full of all kinds of schools and groups that followed the teachings of different philosophers in their perspectives on life and its meaning. Typically this led to the same kind of immoral behavior that paganism and idolatry resulted in.
In Acts 17 when the Apostle Paul was in Athens he encountered two prominent schools of philosophy: the Epicureans and the Stoics. The Epicureans were of the mind that true happiness and closeness to God could only be found in excess and frivolity. There idea was that if it made you happy you should do it and the only sin was in self-depravation. While the Stoics believed in fate, that God was everything and was not a personal God who loved man and cared for man. The Apostle Paul denied both of these ideas and others like them, “Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ.” (Colossians 2:8)
Can We Know God Through Spiritualism and the Occult?
Paul wrote against the mystery religions many times in the New Testament. Today there are many examples of this in the world around us. People try to find God through the occult in several ways today. The word occult means “secret” and it refers to mysterious and mystical practices such as communicating with the dead, reading horoscopes, trying to find spiritual purity through health and diet and things like that. Well the truth is that many of those things are what the Bible calls sorcery or witchcraft and not only do they fail to lead someone to God, they will lead people away from God and ultimately to hell!
Jesus Christ: the Full Portrait of God
The pervasive theme of Ephesians, and in fact almost all of the Apostolic writings is “only in Christ.” Jesus Christ is supreme above all these things. In fact the Apostle Paul would tell us that Christ lived as a visible picture of the invisible God. Paul said in Colossians 1:15 and in chapter 2:9, “For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.” We can open up the Bible and read the blessed accounts from the Gospels of who Jesus was and how He lived and in that we learn who God is! Jesus said, “If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; and from now on you know Him and have seen Him.” Philip said to Him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is sufficient for us.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; so how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?” Now of course the Jews knew something of God, as He had revealed Himself in the Old Testament through the prophets, but until Christ came mankind did not have the great appreciation of who God is that we as Christians now have. Notice how Job spoke with God during their conversation. Many times he took God to task on his righteousness, and he got dangerously close to “foolishly accusing God” at times.
Next week we will take a look into what exactly Jesus taught us about the nature of God, but for now, consider these things. – CED