p. 152 | INTELLECTUAL IDOLATRY by L. A. Reed

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 5, 1901

INTELLECTUAL IDOLATRY

By L. A. Reed

ONLY a great mind can conceive great thoughts, and great themes can come only from great minds. In fact, a mind must be judged by the themes or thoughts on which it dwells, and which it presents to others, even as a tree is known by its fruit. Realizing this, we are able to behold the greatness of the mind of God, its nobility and glory, to the extent that we comprehend and appreciate the literature that presents it — and that literature is the literature of the Bible.

And yet there are those, even among professed Christians, who study the themes of the world’s literature, and live in almost total ignorance of the great thoughts that have come directly out of the wondrous mind and throbbing heart of God. They live in the atmosphere of other men’s minds, of other men’s thoughts and ideas, and these become the impulse of their lives. They become absorbed in hero-worship and intellectual idolatry, and have no place for God’s thoughts in their minds, consequently no place for His acts in their lives; for as a man thinks, so is he.

God calls this committing two evils; it is a double sin. It is worse than the heathen do. “For pass over the isles of Chittim and see; and send unto Kedar, and consider diligently, and see if there be such a thing. Hath a nation changed their gods, which are yet no gods? but my people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit. Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid, be ye very desolate, saith the Lord. For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.”

There are many ways in which we may forsake God, and there are many things to which we can go; but in literature itself, since it deals with the minds of the authors, we have the direct way of forsaking God, and the direct way of going to other minds than His.

Consider it for a moment. Our salvation and our worship of God depend upon true knowledge; for idolaters worship they know not what (John 4: 22), but true worshippers are saved by a knowledge of the true God. John 17: 3. And with this mind which thus knows, they serve the law of God. Rom. 7: 25. If they lack this knowledge, they are destroyed; and because they reject this knowledge, God also rejects them. Hosea 4: 6.

Now in Biblical literature we deal directly with God’s mind; and when we reject Biblical literature and its study and training, we reject the mind of God itself, and its study and its training. And since in other literature we deal directly with other minds, when we choose this literature we choose directly these minds, in preference to the mind of God. It is committing two evils. We turn from God’s mind, the fountain of living waters — that is bad enough, that is one evil. Then we fix our attention on the minds of others, their thoughts and teachings, and thus hew out for ourselves cisterns; and, worst of all, these are broken cisterns that hold no water — and this is the second evil.

God calls it a horrible thing. And truly such it is.

L. A. REED.