Your ShelfYour Projects

JEALOUSY FOR GOD

33%

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 22, 1887

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 13, No. 49.

Read the full edition

JEALOUSY FOR GOD.

By Dr. J. H. Thornwell

IDOLATRY, superstition, Socinianism, all the types of paganism, do not more conclusively demonstrate that man is by nature a religious being, than they demonstrate that the carnal mind is enmity against God. The abominations of the Gentile world are not the crude rites of mankind, as many philosophers would have us believe, adapted to the infancy of human knowledge, expressing the natural sentiments of piety and reverence in a form as yet imperfectly developed, and promoting the education of the race in larger and juster views. They are not tendencies towards God in the direction of a proper worship, the feeble and obscure utterances of childhood, sincere and honest, but uninstructed. They are not the results of involuntary ignorance. On the contrary, they are stages of degradation which men have successively reached in their apostasy from God; they are the utterances of alienated hearts, the slanders of malignant and poisoned tongues.
The heavens declare God's glory, and the firmament showeth his handiwork; the invisible things of him are clearly seen, even his eternal power and Godhead, being understood by the things that are made. Creation and providence, the structure and laws of our own souls, proclaim his being, his attributes, and his will; so that men are without excuse. There are radical principles in the mind, which, if cherished and developed according to their proper tendencies, would rebuke the errors of the heathen; so that they may be said to know God, as possessing the germs of that knowledge in the constituent elements of reason. The real difficulty is their reluctance to glorify his name. Hence, they become vain in their imaginations, suppress the light of nature, and their foolish heart is darkened. Hence it is that they have changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things, and have changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator. This is the natural history of paganism.—Dr. J. H. Thornwell, on the Sacrifice of Christ.