New.Demonstration

If we want to recover the doctrine of God we have to recover the attributes of God, and one attribute that is sorely missing in our time is the attribute of God’s sovereignty.

What happens in the Christian world if you don’t give attention to the sovereign God?

Human sovereignty comes in to take the true God’s place. Idols always replace the true if the true is not kept there.

So you have human beings becoming sovereign in their own estimation in a variety of ways.

Theologically: we are the ones who elect God rather than God electing us.

Programmatically: we are the ones who determine what should be done in our worship rather than following the statements of Scripture.

In this sort of business God gets relegated to the sidelines, we really don’t need him. But really, when you think about it, this is secularism.

I think the best illustration of this in the Bible is the story of Nebuchadnezzar when he stood on the roof of his palace in Babylon and he looked over that magnificent city with its famous hanging gardens and he said, “Is not this the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence, by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?” That is probably the best statement in all of literature of what we call secular humanism, because he is claiming that the world he observed was of him, by him and for his own glory. But the sad thing is that it is not just secular humanism, but is becoming “evangelical” humanism as well.

If we’re the ones who conceive of what should be done and we’re the ones who accomplish it by our skills, whatever they may be, often without prayer (because we are not a prayerful people), then I guess the glory should go to ourselves. So we find ourselves right back where Nebuchadnezzar was, right around the time God judged him with insanity. And as I look at the evangelical world I’d say a lot of it is insane. In addition, Nebuchadnezzar was driven out to live with the animals to behave in a bestial way. And when I read the polls that tell me that evangelicals behave virtually no different than their secular counterparts, and I recognize the bestial manner that the world around us is behaving, I think that maybe the judgment of Nebuchadnezzar has come home to us as well.

Fortunately, Nebuchadnezzar got the message. For his final testimony reads:

At the end of that time, I, Nebuchadnezzar, raised my eyes toward heaven, and my sanity was restored. Then I praised the Most High; I honored and glorified him who lives forever. His dominion is an eternal dominion; his kingdom endures from generation to generation. All the peoples of the earth are regarded as nothing. He does as he pleases with the powers of heaven and the peoples of the earth. No one can hold back his hand or say to him: “What have you done?” …Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and exalt and glorify the King of heaven, because everything he does is right and all his ways are just. And those who walk in pride he is able to humble. (Dan 4:34-35,37)

God is not only able to humble them. He does humble them, and perhaps that ought to be a good starting point for renewal in our churches. We evangelicals need it especially.

—James Montgomery Boice, Whatever Happened to God?

Read the whole of this perceptive article on the reality of the absence of God in today’s Christian culture, It’s causes, and it’s prescribed remedies, here. This is a very pressing and dire situation in Christendom today. I believe John Piper got it right when he said that people are starved and they don’t even know it! What sin it is to preach without accord to the Word; against God, at the expense of man!