Nature is Not My Mother
“So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth”……”For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;…Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen”. Genesis 1:27-28; Romans 1:18,25
Those of you who are as old as I am likely remember the television commercial in which the lady said, “It’s not nice to fool mother nature”. I think it was an ad for margarine as best as I can remember. Margarine producers are always pushing their products claiming that they taste like butter, but I have not found any that really tastes like butter. However, butter is not the subject of this blog. The subject is about how folks have come to worshp the nature that God created rather than worshiping God.
Of course, this is nothing new. Ancient peoples worshiped all sorts of things that they made from materials that God created, like wood, stone, gold, silver, the sun, moon, and stars. It is a fact that God created man with a desire to worship, but God’s intention was for folks to worship Him. Because God gave man free will, man was free to choose whom he would worship, but there are consequences to putting anything ahead of the LORD. God could have created men and women and made them like puppets whose strings He would pull and direct them to bow before and serve Him. But that’s not what God wants nor deserves. He wants people to love Him and commit themselves to worship and serve Him because that’s what they desire.
I think about those arranged marriages that were prevalent in ancient days, and there may still be some in some areas of the world today. What kind of a life would someone have who married someone that they didn’t love and just barely knew? Jacob found out the hard way that the one he truly loved was not the one that he first married. He was tricked by his father-in-law. His first wife, Leah, knew that Jacob didn’t love her. She bore him six sons believing with each birth that perhaps he would love her, but, as far as we know, he never told her that he loved her. Why men in those days thought it was a good idea to have more than one wife at the same time escapes me. Many spouses brought on many problems.
There are folks today who are like the people of old who worshiped the things of nature, only the objects of worship have changed. People don’t usually worship statues and images, at least not in developed nations, but they do worship things that have been made from materials that God created: metal cars, wooden and brick houses, gold and silver in the form of money, investments, stocks, and bonds, and other humans. It seems that people worship things that make them feel important and sophisticated. Many see no benefit in worshiping a God that they can’t see or feel, but the reason they can’t see or feel Him is because they aren’t looking for Him. If they would only begin to seek Him, He would make Himself known to them and show them a better way to live.
Some do acknowledge God but try to put Him in a box and define Him in a way that is on an equal plain with man. People do not like to be told how to live so God leaves them to their own devices and lets them suffer the consequences (Romans 1:28). Matthew Henry wrote, “A man cannot be delivered up to a greater slavery than to be given up to his own lusts”. He also wrote, “For were it not for this (the restraining grace of God), man, who was made a little lower than the angels, would make himself a great deal lower than the devils”. Thus, all who choose to forego the honorable privilege of worshiping and serving the sovereign God of all creation and instead worship that which God created, mostly man himself, has chosen a really pathetic god.