Thinking Thursday: Man Makes God in his Own Image

In the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series, one of the books tells of an expedition to see God’s last message to his creation. It is carved into the side of a mountain, and the way up to the viewing platform is quite a trek. Eventually our heroes make it, and as they move along the walkway they come round the curve of the mountain and the message comes into view. It says “Sorry for the inconvenience.”

The story makes a great joke, and takes the unexpected turn that readers of Douglas Adams’ books have come to expect. But the sad thing is that the message makes sense to a lot of people.

Modern society has been called the ‘Me’ generation – everything in life is viewed from the selfish perspective. “What can I get out of it?” “How do I feel about it?” So it is quite believable that if there is a God, and if he created everything for us, that he would be sorry if he didn’t quite come up to our expectations. Man is king, and everything must serve him.

What a challenge, then, to communicate to this generation the mightiness of God and the need to serve Him and bow to Him. He does not need to apologise to us, rather than the other way around.

2 Corinthians 10:3-5 'For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.'