PATHS OF THE RUINED INSTRUMENT

PATHS OF THE RUINED INSTRUMENT

"And now they sin more and more, and have made them molten images of their silver, even idols according to their own understanding, all of them the work of the craftsman." "Idols according to their own understanding."  (Hosea 13:2)

Man is a ruined instrument. His view on origins at this point is the unmistakable witness. He nevertheless retains, though in impaired form, the natural elements which constitute the Divine image. There is therefore a constant demand in his nature for that for which he was created. Intelligence is still demanding light. Emotion continues to seek for objects upon which to fasten. Will requires a governing principle, in brief, man demands God. Having lost his knowledge of God, he proceeded to substitute in the place of the dethroned One, other deities. It is unthinkable and impossible that human nature should exist without a god in some form. The most blatant infidel, denying the existence of a Supreme Being, yet worships; and where there is no other object, then man enshrines his own intellect, bows down before that, declaring that he will receive and yield to the things he can comprehend through sight, thus making his understanding the very deity that receives his worship. As a bird cannot fly except in air, and a fish cannot swim except in water, so man cannot exercise the necessary functions of his life except in relation to God.

When man is thus driven to the dire necessity of creating his own deity, there is but one way in which he can do it. The only conception of God that man has is gathered from an understanding of his own personality. This is true even in the case of the most devout believer. It is almost impossible to think of God except by projecting the lines of human personality into infinitude, and this is the true method. The last and highest fact of Divine creation is the spiritual in man, and that is in the image of God. Therefore it is possible to argue back from the final creative movement to the originating Creator. If man is the image of God, he is like God; and that is at once to say that God is like man. The intelligence of Deity is argued from the intelligence of man, so that man, projecting the lines of his own intelligence into immensity, thinks of God. This is true also with regard to emotion, and with regard to will.

This creation of a god upon the basis of man's knowledge of himself lies at the back of the whole story of idolatry. From whence then have come all the ignorance and brutality, and vindictiveness of false gods? Evidently from the fact that the lines projected were in themselves imperfect. Project the ruined man into immensity, and a ruined god is the result, only the ruin is worse than the ruined man. In the magnified man there is magnified evil and intensified failure. That is the history of all idolatry. Man having fallen, demanded a god, and having lost the knowledge of the true God, has projected into immensity the lines of his own personality, and thus has created as objects of worship, the awful monsters, the service of which, in process of time, has reacted in the still deeper degradation of the worshipper. All false deities are distortions of the one true God, and the distorted idea is the result of the ruin of the image of God in man.

Referring to the idolatry of Ephraim, the prophet Hosea declared, "And now they sin more and more, and have made them molten images of their silver, even idols according to their own understanding, all of them the work of the craftsman." "Idols according to their own understanding."  (Hosea 13:2) That understanding being darkened, the idol resulting was a libel upon God.

With regard to idolatry, it may broadly be stated that the Old Testament reveals three great ideas of God embodied within the false systems of religion, all of them based upon a truth, but in the distortion of truth resulting most disastrously. These three ideas may be indicated by the three words, Baal, Moloch, and Mammon. All false ideas of Deity gather around those words. Other gods are mentioned, but they are all subsidiary, and stand for some aspect or attitude of these essential misconceptions.

These ideas moreover, have by no means ceased to be the gods which men worship. The form of the worship may have changed, and the garb of the idol may be different, but all else remains the same. Every human being who is not worshipping the One living God, is worshipping Baal, or Moloch, or Mammon, or all three.

The worship of Baal was essentially the deification of Nature (the sun god), and in that deification there comes at last to be necessary the worship of the central and most marvelous fact in Nature. That fact is the reproductive faculty. All Nature worship which may seem to begin in the innocent and harmless adoration of the beauty and the order of Nature, issues at last in all uncleanness and lasciviousness, and the highest forms of worship come to be acts so foul as to be nameless.

The worship of Baal is the groping of the intelligence after God in Nature, and its search is futile; so that at last the darkened understanding touching the last mystery of power, without being able to discover the final truth, there results the degradation of the whole being.

The worship of Moloch expressed itself in all cruelty, its chief expression being the sacrifice of little children. This is the prostitution of the emotional nature. Hate always lives next door to love. Man magnifying his own emotional nature finds a god who will he appeased by acts of cruelty. As in the worship of Nature there is finally committed all manner of sins and sensualism through the debasement of the intelligence, so necessarily the degraded affectional nature will express itself in lack of love, and therefore in deeds of brutality towards the offspring of man.

The worship of Moloch has by no means ceased. As man today has deified, and worships in fearful form at the shrine of, the central mystery of life, he does so with callous heart and absolute indifference to the ruin wrought. Here are suggested lines of thought which must be followed without the expression of words to aid. Let it only be said that as love is the fairest word in all the vocabulary of human speech, the foulest is lust. Yet both these words are the result or the operation of one capacity. Its operation within the realm of a perfectly informed understanding is indicated by the word love. Its operation within the realm of a degraded intelligence is indicated by the word lust.

Yet there remains the third of these—Mammon. Schleusner has asserted that Mammon was the name of a Syrian deity. Of this however there seems to be no positive proof. The word was one in common use in the East among the Phoenicians, the Syrians, and others, and it stood for wealth, and the power of wealth. Jesus made a most significant and remarkable use of the word. He said, "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon." (Matt 6:24). In that statement there is evidence of His intimate understanding of fallen human nature, and of His far-seeing appreciation of all the facts resulting from sin. He did not say, ye cannot serve God and the devil. If He had, for purposes of practical application His word would be almost pointless in this particular age. As it is, with every movement of material progressiveness, His word becomes still more searching, more arresting. The method of the evil one has ever been that of obscuring himself behind some other object of worship. In the dark ages men had a very weird and terrible consciousness of the personality of Satan, and the art of the time depicts him as a monster with hoofs and horns, and all ugliness of countenance. For the purposes of those dark ages, when men were superstitious, because ignorant, such method of appeal proved the subtlety of the foe. In the case of more cultured mental capacity, the foe always hides the ugliness of his being, and today as never before he asks for the submission of man to his sway, by presenting before the vision of man the fascinations of wealth, and the power which wealth commands. The worship of Mammon is the rendering to wealth for the sake of its power, of all that man ought to render to God. In the dethronement of God and the enthronement of man's personal desire as the governing principle behind the activity of his will, man has come to think of greatness as consisting in ability to govern and master other people, the American governing parties today. There is no way by which man may secure more power over other men than by the possession of wealth, and therefore man worships Mammon with all his soul, with his entire mind, with all his heart, because Mammon represents unlimited power.

Thus in the last analysis Mammon is the deification of human will. In projecting himself into immensity, man has magnified a will that insists upon the subservience of others, and so has come to worship a deity whose expression of godhead is mastery, and whose scepter of power is the possession of wealth.

May it not thus be said in brief, that the worship of Baal is the adoration of IMPERFECT KNOWLEDGE, resulting from the darkening of the intelligence; that the worship of Moloch is the adoration of PROSTITUTED EMOTION, resulting from the degradation of the affectional nature; that the worship of Mammon is the adoration of a DEGRADED WILL, resulting from the loss of the true governing principle behind the will of man. All this in its thousand manifestations in the idolatries of the race, and in its continued manifestation in the godlessness of the vast multitudes of the most civilized people, has issued from the fact that man being distanced from God by sin, has become ignorant of God through sin.

Thus all unconsciously out of a terrible ignorance, and, indeed, by that very ignorance, man calls for Christ; calls that is, for the shining of the true Light, in which there shall be the restoration of the true and only God, by which knowledge there shall come a destruction of the false gods, the worship of which has resulted so terribly in the history of the race and the development of religion today.