Our Perception Of God Determines Everything
Our Father; which art in heaven, how wondrous the world as seen through Ttiine eyes. The more we come to know Theey the more we begin to understand the creative world around us and above us.
Thou hast built the world to honor Thee in every possible way. Every aspect of the world reveals something of Thy character and nature. May I discover more of that perception today through Jesus Christ. Amen.
When our perception of God has been damaged or compromised, everything around us falls into confusion and turmoil. Nothing seems to make sense, and everything seems to be at odds with one another. This, as I have pointed out, is a result of man’s downfall in the Garden of Eden. The whole created world was affected by this.
“For we know,” Paul writes, “that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Romans 8:22). It is not possible for us to know what this world was like prior to the curse of sin.
Read and Learn More Things That Delight The Heart Of God
One day we shall experience that, but until then, we are laboring under this terrible curse affecting all humanity and all creation. By getting to know God, I begin to understand how things are supposed to be.
By nature, I would be considered by many a pessimist. I can look around and see everything that is wrong. When I begin to understand God, my pessimism begins to change to optimism.
My nature has been corrupted by depravity, but my new nature in Christ elevates me above the depravity level and introduces me to the glory level. I begin to see the world through divine eyes. The divine perspective, if you please, has affected everything in my life.
In my younger days, I had a deep appreciation for classical music. I enjoyed listening to it and could identify all the major classical musicians. I had great times debating who was the best classical musician and composer.
Those days are behind me now. It is not because I have grown older; it is because I have grown nearer to God. All of the beauty of that secular music and the brilliance of the composers began to fade in comparison to a simple hymn.
I readily admit most hymns cannot compare in brilliance to the great classical composers. Most hymns have flaws in the areas of composition and music. The hymn writers are not in the same class as the great composers of classical music. I get that.
However, as my relationship with God has deepened and I have gotten closer to God, something has changed within me. I no longer look at music in the same way. I am not looking for brilliance in music or composition anymore. My appreciation of hymnody has grown.
I think my attraction to hymns has to do with why and how that hymn came about. I know that the great hymn writers did not write to impress the listening audience, but out of a heart deeply worshiping God. The worship aspect has attracted me.
In the classical compositions, I was worshiping the composition. Now the great hymns of the church have brought me to the place of lifting myself into the presence of God. A hymn is not a hymn unless it lifts me into that rarefied atmosphere of adoring wonder and worship of God.
I may be able to appreciate secular music, but as I have grown in Christ, it does not have the same effect on me as it once did. My heart is stirred to levels of adoration that no secular piece of music can give me when I am reflecting upon one of the grand hymns of the church.
I believe that is why the Twenty-third Psalm is so beautiful— because it honors God. And I think that goes with the whole Bible itself. This book I hold in my hand is a shining, beautiful book.
It is lovely no matter whether it is bound in the cheapest of paper or in the most expensive leather, whether it is printed on plain paper or the finest Indian paper available; nevertheless, it is a beautiful book.
When it comes to the Bible, I have grown a little weary of the battle about translations: which translation is better, which is more accurate, which is more scholarly. I have in my library every translation of the Bible available today.
I love the Bible, and in spite of all of these translations—and many are wonder¬ful—I find myself gravitating back to the good old King James Version. This is not because it is any better as far as a translation is concerned, but there is something in this Bible that stirs my heart and lifts me above the intellectual realm into the realm of adoration.
If after reading and meditating on the Bible, I have not encountered the Living Word, I have truly read in vain. In my reading of God’s Word, I need to persist until I pierce the darkness and come into the light of His presence.
As I meditate on the Word of God, my heart is stirred, and my concept of the Bible is a direct result of my growing appreciation of God. The more I know God, the more I understand His character and nature. The more I delve into the attributes of God and the more I meditate upon His Word, the more I begin to appreciate everything around me.
My relationship with God through Jesus Christ has given me new glasses from which I can look upon the world in deep appreciation and see what God intends for me to see.
I think Christianity is the most beautiful thing in the world.
I think the Bible is the most beautiful book in the world. I think a good hymnbook is the most awesome, wonderful, beautiful thing in the world. And I think the face of an old saint is more beautiful than all the composite beauty of all the bathing beauties.
As we move toward God, all things become more beautiful, and as we move away from God, they become uglier. This is why theology is a beautiful thing. Theology is simply the study of God. It is the mind’s reasoning about God. It is the mind kneeling before God in meditative worship of God.
This kind of theology can be beautiful if it begins in God and ends in God. That is the secret. I know there are those so-called theologians who have spun theology into some technical compos¬ite of religious matters. Let them be as they are. My concept of theology is God.
I want to know God. The more I know God, the more my heart is filled with worship and adoration. As I grow nearer to God, I discover the beauty of all things pertaining to God. I believe worship is admiring the beauty associated with God.
If our theology is not full of beauty, it is simply because it is not full of God. Nothing about God is ugly. The closer we get to God, the more we appreciate what beauty is all about. When we begin moving away from God, we begin to experience the ugliness that is in the world.
This affects our concept of heaven and hell and even the earth. Some of the things being published today about heaven are so off-center with the Word of God, that I wonder where they come up with those ideas. Heaven is not a fictional place of fantasy and folklore; neither is hell.
Our Concept Of Heaven
Heaven is the place of supreme beauty because perfection is there. The perfect God, the God of unqualified beauty—He is there, and heaven is going to be beautiful. Our problem today is we are too satisfied with Earth.
After all, with a split-level house, a TV, and two cars, why would you want to go to heaven? There is no good reason for going to heaven if everything is so nice down here. Nobody chases you and comes at midnight and puts you in jail. Nobody comes and locks up your church and persecutes you. We have it too nice down here. We have it all fixed up.
Henry Ford Thomas Edison and others fixed it all up for us so we can be born in a hospital and go home, never get off the sidewalk and live our lifetime on concrete, and die in the hospital and be taken to Memorial Park, and packed away among the artificial green grass.
It is a beautiful place we live in, you know if you see it from above eye view. It is quite a beautiful place, this world; why should you want to go to heaven?
We sing about heaven an awful lot, not because we expect to get there ahead of the rest, but just because we think heaven must be a wonderful place if Jesus Christ is there. The beautiful One, the Lord of glory, the One altogether lovely—if He is there, it must be a wonderful place.
I am convinced that the average Christian needs to rethink their concept of heaven. Much of their idea of heaven has come from the world, the best things of the world are projected upward into a place called heaven. Nothing could be more discouraging if you think it through carefully.
Heaven is not the best the world has to offer. Heaven is the best God has to offer. The more we begin to know God and understand His character and nature, the more we will begin to understand what heaven is all about.
A lot of literature has been published concerning heaven and what people think it will be like. It is amazing that someone who will live a life of depravity here on earth expects to go to heaven when they die.
Their life is filled with the ugliness of the world, but somehow they believe they will go zooming off to heaven when they die. After all, everybody goes to heaven. At least that is what they are told.
I think we need to see what the Bible has to say about heaven and not what somebody out in the world has to say about it.
If a person, for example, was going on a vacation, they would get as much information about their vacation destination as possible. They would want to see brochures and maps and literature to understand a little bit about what to expect when they get there. I think the same needs to be true concerning heaven.
What Is Heaven All About?
If you could imagine the most beautiful thing here on earth, it has no comparison to the beauty of heaven. We need to understand that earth, this world about us, is under the curse of sin. Heaven will be absolutely free from all aspects of sin.
That is difficult for us who have groaned under the weight of depravity to appreciate.
As Christians, we need to cultivate a more heavenly mind. It is easy to get so caught up with the world around us that we fail to look and see the beauty of our Lord.
The hymn writer Samuel Stennett wrote of the essence of this in his hymn:
On Jordan’s stormy banks, I stand,
And cast a wistful eye
To Canada fair and happy land,
Where my possessions lie.
Stennett understood how stormy this world really was and that there was nothing here for him. Can we appreciate the beauty of heaven? In the midst of all the “stormy banks” do we take the time to “cast a wistful eye” to that “fair and happy land”?
Ah, the beauty of heaven is beyond our ability to describe or even appreciate now.
I refuse to read a book written by someone who knows more about heaven than the Bible tells us. If we get our information about heaven from sources other than the Bible, we are not going to get a view of heaven as God has it. There is so much about heaven that we do not know.
For example, I do not know where heaven is. Sometimes people look up into the air as though heaven were above them. Perhaps it is—I do not know. Not knowing where heaven is is not as important as knowing that heaven is my destination.
The technology of our generation has advanced to such a point that we can send rockets up into the air for thousands of miles. Some wonder if maybe we are now getting closer to heaven.
I do not know where heaven is, but I do know that you cannot get there on the most sophisticated technological rocket man could ever create. Man does not have the capacity to build his own pathway into heaven. Remember the Tower of Babel? For one thing, he does not know where heaven is. For another thing, what would it take to get to heaven?
With all of man’s ingenuity, he has yet to build the doorway into heaven. “I am the way,” Jesus said to His disciples, The truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). If we are going to get into God’s heaven, it is going to be by Gods way.
For me, I want nothing at all to do with man’s heaven man’s idea of heaven, or man’s perception of heaven. I have seen what man has done here on earth, and I do not want any of it to get into heaven.
Heaven is God’s domain, and it has all about it the beauty of God’s nature. Heaven is a reflection of all the attributes of God and His nature and character. It is a place where God is most comfortable and a place where God’s people will find peace and tranquility.
What we see here on earth is nothing compared to what we will see in heaven. After all, what does the world really have to offer us? We are here for only a short time anyway. The best the world has to offer is temporary.
The world tries to tempt us with gadgets and products that will bring us satisfaction, but it does so only temporarily. What God has for us is something that will last for all eternity.
Our Concept Of Hell
Once we get a slight understanding—which is as much as we can do—of heaven, we need to turn our attention to hell. We do not like to talk about hell anymore. We would much rather talk about heaven. I know I would, but the truth of the matter is, there is indeed a hell to avoid. Our problem today is we do not have a realistic view of hell.
There is nothing beautiful about hell as there is about heaven. In hell, we find only monstrous moral deformity and depravity and monstrous ugliness. Some wonder about the fire of hell.
The Bible is clear concerning the fire in hell and the lake of fire. But just for a moment, forget about the fire. Hell has such an ugliness about it that it is reported by anyone who looks into it.
The Bible clearly declares hell was made for the devil and his demons. Hell is not a place for man. The man was created for heaven.
But when sin came into the world and tarnished the image of God within man, he became disqualified for heaven. The only place that could receive him following his death was hell.
When people say a man is lost, that lostness will never be more in view than when that person actually goes to hell. He will be in a place in which he is out of place. Nothing in hell will do anything for the person in hell.
Think for a moment of a place where there is no beauty, no perfection of wisdom, no understanding of God’s nature—a place of ugliness beyond anything we know here on earth. Think of the ugliest place on earth, the most morally depraved place on earth, and it is nothing compared to the ugliness of hell.
William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, was a very passive Christian until he had a vision of hell. That vision so stirred him that he spent the rest of his life rescuing as many people as possible from that awful and terrible destination.
If we only understood what hell was all about, we would become the fiercest evangelists of our generation.
Our Concept Of The Earth
After we have seen the contrast between heaven and hell, we need to correct our perception of earth.
Heaven is a place of utter beauty, whereas hell is a place of utter depravity. Earth now falls halfway between heaven and hell. There are aspects of Earth that are simply beautiful. There are also aspects of the earth that are absolutely ugly.
To understand the contradiction here on earth, we need to get a good view of heaven and hell. We need to see that here on earth is the great battleground between heaven and hell. If I am not careful, I am tempted to believe that hell is winning.
It is easy to see the ugliness permeating through our world today. The depravity of man is raging in our generation like never before. The ability of man to be wicked, hateful, and murderous is a picture of earth’s ugliness.
We see what man is capable of and how sin rules the day, making this world a dreadful place to live. Regardless of what governments try to do, the sinful nature is on a rampage and will not cease until the end of time.
In contrast to this is the beauty of the earth. There are some things that reflect the beauty of our Creator. Redeemed men and women are reflecting into their communities the beauty of our Lord in a way that gives testimony to God’s grace. The beauty of godly living can be seen as a contrast to the depravity in our world today.
What is the responsibility of the church today? The first obligation that lies in current Christianity is to go back to God and get to know God as He is revealed in the Scriptures: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
He is terrible and wonderful and beautiful and lovely and just and severe and kind and holy and pure. You cannot joke with or fool with or pal around with God. He is the awesome God of our fathers whose almighty hand leads forth in beauty all the starry band.
The first duty of every minister of the gospel is to bring God back to the church—not the intellectual God of the academics, not the palsy God of the gospelers, not the chairman of the board, but the God who reveals himself in the Scriptures and who revealed himself supremely in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.
That God must be recaptured—that perception of God must be recaptured. We must bring God back again into our fellow¬ship, the triune God. We must cease to fool with little things, all the little things that we are doing, forgetting that we have one awful loss: the loss of our perception of a majestic God who is worthy to be worshiped.
God made us in His image and never meant for us to mirror anything less than himself. He never meant for us to have a homemade perception of God. There are two kinds of idolatry. It may be overt idolatry, where men make an idol and kneel before it.
That is at least honest. But there is another kind of idolatry, and it is the idolatry of the mind. It is thinking of the God you want and then worshiping what you think God should be.
If I wanted to worship a God that was not God, I would worship a buzzard or something else, like they do in some countries of the world, and be honest about it, instead of trying to reach up and pull the mighty God down to my own cheap perception of Him.
I think the schools ought to do something about it. I think the pulpits ought to do something about it. I think publishers ought to do something about it. I think our hymn writers ought to do something about it. Our musicians ought to do something about it.
We ought to get out of the wallow and look away to the stars, and walk out and listen for the awesome sweet voice that charmed Isaiah and David and all the saints down through the years.
Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven
Praise, my soul, the King of heaven;
To His feet thy tribute brings.
Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven,
Evermore His praises sing:
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Praise the everlasting King
Praise Him for grace and favor
To our fathers in distress.
Praise Him still the same as ever
Slow to chide, and swift to bless.
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Glorious in His faithfulness.
Featherlike, God tends and spares us;
Well, our feeble frame He knows.
Mother-like, God gently bears us,
Rescues us from all our foes.
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Widely yet His mercy flows.
Angels, help us to adore Him;
Ye behold Him face to face;
Sun and moon, bow down before Him,
Dwellers are all in time and space.
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Praise with us the God of grace. –Henry F. Lyte(1793-1847)