Here's a quote from a new book I just found out about called the "Wild Goose Chase" - by Mark Batterson.
"In the beginning, God made man in His Image.
Man has been making God in his image ever since.
Call it naturalism. Call it anthropomorphism. Call it idolatry. Call it what you will. The end result of this spiritual inversion is a god that is about our size and looks an awful lot like us. And most of our spiritual shortcomings stem from this fundamental mistake: thinking about God in human terms. We make God in our image and what we’re left with is a God who can never surprise us, never astonish us, never overwhelm us, never transcend us.
Thomas Jefferson loved the teachings of Jesus. In fact, the author of the Declaration of Independence once called them the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. But Jefferson was also a child of the Enlightenment. He didn’t have a cognitive category for miracles so Jefferson literally took a pair of scissors and cut them out of his King James Bible. It took him two or three nights. And by the time he was done, he had cut out the virgin birth; cut out the angels; and cut out the resurrection. Jefferson extracted every miracle and the end result was a book titled the Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth or what is commonly referred to as the Jefferson Bible.
Hard to imagine isn’t it? And something rises up within those of us that believe the Bible is divinely inspired by God. Part of us scoffs or scolds Jefferson. You can’t pick-and-choose. You can’t cut-and-paste. You can’t do that to the Bible. But here’s the honest truth: while most of us can’t imagine taking a pair of scissors to the Bible and physically cutting verses out, we do exactly what Jefferson did. We ignore verses we cannot comprehend. We avoid verses we do not like. And we rationalize verses that are too radical. And we may not cut them out with a pair of scissors, but the end result is the same. We are trapped by our own logic. Our lives are limited to those things we can comprehend with our cerebral cortex. And we end up in the cage of our own assumptions. And the more assumptions we make, the smaller our cage becomes."
I continually meet people who look at the miracles of the Bible and what Jesus did and dismiss what they can't comprehend. Ok, I must be honest - I do the same thing too. How often do I read that Jesus fed the five thousand or walked on water and thought - that can't happen now --- but then where is my faith?
How much faith do you really have? Do you really believe all the miracles of Jesus? Careful if you read this and say - oh yes!
What about this verse..."When Jesus had called the Twelve together, he gave them power and authority to drive out all demons and to cure diseases, 2 and he sent them out to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick." New International Version. (Lk 9:1-2).
Can you believe God has called us to live in this way of faith? Or would rather form God into our own image?
