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The following message for the moment is delivered by the Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler Thielman. Today's sermon is entitled "On Letting God Grow Up." The scripture reading of the morning is 1 Samuel, chapter 5. I begin the reading at the verse numbered 1. "When the Philistines captured the Ark of God, they carried it from

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Ebenezer to Ashdod. Then the Philistines took the Ark of God and brought it into the house of Dagon and set it up beside Dagon. And when the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, behold, Dagon had fallen face downward on the ground before the Ark of the Lord. So they took Dagon and put him back in his place. But when they rose early on the next morning, behold,

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Dagon had fallen face downward on the ground before the Ark of the Lord, and the head of Dagon and both his hands were lying cut off upon the threshold. Only the trunk of Dagon was left to him. And this is why the priests of Dagon and all who enter the house of Dagon do not tread on the threshold of Dagon in Ashdod until this day." May God bless to us and to our understanding this

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reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. We are all rather talented at creating our own gods. It's so nice, you see, to have a God who always agrees with you. And the Philistines demonstrate this kind of thinking. They had captured the Ark of the Covenant. Now, the Ark of the Covenant was a wooden box about

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four and a half feet long, two and a half feet high, and two and a half feet wide. It was covered over with gold. Within it were the Ten Commandments and other items of the holy history of the people of Israel. And they carried about with them, wherever they went, this Ark, which was the symbol of the presence of God. It became, if you will, a kind of portable worship center. Now,

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when the Philistines captured it, they took it to their temple dedicated to their god, Dagon, and they set it beside the statue. And the next morning, when they came into their temple, they found that the statue of Dagon had fallen from its pedestal and was face down before the Ark of the Covenant. So they proceeded to prop him up once more. Now, that, of course, is an

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essentially irrational act, because if Dagon was really a god, he should have been able to get up on his own pedestal. But that did not deter them, because while it may be irrational, it was a natural act. Because, you see, Dagon was the god they had created. They had made him in their image. He met their needs insofar as they understood them. So they were not about to start

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some death of god theology. So they propped up Dagon once more. And the next morning, when they came into the temple, they discovered that again the statue of Dagon had fallen face down before the Ark, only this time it had broken into four pieces. Here is this smashed, false god, Dagon, lying in pieces before the calm, serene, beautiful, and power-filled Ark of the Covenant between the

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true God and his people Israel. So what did the Philistines do? Well, they sent the Ark back to the Israelites and proceeded to set up Dagon and to continue to worship him. It's so nice, you see, to have a god who always agrees with you. That was true 3,000 years ago, and it is true now. All of us, you see, are tempted to make god in our own image. We don't want a god who is too far beyond

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our understanding. We don't want god to grow up beyond our ideas of what god ought to be. The archaeologists have told us a lot about this false god, Dagon. The Philistines were divided into two groups. There were those who were fishermen and there were those who were farmers. And in the areas where the fishermen lived, Dagon was always made to appear with scales on him, just as a fish

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has scales. But in the agricultural areas, Dagon was always represented as being covered with kernels, just like an ear of corn. Each group, you see, suited Dagon to fit their own understanding of what he ought to be. And there are many who do this, who proceed to carve their god out of their own ideas and their own prejudices. And then they say, "Look, isn't it wonderful? Our god looks

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just like us. He shares our ideas, he shares our goals, and he shares our values. He never disagrees with us." The question is, has God made you in his image or have you made God in your image? Archbishop Temple, one of the great Anglican bishops of all history, said on one occasion, "If your conception of God is radically false, the more devout you are, the worse off you're going to be. You are opening

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your soul to be molded by the base, and it would be better for you to be an atheist." And that's absolutely true. If the Philistines, for example, had been atheists and seen and begun to recognize and learn about the Ark of the Covenant and the true God that it represented, then they might have bowed down and worshipped that God. But because they had already made a god to satisfy their own

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desires, Dagon, they were unwilling to turn toward the one true God. And they kept propping up Dagon, no matter how many times he fell, no matter how smashed to bits he was. It's so nice to have a God who always agrees with you. Now, this Ark of the Covenant had essentially two functions. The first function was to carry the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were written and various

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other articles of Israelite religious history. Now, one of those commandments you will remember is this, "Thou shalt make unto thee no graven image." Now, literally that means, don't inhibit, don't deter, don't try to contain God into your ideas. God says, "My thoughts are beyond your thoughts. You can't even begin to imagine my fullness, so you cannot make an image of me. I

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am what I am." And every definition of God that we try to fashion ends up becoming, in the end, inadequate. Take the definition of God which we use most frequently in the Presbyterian Church. It is derived from the Westminster Confession of Faith, one of our most precious documents. You've heard it many times. God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable. In his being, wisdom,

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power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. All right, it begins, "God is a spirit." That's true, but the Bible also teaches us that God is Father and Son. It says that God is infinite. The word "infinite" only appears in the Bible three times, and there are places where God is described as being quite finite. We say that God is eternal, but we really don't know what "eternal" means,

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because eternity is outside of time, and all of us are within time, and thus our thinking is bound by time. We say in that definition that God is unchangeable, and yet the Bible says that there are times when God changes his mind, and there are times when God changes his plans. That definition talks about the being of God, but the Bible never uses the word "being" with regard to God. Now,

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I'm not belittling that definition. That's a great definition, an affirmation of God, but it does not define everything that God is, and if we cannot describe God adequately in a carefully crafted creed, then how much less can individuals manufacture a God out of their own prejudices and their own preferences? You see, God is not interested in his feeling about things as we do.

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He wants us to feel about things as he does. Let me give you a personal example of what I mean. I was reared in a religious tradition in which the Bible was seen as being verbally inspired. Each and every word of it was absolutely perfect. It was without error from the beginning to the end. Now, it was acknowledged that this perfection of writing applied only to the original documents,

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and it was also acknowledged that across the years, in copying these documents over and over, some mistakes might have crept in. But essentially, the Bible was absolutely, perfectly infallible, whether it was talking about religion or science or history or any other discipline or field of conversation that you might think about. That's the tradition from which I came, far more strict

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than our Presbyterian tradition today. But I began to ask myself some questions. If this Bible is the perfect expression of God's Word, perfection implies completeness. Something can be perfect and still something cannot be perfect and at the same time incomplete. And so if we believe that the Bible is perfect in every word, then that means God has had nothing to say since it was

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written. And if that is the case, then why do we pray? The Bible approves of slavery. It approves of polygamy. It approves of stoning to death disobedient children. Did I believe those things? No, I did not believe those things. The sign that was put up over Jesus' head when he was crucified, it's reported three places in the gospel and each place, the words on the sign

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are different one from the other. At one place, the Bible says that David killed Goliath. At another place, it says that David and Elhanan killed Goliath. The chronologies of the kings, which appear in Chronicles and in the Book of Kings, do not agree with one another. Who was the first person to get to the tomb on Easter morning? Each of the Gospels describe a different

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person as getting there first. And who do they meet when they got there? One gospel says there was an angel, another gospel says there was two angels, another says there was a young man, and then another says that Jesus himself was met there. Well, in the light of these questions, I began to study the doctrine of Scripture very thoroughly. And I discovered in the first place

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that in the ancient church, there was no belief that every word in the Bible was absolutely correct. The Reformers, Calvin, Luther, Knox, Zwingli, Beza, they did not teach that. The Westminster Confession of Faith, which is usually seen to be the most conservative affirmation of faith in the Presbyterian tradition, does not maintain this. This whole idea of the perfection

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of the Scriptures in every jot and tittle, in every sentence and syllable, comes from a man named Turretini, or it was shortened into the Swiss form of Turretin. Turretin was bothered by the fact that the Roman Catholics were coming back after the Reformation and regaining places which they had lost to Protestantism. So in order to make Protestantism stronger, Turretin taught

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that its Bible was absolutely perfect. And all you had to do, you see, to repulse any Roman Catholic who placed his ultimate faith in the church was to say, "I place my ultimate faith in a perfect Bible." Those ideas of Turretin passed down in a very narrow historical stream, but it so happened that some of those who were in that stream were named Warfield and Hodge. And Warfield and Hodge

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were two of the professors who came over and influenced what Princeton Theological Seminary became. And it was out of that seminary that this idea of the absolute perfection and inerrancy of every word in the Bible came. So I began to do some careful exegesis. I looked at every verse in the Bible in which the Bible talks about itself, and I found that there was no place

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where the Bible describes itself as being absolutely flawless. And that could explain to me why it was that in the New Testament you find characters correcting what was in the Old Testament. They would not have to correct them if they were perfect, but Paul corrected the Old Testament, Peter corrected the Old Testament, Jesus corrected the Old Testament. These people said that the

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Bible was perfect because it was inspired of God, but there's no place in the Bible where it says that inspiration means perfection. I was still bothered with this one question, however. If I say that part of the Bible, the part that has to do with science or history or things of that kind, if I say that in that there may be some errors here and there, wouldn't it become too easy for

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me to throw out any part of the Bible that I didn't agree with? Well, as I wrestled with that question, I came to the conclusion that to say that something is made by way of a mistake in honesty is not to say that everything that that person says or writes is going to be, because of that one mistake, equally wrong. The fact that someone makes an error in one thing that they

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tell you, not deliberately, perhaps they do not have sufficient knowledge to speak perfectly on the subject, as the early biblical writers, for example, did not understand astronomy and things of that kind. Because they make a mistake there, that doesn't mean that every word that these individuals say is therefore not to be trusted. And I became aware as I looked at people who held

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to this verbal plenary infallibility idea of the Bible, I became aware that they were always looking for black and white answers. They didn't want to have to wrestle with the teaching of Scripture. They wanted to parrot a theology which had come into being many, many years before in a very small part of the Christian faith. There is a wise word which goes, "He that cannot reason is a fool,

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teach him. He that will not reason is a bigot, chasten him. He who dares not reason is a slave, free him." So I began to seek to be freer in my understanding of the faith. I moved to what is the Presbyterian view, that when the Bible speaks about matters of the Christian faith or how to live it, it speaks absolutely perfectly. But in some historical matters and in some scientific

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matters, things of that kind, there are possibly errors. Make no mistake, I love this book. I study this book every day of my life. I read it devotionally as well as studying it exegetically. This is a unique book. There is no other book like it. It is indispensable to Christian growth. You can't develop as a Christian if you do not learn this book. This word is what our confession

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of 1967 describes it as being, God's word written. When it speaks of our Christian faith and the way to live it, it is absolutely infallible. But this book is not God. You cannot contain God in paper any more than you can contain God in a wooden idol. God is alive. He is active. He is in movement. He is contemporaneous. He is seeking to direct our lives now. And we are meant to pursue God and to

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seek always to have greater understandings of this God who is regularly revealing more and more of himself. And that means that we're to shake off the things we learned in Sunday school 30 or 40 or 50 years ago and to wrestle with issues as they are confronted by us honestly in the faith today. This means that we don't let our prejudices or our history cripple our understanding of what the

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word of God is. This means that when our idea of God begins to crack and fall, we don't prop it up. We let it fall. God is at work altering our altitude. The secret is, you see, to keep one's heart closed on Jesus and one's mind open to all other possibilities. Now I mention Jesus because Jesus was present there in that temple of Dagon also. I said that the Ark had two principal purposes.

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One was to contain the Ten Commandments and other items, but it had a second purpose. It was covered over with gold and the top of it was ornamented with two golden statues of cherubim, which were high-ranking angels. And they were arranged in such a way that their wings curved up above them and almost touched in the middle over the lid of the box. And that space in there between the lid

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of the box and the wings of the cherubim was called the mercy seat. And God said to his people, "I shall appear in a cloud to meet with you at the mercy seat." And that was why when the Jewish high priest sought to pray, he would go into that place where the Ark of the Covenant was and he would say his prayers right there before that Ark, right there before that mercy seat. And once a

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year he would go into that place with blood, fresh blood, and he would sprinkle it upon that seat. And that represented the people's willingness to offer their very lives in atonement for their sin. They were willing to bleed and to die. This represented this concept. And from this, they would be forgiven by God. The mercy seat, then, you see, was the place where God and men

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met, and it was also the place where blood was shed for the forgiveness of sin. Now in Romans chapter 3, the Apostle Paul, talking about Jesus, says this, "Whom God set forth as a propitiation through faith in his blood." And that word, "propitiation," is the same word which is rendered in the Old Testament Hebrew as "mercy seat." Paul is saying that Jesus is the mercy seat.

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Jesus is the place where God and man meet. He was the God-man. And Jesus is the place where blood is poured out for the atoning act that forgives people of their sin. And Jesus, of course, was that one who died upon the cross that we, through his cross and through his sacrifice, through his shedding of his life's blood, might be saved. The Bible says that Jesus is the image of the

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invisible God. So if you want to see God, look at Jesus. Notice, of course, that we don't have a word that he ever wrote. We have no photographs of him. He did not permit himself to be locked on paper or onto film. He lived amongst us and he said this, "If you see me, you see the Father." The central doctrine of the Christian faith, my friends, is not the deity of Christ. The central

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doctrine of the Christian faith is the Christ-likeness of God. So every idea that we have of God, we must hold up against Jesus. And if it falls short of Jesus, then we throw out that idea. And every idea of God which we have, we hold up against Jesus. And if it meets the measure of the Master, then we can include that in part of our understanding. We need to see Christ and to study

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Christ and to surrender to Christ and to lose ourselves in the love of Christ. And as we do this, we discover the joy and the power of true believing. The scriptures call Jesus the mercy seat. They call him the Son of man and the Son of God. They call him the Son of David and the They describe him as the servant of God.

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He is called the shepherd, the good shepherd, the divine physician. He is described as savior and as prophet and as priest and as king. He is pictured as the great cornerstone of the church. He is the bridegroom. He is the bread of life.

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He is the light of the world. He is the door. He is the vine. He is the way. He is the truth.

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He is the life. He is the firstfruits of the resurrection. He is the judge. He is the lamb of God.

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He is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He is the scapegoat. He is the forerunner. He is the surety.

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He is the mediator. He is the beloved. He is the chosen of God. He is called the just one.

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He is called the great amen. He is described as he that shall come. He is alpha and omega. He is the beginning and the end.

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He is the head of the church. He is the firstborn of all creation. He is the Lord. He is the bright and the morning star.

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He is the word of God. And he is also our friend. For he said, "I do not call you servants. I call you friends."

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And that ought to be enough to satisfy us. So that we do not have to manufacture any God of our own. There is no need for us to seek to improve upon his perfection. He comes to us as he came to the disciples by the lakeside so many years ago.

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And he speaks to us as he spoke to them. And he says, "Follow me." And as we set ourselves to our tasks, as we obey him,

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whether we be wise or simple, sophisticated or unsophisticated, in serving him, he is more and more revealed to us. It is as we toil,

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it is as we labor, it is as we suffer for him, that he shows us the Father. Within our own experience of Christ,

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we discover who God truly is. Let us pray. Oh God our Father, it stuns our hearts that you came into life in the person of a little baby. We love you for that.

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But oh God grant that we don't try to keep you. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]