Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. Romans 1:25
The various heathen nations did not develop peculiar religious ideas from a place of ignorance. Rather, our ancestors deliberately departed from Eden’s perfect knowledge, and invented false religions – they changed the truth of God into a lie.
These apostate descendants of Noah worshipped the creature – that is, the creation – more than or instead of the Creator. Of the more overt examples of this deification of the forces of nature is the Egyptian crocodile god, Sobek, who was thought to control the fertilising floodwaters of the Nile. But more sophisticated and subtle delusions resulting in creation-worship have been devised.
Truth and error lay side by side. The line distinguishing between light and darkness is imperceptible; as soon as we depart from the truth, we are immediately in error. The malicious misplacement or rearrangement of inspired words is sufficient to place one on the wrong side of this line.
A modern example of those who have ‘changed the truth of God into a lie’ are trinitarian theologians who subtly altered the term ‘the Spirit of God’ to ‘god the spirit’. The former Biblical rendering is readily understood as something that pertains to God – an agency pertaining to divine nature – but not God in His entirety. Whereas the term ‘god the spirit’ leads one to conceptualise a mysterious spirit being.
We can demonstrate the huge effects of this subtle grammatical alteration through the following verse:
All the while my breath is in me, and the spirit of God is in my nostrils; Job 27:3
If one believes that ‘the Spirit of God’ is another way of saying ‘god the spirit’, they might understand that a mysterious being called ‘god the spirit’ is literally dwelling inside their nostrils. The verse below would result in the same erroneous understanding being applied to the animal creation:
Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created: and thou renewest the face of the earth. Psalm 104:30
If God is literally dwelling in human, animal, and plant life – as would be consistent with believing there is such a being as ‘god the spirit’ – then nature becomes deified in the same way as it was by pagan nations of old.
Yet the truth is that God sustains life through the agency of His Spirit, while He is physically present in heaven, as is outlined in the verse below:
Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high; Hebrews 1:3
Through His creative Word – which may also be understood as His Spirit (Psalm 33:6) – Jesus sustains all nature. Yet all the while, He is physically seated next to His Father in heaven.
Christopher Sparks