A god of one's own making

Your weekly Dose of Spurgeon

The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from the lifetime of works from the Prince of Preachers, Charles Haddon Spurgeon.  The following excerpt is from The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, volume 47, sermon number 2,736, "The great miracle worker."

"Would you have a Bible made according to your mind,—a brand-new Bible, I suppose, once a week, for your mind changes so often that it would need constantly to be revised in order to be according to your mind? And shall God speak only such things as you would have him say? Are you to be master of his voice, and lord even of the Inspired Word?" 

There are some people who raise questions even concerning God himself. According to their notions, God should be this, or that, and almost anything but what he really is.

Jehovah, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the only living and true God, is not at all according to their taste.

Some even venture so far as to call his justness, “severity.” They would have “a God all mercy” if they could. Or they pick out some one or other of God’s attributes, and they want to have a change made in it.

What! man, is God to be made to suit thee, instead of thyself being adapted to God’s will? And is the question to be, not, “How can I be right with my Maker?” but, “How can I make my Maker right with myself?”

Is that the blasphemous turn that your thoughts have taken? It is so with some people; and, accordingly, they practically become idolaters; for, while they pretend to worship the one living and true God, yet, inasmuch as they attribute to him a character which is not his own, they do, in effect, worship a god of their own making.