A Year With the Institutes - 1.3.1-3

At the gentle prompting of David at Boomer in the Pew, I am trying to utilize a reading plan of reading John Calvin's "Institutes of the Christian Religion" in 2009. I own a copy of the book, but it has been sitting unread on my bookshelf. This on-line reading plan will give me daily readings so I do not have to pace myself. And since I do not always do well absorbing on line reading of this sort, I have the hard copy as back up and for further reflection. I have gotten off to a slow start on this but I am trying to stay on track. This excerpt from today will help quite a bit:

Indeed, even idolatry is ample proof of this conception. We know how man does not willingly humble himself so as to place other creatures over himself. Since, then, he prefers to worship wood and stone rather than to be thought of as having no God, clearly this is a most vivid impression of a divine being. So impossible is it to blot this from man's mind that natural disposition would be more easily altered, as altered indeed it is when man voluntarily sinks from his natural haughtiness to the very depths in order to honor God! "

Institutes-Book First, Chapter 3, Paragraph 1

What a thought. Even the idolatrous acknowledge the one true God through their idolatry. They probably would not recognize that fact. We cannot, even in our most base form of pseudo-worship, ignore the fact of God's existence. We, no matter how proud, will acknowledge something that we need to worship. And these thoughts must come from the existence of the one true God or we would not feel driven to idolatry in the absence of acknowledging God.


This is one to chew on and over for the rest of the day.