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1. To right hearts, a study of God's character both attracts and repels. The attractive influences are our need of God, our thirst after Him, and the curiosity of our natures. And yet no sooner do we approach the consideration of His appalling greatness and spotless purity, than we shrink back under an oppressive sense of our demerit. Only sanctity of heart can give the power of apprehending this subject needs.

2. Our age is preeminently one of criticism and reconsideration. Every theory of science and theology is being put into the crucible. We have no anxiety about the final issue. Nothing will be lost but the dross. But this fact should not become a couch on which our indifference reclines, but rather an inspiration to us to defend the truth. Between the Bible representation of God and the God of much modern thought there are sad discrepancies. Error can change its form without disappearing. If heathens have had a god made with their own hands, modern thinkers have one cast in the mould of their wild imaginations. They may revolt at the idea of bowing before an idol; but they conceive a Deity lacking the qualities essential to the nature of Jehovah, such as righteousness, justice, and grace.

3. There are many reasons why we should seek to have right conceptions of God.

(1) Our belief will effect our life. Souls become assimilated to the object of their worship. The voluptuous worshipped Venus, etc. False and faulty conceptions of God cannot do other than result in the false and faulty character.

(2) There is an equally close connection between character and work. Our work will never be better than we are.

I. FALSE CONCEPTIONS OF GOD. The most prevalent of these are —

1. Pantheism which teaches that the universe is God, and that God is the universe. This, of course, denies His distinct existence, and affirms that God has neither intelligence, consciousness, nor will. He is not a personality who can say "I," or be addressed as "Thou." What a man would be without faculties and without consciousness, that, say they, is God without the universe. The destiny of the human soul, according to Pantheism, is its absorption into the Infinite. And, as we may well suppose, its effects have been, and still are, disastrous. It destroys all distinctions between good and evil, for they are alike the operations of God. Sin is no barrier to intercourse with God. Self is deified, for the soul is part of the Divine essence. The drapery and sophistry of this form of religion deceive the imagination and captivate the minds of some. But there will come a time when all hearts will be sick of it. The heart yearns for a personal Father to whom it can carry its burdens and tell its griefs. But that Father is not found in Pantheism, but in the personal, self-existent, glorious God of the Bible.

2. The mechanical conception of God is very different, but little less revolting. According to this "God is" — as Carlyle has worded this theory, "an absentee, sitting, ever since the first Sabbath, on the outside of His creation seeing it go." God is only present in the world by the agency of law, and law acts through the agency and tendencies of matter; while the Lawgiver Himself is, to use Martineau's words, "a remote and retired mechanician, inspecting from without the engine of creation, to see how it performs." Those who thus believe seem to leave the character of God with no other perfection than that which belongs to a great first cause, or an Almighty contriver "too vast to praise, too inexorable to propitiate, with no ear for prayer, no heart for sympathy, no arm to save." They believe in law, and that is all they do believe in. Poor mortals! We are fed, preserved, and nurtured from the cradle to the tomb by machinery. We do not hesitate to pronounce this conception of God to be false. The world is not a mere machine. Natural law is but the omnipresent expression of God's will. Law does not govern, but God — by means of law. Instead of God being "an absentee," "He is not far from any one of us," etc.

3. The poetic view of God has been propagated, by sentiment and imagination, influenced and guided largely by an unsanctified heart. A few of God's attributes are admired, but the stern integrity of His nature is forgotten. With these dreamers God is not principle, but sentiment. As to how the great Lawgiver is to act towards a broken law these visionaries never trouble themselves. The King of kings may reign, but He certainly does not govern. But such conception is false. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob still lives, and, as ever, He has thunderbolts as well as tears. He awards and avenges. Holiness and heaven, sin and hell, He has linked together with indissoluble chains. The Judge is not lost in the Father nor the Father in the Judge.

II. FAULTY CONCEPTIONS OF GOD, i.e., defective, fragmentary.

1. Perhaps there are few of us but have faulty conceptions of God.

(1) This can be partially accounted for by a consideration of our constitutional peculiarities. Most of our minds are ill-proportioned, and, as a consequence, we are apt to see only isolated fragments of God's character. We may believe in God as revealed in Scripture, and yet, certain elements of our nature being more susceptible of impression, we are apt to conceive of God as possessing only those attributes and qualities that interpret themselves to our nature. One man is overstrung with nerves; to him God is all joy — one eternal summer. But to another man "whom melancholy has marked for her own," God exhibits the hues of His own feeling. Men, whose natures are full of stern severity, are apt to view God only as a mass of spiritual strength. But there are those who revolt at this stoical conception of God, for in them the pathetic, tender, benevolent elements largely predominate.

(2) Our individual experiences have a determining force in this matter. To the Christian whose life has been one of signal success and joyous prosperity, God is the hero of a thousand battles, never once disappointed in His expectations or frustrated in His purposes. To others, life has been a melancholy blank — a series of unfinished, unsuccessful enterprises. Such are apt to forget that "the Lord reigneth," and that "out of evil He still educeth good."

2. How are we to avoid these mistakes?

(1) Let us labour after a growing likeness to God, for God only becomes real to us as His nature is unfolded within us.

(2) In our testimony for God, let us endeavour to meet every phase of human want. The needs of human souls, the conditions of human life, are infinitely various, and it will expand, ennoble, and enlarge our conceptions of God if we endeavour to show that God's character is adapted to the necessities and wants of all.

(3) Above all, we should constantly study Him who is "the image of the invisible God." The person of Christ reflects the Divine nature; His ministry the Divine mind; His death the Divine heart; His resurrection the Divine power. In the life and death of our Redeemer, justice, wisdom, love, and power, mingle their beams and shine with united and meridian splendour. There they form a glorious covenant rainbow, made up of the effulgent light of the Eternal, and tears of the Redeemer's grief.

(W. Williams.)

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KJV: Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.

WEB: because that which is known of God is revealed in them, for God revealed it to them.