GOD FADING OUT

Day 3

Genesis 31:53, 27:35-36, 32:24-30

GOD FADING OUT

How has God faded out of the mind of this age? Well, the age, like thoughtless children, believed that the toyland of material wealth was a sufficient world; then God faded out, smothered by preoccupation. As a prosperous New Yorker and his wife came to the small town where they had grown up, he said to her complacently, "Well, that's were we came from, dear." And she replied with an unexpected answer: "Yes, and I am wondering where we got to." She felt the emptiness amid the plenty.

Professor Summer put it this way: "I never consciously gave up a religious belief. It was as if I had put my beliefs into a drawer, and when I came again to look for them the drawer was empty."

The thing has happened to this generation that happened to the three generations of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jacob could say, "my father's God, the God of Abraham, the Awe of Isaac." (Genesis 31:42.) God was God to Abraham; he had ventured forth with Him, his "Friend"; He was intimate and firsthand and real. But in the next generation God was "the God of Isaac," but the only the "Awe of Isaac." He had faded and become secondhand. Still Isaac stood in "Awe" of his father's God. In the third generation, in Jacob, the result of this gradual fading of god began to be shown in the decaying morals of Jacob; moral rottenness appeared. He stole his brother's birthright. He was ready to take the main chance without regard to God.

The same things have happened with us: Our forefathers had a firsthand experience of God through the Evangelical Revival. Teh next generation clung to the Church for their father's sake, but God was only the "Awe," the afterglow of a fading faith. The third generation is reaping the result of a fading faith which is producing decaying morals and a decaying civilization. Our loss of God is working out in moral decay. We are going to pieces morally, for we have gone to pieces religiously. We have lost God and have thus lost the basis of morals. Jacob met God on Jabbok's banks in his midnight wrestle and emerged a new man. Unless we, like Jaco, find a moral renewal in finding God, we are done for.

Prayer

O God, I know that with the loss of Thee some chord has dropped out or my symphony. Life has lost its music; but now I see further. I see that I have no basis for action, no moral world that can make sense without Thee, I must find Thee again, as Jacob did. Amen