Creator > created

It is Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada. This past week has been building up to coming home and just taking some time to be thankful. Yet, this past week a theme that seemed to keep popping up in my life was the wickedness of human kind. Not a very fitting topic for the season.

This year at school I am leading a Discipleship Group and we are making our way through the book of Romans. For those of you who don’t know the book of Romans very well, it is a very “meaty” book of the Bible and it touches on a lot, and I mean A LOT, of topics that make you feel a little uncomfortable. So this week the passage we were looking at was Romans 1:18-32 God’s Wrath Against Sinful Humanity. As the title of the chapter suggests it’s a pretty harsh bit of scripture, but the verse that stood out to me most in this chapter was verse 21: “ For although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened”.

This verse points out that our wickedness and sinfulness is rooted in one key mistake we make. We ignore God. We turn our eyes to other things. Verse 23 of the same chapter says that we have traded in the glory of the immortal God for images. We have stopped worshipping the Creator and started worshiping the created.

My roommate and I watched the movie Blood Diamond this week and it showed what the effects of this verse are in real life. The people in that film were so obsessed with diamonds that they were willing to steal, cheat, lie, oppress, and even kill to get this diamond. All that for what is essentially a rock. Unfortunately this film was based on true events that happen frequently in Africa and other places around the globe. And when we look at the wars in the world, most, if not all, are caused by us wanting something: gold, oil, precious stones, power. All these things are rooted in us worshipping the created rather than the Creator.

“…although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him…” This weekend I want to take time to give thanks to God. Not only for the things He has blessed me with in my life, but for who He is. I want to thank God for no other reason than for being God. Because that in and of itself is something that I am thankful for with my whole heart.