God’s gifts now take the place of God
Within him was God; without, a thousand gifts which God had showered upon him.
Randy Alcorn in his book Money, Possessions, and Eternity quotes A.W. Tozer's The Pursuit of God. These are wonderful truths that should be considered by all.
The genesis of materialism was in the Garden of Eden, when the first man and woman chose to follow their appetites rather than God, seeking fulfillment in the one thing he had told them was forbidden. A. W. Tozer describes the ongoing results of their sin and ours:
Before the Lord God made man upon the earth, He first prepared for him a world of useful and pleasant things for his sustenance and delight. . . . They were made for man’s use, but they were meant always to be external to the man and subservient to him. In the deep heart of the man was a shrine where none but God was worthy to come. Within him was God; without, a thousand gifts which God had showered upon him.
But sin has introduced complications and has made those very gifts of God a potential source of ruin to the soul.
Our woes began when God was forced out of His central shrine and things were allowed to enter. Within the human heart things have taken over. Men have now by nature no peace within their hearts, for God is crowned there no longer, but there in the moral dusk stubborn and aggressive usurpers fight among themselves for the first place on the throne.
This is not a mere metaphor, but an accurate analysis of our real spiritual trouble. There is within the human heart a tough, fibrous root of fallen life whose nature is to possess, always to possess. It covets things with a deep and fierce passion.
The pronouns my and mine look innocent enough in print, but their constant and universal use is significant. They express the real nature of the old Adamic man better than a thousand volumes of theology could do. They are verbal symptoms of our deep disease. The roots of our hearts have grown down into things, and we dare not pull up one rootlet lest we die. Things have become necessary to us, a development never originally intended. God’s gifts now take the place of God, and the whole course of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution.
