Thanksgiving and Idolatry Don’t Mix
November 22, 2017 § 1 Comment
Thankfulness is an integral part of knowing and worshiping God. That’s a perspective that Albert Mohler shared on his daily The Briefing program based on a few passages in the Bible that don’t normally get pulled out around Thanksgiving time.
“For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, namely, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.” (Romans 1:19-23)
Often this passage is an apologetic for knowledge we all have of our Creator, the existence of Whom can be inductively reasoned from observing creation. But in verse 21, those who reject God “did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him.” Rejecting God logically, but maybe not intuitively, goes right along with not being thankful to Him for all He provides. A lack of thankfulness indicates idolatry. The absurdity in feeling thankful at Thanksgiving (which almost everyone does) while rejecting God as the ultimate provider is that we are crediting everything to no one.
Here is where Paul places absence of thankfulness in his 2nd letter to Timothy: “… in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.” (2 Timothy 3:1-5).
Right there in verse 3, “ungrateful” is among the descriptors of the evil people we should avoid. Though not intuitively, a lack of thanksgiving goes hand-in-hand with all kinds of wickedness.
We try to impress on our son the need for a thankful heart, specifically in our prayers. Even at age 4 or 5, my wife and I were happy to hear him pray before meals and at bed time. At first I dismissed the content of his prayers as childish, because he would thank God for things like trees, grass, and “the ground we can stand on”, along with other aspects of nature. But when I think about the connection between observing God’s creation and thankfulness, I began to see my son’s simple prayers as profound. Am I that thankful for the many things I take for granted, foundational realities like “the ground we can stand on”? In teaching children, we can actually learn a lot ourselves.
With a contrite heart, David wrote in Psalm 106:
“Both we and our fathers have sinned;
we have committed iniquity; we have done wickedness.
Our fathers, when they were in Egypt,
did not consider Your wondrous works;
they did not remember the abundance of Your steadfast love,
but rebelled by the sea, at the Red Sea.
Yet He saved them for His name’s sake…”
(Psalm 106:6-8a)
May we not forget God’s wondrous works and the abundance of His steadfast love, a love that drove God to offer, through Jesus Christ, forgiveness and salvation even to forgetful, rebellious, and ungrateful people. “Thanks be to God for His inexpressible gift!” (2 Corinthians 9:15). And I would echo my son’s prayer: “Thank you for the ground we can stand on!”
God&Neighbor 
Good post.
Shrink your image