An elementary truth claim of Christianity is that God is a “Person”. Not a thing. Not a force. Not a principal of reason or intangible construct, or a feeling.
But what does that mean?
We may smirk at the practice of people in the Bronze Age who constructed gods out of hand-made objects and worshiped them. We may think ourselves better than primitive people who worshiped the sun, moon, mountains, and trees. We may not worship physical objects anymore (most of us), but are we any different than they?
When we conceive of God as a force indistinct from the universe, we are doing the same thing, albeit with more subtlety. Our concepts of God may be more sophisticated than most people in primitive cultures in the past, but only in degree.
When we approach think of God as an intellectual construct or a feeling, we may be walking in the footsteps of our primitive ancestors. The same is true when we view God as an abstract idea. An abstract idea, or ideal, is still a thing. Not a thing made of human hands, but a thing imagined by human intellect.
When we construct a god, whether by our hands or in our minds, or view God as indistinct from the universe, we are not perceiving God in the way He is revealed in the Bible. These are constructs are “idols” that are poor substitutes for the “person” of God.
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