by A. W. Tozer
Superstition is inherent in fallen human nature and I suppose there is no one entirely free from it.
There are two classes of men who appear to have come the nearest to getting deliverance from the bondage of superstition: the scientist who has developed a mentality that accepts nothing that cannot be proved and the philosophical skeptic who has taught himself to discount the supernatural. By denying the existence of the spiritual they reduce their hopes and fears to the ordered operation of the natural, but that seems too high a price to pay for their freedom.
With the same broom they use to sweep out banshees, wraiths and apparitions, they also sweep away angels, heaven and (may we reverently say) God Himself. Along with these go belief in prayer, fear of retribution and hope for a future life. Which all is a very unscientific and extremely irrational way to proceed, if you ask me, and especially significant since the very ones who take that way boast above everything else of their scientific minds and their rationality. The man who, in order to get rid of the fear of black cats, must also rid himself of the fear of God is a victim of his own ignorance as surely as the man who nails a horseshoe over his door to bring good luck or carries a horse chestnut in his pocket to ward off an attack of the miseries. Neither man is acting rationally.
Superstition is a child of credulity and thrives on a diet of half-truths and error. It sneaks into the assembly of the saints as did the man without the wedding garment, and unless there is someone present with the gift of discernment, it manages to pass as a true child of faith. But superstition and faith are alike only as a mushroom and a toadstool are alike; one is good nutritious food and the other contains a dangerous poison.
Faith honors God by accepting the biblical revelation of the divine character. Faith lets God be what He says He is and adjusts its concepts accordingly. Superstition degrades the reputation of God by believing things unworthy of Him. One rests upon fact and the other upon fancy.
As I said before, there is probably a streak of superstition in everyone, even in the genuine Christian. Any notions we may have of God that have not been corrected and purified by the Word and the Spirit are likely to have some element of error in them, and the religious beliefs resulting from them will of necessity contain a certain amount of superstition. The Christian who flares indignant at such a statement as this and denies that it describes him is not therefore free from superstition; he merely compounds his faults by adding bigotry and anger to the rest.
But if superstition dishonors God, is it not an evil thing and is not the Christian who harbors it guilty of serious sin against the Majesty in the heavens? The answer to these questions is not as pat as we could desire it to be. An unqualified yes or no would both be wrong. Here is the reason:
When we first come to God through Christ, we are pagans at heart and our ideas of God are likely to be a mixture of truth, half-truth, ignorance and error. Conversion lifts the veil of darkness in some measure from our minds and allows the light to shine in, but no one who is capable of self-analysis will deny that there still remains a great many shadowy images that have not yet come into clear focus. The newborn child knows God in the deeply spiritual meaning of the word know as found in John 17:3, "Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent." But this intimate, vital knowledge does not immediately result in a perfect conception of God. The mind may yet suffer from imperfect religious teaching, prejudices, mistaken judgments and faulty theological instruction; and in the exact measure that these things are present there will be unworthy and superstitious notions of God and spiritual things.
This kind of error is inevitable at first encounter with God. Let the Christian "follow on to know the LORD" (Hosea 6:3, KJV) and the margin of error will become narrower day by day and year by year as the body of truth becomes greater. So at any given moment in the Christian's life, he may be entertaining imperfect or even unworthy ideas of the Deity, but the Spirit "working unseen like a miner in the depths of the earth" is laboring to purge away the error and fill the heart with pure and lofty notions of the Triune God. While this is going on the patient heavenly Father bears with our imperfection, "for he knows how we are formed,/ he remembers that we are dust" (Psalm 103:14).
( The Size of the Soul, Chapter 36 )
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