Shattering Small Gods: Awakening to the Revolutionary Light
Acts 26:1
So Agrippa said to Paul, "You have permission to speak for yourself." Then Paul stretched out his hand and made his defense:
Paul breaks down his life as a Jew and a Pharisee, and his sudden conversion on the road to Damascus. It’s a testament to transformation, testimony, and the hope of the resurrection in Christ. Despite his chains and their threats against him, Paul shares his faith unapologetically, tying it to Old Testament promises (verses 6-8, 22-23). Central to Paul’s defense is the "incredible" idea of God raising the dead (verse eight)
Acts 26:24
And as he was saying these things in his defense, Festus said with a loud voice, "Paul, you are out of your mind; your great learning is driving you out of your mind."
Festus’s outburst reveals how a limited view of God can make divine truths seem irrational or even insane. It underscores how our preconceptions shape what we’re willing to accept as possible from God, often boxing Him into human-sized expectations rather than embracing His infinite nature.
J.B. Phillips wrote his book "Your God Is Too Small", and he argues that many people, believers and skeptics alike, hold onto inadequate, "small" images of God (as a distant grandfather, a cosmic cop, or a mere resident of the universe) that fail to capture His grandeur, leading to disillusionment or rejection of faith. He draws on Scripture to expand our understanding, emphasizing a God who is both transcendent and intimately involved, much like how Paul’s testimony in Acts 26 challenges Festus’s narrow worldview. Just as Festus dismissed Paul’s resurrection hope as madness due to his "great learning" gone awry, Phillips encourages readers to dismantle those mental barriers for a fuller appreciation of God’s reality.
Phillips expresses something I must admit I also have believed about the communities of faith, and it's interesting because he uses the viewpoint of an unbeliever to express it.
"The man who is outside all organized Christianity may have…a certain reverence for God, and a certain genuine respect for Jesus Christ…But what sticks in his throat about the Christianity of the Churches is…they seem to him to have captured and tamed and trained to their own liking Something that is really far too big ever to be forced into little man-made boxes with neat labels upon them."
- Your God Is Too Small by J.B. Phillips
Phillips uses this to illustrate how faith suffers when we reduce God to fit our narrow expectations, rather than embracing His boundless capacity to act beyond them. And he goes on to critique pressured or artificial evangelism while advocating for authentic revelation through Christ's Word that can spark quick revolutions in worldview. For instance, he describes the potential for abrupt change when someone glimpses God’s true nature:
"Should the proud and self-loving man once see that God is like that, there may be, and sometimes is, a revolution in his whole scale of values."
This "revolution" mirrors the rapid persuasion Paul attempts, where a single encounter (like his own on the Damascus road) or testimony could pivot someone toward faith. On a personal level I can relate. Having experienced my own dramatic transformation from being outwardly opposed to God's plan, to adopting a genuine desire and conviction towards living fully devoted to that divine plan.
Phillips also ties this to biblical missions of revelation, noting how the early disciples underwent a swift transformation post-Resurrection:
"What changed the early disciples? …Yet within a very short time we find them…filled with an extraordinary courage and spiritual vitality."
I can relate.
Phillips highlights Paul’s own words on the Resurrection’s power:
"Jesus Christ hath abolished death,’ wrote Paul many years ago, but there have been very few since his day who appear to have believed it."
This underscores Paul's theme of "opening eyes" to eternal realities, much like Paul’s commission to turn people "from darkness to light."
Fact of the matter is, there are two realities that all earthlings, and for that matter heavenly creatures, are subject to, darkness and Light. The small gods of darkness, (those limited, man-made idols that dim our vision and vitality, typically the work of the traditions of men), verses the big God of light, (the infinite, revealing One who illuminates truth and sparks life-changing revolutions). This reflects Paul's binary presentation in Acts 26:18, where the call is to turn from Satan’s shadowy power to God’s radiant forgiveness and inheritance.
J.B. Phillips contrasts inadequate, confining views of God (which lead to spiritual "darkness", religious, cramped, joyless, or disillusioned lives) with a fuller, more biblical revelation that brings clarity, courage, and vitality (like light breaking through).
Phillips writes:
"Their god surrounds them with prohibitions but he does not supply them with vitality and courage….Their lives are cramped and narrow and joyless because their god is the same."
These "small gods" (idols really) foster a kind of inner darkness, devoid of the transformative power Paul experienced and preached. It's a blindness to revelation, which explains why they all too often avoid biblical truths. It’s like a self-imposed veil that blocks the light Paul was commissioned to bring (Acts 26:18), leaving people in a state of spiritual stagnation or cynicism, much like Festus who recoiled from the resurrection’s "madness" because it shattered his confined worldview. These small gods (idols) dim their inner lives, fostering a blindness that dodges the full, unsettling revelation of Scripture to avoid the radical change it demands. In their religious stagnation people feel wrong to be themselves, wrong to be free, wrong to enjoy beauty, wrong to expand and develop. A stunted existence under the shadow of their god's hand that leaves believers (or skeptics) stunted, and devoid of the vitality and courage that Paul’s encounter unleashed.
It's born from a fear of revelation, noting that accepting Jesus as the God of light means no more blindly blundering around in the dark, but facing reality without the cover of their rituals. With religion there is every excuse for blundering around in the dark, but in the light of God's word, there is no cover from reality. And because they strongly sense this about the nature of God's word, they shrink from committing themselves to it. It's a subconscious dodge, constructing intellectual bypasses around biblical claims in order to evade the readjustment of purpose and values that true light demands from believers, much like Agrippa’s deflection or Festus’s dismissal.
These small idyllic gods create anxious slaves of sensitive souls guilty and miserable, terrified by unattainable standards that obscure the freeing power of grace. It’s a method of controlling the masses. The blindness sidesteps Scriptures creating spiritual poverty, and dependence upon the community. In this way they promote cynicism and despair, taking the place of grace and mercy.
2 Corinthians 4:3-4
"And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God."
Their idols (small gods) aren’t just theoretical; they actively thwart the road-to-Damascus revolutions. Phillips refers to these as the “Resident Policeman”. The conception of God, which perfectly illustrates the kind of limiting idol that fosters inner darkness and a blindness to deeper revelation. This view reduces God to little more than an internalized conscience, a stern enforcer lurking in the mind to police behavior, induce guilt, and curb enjoyment, rather than a relational, life-giving Presence who inspires love and transformation like the God Paul encountered. This "conscience" comes as a "still small voice", but not to reveal the divine truth, instead this voice nags with unhappiness before, during, or after wrongdoing, compelling even harder choices and more irksome duties spoiling the light. This making conscience into god is very dangerous.
Why?
Because conscience is fallible, it can be twisted, ignored, or shaped by culture, upbringing, or propaganda, making it an unreliable "deity." Without a transcendent God to anchor "right" and "wrong", especially in His revealed Word, moral judgments become mere subjective opinions. Such a small god blinds people to biblical truths because it turns faith into rote rule-keeping, avoiding the revolutionary light of resurrection hope (like Festus dismissing Paul as mad). This explains why some dodge Scripture’s fuller revelation; facing a "big God" would demand dismantling that internal traditional cop, embracing grace over guilt, and risking the kind of swift value-revolution the apostles wrote about.
In summary, each of our "small gods" creates a form of inner darkness or blindness, dodging the revolutionary light of the gospel.
What are small gods?
Miscellaneous substitutes. God as a societal or personal magnification of our dominant traits. A negative, prohibitive force draining all joy from life. God as a source of constant disappointment when He doesn’t meet our selfish expectations. Knowledge of God filtered through our biased, distorted, or faulty sources. A distant overseer. God tamed and confined by churches or denominations into labeled systems. God as an escapist refuge for the spiritually immature. Unattainable, placid, outdated, tyrannical, or just our own nagging inner voice disguised as god. Everything and nothing at all, a pantheistic or nebulous substitute that dilutes God into irrelevance.
It's a bleak world that creates small gods. These idols collectively forge an inner veil, shielding us from the gospel’s piercing light.
Phillips himself summarizes the destructive impact of these unreal gods collectively, framing them as barriers that must be cleared:
"We can hardly be surprised if children say their prayers to a parenthesis, lovers invoke a caress in brackets, the frightened make obeisance to a fear in a fog, and the dying call upon a coloured vapour. It is God Himself we are seeking, and in our millions we are—if these inadequate ideas are the best we can find—still terribly athirst."
This thirst, he implies, stems from the darkness these small gods impose, blinding us to the "adequate God" revealed in Christ, who abolishes death’s gloom and invites the kind of swift transformation I, (and Paul), and hopefully you experienced.
Prayer:
Lord, shatter our small gods and flood our hearts with Your revolutionary light. Open our eyes to Your infinite grandeur, as You did for Paul, turning darkness to hope and chains to testimony.
In Jesus’ Holy name, Amen.