Is God Dead? Killing God Off

"...The biggest and most heinous of our society's murderous rampage is that we have killed God out of our churches…"

Matthew 6:24
"No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon."

In our first post of this series, we began asking the question: Is God Dead? It’s easy to look at the world and find it lacking a reverence for God. Morality is waning, and the world waxes worse and worse, as it drifts further from the foundations that once upheld faith and virtue. But there’s a deeper, more troubling reality we must face—it's not just the world that has moved away from God; it's the church itself. In fact, one of the most insidious aspects of this cultural shift is how we, as the body of Christ, have effectively killed God off within our own walls.

Let me be clear: God hasn’t died. We haven’t lost Him, He hasn’t changed, and He hasn’t been dethroned. But what’s become evident is that we have, in many ways, forgotten Him.

When we read Matthew 6:24, Jesus speaks of the impossibility of serving two masters, emphasizing the stark reality that divided loyalty leads to spiritual dysfunction. The world we live in has become so entangled in serving multiple masters—whether it's the pursuit of wealth, self-indulgence, or secular ideologies—that God is no longer the priority He once was. And tragically, in many churches, God has become just another master, but one we no longer actively serve.

In a darkly ironic twist, our society has, in a sense, made the decision that God is the one to be cast aside. We’ve “killed Him off.” It's not that He’s been overtly rejected, but rather that He's been marginalized, reduced to a relic of the past—an old tradition or a piece of heritage rather than a living, active presence in our lives. Think about it: the Bible—once revered as the Word of God—is now often treated like an artifact, a decorative item on a shelf rather than a life-giving source of truth. We honor it, we praise it, but we rarely open it, let alone live by its commands.

This mindset has infiltrated not only secular culture but also the heart of the church. Many churches have become spiritual museums—places where God is remembered, but not experienced. We walk into services, sit through rituals, sing songs that talk about a God we believe exists somewhere in the past, but we don't expect to encounter Him in the present. God, for all intents and purposes, has been relegated to a past-tense deity, left untouched and undisturbed, as if He has no relevance to the here and now.

It’s almost as if we’ve had a spiritual funeral—a memorial service for a God who is no longer alive in our hearts and minds. We’ve become so accustomed to a stale, predictable form of worship that we no longer recognize the absence of His life-changing power. But why is this happening?

It’s easy to point fingers at secular society or at the rampant materialism and distractions that pull people away from God, but we must look inward as well. In many churches, God has become dead in the sense that we no longer expect Him to move, to speak, to heal, or to transform. We’ve become desensitized to the possibility of a divine encounter. We’ve adopted a passive faith, one where we show up, but we don't expect God to actually show up with power.

This is the core of the issue. We have made God a passive observer in our lives. We’ve dictated that He is no longer the center of our existence, that His role is simply to give us a nice moral framework, a way of helping us “feel good” and live a moral life. But we’ve traded the living, active God of the Bible for a passive deity who endorses whatever we choose to do, no questions asked. We’ve killed off the God who demands surrender, the God who calls us to be holy, the God who moves in power and authority. In His place, we’ve replaced Him with a "nice" version of God—a deity who is there when we need Him, but one who never disrupts our comfortable lives.

We’ve become so sophisticated and educated, so self-reliant, that we’ve convinced ourselves that we no longer need God. “We can do this on our own,” we say. But this mindset has only led to spiritual apathy. The church has become a social club, a place for people to gather and share nice thoughts about God, but it’s devoid of the fire, passion, and power that should characterize the body of Christ.

This apathy is most clearly seen in the way many churches today have become spiritually dead. I’ve sat through too many services where the atmosphere felt more like a funeral than a celebration. People sing songs, but there’s no heart behind them. People hear the Word, but they don't let it change them. People go through the motions, but they’re not living in the power of God’s presence. It’s as if God is absent from the very place He’s supposed to be most present.

And here’s the tragedy: We think we’re okay. We live our lives as if God is dead, but we tell ourselves, “As long as I’m doing the right things and living a decent life, I’ll be fine.” We convince ourselves that because we’re not breaking any rules, we’re in the clear. We forget that God never intended for us to just “go through the motions.” He wanted a relationship, not a religious routine.

This brings us to the most crucial question: What happened? How did we get here? How did we go from serving a powerful, living God to treating Him like a forgotten ancestor or an outdated concept? The truth is that we’ve killed Him off by living as though He is irrelevant to our lives. We’ve allowed the distractions of the world, the comforts of modern living, and the desire to do things on our own terms to push Him aside.

In the coming posts of this series, we will begin to unpack how this shift in our relationship with God has impacted not only the church but the world around us. We’ll explore how this detachment from God has led to a spiritual deadness that’s become all too common, and how we, as the church, can resurrect the living God in our lives once again. But first, we must confront the reality that we’ve allowed the death of God to take place—not in the world, but in our very hearts.