Excessive religious zeal is as dangerous to the salvation of men as stubborn unbelief. Any virtue overdone becomes a vice. To honor and reverence the Lord’s anointed is a requisite of salvation; to deify them is to falsify their nature and to pervert the message with which they are entrusted. It is to make of them the object of worship in place of the God who gave us life. This most damning and dangerous practice also finds expression in the deifying of the words of the prophets.
The Pharisees of Jesus’ day had done this with the law of Moses. Their reverence was for the law rather than for the Lawgiver. They bowed the knee to the law while crucifying him of whom it testified. In our day there are those who do much the same thing, wherein they make all manner of claims for the Bible which it does not make for itself, including the idea that it is complete, final, inerrant and infallible. The effect of such verbal shrines and theological pilgrimages is to divert worship from the only true and living God to salvation in a book, rather than in the injunction of the Master who said, “Follow me” (Matthew 4:19).