John Calvin on God's Opposition to Idols, Part I

"As Scripture, in accommodation to the rude and gross intellect of man, usually speaks in popular terms, so whenever its object is to discriminate between the true God and false deities, it opposes him in particular idols; not that it approves of what is taught more elegantly and subtly by philosophers, but that it may the better expose the folly, no, madness of the world in its inquiries after God, so long as everyone clings to his own speculations.  This exclusive definition, which we uniformly meet with in Scripture, annihilates every deity which men frame for themselves of their own accord - God himself being the only fit witness to himself.  Meanwhile, seeing that this brutish stupidity has overspread the globe, men longing after visible forms of God, and so forming deities of wood and stone, silver and gold, or of any other dead and corruptible matter, we must hold it as a first principle, that as often as any form is assigned to God, his glory is corrupted by an impious lie" (Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin).