Consider: man is obliged to acknowledge God out of gratitude and out of respect for his own intelligence.
Out of gratitude. God created man and granted him the ineffable gift of life and provided him with the super-ineffable gift of Grace. When man lost Grace through his own fault, he heard a great promise being made to him: “I will give Grace back to you”. It is God, the offended party, Who says so to the offender, as if He, God, were guilty and obliged to make amends. And God keeps His promise. Behold, I am here to give Grace to man. God has not confined Himself to giving only what is supernatural, but He has lowered His Spiritual Essence to provide for the coarse necessities of man’s flesh and blood, and He gives the heat of the sun, the relief of water, corn, vines, all kinds of trees and all races of animals. Thus man received from God all the means of life. He is the Benefactor. Man must be grateful and show his gratitude by endeavouring to know Him.
Out of respect for one’s own reason. A madman and an idiot are not grateful to those who cure them, because they do not understand the true value of the cure. And they hate those who wash them and feed them, who accompany them and put them to bed, who watch that they do not get hurt, because beastly as they are on account of their illness, they mistake cures for tortures. The man who fails in his duties towards God disgraces himself, a being gifted with reason. Only a fool or an idiot cannot tell his father from a stranger, a benefactor from an enemy. But an intelligent man knows his father and his benefactor and takes pleasure in knowing him better and better, also with regards to things of which he is unaware, as they happened before he was born or before he was helped by his father or benefactor. That is what you must do with the Lord to show that you are intelligent and not brutes.
But too many people in Israel are like those fools who do not know their father or their benefactor.