As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
“…the elegance and beauty with which God expresses His love and justice in rescuing people from eternal punishment is mind blowing. In Islam, for example, Allah capriciously grants eternal life to some and punishment to others. In this way, Allah provides love at the expense of his justice, and thus justice is left wanting.” - CPost
“Because of my stand on a young universe, a man approached me and said, ‘But it makes no sense to believe in a young universe. After all, what was God doing all that time before He created?’” - Ken Ham
“no matter how much we know, there will always be something beyond us. We cannot know God as God knows himself. Nor can we know anything in creation as God knows it.” - Frame
“Among the more academic and influential contemporary advocates of Molinism are Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig (who has proposed that Molinism is the key to a Calvinist-Arminian rapprochement)….If you have not yet encountered it, there is a good chance that either you or one of the members of your church will. ” - Ref21
Casting Crowns popularized a song titled, “In Me.” Some of the lyrics follow:
How refreshing to know You don’t need me.
How amazing to find that You want me.
So I’ll stand on Your truth, and I’ll fight with Your strength
Until You bring the victory, by the power of Christ in me.
I was impressed at the depth of these lyrics. They serve as a jumping board for my topic: He is God and we are not. Hopefully, these thoughts will serve as a tonic to remedy a popular—but weakened—view of God.
Read Part 1.
As we contemplate God’s perfections, we need to pay attention to what God has disclosed about Himself, linking these qualities together as they are linked together in His person. The perspectival aspect that is so important to grasp when we are dealing with the attributes should be remembered.
Christians can get tangled up when they consider the knotty conundrums of God’s divine sovereignty and man’s free will. How do these things go together? Well, we’re not quite sure, because our perspective is a bit limited. But, both are true.1
Of all of the theological issues that have arisen in the last couple of decades, the matter of what God is like has to be one of the most crucial. As A. W. Tozer has written, “[T]he most portentous fact about any man is…what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God” (A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, 7).
Reposted with permission from The Cripplegate.
You’ve probably heard it said. “All of the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—they all worship the same God.” More and more today, we hear such things from the mouths and tweets of idealized and uninformed westerners.
Discussion