Life Without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23

by Dallas Willard

So God’s essential nature can be characterized in this way: God is an immaterial, intelligent, and free personal being, of perfect goodness, wisdom and power, who made the universe and continues to sustain it, as well as to govern and direct it in his providence.3 Or consider carefully this description of God by the nineteenth-century Methodist theologian and biblical scholar Adam Clarke: The eternal, independent, and self-existent Being: The Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself, without foreign motive or influence: He who is absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, the most spiritual of all essences; infinitely benevolent, beneficent, true and holy: The cause of all being, the upholder of all things; infinitely happy, because infinitely perfect; and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made; illimitable in his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of existence, and indescribable in his essence; known fully only by himself, because an infinite mind can only be comprehended by itself. In a word, a Being who, from his infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived; and, from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just, right, and kind.