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For starters, we cannot speak univocally. “Univocal” refers to something having the same meaning as something else.
Univocal knowledge is the road to rationalism. The rationalist claims that his or her reason in and of itself can know who God is in and of himself.
equivocal
Its advocate concludes that nothing can be known truly. All knowledge is subjective, inconclusive, and indefinite.
“Analogical” means something shares similarities with something else but is not identical with it. It is not totally the same, nor is it totally different.
We are not the Creator, but the finite creature, and yet we’ve been created in the image or likeness of God. Our identity, our makeup, is analogical by definition. We image the Creator, though we are not the Creator. We mirror his glory, though we should never be confused with his glory.
Analogical knowledge is why we keep returning to God’s self-revelation in the Scriptures; we are striving to think God’s thoughts after him.
“In him [God] all that we are is possessed in a higher, fuller, purer, and limitless way.”
There is a correlation between divine and human wisdom (see Proverbs). Such continuity is what classifies wisdom as a communicable attribute of God (one that is reflected in us in some way), as opposed to an incommunicable attribute of God (one that is not in us in any sense).
cataphatic theology and apophatic theology.
“all language about things other than physical objects is necessarily metaphorical,”
Picturing God entering and exiting a scene reveals either his covenant blessing
or his judgment (e.g., the Spirit departing from Saul in 1 Sam. 16:14).
we “ascribe to God in an absolute sense all the perfections we observe in creatures.”
“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
who advises us that if we think about God, we should say to ourselves: “This is not God; God is more than this: if I could conceive him, he were not God; for God is incomprehensibly above whatsoever I can say, whatsoever I can think and conceive of him.”
they do not ask why because they are skeptics, but rather they ask because they believe and thirst to know the world’s secrets.
“As we age, however, we lose our sense of the intimate otherness of things; we allow habit to displace awe, inevitability to banish delight;
faith that brings one into his Father’s kingdom must be a childlike faith.
faith filled with wonder and awe
It is a faith that marvels at the “intimate otherness” of not just things created but the Creator himself.
God is not “conspicuously different from the polytheistic picture of the gods as merely very powerful discrete entities who possess a variety of distinct attributes that lesser entities also possess, if in smaller measure.”
God is, as Anselm so famously said, “something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought.”
Each great-making attribute is essential; subtract one and we no longer have a perfect divine being.
he must be infinite. Infinitude is the very makeup of a perfect being.
If we can think of anything that would limit God, then it cannot be true of God.
“any perfection attributed to God” must be “attributed in an unlimited degree.”
He is his attributes absolutely.
“hearts enlightened” so that they might know the “immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe” (Eph. 1:19).
Not only does Paul say that God’s power is infinite, but he assumes, even prays, that the believer can and will know, experience, and live a life defined by God’s infinite nature.
“immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places”
The same infinite power of the Almighty that raised Jesus from the tomb is at work in us who believe.
Responding is hard, not least because the unbeliever does not grasp the sinfulness of sin. More fundamentally, they have no category for who they have sinned against: an infinite God.
For it is painfully obvious there is no one who can make atonement. Such a person would have to be infinite himself to atone for a sin against an infinite God,
No, it is his divine attributes that qualify him to make atonement in the first place. Sin against an infinite God can be met only by a Savior who is himself deity—and all the perfections identical with that deity—in infinite measure.
Paul transitions from the immeasurable greatness of God’s power in Ephesians 1 to the immeasurable riches of God’s grace in Ephesians 2.
The infinite power of God that is displayed in the raising of his Son from the dead is equally manifested in the raising of our spiritually dead souls to new life.
Not only is God infinite in power, but he is infinite in mercy, infinite in grace, and infinite in kindness.
God’s aseity
be self-existent and self-sufficient.
These three are to be identified in eternity by certain eternal relations of origin or personal modes of subsisting: paternity, filiation, and spiration.
God’s aseity is wrapped up in not only his identity as Creator but his role
as Israel’s covenant Lord and Savior.
one: Israel thinks that God needs her sacrifices and therefore she can use her sacrifices to bribe God! Notice how the Creator of the universe responds to his covenant people: I will not accept a bull from your house or goats from your folds. For every beast of the forest is mine,
the cattle on a thousand hills. I know all the birds of the hills, and all that moves in the field is mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and its fullness are mine.
The point is clear: the Creator needs nothing, for he owns everything. And it is this affirmation of divine aseity that sets the tone for Israel’s relationship with him. The people are not to approach their covenant Lord as they would a god they h...
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“The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything”
God answers Job, explaining that he owes an explanation, apology, and debt to no one. Job
all that we have is from the Lord in the first place. Not one breath we take, not one minute of time, and not one single dollar is truly ours. It all belongs to the Lord,
Therefore, when we serve God and when we give to him, we should do so out of thanksgiving, remembering that all of this is his to begin with.
