More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 30 - June 5, 2020
For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that “nothing happens” when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand. C. S. LEWIS, “ON THE READING OF OLD BOOKS”
If you’ve ever read John Bunyan’s famous allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress, then you know that picking the right friends to travel with can be the difference between reaching the celestial city and not. Friends can corrupt us, or they can lead us home.
“We are speaking of God. Is it any wonder if you do not comprehend? For if you comprehend, it is not God you comprehend. Let it be a pious confession of ignorance rather than a rash profession of knowledge. To attain some slight knowledge of God is a great blessing; to comprehend him, however, is totally impossible.”
“The infinite cannot be contained in the finite. God exists infinitely and nothing finite can grasp him infinitely.” Aquinas concludes, “It is impossible for a created mind to understand God infinitely; it is impossible, therefore, to comprehend him.”
some believed they could determine who God is simply by means of using their reasoning powers alone. The Bible could be set aside for good; reason was enough. As time passed, it became evident that the Enlightenment experiment had failed. War, for example, exposed the fact that humanity is not morally neutral but corrupt. The ill use of reason demonstrated that humanity was desperately in need of special revelation after all. Autonomous reason was not so autonomous, as it turned out. In fact, it was idolatrous, attempting to remove God from his throne and replace the Creator’s authority with
...more
In short, it is silly to say that “knowing” limits God when our knowledge itself is completely dependent on the one known.
“In him [God] all that we are is possessed in a higher, fuller, purer, and limitless way.” God is the one who “donates everything that we are to us out of his infinite plenitude of being, consciousness, and bliss.”
Sin against an infinite God cannot be atoned for by a Savior who has emptied himself of his divine attributes. 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.
As Lord of heaven and earth, he does not need humans, nor is he served by human hands. If he were, then creation would be Lord instead of him.
if God is self-sufficient, then so also must he be self-attesting, since he is the very criterion for truth, just as he is for morality. God does not merely possess the truth, know the truth, and speak the truth; he is the truth. To know the truth, everyone must look to him because he is the very standard of truth. He is truth in and of himself, independent of any other.
“For anything that is great through something else is less than that through which it is great.”
What good news it is, then, that the gospel depends on a God who does not depend on us.
But remember, the being of God is “infinitely simple, hath nothing in himself which is not himself, and therefore cannot will any change in himself, he being his own essence and existence.”
“God neither obeys the moral order, nor does He invent it,” says Katherin Rogers. “He is Goodness Itself, and all else that is good is good in imitation of God’s nature.”
“All that is creaturely is in process of becoming. It is changeable, constantly striving, in search of rest and satisfaction, and finds this rest only in him who is pure being without becoming.”
The Father’s love for us is as unchanging as his love for his Son, Jesus Christ.
“God in Auschwitz and Auschwitz in the crucified God—that is the basis for a real hope.”23
as Anselm labels it, no “temporal present.”
“God sees all things together, and not successively,” says Aquinas.
Christianity is not about coming to God so that he can direct us to something or someone better than himself, some other thing that will make us ultimately happy. No, God himself is the one in whom all our joy, pleasure, and happiness are found.
God is present everywhere equally, even if he is present somewhere uniquely.
“going to God and seeking his face does not consist in making a pilgrimage but in self-abasement and repentance.”
“No matter where you flee, he is there. You would flee from yourself, would you? Will you not follow yourself wherever you flee? But since there is One even more deeply inward than yourself, there is no place where you may flee from an angered God except to a God who is pacified. There is absolutely no place for you to flee to. Do you want to flee from him? Rather flee to
Anselm corrects our misconception: “For he who can do these things can do what is not good for himself and what he ought not to do. And the more he can do these things, the more power adversity and perversity have over him and the less he has against them. He, therefore, who can do these things can do them not by power but by impotence.”
So it is with God. His power is just as powerfully manifested in what he cannot do as what he can do.
As Augustine remarks, “God does not know all creatures . . . because they exist; they exist because he knows them.”
Francis Schaeffer famously has said, with a very big God in mind, that there “are no little people.”
“I AM” means not only “I am the one who is” but “I am the one who is . . . with you.”
