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It is not a cheerful thought that millions of us who live in a land of Bibles, who belong to churches and labor to promote the Christian religion, may yet pass our whole life on this earth without once having thought or tried to think seriously about the being of God.
To this I reply that, because we are the handiwork of God, it follows that all our problems and their solutions are theological.
We can never know who or what we are till we know at least something of what God is. For this reason the self-existence of God is
So what about our violent horrible tendencies
Think God away and man has no ground of existence.
That God is everything and man nothing is a basic tenet of Christian faith and devotion;
I thought God loves us dearly
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made.” That is how John explains it, and with him agrees the apostle Paul: “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him;
One of the marks of God’s image in man is his ability to exercise moral choice. The teaching of Christianity is that man chose to be independent of God and confirmed his choice by deliberately disobeying a divine command.
A moral being, created to worship before the throne of God, sits on the throne of his own selfhood and from that elevated position declares, “I AM.”
after Peter had preached the first great Christian sermon.
What about Sermon on the mount
Any motion in His direction is elevation for the creature; away from Him, descent.
was a demonstration, not of unveiled deity but of perfect humanity. The awful majesty of the Godhead was mercifully sheathed in the soft envelope of Human nature to protect mankind.
This, this is the God we adore, Our faithful, unchangeable Friend, Whose love is as great as His power, And neither knows measure nor end. ‘Tis Jesus, the first and the last, Whose Spirit shall guide us safe home; We’ praise Him for all that is past, And trust Him for all that’s to come.
For a moral being to change it would be necessary that the change be in one of three directions. He must go from better to worse or from worse to better; or, granted that the moral quality remain stable,
And all things as they change proclaim The Lord eternally the same. –Charles Wesley
There are still the seven thousand who have not bowed their knees to Baal.
Neither does He change His mind about anything.
God never changes moods or cools off in His affections or loses enthusiasm. His attitude toward sin is now the same as it was when He drove out the sinful man from the eastward garden, and His attitude toward the sinner the same as when He stretched forth His hands and cried, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
nor talked into answering selfish prayer.
He possesses perfect knowledge and therefore has no need to learn.
But it is more: it is to say that God has never learned and cannot learn.
From there it is only a step to the conclusion that God cannot learn. Could God at any time or in any manner receive into His mind knowledge that He did not possess and had not possessed from eternity, He would be imperfect and less than himself.
am the Lord, I change not,”
He doth give His joy to all; He becomes an infant small; He becomes a man of woe; He doth feel the sorrow too.
Think not thou canst sigh a sigh And thy Maker is not by; Think not thou canst weep a tear And thy Maker is not near. O! He gives to us His joy That our griefs He may destroy; Till our grief is fled and gone He doth sit by us and moan.
Thou, O Christ, who wert tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin, make us strong to overcome the desire to be wise and to be reputed wise by others as ignorant as ourselves.
Indeed, when seen from the lofty peak of Sinai or Calvary, the whole history of the world is discovered to be but a contest between the wisdom of God and the cunning of Satan and fallen men.
All God’s acts are done in perfect wisdom, first for His own glory, and then for the highest good of the greatest number for the longest time. And all His acts are as pure as they are wise, and as good as they are wise and pure. Not only could His acts not be better done: a better way to do them could not be imagined. An infinitely wise God must work in a manner not to be improved upon by finite creatures.
“And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
Voltaire in his Candide introduces a determined optimist, whom he calls Dr. Pangloss, and into his mouth puts all the arguments for the “best-of-all-possible-worlds” philosophy.
In spite of tears and pain and death we believe that the God who made us all is infinitely wise and good.
Any faith that must be supported by the evidence of the senses is not real faith.
“Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”
“I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be forever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it: and God doeth it, that men should fear before him.”
Most of us go through life praying a little, planning a little, jockeying for position, hoping but never being quite certain of anything, and always secretly afraid that we will miss the way.
Here is His promise: “And I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; I will lead them in paths that they have not known: I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight. These things will I do unto them, and not forsake them.”
Our Heavenly Father, we have heard Thee say, “I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect.”
In the time of his vision John the Revelator
“Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.
And that is what omnipotent means, having all power.
Where the sacred writers saw God, we see the laws of nature.
Science observes how the power of God operates, discovers a regular pattern somewhere and fixes it as a “law.”
The uniformity of God’s activities in His creation enables the scientist to predict the course of natural phenomena. The trustworthiness of God’s behavior in His world is the foundation of all scientific truth.
the most horrendous that I have seen being that supplied by Rudolph Otto: “The absolute, the gigantic, never-resting active world stress.”
The Christian delights to remember that this “world stress” once said “I AM” and the greatest teacher of them all directed His disciples to address Him as a person: “When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.”
Since He has at His command all the power in the universe, the Lord God omnipotent can do anything as easily as anything else. All His acts are done without effort. He expends no energy that must be replenished. His self-sufficiency makes it unnecessary for Him to look outside of Himself for a renewal of strength. All the power required to do all that He wills to do lies in undiminished fullness in His own infinite being.
On the 7th day he rested
Nothing is too hard for Jesus, No man can work like Him.
God is spirit, and to Him magnitude and distance have no meaning. To us they are useful as analogies and illustrations, so God refers to them constantly when speaking down to our limited understanding.
And in their judgment the whole civilized world concurs, for the little girl can love and laugh and speak and pray, and the mountain cannot.
No! Priorities have shifted because she is in danger. She always smiled and laughed. And who weighs a childs value against a mountain? Though there are those who have killed children or endangered them for less
How shall polluted mortals dare To sing Thy glory or Thy grace? Beneath Thy feet we lie afar, And see but shadows of Thy face.
Yet we console ourselves with the knowledge that it is God Him-self who puts it in our hearts to seek Him and makes it possible in some measure to know Him, and He is pleased with even the feeblest effort to make Him known.
