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An unknown God can neither be trusted, served, nor worshipped.
Something more than a theoretical knowledge of God is needed by us. God is only truly known in the soul as we yield ourselves to Him, submit to His authority, and regulate all the details of our lives by His holy precepts and commandments.
During eternity past, God was alone: self-contained, self-sufficient, self-satisfied; in need of nothing.
The creating of them when He did, added nothing to God essentially. He changes not (Mal 3:6), therefore His essential glory can be neither augmented nor diminished.
God is no gainer even from our worship. He was in no need of that external glory of His grace which arises from His redeemed, for He is glorious enough in Himself without that. What was it that moved Him to predestinate His elect to the praise of the glory of His grace? It was, as Ephesians 1:5 tells us, “according to the good pleasure of His will.”
17:10)—our obedience has profited God nothing.
He is solitary in His majesty, unique in His excellency, peerless in His perfections. He sustains all, but is Himself independent of all. He gives to all, but is enriched by none.
Such a God cannot be found out by searching. He can be known only as He is revealed to the heart by the Holy Spirit through the Word.
The Holy Spirit has to shine in our hearts (not intellects) in order to give us “the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (II Cor 4:6).
The principal prayer and aim of Christians should be that we “walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God” (Col 1:10).
The decrees of God relate to all future things without exception: whatever is done in time was foreordained before time began.
while God is the Orderer and Controller of sin, He is not the Author of it in the same way that He is the Author of good.
The care of Providence reaches to the most insignificant creatures, and the most minute events—the death of a sparrow, and the fall of a hair.
In every instance where God has decreed an end, He has also decreed every means to that end.
Side by side with the immutability and invincibility of God’s decrees, Scripture plainly teaches that man is a responsible creature and answerable for his actions.
Real prayer is indited [dictated] by the Spirit, yet it is also the cry of a human heart.
O my reader, how thankful should we be that everything is determined by infinite wisdom and goodness!
Nothing escapes His notice, nothing can be hidden from Him, nothing is forgotten by Him.
Each of His glorious attributes should render Him honorable in our esteem.
The apprehension of His omniscience ought to bow us in adoration before Him. Yet how little do we meditate upon this divine perfection! Is it because the very thought of it fills us with uneasiness?
But to the believer, the fact of God’s omniscience is a truth fraught with much comfort.
The cause of all things is the will of God. The man who really believes the Scriptures knows beforehand that the seasons will continue to follow each other with unfailing regularity to the end of earth’s history (Gen 8:22), yet his knowledge is not the cause of their succession.
So God’s knowledge does not arise from things because they are or will be, but because He has ordained them to be.
The infinite knowledge of God should fill us with amazement.
The infinite knowledge of God ought to fill us with holy awe.
The whole of my life stood open to His view from the beginning. He foresaw my every fall, my every sin, my every backsliding; yet, nevertheless, fixed His heart upon me. Oh, how the realization of this should bow me in wonder and worship before Him!
God purposed in Himself to elect a certain people, not because of anything good in them or from them, either actual or foreseen, but solely out of His own mere pleasure.
God did not predestinate those whom He foreknew were “conformed,” but, on the contrary, those whom He “foreknew” (i.e., loved and elected) He predestinated “ to be conformed.” Their conformity to Christ is not the cause, but the effect of God’s foreknowledge and predestination.
God did not elect any sinner because He foresaw that he would believe, for the simple but sufficient reason that no sinner ever does believe until God gives him faith; just as no man sees until God gives him sight. Sight is God’s gift, seeing is the consequence of my using His gift. So faith is God’s gift (Eph 2:8,9), believing is the consequence of my using His gift.
so God’s purpose is the ground of His prescience.
“YOUR thoughts of God are too human.”
instead of searching the Scriptures for themselves, lazily accept the teaching of others.
Men imagine that the Most High is moved by sentiment, rather that actuated by principle.
The heathen outside of the pale of Christendom form “gods” out of wood and stone, while the millions of heathen inside Christendom manufacture a “god” out of their own carnal mind. In reality, they are but atheists, for there is no other possible alternative between an absolutely supreme God, and no God at all. A “god” whose will is resisted, whose designs are frustrated, whose purpose is checkmated, possesses no title to Deity, and so far from being a fit object of worship, merits naught but contempt.
God’s supremacy is also demonstrated in His perfect rule over the wills of men.
Men may boast that they are free agents, with a will of their own, and are at liberty to do as they please, but Scripture says to those who boast “we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell...Ye ought to say, If the Lord will” (James 4:13,15)!
Our lives are neither the product of blind fate nor the result of capricious chance, but every detail of them was ordained from all eternity, and is now ordered by the living and reigning God.
absolutely independent; God does as He pleases, only as He pleases, always as He pleases.
Men will allow God to be everywhere except on His throne. They will allow Him to be in His workshop to fashion worlds and make stars. They will allow Him to be in His almonry to dispense His alms and bestow His bounties. They will allow Him to sustain the earth and bear up the pillars thereof, or light the lamps of heaven, or rule the waves of the ever-moving ocean; but when God ascends His throne, His creatures then gnash their teeth.
But, instead, He chose to set him in Eden on the basis of creature responsibility, so that he stood or fell according as he measured up or failed to measure up to his responsibility—obedience to his Maker.
God is perpetually the same: subject to no change in His being, attributes, or determinations.
though all creatures are subject to change, God is immutable. Because God has no beginning and no ending, He can know no change. He is everlastingly “the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning” (James 1:17).
There never was a time when He was not; there never will come a time when He shall cease to be. God has neither evolved, grown, nor improved. All that He is today, He has ever been, and ever will be. “I am the LORD, I change not” (Mal 3:6) is His own unqualified affirmation. He cannot change for the better, for He is already perfect; and being perfect, He cannot change for the worse.
When speaking of Himself, God frequently accommodates His language to our limited capacities. He describes Himself as clothed with bodily members, as eyes, ears, hands, etc. He speaks of Himself as “waking” (Psa 78:65), as “rising up early” (Jer 7:13); yet He neither slumbers nor sleeps. When He institutes a change in His dealings with men, He describes His course of conduct as “repenting.”
God’s purpose never alters.
Human nature cannot be relied upon; but God can! However unstable I may be, however fickle my friends may prove, God changes not.
This is more fixed on as an epithet to His name than any other.
God swears by His “holiness” because that is a fuller expression of Himself than any thing else.
God’s holiness is manifested in His works. “The LORD is righteous in all His ways, and holy in all His works” (Psa 145:17). Nothing but that which is excellent can proceed from Him. Holiness is the rule of all His actions.
God’s holiness is manifested in His law. That law forbids sin in all of its modifications: in its most refined as well as its grossest forms, the intent of the mind as well as the pollution of the body, the secret desire as well as the overt act.
