10 Minutes
The wonderful thing about scripture is that we cannot claim ignorance. The truth is reasoned, revealed, and available to us that we can have no excuse. If there be any thought that there is arbitrariness in any of God’s word, it is because someone chooses not to hear what a thus saith the Lord is saying. Because of the entrance of sin, God’s role changed from Creator to Savior while there is in Him no variableness, neither shadow of turning. For He is and always and can only be the One Divine Being. That truth confirms that we can never define all that He is with the senses of humanity; gustation, olfaction, vision, audition, tactition, memory, thought, and reason. The strongest of these senses is reason. Why? Reason is the faculty or process of drawing logical inferences. Reason can broaden the use of the other narrower senses. Reason is in opposition to sensation, perception, feeling, desire, and causes fundamental truths to be intuitively apprehended. These fundamental truths are the causes or results of all derivative facts. Next to reason is thought. Why? The sense of thought is very important in people's spiritual development, as thought enables us to consider new conceptual beliefs. Next to thought is the sense of memory. Why? Memory relates to events that are scattered across the brain's sensory centers. When one of the senses is stimulated to evoke a memory, other memories featuring other senses are also triggered. When we remember the Sabbath our thoughts highlight the goodness of God whereby we reason the source that He is the bringing forth all things created. God is the invariable Divine Being who made us to be perfect.
James 1:17
The sun has no variableness, yet we say it sets and rises...perspective that is not truth. I pray that we have the wisdom to understand why the One God shows Himself in three Persons, the three in oneness.
The word “God” itself suffers from some imprecision. Since every culture has “something it refers to as “god”. But what comes into our mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us and to us. Those whose faith will show pleasure to God look to the bible as an authoritative source for knowing God. And our God’s name is based on an eternal claim: “I am who I am.” In essence, God said, “My name is, ‘I exist’ - in the past, in the present, in the future. I am before and after all time. I am the harbor of eternity. The breath and depth and height and width and length of wisdom is astounding. Consider the “Word”.
John 1:1-18
What is this “Word”? Pretty immediately, we learn that “the Word” refers to a Person—a “him,” in fact. And notice the wise use of truth by John. He uses the same truth for both the Father and the Son. He writes “in the beginning” as it is in the book of Genesis. The Creator entered into His creation. Humankind may have been banished from God’s presence in the Garden of Eden, but in Christ, God came “to seek and to save the lost.” And this God who walked the earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth is present with those who believe in him through the Holy Spirit. We must come to fully understand how the truth is rooted in scripture. It is a mystery of complexities. It is on the cross that we see God as He truly is. He demonstrates His own love for us by taking away the sins of the world. On the cross, God’s manifold perfections meet in a single event. We see at once the God of justice and of love. He is just. He does not let sin go unpunished. He is love. He takes that punishment on Himself. Let’s say it this way: “The wisdom of God has ordained a way for the love of God to deliver us from the wrath of God without compromising the justice of God.”
Ours is the only faith whereby its central event is the humiliation of its God. And it is in this humiliation that our God is exalted. As we ponder who God is, great and gracious, Creator and Savior, Triune Lord - may we do so with faith. God is a personal Being, and He wants a relationship with us. Therefore, He has revealed Himself. The knowledge we can thus have about God is limited but true and reliable. He tells who He is and what His will is. This knowledge is a source of deep joy, and the basis for eternal life.
God reveals Himself by His works. By His creation, for example, He shows His power, wisdom, and wonderful creativity. In His answer to sin, God shows His holiness and righteousness – but also His love in offering people a way to salvation. The bible offers us an extensive report about what God has done and will do for His people. God’s greatest reasonable and revelational change was when He revealed Himself in Jesus. He is the Son of God who became human and showed humanity Who God is.
John 1:18
This Son is a son to indicate that they have the same nature. They’re both personal, and love reigns between them. The bible speaks of God the Father loving God the Son, and God the Son loving God the Father, and the bible points to the reality that there is this Spirit between them, this love between the Father and Son - carries, as it were, such a fullness of all that they both are, that a third Person is them, standing forth, and has always been God. And if that’s not amazing enough, the most amazing thing of all about who God is, in His perfection, is that He wants to share it all with His created ones.
God is eternal and unchangeable in His determination, His character and His purpose. He has always been and will always be. He is sovereign, self- sufficient, omniscient, and almighty. He does not have a physical body but is a Spirit. Therefore, He is omnipresent, not confined to one place. All of God’s attributes form a unity. We cannot only stress God’s love and forget about His holiness, or just talk about His wrath and keep silent about His mercy. That would create a false image of God. He is not partly this and partly that, for whatever He is, He is so in all its entirety. And God is triune, which means that there is one God existing in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Scripture begins with God. In the very first sentence we know who He is. It assumes He exists. In part that is because when the bible was written no one said He didn’t. Why answer a charge no one is making? What scripture does tell us, however, is that the God who exists speaks and reveals Himself in and through creation. He is there and He is not silent. God reveals Himself because He wants to be known, but for us to know God completely is impossible. As scripture says, how great is God - beyond our understanding! The number of His years is past finding out. This comes as no surprise. We don’t know anyone or anything completely. As finite creatures, all our knowledge is limited. But even if we can’t know God completely, that doesn’t mean we can’t know Him at all. Consider this: whatever we see that has power, God has more. Whatever we see that is good or lovely, God is better and lovelier. Wherever we see creativity, we know it started with God. But God has given us more than creation to tell us about Himself. He has spoken to people and given us His written word through inspiration. God needs nothing outside Himself. He did not create the world to fill a void within Himself, and He doesn’t need help from anyone or anything in order to exist. He created us for His pleasure, and we are meant to display or reflect Who God is.
Revelation 4:11
The language used in the bible to describe God is decidedly anthropomorphic. That is, it starts with us below in order to say something significant about God above. It starts with what we know in order to say something about the one who wants to be known. But if God cannot be known completely, neither can the language we find in the bible adequately describe Him or exhaust His nature. He is the absolute pinnacle of truth and goodness and beauty. God is just, and this sense of God’s justice or righteousness is central to the scripture. God’s righteousness will ultimately extend to all creation, and He will restore creation to what it was meant to be in the first place - perfect and pure.
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