Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2072. Divine beauty is not a category Christians spend much time thinking about, next to holiness, love, or justice, yet Scripture reaches for it often enough that I think it deserves a proper place among the attributes we teach. David’s one great request was ‘to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD’ (Psalm 27:4),…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 2070. Divine repentance is the term theologians use for those startling verses where God is said to have ‘repented’ or ‘relented’ of something, most famously Genesis 6:6, where the LORD ‘regretted that he had made man on the earth’ (Genesis 6:6). At first glance it looks like a straightforward contradiction of God’s unchanging character,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2069. God’s experience is not static in the way a statue is static, even though His character never shifts an inch. Scripture is full of language describing God rejoicing, grieving, being moved with compassion and, at least on the face of it, responding to what creatures do, and I do not think we should…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2067. Divine eternity is the doctrine underneath one of the most fascinating questions in all of theology, and one with genuinely practical consequences for how I read Scripture’s prophetic material. When we speak of God knowing the future, we naturally reach for spatial metaphors. God looks ahead. He foresees events. He knows in advance…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2063. God is Spirit. When Jesus told the Samaritan woman this in John 4:24, He was making one of the most consequential theological statements in the whole of Scripture, and it is worth slowing down to see exactly why. This simple declaration reshapes how I understand God’s nature, how I approach worship, and what…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2062. God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. Those words from 1 John 1:5 are among the most compact and striking theological statements in all of Scripture. They arrive without qualification, without hedging, and without any parallel phrase to soften them. I want to work through what John actually…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2056. God’s self-sufficiency is the reason the answer to this question is a clear and unqualified no. God does not need us, not for His existence, not for His happiness, and not for His glory. Understanding why that is true, and why it is not the discouraging answer it might first sound like, takes…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2053. God’s attributes are not a set of competing interests inside a divine committee, however often popular preaching makes it sound that way. If God is perfectly holy and perfectly loving, do those two things ever pull in opposite directions? I hear this question in different forms all the time, and it matters more…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2052. Divine aseity is one of those doctrines that sounds abstract until you actually sit with it, and then it quietly rearranges how you think about everything else you believe about God. The word comes from the Latin a se, meaning from himself, and the doctrine states plainly that God exists entirely from Himself….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2051. Divine simplicity means that God is not assembled out of separate parts or ingredients the way a created thing is, a portion of love here, a measure of power there, a quantity of holiness added on top. He is entirely, undividedly and simultaneously all that He is, in every attribute, at every moment,…