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,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2050. Divine immutability means that God’s character, His purposes and His promises never change, improve, decay or shift in any respect. James describes Him as the Father “with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17), a striking image drawn from astronomy, since even the most reliable heavenly bodies cast…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2049. Change his mind is a question Scripture answers in two apparently different ways, and I think both answers need to be taken seriously rather than one quietly explained away. Malachi 3:6 states plainly, “For I the Lord do not change,” yet Genesis 6:6 says God “regretted that he had made man on the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2048. God’s providence is His continuous, active care in directing the events of creation and history toward His good purposes, quietly working through ordinary causes rather than only through dramatic miracle. The book of Ruth never mentions a single miracle, yet it opens with a famine, follows a chance-seeming arrival in a particular field,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2047. God’s supreme rule means that He reigns as King over every person, every nation and every event in history, with nothing genuinely outside His authority or beyond His final purposes. I want to say plainly why I reach for this phrase rather than the more common theological term for this attribute. That older…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2046. Wrath and love feel, to many people, like they must belong to two different gods, one frightening and one kind, rather than to a single, coherent character. I want to challenge that instinct directly, because Scripture never treats these as competing attributes locked in tension. It presents them as two expressions of the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2045. God’s wrath is His settled, righteous opposition to sin, not a sudden fit of temper or an emotional outburst He later regrets. Romans 1:18 states plainly that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.” I want to take that verse seriously rather than explain it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2044. God’s mercy is His compassionate refusal to give sinners what their sin actually deserves, withholding deserved judgement out of tender, active compassion. Lamentations 3:22-23 puts it with unmatched beauty in the middle of a book otherwise soaked in grief, saying “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to…