The Redeemed Rose

  “Behold, God is great, and we know him not;  the number of his years is unsearchable.”  (Job 36:26)   If you could have one superpower, what would it be? If you could bend the laws of nature, what would you do? Move things with your mind like Jean Gray? Bend time like Dr. Strange? Have x-ray vision and fly like Superman? We certainly enjoy seeing our favorite heroes do these things in movies. It’s fascinating to imagine what we might do if we were free from the normal constraints of our human bodies and world. But the reality is we are all limited. We are finite.   If we are honest, we all wish we were infinite. To be infinite means to have no limit. It means having freedom from any and all boundaries of the created world. There is only one being who can make this boast. The God of the Bible is infinite in all of his being; infinitely loving, infinitely powerful, infinitely just, and infinitely merciful, to name a few. He is without constraint, without confine...

  Her obituary stopped me dead in my tracks. I didn’t know her at all. I didn’t even go searching for it. In fact, I don’t even get the paper. I just happened to be carefully wrapping my belongings in some borrowed old newspaper for my upcoming move. Thousands of tiny black words leaving their sooty grime on my hands. Words blurring together indistinguishably from the rest of the printed page.  But these words made me freeze.  Her name in bold black type caught my eye. Maybe because it was the same as mine:  Joyce . I stared, blinking at it for a few seconds before scanning the words below her name, desperately darting from line to line, intent on learning what this woman was like.  Who was she?  Was she loved?  What did she spend her life doing?  What would they say about her?  Did she make an impact while she was here? Or did she barely leave an imprint on this soil? My eyes locked onto the paper for any sign that this woman had done someth...

The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.  (Acts 17:24-25) From the time we can crawl, we are trying to gain our independence. We walk, we run, we climb the highest tower of the jungle gym. From there, we cannot wait to gain our first proof of the world acknowledging our independence, a plastic card that makes it legal for us to peel out of the driveway alone in gloriously gleaming metal on wheels. The next step to independence is getting a job so we can make enough money to leave our parents’ house for the autonomy of adulthood.  But in all this, we are never truly independent. We neither made ourselves nor can we  make it  by ourselves. We have needs—lots of them. However, there is one being who needs nothing at all and is truly independent from the rest of c...

  There is none holy like the LORD:  for there is none besides you;  there is no rock like our God.  1 Samuel 2:2 What do you think of when you hear the word  holy ? Perhaps you think of a special place like the Holy Land in Israel. Maybe it’s a special time of year like Holy Week, the days between Palm Sunday and Easter when Christians reflect on the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Or maybe you think of a person who lived an exceptionally pure life spent serving the needs of others, like Mother Teresa.  But what does the word  holy  actually mean? Holy  means to be set apart, or separate from something. It can involve being removed from evil and sin, but there is more to it than just moral purity. Holiness is not an abstract or subjective idea but is founded in a source. True holiness is found in God and God alone, and all holiness derives its origins from him. God is holy and everything he does is holy. God’s holiness means...

  “All the problems of heaven and earth, though they were to confront us together and at once, would be nothing compared with the overwhelming problem of God: That He is; what He is like; and what we as moral beings must do about Him.” —A.W. Tozer Everyone knows there is a God. This is true because he reveals himself to us in nature, in our fellow human beings, and in the fact that we have a conscience. So the question is not “Is there a God?” but “Who is God and what is he like?” But why should we want to know what he is like?  Why should we study the attributes of God? There are several reasons we will briefly explore. God exists.  We cannot simply ignore the metaphorical God-shaped elephant in the room, or at least not forever. The fact that there is a God means we need to know who he is and what he is like in order to make a decision about how we will respond to his existence. And how we respond shapes and affects how and why we do everything else in our lives. As Dr....

Who is God? What is he like? Is he even knowable? And if so, why should we want to know him? These are all important questions to ask and each deserves a fair consideration. In this series of articles we will look at these questions and more, but for now we will only deal with one: Is God truly knowable?  Some have argued that it is not possible to know God, if he exists at all. Many who do acknowledge there is a higher power say it would be impossible to know a being who is so lofty and far off from us. Others espouse that even if we can know some things about this deity, it is not possible to know him personally.  The problem with this agnostic view is that God has willed to make himself known. It may be difficult, improbable, or even impossible to know a God who did not desire to be known. But God does desire to be known and he decrees to make it so. How do we know this? Because he reveals himself to us. Contrary to the deistic view of God, he did not set up the world, send...