Good Gifts from Our Good God

I have a post on God’s goodness—and what it means for us to reflect his goodness—up at Out of the Ordinary this morning.

From the abundance of his generosity, God grows mushrooms to feed squirrels and saplings to feed deer. He provides earthworms for robins and mice for foxes. The greens I grow in my garden come from his goodness, too. He could have created only one kind of salad green, or none at all, but instead, he created crispy romaine, buttery spinach, chewy kale, spicy arugula, and red leaf lettuce for extra visual punch, each variety increasing my pleasure as I eat my salads. Vegetables, fruits, grains, and meats—every different kind is a good gift from our good God.

Head over and read the whole piece.

Remaking the One True God

Do you know the Old Testament story of the golden calf (Exodus 32:1-6)? Moses, the leader of the people of Israel, went up on Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments and other instructions from God. He was gone for forty days and the people grew anxious without him, so they asked Aaron, the priest, to make gods to lead them in Moses’s absence. Together with Aaron, then, they made a golden calf to worship. It’s shocking how quickly they turned to polytheism and idolatry, breaking both God’s first commandment—“You shall have no other gods before me. (Exodus 20:3)—and his second—“You shall not make for yourself a carved image” (Exodus 20:4). 

But there’s something else to note: When the Israelites made the calf, they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” In their minds, the one golden calf was not their only god. They were, it seems, crediting the calf with working with the one true God to bring them out of Egypt. They may not have been denying that God brought them out of Egypt, but rather, denying that he had done it alone. And when they feasted … .

  

You can read the rest at Out of the Ordinary.

Thinking About the "Omni" Attributes

For the most part, which of God’s attributes are communicable is self-explanatory. He is loving and we love. Yes, he loves with infinite, independent love and we love with finite, dependent love, but God loves, and in some small way, we image his love. God is holy, too, and he commands us to be holy. He is infinitely and independently holy and we can only be holy as we depend on him to make us holy, but still, when he makes us holy, we truly reflect his holiness. God’s love and his holiness, then, and all the related attributes like righteousness, grace, mercy, etc., are communicable attributes.

It’s with God’s omniscience and omnipotence that classifying the attributes can get a little tricky. It may seem that omniscience should be an incommunicable attribute—after all, it starts with the omni prefix, and we certainly can’t be omni anything. But don’t be fooled by the omni in omniscience. Omni just means unlimited, and all God’s attributes, even the communicable ones, are unlimited. God’s omniscience is simply his unlimited knowledge. And it is a communicable attribute because God has also given us the ability to know. God has knowledge and so do we.

Read the whole thing at Out of the Ordinary.