To Whom Shall We Go?

Where does prayer come from? [Who thought it up?] Why do I often not pray at all, but I always feel that I should? I think one answer that J. I. Packer might give is this: “It is not too much to say that God made us to pray , that prayer is (not the easiest, but) the most natural activity in which we ever engage, and that prayer is the measure of us all in God’s sight.” (Emphasis added) Prayer is at least communicating with God. And any genuine communication is two way. Thus when we long to pray we are seeking to fulfill that innate desire to receive and respond to revelation. The great catastrophe of the human fall into sin (see Genesis 3) is that it was a failure to "take God at his word." What he had promised to Adam and Eve was revelation: of truth, of beauty, of Himself. When we pray we say, "Lord, show me who you are and why that matters in my life right now." God's revelation to us in 2009 is through his Son and through his Word. So we must let t...

I always love it when someone helps me understand something a little bit better. Especially when it's something in the Bible. John Frame is someone who has done this for me several times before. You know those difficult phrases in the OT when it says “God relented” or “God changed his mind” or even “God repented” (see particularly in 1 Samuel 15 )? There is no easy, quick answer to the apparent difficulty with God changing his mind. In other words, doesn't someone change their mind when they don't really know what's going on? Isn't God omniscient (i.e., since he knows everything why would he change his mind?)? This quote from Frame is instructive: How then should we understand God’s “relenting?” For one thing, God states as a general policy in Jer. 18:5-10 that if he announces judgment and people repent, he will relent; similarly if he pronounces blessing and people do evil. In other words, relenting is part of God’s unchanging ...

God is utterly incomprehensible. To "comprehend" literally means to wrap your mind around something, to the point that you fully understand it. Without a doubt, then, it is impossible for us to fully comprehend God. But this does not mean he is unknowable. Deuteronomy 29:29 reads, "The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we might do all the words of this law." Among other things, Moses here tells us that we can know some things about God, just not everything. We can know God truly, but never exhaustively. I thought of this as I read a quote from a wonderful Christian thinker of the past who spoke of the goal of the Christian when he or she sits down to study the Bible. We should "reverently embrace what it pleases God there to witness of himself." God has graciously made himself known to us in the Bible. It is not everything that might be known about him, but it is more t...