God's Love

“The guy upstairs.” “The big man in the sky.” These are just two of the more common, modern slang terms for God. Aside from being utterly irreverent, they transgress the Second Commandment of having no graven images of God in that they grossly mistake this important attribute of God: His...
Is your prayer life merely a lengthy list of requests that so often seem to go unanswered? Sarah Ivill never tires of considering the Christian’s privilege to pray directly to the Father, through the Son, by the Holy Spirit. Equally amazing is the fact that God initiates that relationship with us,...
With the recent epidemic of weekly, if not daily, lethal shootings across the country, does your heart not cry out, “Is God paying attention?” Do terrorist bombings, corrupt business and politics, death inducing dictatorships, and human trafficking around the world go unnoticed? Will the silent...
History is replete with the stories of despots and tyrants who wielded unbridled power with cataclysmic results. Everyone knows the horrors of the Hitlers of the world. Shakespeare famously wrote about a man who committed atrocious acts of paranoid murder to keep power in Macbeth . In both history...
Commenting on Exodus 21 and capital offenses, Umberto Cassuto notes that “ The Torah wishes to affirm and establish the principle, in the name of Divine law, that human life is sacred, and whoever assails this sanctity forfeits his own life – measure for measure.” [1] The civil right of human...
Paul, in Romans 1:20, tells us that there is something which he refers to as God’s divine nature. That is, there is something unique to God and about God that cannot be said of any other being. There is a Godness to God, what philosophers and theologians would call God’s essence (or an even more...
“You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.” – Romans 8:9 The Early Church Father, Basil of Caesarea, in a profound bit of theological reflection, says, “Whoever perceives...
Many years ago I was listening to Christian radio. It was in the early 90s and there was a lot of talk about self-esteem. In fact, if you were raised in the 80s and 90s you probably remember the government, media, books and lingo associated with the self-esteem craze. Maybe you were small enough to...
“For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” – Romans 8:5-6 I first...
Perhaps you’ve never considered how each of the commandments of the Decalogue relate to the opening several chapters of Genesis. The primacy of God as the only God and the One deserving of all our worship are woven throughout those chapters. God resting on the 7 th day serves as the model for the 4...