God

Holy Week Trilogy Part 3: Alone

1 Comment / God, Holy Week, Lent, Spiritual Disciplines / By /

Matthew 27:43-50 Good Friday opened with Jesus once again in the midst of crowds, only this time the voices were jeering and mocking. Romans and Jews alike were shouting, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” and “Hail, king of the Jews!” The way to Golgotha was lined with onlookers taunting him with bad theology and sarcastic insults. Matthew spares us any details of the actual crucifixion, but dwells on the reactions of spectators. Which one am I in that crowd? Of the “seven last words of Christ” found in the gospels, Matthew records only one: “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”—which means, “My God, […]

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Knowing What’s Good for Us

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I was walking the 1.5 miles home from my doctor’s appointment this morning, along busy Treat Boulevard, when I came upon a goose and her four goslings. Mama apparently wanted to take the kids out for a walk—water nowhere in sight—and chose to parade down Treat Boulevard. Two lanes of traffic were blocked by motorists either enthralled or frustrated with the slow-motion chase I was on. I tried to herd the birds back onto the sidewalk, but Mama was getting mad at my interference. I even called 911 for traffic help, but the dispatcher said, “We don’t dispatch police officers

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So What IS God Like?

2 Comments / God, Theological Reflection, Uncategorized / By /

Somebody made a quirky comment about God and Jesus the other day; it got me thinking. It went something like this: “I’m a Jesus person; the God of the Old Testament needs rehabilitation, and Jesus did that.” Aside from who/what you think might be “the God of the Old Testament,” can you see what is wrong with this statement? The comment basically states that Jesus is not the same God as YHWH of old! It also suggests that the speaker might not be truly Trinitarian. But let’s take a look at one statement of the character of God found in

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How Can We Know the Nature and Character of God?

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I have heard it said, even in PCUSA General Assembly committee meetings, that God is unknowable. “God is so vast and so big that we cannot possible know or understand what God wants to do.” This is a bogus claim in the guise of humility. As I have written before, God wants to be known and has gone to great lengths to make himself known to his creation (cf. Deuteronomy 4:5–8, 32–36). Not only can we know about God—his nature and character—we can actually know God (more on that in a later post). Our investigation into God’s background is not

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The God of Self Must Stand Down

6 Comments / Current Events, God, It All Started in the Garden, Moral Authority, PCUSA, The Property Clause, Theological Reflection / By /

The human lust for power is a natural outflow of Adam and Eve’s resistance to God’s authority. When a person, a group, or a nation believes itself to be any equivalent of “the center of the universe,” bad things begin to happen. Adam and Eve’s choice may seem innocent enough to modern eyes, but within a generation, murder had entered human experience. The desire of one to dominate another comes out of the irreconcilable demands of two adjacent egos vying for the center of the universe. If a culture adopts the philosophy that all people are free to do whatever

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Allegiance to the Wrong God

2 Comments / God, It All Started in the Garden, Theological Reflection / By /

Mark Labberton, president of Fuller Seminary, recounts the story that took place when he was pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley (California). A very brief report of the story appears in his book The Dangerous Act of Worship (p. 64), but he shared an expanded version in a talk a few years ago: A gentleman came to him a bit confused and befuddled, because his wife had just become a Christian. His purpose for the visit was to get the Cliff Notes rendition of the faith—“just bullet points, please”—so he could hold his own in the nightly conversation he

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The Gods We Worship

1 Comment / Current Events, God, Theological Reflection, Turkey / By /

My second prod to think and write about belief in God comes from my experience in Turkey and Greece, where “gods” were everywhere—or at least remnants of worship spaces, icon niches, and other ancient signs of pantheism and Greek/Roman mythology. Walking up the hill through the ruins of Delphi (Greece), we encountered the monument to Argos, the sanctuary of Gaia, and the great temple to Apollo. In Ephesus (Turkey), strolling down the main road made of marble, we saw what is left of the Temple of Artemis (one of the seven Great Wonders of the Ancient World, but represented now

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