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PART II. The Depths of the Five Distinct Yet Related Features of God’s Holiness
Difference-holiness means that God is not like us but is utterly unique: he stands outside us and over against us as the objective reality to whom we must respond.
PART I. Encompassed by God’s Holiness
Making complex subjects simple is a genuine good - at least to the extent that it is possible. Simplicity seeks to make things easily understood. Yet true simplicity presents things clearly without over-simplification, which reduces them to the point of distortion. Achieving this balance is a rare and valuable skill.
Part III
It is significant that God – YHWH in the Hebrew Old Testament – is first known as ‘Providence’ (YHWH-JIREH), within the explicit context of redemption history, as he supplies a lamb for Abraham to sacrifice instead of Isaac (Gen 22:14, 8). From the outset, therefore, that is, the doctrine of providence rests on the doctrines of both creation and redemption, grounded in God's foreordained purposes for mankind in Jesus Christ. As we will see below, the providence of God, his governance of creation and history, stretches outward from his saving purposes, which came to their fulness in Jesus Christ and embraces every dimension of life.
Part I
All the goodness that there is in this beautiful world is caused by the perfect goodness of God. For a basic fact of Biblical doctrine is that God who is good in himself shares that goodness with others. God’s essential goodness – his goodness in himself – the goodness of his being and nature, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is given in all kinds of ways by the Creator for the good of creatures, who are not God.
The good news begins with God. For the gospel’s main message concerns ‘God with us’ in the Lord Jesus Christ ‘to save his people from their sins’ (Matt 1:21, 23). The fundamental focus of the Christian good news regards ‘God incarnate, Jesus of Nazareth, who did for us what we could not do for ourselves, in order to bring us, a lost people, back to God.’ So the first great reality of the gospel is God himself. God is where the gospel begins.
A Faithful God for Fearsome Times
There are two principal assumptions or experiences that we can bring to the Book of Exodus that may impact our understanding ... It speaks powerfully to the minds and hearts of anyone experiencing exploitation and injustice precisely because of its account of Israel’s liberation. ... It also addresses the tension many Christians feel between what we read in the Word of God and what we feel in our own human experience.
The gospel can be cast in both careful formal language as well as in everyday informal language. It is something that addresses and speaks to all of us, something that all of us can grasp hold of, understand, and relate to at whatever level we will. ... There is a comprehensiveness and an immensity to the Biblical good news. Yet all its elements are interlinked, gathered around a central strand, unified by a single person. ...
Part II
‘The physical resurrection of Christ is not an isolated historical fact. It is inexhaustibly rich in meaning for Christ himself, for the church, and for the whole world.’ Certainly, the significance of Christ’s resurrection saturates every aspect of New Testament teaching. Its meaning may be presented in several ways.
The texts of the New Testament claim that although Jesus was dead and buried on a Friday afternoon, early the following Sunday morning, roughly 36 hours later, his corpse had revived, and he had physically come to life again in a new unprecedented bodily form. Supporting this is substantial detailed historical evidence, including numerous first-hand eyewitnesses ‘who talked with a person whom they took to be Jesus, and witnesses who saw the empty tomb.’
The world we inhabit contains an endless array of contrasts. Every human life is born out of crisis, proceeds in conflict, and invariably ends with irreversible loss. Yet, there is astonishing goodness. Between the boundaries of birth and death, breath-taking wonder combines with utter misery, sublime beauty with callous cruelty. Ecstatic joy, deep satisfaction, and heart-capturing tenderness, are bound up with terrible agony. Life is far worse than we ever feared and much better than we dare dream.
The first sentence of the Bible explains that God created both ‘the heavens and the earth’. This indicates that the environment that we inhabit is twofold. God’s world is comprised of two parts. The physical universe – ‘earth’ – has a counterpart in the spiritual universe – ‘the heavens’. There are then two distinct dimensions of created reality, two interlocking spheres, directly connected in some respects and more indirectly linked in others.
God’s life in himself is the fundamental condition of God’s work of creation. We start therefore with consideration of the identity and nature of the Creator, for biblical teaching about the act of creation grows out of what Scripture suggests about the perfect life of God. Clarity about the character of the Creator ensures that the relation between the Creator and his creatures is accurately represented.