Thought Exercise on God's Omniscience

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Born with Limits (Unlike God)

Author

Keywords

Scripture

Isaiah 40:28, Job 11:7-9, 1 Kings 8:27, Romans 11:33, Psalm 145:3, Ephesians 3:18-19

On the day I was born, the doctor who delivered me inscribed my birth records with a firm hand: seven pounds, eleven ounces, twenty-one inches. It was the first legally attested evidence that I was no...

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How’d You Know My Name?

Author

Clara Null

Keywords

Scripture

Matthew 6:9, Isaiah 43:1, John 10:3, Luke 12:6-7

My Sunday school class of youngsters had some problems repeating the Lord’s Prayer. One child prayed, “Our Father, who art in heaven, how’d you know my name.”

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The Dentist Always Knows

Author

Grant R. Osborne

Keywords

Scripture

Galatians 6:1-10, Hebrews 12:4-13, Proverbs 27:17, Luke 12:48, Matthew 12:36, Ecclesiastes 12:14, Galatians 6:7

Many of us, when we know we are going to the dentist in a few days, suddenly start brushing and flossing our neglected teeth and gums, hoping that we will somehow trick the dentist into thinking that ...

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What Matters Supremely

Author

James I. Packer

Keywords

Scripture

Isaiah 49:15-16, Galatians 4:9, John 10:14-15, Matthew 10:29-31, John 17:9-10

What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it- that He knows me. I am graven on the palms of His hands. I am never out o...

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Did God Do This?

Author

William Paul Young

Keywords

Scripture

Habakkuk 1:, Habakkuk 2:, Habakkuk 3:, Romans 8:22, 2 Peter 3:9

I was sitting in a hotel lobby in Orlando, Florida, having a conversation with my friend K, from Germany. Her world-class young athlete friend was recently paralyzed as a result of an on-camera stunt ...

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God Speaks, God Listens Too

Author

Adam S. McHugh

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 18:22-33, Exodus 3:1-12 , 1 Kings 19:9-13, John 5:19-30, John 16:12-15, Psalm 116:1-2

The God who shares power is a listener. Listening is not something that becomes necessary for God only after the world is created. Listening is who God is. In God’s very being, communication does not ...

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Is God an Object?

Author

Eugene H. Peterson

Keywords

Scripture

Jeremiah 1:5, Psalm 139:1-4, Isaiah 49:1, Ephesians 1:4-5, Romans 8:29-30

We think that God is an object about which we have questions. We are curious about God. We make inquiries about God. We read books about God. We get into late-night bull sessions about God. We drop in...

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Why Evil?

Author

N. T. Wright

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 50:20, Romans 8:28, Habakkuk 1:, Habakkuk 2:, Acts 4:27-28

Somehow, strangely (and to us sometimes even annoyingly), the Creator God will not simply abolish evil from his world. The question that swirls around these discussions is, Why not? We are not given...

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All His Ways are Beautifully Fatherly

Author

Michael Reeves

Keywords

Fathers

Since God is, before all things, a Father, and not primarily Creator or Ruler, all his ways are beautifully fatherly. It is not that this God “does” being Father as a day job, only to kick back in the...

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To the Prophet, God is Intimately Involved in Life on Earth

Author

Abraham J. Heschel

Keywords

To the prophet, God does not reveal himself in an abstract absoluteness, but in a personal and intimate relation to the world. He does not simply command and expect obedience; He is also moved and aff...

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God’s Self-Revelation

Author

Vaughan Roberts

Keywords

Scripture

Exodus 3:13-14, Exodus 6:2-3, Isaiah 42:8, Exodus 33:19, John 17:6, 1 Kings 18:36-39, Exodus 34:5-7

There are no vowels in the Hebrew (YHWH), which makes it impossible to know exactly what the word is. Some old translations say ‘Jehovah’. Modern scholars tend to speak of ‘Yahweh’. When the word appe...

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If God Wanted to Remain Silent…

Author

Michael Kendrick

Keywords

Scripture

Psalm 19:1-2, Romans 1:20, Isaiah 6:3, Job 12:7-9, Colossians 1:16, John 1:3

If God wanted to remain silent about His existence, He wouldn’t have bothered creating the stars; He wouldn’t have made the Milky Way, or Betelgeuse. In fact, He wouldn’t have made the majestic Rocky ...

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A Consuming Fire

Author

John Starke

Keywords

Scripture

Exodus 24:17, Deuteronomy 4:24, Hebrews 12:29, Isaiah 6:5

“Holy, holy, holy.” What are they saying? Have you ever wondered that? What does that mean? Many people have tried to understand what God’s holiness means. Some describe it as his perfect morality. Go...

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The Aseity of God

Author

John Piper

Keywords

God's Existence

Scripture

Psalm 50:10-12, Revelation 4:11, Colossians 1:16-17, Acts 17:24-25, Isaiah 40:28, Psalm 90:2, Exodus 3:14

Aseity refers to God’s self-existence (a—from, se—oneself). God exists ‘from himself.’ God owes his existence and completeness as God to nothing outside himself. . . . God’s act of creation was not c...

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God Has Written Himself into Our World

Author

Timothy Keller

Keywords

C.S. Lewis wrote an essay…called “The Seeing Eye,” and in it he argued that if there were a God, we would not relate to him the way a person on the first story of a house relates to a person on the se...

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Our God is Great as God is Good

Author

Gardner C. Taylor

Keywords

Scripture

Romans 5:8, Psalm 90:2, James 1:17, Psalm 145:3, 1 John 4:8

The great African-American preacher Gardner Taylor, preacher of the Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn for over 40 years, begins one of his sermons with a paean to the God revealed to us in the 66 boo...

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A Firm Conviction

Author

Ben Patterson

Keywords

Scripture

Isaiah 40:28-31, Ephesians 3:20-21, Psalm 147:5, James 1:5, Proverbs 3:5-6

The foundation of faith is a firm conviction regarding three things about God—his perfect love, wisdom and power. Like a three-legged stool, no combination of two will do. There must be all three for ...

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Reducing God to Manageable Terms

Author

A. W. Tozer

Keywords

Scripture

Exodus 32:1-6 , 1 Samuel 4:3-10, Isaiah 40:18-25, Matthew 16:13-20, Acts 5:1-11 , Psalm 115:4-8

A. W. Tozer once wrote, Left to ourselves we tend immediately to reduce God to manageable terms. We want to get Him where we can use Him, or at least know where He is when we need Him. We want a ...

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Elevated to the Third Degree

Author

R. C. Sproul

Keywords

Holiness

Only once in sacred Scripture is an attribute of God elevated to the third degree. Only once is a characteristic of God mentioned three times in succession. The Bible says that God is holy, holy, holy...

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A Moral God

Author

Nahum Sarna

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 18:25, Leviticus 19:2, Deuteronomy 34:2, Romans 1:18-20, James 1:17

This capriciousness of the gods is diametrically opposed to the biblical view. The God of Creation is not at all morally indifferent. On the contrary, morality and ethics constitute the very essence o...

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All Knowledge Requires Some Presumed and Final Authority

Author

Craig Gay

Keywords

Scripture

Colossians 2:8, 1 Corinthians 1:20-21, 2 Corinthians 10:5, Isaiah 55:8-9, Hebrews 4:12

What we need to realize, however, is that there is no such thing as autonomous or “self-grounding” knowledge. All systems of interpretation and all claims to true knowledge are ultimately grounded out...

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The Love of God Wrapped About Him

Author

Thomas Kelly

Keywords

Scripture

Psalm 4:1-3, Psalm 30:5, Romans 8:28, 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, Psalm 34:18, Isaiah 43:2, Psalm 23:4, Job 1:, Job 2:, Job 42:, 2 Samuel 11:, 2 Samuel 12:, Genesis 37:12-36, 1 Kings 17:8-24, Daniel 6:, Psalm 34:18

The sense of Presence! I have spoken of it as stealing on one unawares. It is recorded of John Wilhelm Rowntree that as he left a great physician’s office, where he had just been told that his advanci...

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The Two Surveys

Author

John Mark Comer

Keywords

Scripture

Psalm 50:21, Job 38:1-4, Romans 11:33-34, Exodus 34:6-7, Isaiah 55:8-9

My friend Scot McKnight is a New Testament professor in Chicago. For years, he taught a class on Jesus, and he would start every semester with two surveys. The first was a set of questions about the s...

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God Makes the First Move

Author

John Stott

Keywords

Scripture

Ephesians 1:4, 1 John 4:19, Romans 5:8, John 1:1-2, Genesis 1:1

In his classic work, Basic Christianity , John Stott shares this most fundamental truth about God: God always makes the first move. Whether it is the creation or our personal relationship, we are n...

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God Was There First

Author

John Stott

Keywords

Scripture

Matthew 4:18-22, Luke 19:1-10, John 4:1-42, John 6:44, Ephesians 1:4-5

‘In the beginning God.’ The first four words of the Bible are more than a way of launching the story of creation or introducing the book of Genesis. They supply the key which opens our understanding t...

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The Hound of Heaven

Author

Max Lucado

Keywords

Scripture

Jonah 1:1-4, Genesis 3:8-9, Hosea 3:1, Luke 15:4-7, Psalm 139:7-10, Acts 9:3-6

In 1890 Francis Thompson, a Roman Catholic poet, described God as “The Hound of Heaven”: I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him,...

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Mystery and Revelation

Author

Darren Pollock

Keywords

Scripture

Ephesians 3:8-10

Karl Barth wrote that, “God is always a mystery. Revelation is always revelation in the full sense of the word or it is not revelation” ( CD I.8.2). God’s revelation, to Barth, always exists in a dia...

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“If God Makes One More, It’s All Right With Me”

Author

Paul S. Fiddes

Keywords

Scripture

Deuteronomy 6:4, John 10:30, 2 Corinthians 13:14, 1 Corinthians 8:6, Colossians 2:9

There is no question then of the doctrine of the Trinity being a kind of numerical puzzle designed to test faith or to baffle the human mind. The doctrine does not state the paradox that God is one be...

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A Trinitarian Deficit Disorder

Author

James Bryan Smith

Keywords

Scripture

John 14:9, Colossians 1:15, John 10:30, 1 John 4:8-16, Romans 8:32

A student of mine, Josiah Brown, oversees the student outreach team. He and some of our students go to youth groups to teach the youth about Christian spiritual formation. They talk about what formati...

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God is a Consuming Fire

Author

Fulton J. Sheen

Keywords

Curiously enough, it is a fear of how grace will change and improve them that keeps many souls away from God. They want God to take them as they are and let them stay that way. They want Him to take a...

thought exercise on God's Omniscience

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