thought exercise on God's Throne

The ascension of Jesus was the supreme political event of world history. He ascended not so much to a place as to an office. He departed from the arena of humiliation and suffering to enter into his g...

The tabernacle consists of a courtyard and a tent inside, separated into two sections: ‘The Holy Place’ and ‘the Most Holy Place’ or ‘Holy of Holies’. Inside the Holy Place is a table that holds ‘the ...

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,...

During each full moon, believing himself equal to the Roman gods, the Roman emperor Caligula would summon the moon goddess to share his bedchamber. When he asked Aulus Vitellius—a member of the Roman ...

In The Lord of the Rings, Denethor is a steward of Gondor, the great kingdom of men. He comes from a long line of stewards who have ruled Gondor as temporary lords while the kingdom waited for the n...

In the English language, worship is an important word. It comes from ancient Anglo-Saxon and means “worth-ship”—to ascribe ultimate worth to something or someone. Matthew is portraying the nature of t...

“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...

In his wonderful book, God’s Big Picture, Vaughan Roberts gives readers an overview of the Bible, focusing on the importance of context for developing a deeper understanding of holy scripture. In this...

The phrase “kingdom of heaven,” which we find frequently in Matthew’s Gospel where the others have “kingdom of God,” does not refer to a place, called “heaven,” where God’s people will go after death....

The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge...

While many world religions worship gods in temples, Israel’s claim was unique. Theirs wasn’t simply a consecrated center for worship; it was a meeting place where the Lord of the creation actually met...

What is the Kingdom of God, according to the prophet Zechariah (Zech. 8:1-8)? It is a public park! It is a park where old people are no longer cold and lonely and ill and senile, but participants in a...

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...

On this earth, then, in our deserts, God personally reveals and names himself. When he does so, his pleasure floods our senses, his beauty engulfs us, and our God-misconceptions are devastated. He mov...

While I don’t agree with late professor and scholar Marcus Borg on significant theological positions, I appreciate how he described the context surrounding Jesus’ new paradigm of kingdom living: In hi...

What resonance does the word glory have in today’s English language? How often is it used, and with what meaning? The adjective glorious is familiar enough—we might say that we saw a “glorious” sunset...

Sometimes, of course, the sense of God with us becomes much more distinct. My oldest brother, J. I. Willard, served for over thirty years as a minister under the blessing of God. But his entry into th...

The fact is there is nothing that we are doing that God could not raise up a stone in the field to do for him. The realization of this puts us in our true place. Though, lest we get too knocked down by...

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...

The word worship comes from the Old English weorthscipe, which combines two words meaning “ascribe worth.” The Trinity can be said to be always at worship because the three persons of the Godhead perf...

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 ...

Sometimes evil can feel so strong, so powerful, that its damage seems permanent and the final word on the subject. In this short excerpt from Philip Yancey, we see a reversal, perhaps a foretaste of w...

God’s “glory”: the phrase means, no doubt, that when people eventually see God the sight is astonishingly bright and dazzling. But beyond that it also means that it is surpassingly lovely and beautifu...

At the heart of [his prayer for daily bread] stood a central biblical symbol of the kingdom: the great festive banquet. Which God has prepared for his people— The whole point of the Kingdom…isn’t abou...

N.T. Wright takes some time in his book, How God Became King , to connect the idea of the logos (the eternal Word), with the idea of “dwelling,” or abiding in God’s presence: The Word became flesh ...

Julian of Norwich was a fourteenth-century mystic-theologian who maybe understood the belovedness of creation and new creation better than anyone. In the fifth chapter of her book Revelations of Divin...

Addressing the clergy gathered at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 was a pivotal moment in the Protestant Reformation. Luther wrote, “God’s Word is more ancient than you and will also be newer and more...

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...

Thus the incomparable George Herbert writes of our glorification in his poem “The Star”:  Bright spark, shot from a brighter place,  Where beams surround my Saviour’s face,  Canst thou be any where ...

God wants to feed his people. In keeping the one tree from them, God protected Adam and Eve. When they broke table fellowship with God, they suspected that God was withholding something good, that thi...