bible and theology on God's Design

Several years ago, a friend of ours read a book on chaos theory and shared some of the ideas with our family. We were fascinated as he described to us the incredible concept of fractals—patterns withi...

He has no design upon us, but to make us happy. . . . Who should be cheerful, if not the people of God?

Medical doctor Paul Brand, who is best known for discovering the cause of leprosy and developing a treatment for it, reflects on the nature and design of the universe. The more I delve into natural l...

The significance and joy in my science comes in those occasional moments of discovering something new and saying to myself, ‘So that’s how God did it.’ My goal is to understand a little corner of God’...

The cosmology of the ancient world was dramatically different from the way that we think of ours. Scholar John Walton writes in The Lost World of Genesis One , “Old world cosmic geography is based on...

Heavenly Father, we stand in awe of Your creation. You are the master of design. You know the change of seasons, You know the orbit of planets, and You know exactly what human beings were made for: a ...

Most of life is lived in the gaps between great moments. The peaks seem to protrude only after miles and miles of death valleys. While the Bible reveals its characters in terms of their high points, w...

This seven-day week is not something that can, or should, be tinkered with, although some have tried to. In 1793, France, in an effort to increase human productivity, de-Christianized the calendar by ...

O God, whose reason rules the world, who formed the starry heights above, timeless, time’s chain far forth you hurled, unmoved, gave all things power to move. Prevailed on by no outside cause to fashi...

Deep in unfathomable mines Of never ending skill, He treasures up his bright designs, And works his sovereign will.

I think it is interesting that God designed people to need other people. We see those cigarette advertisements with the rugged cowboy riding around alone on a horse, and we think that is strength, whe...

God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.

My dear King, my own King, without pride, without sin, You created the whole world, eternal, victorious King. King of the mysteries, You existed before the elements, before the waters covered the ocea...

We are invariably made for faith, to operate out of a need to trust something we cannot control.

Lord Almighty, you have given us a purpose in life. You have gifted us with abilities and passions. Sometimes we choose to live according to that purpose you have designed for us. Other times we live ...

Why is power a gift? Because power is for flourishing. When power is used well, people and the whole cosmos come more alive to what they were meant to be. And flourishing is the test of power.

Joy is the foundation of our identity and our resilience. Our neural pathways are wired as a result of our early experiences of joy. Without a strong foundation of joy, we struggle for identity and ar...

In his book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, author Bill Bryson details the complexity within the human body: No one really knows, but there may be as many as a million types of protein in the ...

Ancient Lens What’s the historical context? Background Structure This Psalm of David is unique. “It is the only hymn in the Old Testament composed completely as a direct address to God.” [1] It e...

God has planned since the beginning of time to cultivate diversity among human beings. When people tried to circumvent His plan, God intervened by creating many languages. … [God] is a God of innovati...

I turn to John Wyatt [professor of ethics and perinatology at University College Hospital in London] for an eloquent expression of the priority of dependence: “God’s design for our life is that we sho...

Sadly, many of us live this way every day even though God has designed the world in which we live to be a gloryscope. What does this term mean? Just as a telescope points you to the stars and magnifie...

We will rise From the destruction From the ruins From the sin and isolation We will rise Building strong foundations Bridging the breach Making a way, a highway to our God We will rise in our ce...

In all life we see this circle of giving, which is the law of love. Consider electricity: when electricity moves through metal wires it does so by the movement of electrons from one atom to another. T...

Ancient lens What’s the historical context? Historical Background We need to understand several things about Psalm 107 before we can put it all together. First, it is the beginning psalm of Book...

The Master & His Workshop I remember first walking into my friend Andrew’s new workshop, housed in a colonial-style barn and situated on an expansive wooded acreage on the Eastern Seaboard. Thin...

In the Middle Ages there were theologians who wrote volumes on proofs of God. Anselm (1033–1109) came up with the ontological proof of God that there exists in our minds an idea of a being than which ...

Summary The Text: 1 Peter 3:13-22 In the first chapter of this letter, Peter sets out the reason for writing. He affirms the eternal state of the believer:  Blessed be the God and Father of our Lo...

Why Are Our Bibles Different? Wait a minute… why does your Bible have lowercased lord while mine has capitalized Lord ? That was a question one of my small group members asked as we studied Ge...

Ancient lens What’s the historical context? A Structured Complaint The Psalmist organizes his complaint against God in three sections. The first two sections dramatize the complaint (vv. 1-11 and...