The Bible Bloke

In examining the Creation account the reader’s expectation would be on the perfection of the result. After all, this is God who is at work, who is creating, who is rendering from a position of Love in order for His handiwork to come about. Omnipotent, omniscient. On seven separate occasions God pronounced His handiwork to be good. What had been brought into existence was satisfactory to the God who created. Is there any suggestion here that the world was now locked into a cycle of perfection? After all, God’s “good” must be without conceivable blemish. There can be no doubt that because of God’s essential nature there can be no other position than Good from which to account for the creation. How can we, who are so far removed from the historical events of the creation, and who are living in that creation, who are finite and therefore incapable of seeing anything close to resembling the complete picture make any fist at judging what God has done? We should be nothing more than...

Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow; Praise Him, all creatures here below; Praise Him above, ye heavenly host; Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost. This is probably familiar to most Christians. It is in the form of a doxology. This Greek word basically means words that offer praise to God. Consider the following: “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.” Or look to Ephesians 1:3, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.” Later in Ephesians the following can be found: “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.” (3:20-21) One of the aspects of creation I have been looking at ove...

How humbling is it for us, his created, to realise that there was nothing before God, there is nothing after God. God is, always has been and always will be. The key thought here is ‘being.’ God says I AM, (Exo 3:14) when He makes Himself known to Moses, and here He confirms to us that He always has been. John’s declaration in Revelation 4:11 brings us to a life changing fact: “Worthy are You, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power; for You created all things, and because of Your will they existed, and were created.” First it is necessary to recognize that nothing exists that was not made by God, (See John 1:3) which is a specific reference to Christ’s role) and secondly that God has made Himself known to us in order for us to praise Him, to worship Him, to see Him for who and what he is and to be humbled to tears of joy by that self-disclosure. Take a moment after my second use of the word humble and turn to Isaiah 66, and read verse 1. “Thus says the Lor...

In his book Knowing God , J.I. Packer states that our number one purpose on this earth is to know God. 1 “What aim should we set ourselves in life?” He asks. “To know God.”   At the very beginning of the Bible, Genesis chapter 1, God commands “Let there be light.” When we read the Creation story, it wasn’t until day four that God actually brought light giving bodies into existence, with the sun and the moon and the stars put into their places. (Genesis 1:14ff) I think it is possible to contend here that the Light referred to is that light spoken of by the David in Psalm 119:105. 2 For it is through God’s Light, and through God’s Word, then we have knowledge of God. He becomes that lamp that lights our way in the darkness of this world. As David cries out to God in Psalm 43:3 “O send out Your light and Your truth, let them lead me; Let them bring me to Your holy hill And to Your dwelling places.” Note that the Psalmist’s despair is assuaged only through praising God, an...

  Genesis 1 recounts God’s actions in vast, poetic, unimaginable creation of all that we see around us. This is the same Creation that we live in today. It surrounds us to the point that many have come to take it for granted. Usually, on an average day the details of living crowd out the grander vision. The first thing God created, the very first words recorded in the Bible, the very first command was, “Let there be light.” And because all things are under God’s Sovereignty it came into being. John 1 calls Jesus the Word but also refers to him as the Light of the World. Just as the world had no shape before-hand, being formless and void, so too our lives lived without the presence of God are in darkness, they are without shape and are void. The ability to perceive that light, the light of God, then is a vital part of the beginning of the world and creation in general. Without the presence of God to light the way for us to see, then we remain without that hope promised i...