Intimacy requires Knowledge

"I encourage you to read really good books about God. You do realize that ignorance is absolutely antithetical to intimacy. You cannot be intimate with someone you don’t know.” Sam Storms, Quoted in a sermon 10/5/08

The Jealousy and the Love of God

"God's jealousy for God's own self is a powerful dynamic throughout Scripture. But, on the other hand, God's battle against the gods of human hands (and all they represent) can be seen as a function of his loving benevolence toward us and indeed toward his whole creation. Divine jealousy is in fact an essential function of divine love. It is precisely because God wills our good that he hates the self-inflicted harm that our idolatry generates. God's conflict with the gods is ultimately for our own good as well as for God's glory. This further highlights why idolatry is such a primary sin in the Bible--identified as such by the primacy of the first two commandments of the Decalogue. It is not merely that idolatry steals God's glory but it also thwarts God's love--the love that seeks the hightest good of all God's creation. Idolatry therefore contradicts the very essence, the Godness, of God, for 'God is love.'" Christopher Wright

The Mission of God, 177

Orphan

"In you the orphan finds mercy." Hosea 14:3

Sympathetic God?!

P.T. Forsyth again:

"...There is little doubt that the sympathetic tendency is the more popular today...But a God who is merely or mainly sympathetic is not the Christian God. The Father of infinite benediction is not the Father of an infinite grace...But what we need much more to-day is a caution against anthropopathism, or a conception of God which thinks of Him chiefly as the divine consummation of all our human pity and tenderness to man's mischief, bewilderment, sorrow, and sin. A being of infinite pity would not rise to the height of the Christian God....We must have a sympathy that can not only help but save, save to the uttermost, save for ever, and not only bless but redeem. Nay, far more, we must have, for the entire confidence of faith, a sympathy that has redeemed, and already triumphs in a conclusive salvation...Even a loving God is really God not because He loves, but because He has power to subdue all things to the holiness of His love, and even sin itself to His love as redeeming grace. A sympathetic God is really God because He is a holy, saving, redeeming God; because in Him already the great world-transaction is done, and the kingdom of His holy love already set up on His foregone conquest of all evil." (p. 32, 33)

See earlier posts for source.