Bible Stories

All we know about God has come to us in history. He has revealed himself in historical events and in words spoken by historical people. What he has revealed has affected the history of the nations it has touched.

God has chosen to reveal himself to humanity in a number of remarkable ways. One of these is to use deeply significant names for himself. His ‘names‘ or ‘titles’ reflect what and who he is. He is ‘Yahweh‘, the personal God of the covenant with his people. (The old word for this was ‘Jehovah’; in most Bibles it is given as ‘the LORD’.) The name signifies ‘I am what I am’. He is ‘Yahweh the everlasting God‘. He is addressed as ‘Yahweh provides’, ‘Yahweh is our righteousness’, ‘the Ancient of days’, ‘the holy One of Israel’. Read more

It is hard enough to understand God’s unlimited power, his absolute sovereignty. But it is more difficult to understand how this utterly sovereign God, who does whatever he wants, can have meaningful relationships with us, his creatures, without either reducing us to robots or else sacrificing his own sovereignty.

Yet these very difficulties to our understanding can also prove a help. If we can get them sorted out, they help to explain some of the earlier questions we faced. We said that God is both loving toward sinners and angry with them. We find it hard to imagine how that can be. Read more