WHAT
DOES GOD LOOK LIKE?
A
DISSERTATION
Presented
to
The
Faculty Of
In
Partial Fulfillment
Of the
Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor
of Theology
By
Donald
Paul Lyles
2007
APPROVAL SHEET
WHAT DOES GOD LOOK LIKE?
DONALD PAUL LYLES
Read and Approved by:
(Chairperson)
(Member)
(Member)
(Member)
(Date)
DEDICATION
To my parents Finis and Nelly Lyles who have always been there; who showed me the Love of Christ as I grew up in their home and by being one of the first to do Children’s Church on a weekly basis more than a half-century ago.
To my mother that
walked us across the street and across town to teach Child Evangelism
Fellowship and Released Time lessons.
Some of my earliest memories are of running under tables while my mother
made flannel graph backgrounds with other women at the Say-So House in
And
Benjamin
ABSTRACT
Before
I begin, I need to mention Ralph Sheinbein.
Ralph was my roommate in Shenzhen, People’s Republic
of
We
spent seven weeks together in BaoAn, Shenzhen, People’s Republic of
Ralph taught me much about meditation during
these weeks. Neither of us needed to
watch a lot of television, so we talked.
We talked about home, our students and tomorrow’s lessons but
occasionally he would interject a question like, “Is Wisdom a real woman? Proverbs 8 makes it look that way.” And for the next week, we would talk about
the woman of Proverbs 8 tearing the Bible apart. On another occasion, he asked, “What shape is
the New Jerusalem?” We went on for long
enough I remember it these years later that a cube is logical and probable but
a pyramid or globe would equally fit the information given in the last chapters
of The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ. God
has no known cubes he has created in the Universe and it is entirely possible
the New Jerusalem is a globe, like all the other things God created, as we
observe his natural revelation.
Now we know this is not true, but it kept us meditating on scripture. As one actually reads Revelation 21:16, kai’ ń polis tetagwnos keitai, or translated “and the city lies square.”
Somewhere in this education as the Holy
Spirit began to transform my mind, I began to wonder what Jesus looked like? What is sin and
why are we sinners? Is my cat a
sinner? To what extent does the curse of
sin rule the cosmos. What does heaven
look like and will my cat bother me in heaven?
If we could watch God on TV what would He look like? If God walked in the Garden with naked Adam
and Eve did He wear clothes or did he look like Adam? If we eat the Marriage Feast in Heaven, is
there a sewer system? I would like to take you on a trip through my musing for
the last third of my life and some of what I find fascinating and different
from anything I have ever heard in a sermon.
In particular, I would like to look at
God. I have heard dozens if not hundreds
of Christians quote, "God is spirit, and those who worship Him must
worship in spirit and truth.[1]" But there are other verses, like "Let Us
make man in Our image, according to Our likeness;[2]”
and “they saw the God of Israel; and under His feet there appeared to be a
pavement of sapphire, as clear as the sky itself. Yet He
did not stretch out His hand against the nobles of the sons of
I believe when we quit viewing God as a invisible
glob and see Eloheim loving us and on his hands and knees in the clay creating us in his image, and then when we realize
this is the image Jesus took when he came to Earth, this should bring us to
true humility as Christians and be willing to do his bidding, now and
forevermore.
PREFACE
Man was created in God’s
image. Hagar talked with God and was
surprised she was still alive. Abraham
had a discussion with God about
If you are looking for a photograph or
drawing of God, this is the wrong volume.
You will not find a picture in this book of God. In fact, Deuteronomy 4:16 says God is not pleased if we have a
“graven image, or picture of God.” We
read In the Decalogue we are to have no graven images.[5] For
decades I have wondered what God looks like.
In recent years I have wondered, what did Moses see while in that crack
in the rock?[6] As a
member of the first TV generation and now looking for a topic to explore, this
topic seemed like a natural growth of who I am.
I am looking for God, hopefully in all the right places. My message comes from God’s Word.
When I first brought this up in discussion at
different times with two of my best friends, Don and Jim, both got quite
agitated. Both quoted John 4:24
"God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and
truth." But what did Moses Daniel,
Ezekiel and John see? I don’t want to
walk down the clear gold-like streets of heaven and walk by Theos, because I didn’t
know what he looked like.
Secondly, this is not a manuscript on the
physical characteristics of light. God
is light.[7] Light
may be a particle, wave or it may be answered one day in quantum physics or
Heaven, but not in this paper. Several
times when God reveals himself in glory, unbearably bright white light is
mentioned. Each theory seems to have its
points where it makes sense, but points that don’t follow the theories
mentioned.[8]
Third, it is not my desire to use
slight of hand, optical illusions or turn my search into a house of mirrors or
some kind of movie special effects. My
goal is to take a decade of delightful contemplation and study in the Word of
God and to piece a picture of God together in words. It will satisfy some, for some it will
not.
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
The Title of Contents is PAGE ONE of your Dissertation. The Chapter numbers and contents that follow must be designated by Roman numerals, not Arabic letters. Following is a SAMPLE TITLE PAGE.
CHAPTER AND TITLE PAGE
Preface 9
1. Hermeneutics 12
2. The Invisible God 14
3. The Angel of the Lord 30
4. Visions of God 29.3
5. Seeing God 100
6. Appendixes (if used) 155
7. Conclusion 168
8. Bibliography 190
[These are not the correct page numbers]
So we all play by the
same rules
The Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit. The Bible was written for all men in all time
in all cultures. The Holy Spirit had you
in mind when He wrote the Bible and He knew you would read His Word.
There are two verses on the subject of how to correctly
understand the Bible. These include the
following:
2 Timothy 3:16 All Scripture is
inspired by God[11] and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction,
for training in righteousness; 3:17 that the man of God may be adequate,
equipped for every good work.
2 Peter 1:21 But know this first of all, that no prophecy
of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, 1:21 for no prophecy was
ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from
God.[12]
With this in mind, I believe we should follow the Bible for
our faith and practice. We do hope these
steps will help you to enrich and enjoy your Bible as you study it from day to
day and help us understand what rules we will be using in this paper to
understand God better.
In many ways, we should read the Bible the same way we do a
Mathematics story problem. We need to
read the entire problem to see what is being asked. We need to look at each word to find and pull
out the key words. We need to determine
the formula that needs to be used. And then we need to follow the order of
operation to complete the problem.
Dwight Pentecost
describes two methods of interpretation. The first is the Allegorical
method. The second is the Literal
method. The Allegorical method is the
method where the reader knows there is a literal meaning but chooses to use a
moral or figurative meaning.[13]
Let me use an example.
Many years ago, I was traveling across country and on Sunday morning, several
of us college students stopped for church in
The pastor preached the best sermon on hell I have ever
heard. He discussed the three words
translated Hell in the Bible; the Hebrew words Gehenna and Sheol and Greek word
for Hell, Hades. I can remember the
sermon and his word pictures over four decades later. Then as he concluded in a paragraph or two he
laughed and said, “Of course we believe hell is in your heart…if you wrong
someone…” and in his final seconds he allegorized the entire sermon.
The Literal method is where the customary,
socially-acknowledged designation of a word is the literal meaning of that
word.[14] The literal method
would take Jesus’ words and not only draw word pictures but also apply it as
Jesus did.
“The Literal method is taking a passage and looking at it
from a literary genre while taking in consideration the grammatical, cultural,
historical and geographical aspects just as the first readers of the passage
might have when they read the book or passage.
A good expositional sermon will draw on these concepts and paint a
picture in such a way that the listeners will want to take the Bible and apply
it and use it in their lives.
“Another approach to interpretation is letterism. While often ignoring context, historical and cultural setting, and even grammatical structure, letterism takes each word as an isolated truth. A problem with this method is that it fails to take into account the different literary genre, or types, in the Bible.”[15]
There are some rules we believe will help us to interpret the Bible correctly in our desire to understand what God looks like.
First and last, pray. Reading a book is so much more enjoyable when you know the author of a book. Spend some time with Him before you begin reading His Word.
The first rule of Hermeneutics is to understand the context. Read the entire passage several times until you can restate the entire concept or passage in your own words. Know who is writing the passage and whom it is written to. Put yourself into the story and visualize the time of day, what city or country, by a lake, river or desert. Read enough of the passage you can “paint” a picture of what is going on. Know if the passage is poetry or a lecture. Notice words like “Therefore” and find out the reason they are “there for.”
When teaching students how to read a story problem in Math, we begin by reading the problem four times. The first time is to read the entire problem as a whole. Then we read for each word, picking out the important words. Third we read, drawing a picture of what we are reading about. The fourth time we read to see if the words match the picture we have drawn from the details. In many ways this is exactly how we need to study the Bible.
The second rule of Hermeneutics is to look at the words in the original language. The Bible was written in Hebrew, and Koine Greek and two short passages in Aramaic; Daniel 2:4 to Daniel 7:28[16] and Ezra 4:7-18, Ezra 7:12-26.[17] It is hard to understand any book that one doesn’t understand the words.
The third rule of Hermeneutics is to give special significance to the first use of a word or concept in the Bible. If it is a concept, you go to the first use to get the definition. If it is a word, you go to the original language Aramaic, Greek or Hebrew, to get the definition. Pentecost quotes Angus-Green, “The words of Scripture must be taken in their common meaning, unless such meaning is shown to be inconsistent with other parts of Scripture. Of the two meanings, that one is generally to be preferred which was most obvious to the comprehension of the hearers or original readers.”[18]
An illustration of this would be the word “holy” The first mention of holy is in Exodus 3:5, "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground." Holy dirt, appears to be an oxymoron and doesn’t fit our usual understanding of the word, holy. There are 581 words translated “holy” in the NASB Old and New Testament[19]. The Sabbath is holy. The Tabernacle was a holy place, God is holy. Suddenly, it is not the dirt that is holy, it is different dirt, the Sabbath is a different day, holy has the idea of being different. God is different than we are, He loves the world, we love ourselves. God is holy. God is different, for God is removed from Sin.
The fourth Rule of
Hermeneutics states the Bible does not contradict itself.
If the Gospel’s state in Matthew 15:38, “And those who ate
were four thousand men, besides women and children.” And in Mark 6:44, Luke
9:14 and John 6:10, “Jesus said, "Have the people sit down." Now there was much grass in the place. So the
men sat down, in number about five thousand.” Then there were two events.
The event in Matthew was in the hill country and they had
been with Jesus three days. They found seven loaves and a few fish. The event John describes as being along the
The fifth rule is to Interpret Scripture with Scripture. Use historical, cultural, logic and precedent as you use other Scriptures to understand the concept, verse or word you are studying.
The sixth rule is inference. Is there a meaning inferred by another passage that can be applied to this one? For example, if we are ‘saved by grace, not by works’, and Jesus told us in John 14:21 that if we love Him we will keep His commandments, we can infer that even though nothing we can do will save us – it is all grace – beyond that if we truly love Jesus, we will want to please Him and keep His commandments.
In
critical thought, the law of inference is just an instruction for obtaining
additional true statements from a list of true statements. In
Biblical interpretation you do this by cross-referencing the concept in Scripture.
The seventh rule is to check the grammar. One of the most useful tools in studying my Bible is to diagram sentences and passages.
The eighth rule of Interpretation is to view figurative language. E. W. Bullinger wrote a classic thousand page book on figurative language in the Bible. Much of the Psalms and Prophets are poetic. But Matthew Maury took the passage in Psalm 8:8, ”The birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, Whatever passes through the paths of the seas.” And threw many bottles over the side of the ship and his life work was to find the ocean currents used today in maritime travel. Because it sounds figurative, doesn’t mean it is, there are paths in the seas, we just call them currents.
Ninth,
we understand we need to define the terms, concepts,
and ideas. It is logical. So when we see a possible problem in Scripture,
we need to state the problem. If we
don’t state the problem, we can’t answer it.
Now we need to pray and meditate on the passage – give time for the Holy Spirit to instruct us – and write down your final interpretation based on all the rules and above steps.
Finally, no Scripture is to be uniquely interpreted. Most of the cults come from a different or unique interpretation of a passage.
2 Peter 1:20, “But know this first of all,
that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation,”
A scientific law is a theory that has been tested and widely accepted as true. If the full council of God’s Word agrees with
your
conclusion, a wide audience agrees with your interpretation, you can teach it
as “Gospel truth.”
What does God look like?
I have broken up my discussion to look at the
following
sections; The invisible God, the God that could be seen, the God that can be seen The first section
will be divided into the major divisions of the Bible.
I. The Invisible God
COL 1:15 And He is
the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation.
II.
The Angel of the Lord
Angel OF THE Lord
Eloheim, we are created in
his image
Isaiah 6:5, Yhwh I am undone
III.
Visions of God
V. The God that can be seen
IV. The God that could
be seen (pre-history)
“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’[20]
God restates this concept when he is pushing for the death penalty in the Noaic Covenant.
“Whoever sheds man’s blood, By man his blood shall be shed, For in the image of God He made man.”[21]
In many ways this is the ultimate proof text for our discussion on what Eloheim looks like? God looks like we do, or more correctly, we look like Eloheim looks.
According to the Genesis account of creation, Adam and Eve talked with God in the Garden of Eden each evening. If this were a natural communication, this would expect God and man to have normal bodies with eyes, ears and a mouth to share ideas back and forth.
The God that can be seen in the Pentateuch.
Adam and Eve walked and talked with Eloheim
in the Garden of Eden. They were people,
but perfect people when they walked with God.
My guess is they would not have been satisfied to talk to a person with
no body. This may not be true, as I talk
to people across the planet on my phone and amateur radio transmitter, a voice
without being able to see a face or body.
What did Adam see? But I prefer to talk to people eyeball to eyeball. I can’t imagine God creating Adam and Eve and
a perfect garden for them to live in and then having them pick up a cell phone
and being patched into heaven. When I
want to enjoy people, I go out to dinner with them. My guess is that God walked in the garden
with the pair looking at his creation and them being surprised at the things he
was teaching them.
In
In Genesis 1:26, “Then God said, ‘Let Us make
man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of
the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the
earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’"
In Latin, the expression “Our image” is
translated Imago Dei or Image of God
what does this mean? In a real sense,
this paper is a look at this question.
For man is specifically stated as being made in an image.
GEN 9:6 "Whoever sheds
man's blood, By man his blood shall be shed, For in
the image of God He made man.
If this God is only a spirit then what does Imago Dei mean? Does God look like a squid? Does God look like the blobs and blurred
images in the “B” movies one might see late at night on UHF? Does God have a body? Whom did Eve and
Enoch walk? What does God look like?
Genesis 11:6 And the Lord said,
"Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And
this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be
impossible for them.
There are several verses early in Genesis
that have queried my mind, if God is only a Spirit. “And they heard the sound
of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and
his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of
the garden.”[22] “And Enoch walked with God; and he was not,
for God took him.”[23] Did
Adam, Eve and Enoch walk with a
Hagar talked with God and was surprised she was
still alive.
Genesis 16:7 to GEN 16:13 Then she called the name of the Lord who spoke
to her, "Thou art a God [El] who sees"; for she said, "Have I
even remained alive here after seeing Him?"
In
this chapter Hagar is pregnant and Sarai is envious and treats her handmaiden
harshly as she wants to have her husband’s child. We don’t know how old Hagar is, but Abram is
86 and Sarai is ten years younger. Sarai
is so difficult to her maid, Hagar flees into the desert preferring death to
her treatment in the only home she has known for decades.
The Angel of the Lord, Theophany and/or Christophany
The
“Angel of the Lord” is first mentioned in Genesis 16:7, when Hagar states, ”Thou art a God who sees” in my mind, she is answering the
controversy once and for all. The Angel
of the Lord is God, probably God in flesh or Jesus Christ. This being that deals with Hagar is called
the Angel of the Lord and Hagar knows exactly who she is looking eyeball to
eyeball with, God. When the smoke
clears, she is surprised she is still alive.
When
we exegete the text we find the Angel of the Lord speaking for God. William C. Williams Begins his comments on Theophanies with the sentence, “Manifestation of God that is tangible to the human senses.”[24] God can be seen, at
least in the Pentateuch.
Theophany
Theophanies
Angel of the Lord
Manifestation of God that is tangible to the human senses.
In its most restrictive sense, it is a visible appearance of God in the Old
Testament period often, but not always, in human form. Some would also include
in this term Christophanies (preincarnate appearances of Christ) and
angelophanies (appearances of angels). In the latter category are found the
appearances of the angel of the Lord, which some have taken to be
Christophanies, reasoning that since the angel of the Lord speaks for God in
the first person (Genesis 16:10)
and the human addressed often attributes the experience to God directly (Genesis 16:13),
the angel must therefore be the Lord or the preincarnate Christ. Yet, though
the angel is clearly identified with the Lord, he is distinguished from him (he
is called "angel, " meaning "messenger" similar patterns of
identification and distinction can be seen in Genesis 19:1, 21; 31:11, 13; Exodus 3:2, 4;
Judges 2:1-5;
6:11-12, 14; 13:3, 6, 8-11, 13,
15-17, 20-23; Zechariah 3:1-6;
12:8). In the
ancient oriental world, a king's messenger spoke in the name of the king. Any
insult rendered him was interpreted as an insult to the king himself (cf. Hanun's treatment of David's embassy, 2 Samuel 10:1-4;
1 Chronicles 19:2-6).
There seems, therefore, no necessity to posit a theophany for the angel of the
Lord. In Joshua 5:13-6:5, the conquest narrative is interrupted by the abrupt
appearance of a being who calls himself the "commander of the army of the
Lord" (5:14). To interpret this event as an encounter with God or with the
preincarnate Christ forces the text. Angels were sent on missions of this kind
(Judges 6:11; 13:3), and
some were identified as captains over heavenly armies (Dan 10:5, 20;
12:1). While
there are no indisputable Christophanies in the Old Testament, every theophany
wherein God takes on human form foreshadows the incarnation, both in matters of
grace and judgment.
Following are a number of what may be considered classic
theophanies. The Lord appears to Abraham on his arrival in the land, wherein
God promised the land to Abraham and his descendants (Genesis 12:7-9);
God reaffirmed his promises of land and progeny when Abraham was ninety-nine
years old (Genesis 17:1),
and on the Plains of Mamre on his way to destroy Sodom (Genesis 18:1).
God appeared to Jacob in his dream at
God appeared to Moses alone on the mountain (Exodus 19:20;
33:18-34:8).
God also appeared to Moses, with Aaron and his sons and the seventy elders (Exodus 24:9-11)
and in the transfer of leadership to Joshua (Deut 31:15).
While he suffered, Job had complained that he sought an
audience with God (31:35). At
the conclusion of the book the Lord appears in a thunderstorm to deliver two
discourses, designed to grant Job's request for a hearing and arguably to
supply at least one of the meanings for Job's affliction: God is sovereign.
In a looser sense, God's promise of the land to Abraham (Genesis 15),
as well as his commission that Abraham sacrifice Isaac (Genesis 22),
could be considered theophanies. Frequently the term, "glory of the Lord, " reflects a theophany, as in Exodus 24:16-18; the
"pillar of cloud" has a similar function in Exodus 33:9. The Spirit
of God or the Spirit of the Lord must be considered theophanous,
particularly when it comes upon men, transforming them (1 Sam 10:6)
and equipping them for divine service (1 Sam 16:13).
The Lord appears to people in visions (Genesis 15:1;
46:2; Job 33:15; Psalm 89:19; Dan 2:19; Acts 9:10; 18:9) and in
dreams (Genesis 20:3;
31:24; 1 Kings 3:5; Matt 2:13) to
reveal his plans for them or to unveil mysteries for the future.
The Lord appears in theophanies both to bless and to judge.
A frequent introduction for theophanies may be seen in the words, "The
Lord came down." Examples may be found in Genesis 11:5, Exodus 34:5,
Number 11:25, and Numbers 12:5. Although the most common verb for the
manifestation of the glory of the Lord is "appeared" (Lev 9:23; Num 14:10; 16:19, 42; 20:6), God's
glory also "settled" on Mount Sinai (Exodusd 24:16).
William C. Williams
Abraham had a discussion with
God about
GEN 17:1 Now when Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to
Abram and said to him, "I am God Almighty; Walk before Me, and be
blameless.
GEN 17:2 "And I will establish My covenant
between Me and you, And I will multiply you exceedingly."
GEN 17:3 And Abram fell on his face, and God
[Eloheim] talked with him, saying,
GEN 18:1 Now the Lord appeared to him by the
oaks of Mamre, while he was sitting at the tent door in the heat of the day.
Jacob wrestled with God and
walked away limping.
GEN 32:24 Then Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until
daybreak.
GEN 32:25 And when he saw that he had not
prevailed against him, he touched the socket of his thigh; so the socket of
Jacob's thigh was dislocated while he wrestled with him.
GEN 32:26 Then he said, "Let me go, for the
dawn is breaking." But he said, "I will not let you go unless you
bless me."
GEN 32:27 So he said to him, "What is your
name?" And he said, "Jacob."
GEN 32:28 And he said, "Your name shall no
longer be Jacob, but
GEN 32:29 Then Jacob asked him and said, "Please tell me your
name." But he said, "Why is it that you ask my name?" And he
blessed him there.
GEN 32:30 So Jacob named the place Peniel, for
he said, "I have seen God [Eloheim] face to face, yet my life has been
preserved."
Moses
Exodus 24:9-11
EXO 24:9 ¶ Then Moses went up with Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of
the elders of Israel,
EXO 24:10 and they saw the God of Israel; and under His feet there
appeared to be a pavement of sapphire, as clear as the sky itself.
EXO 24:11 Yet He did not stretch out His hand against the nobles of the
sons of Israel; and they beheld God, and they ate and
drank.
Exodus 33:18 to 23 virtually demanded to see
God, and was granted his wish.
EXO 33:18 Then Moses said, "I pray Thee, show me Thy glory!"
EXO 33:19 And He said, "I Myself will make all My goodness pass
before you, and will proclaim the name of the Lord before you; and I will be
gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will
show compassion."
EXO 33:20 But He said, "You cannot see My
face, for no man can see Me and live!"
EXO 33:21 Then the Lord said, "Behold, there is a place by Me, and you shall stand there on the rock;
EXO 33:22 and it will come about, while My glory is passing by, that I
will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with My hand until I have
passed by.
EXO 33:23 "Then I will take My hand away
and you shall see My back, but My face shall not be seen."
Gideon met the Angel of the Lord and says much the
same thing as Hagar in Judges 6:11-23
JDG 6:11 ¶ Then the angel of the Lord came and sat under the oak that was
in Ophrah, which belonged to Joash
the Abiezrite as his son Gideon was beating out wheat
in the wine press in order to save it from the Midianites.
JDG 6:12 And the angel of the Lord appeared to
him and said to him, "The Lord is with you, O valiant warrior."
JDG 6:13 Then Gideon said to him, "O my lord, if the Lord is with
us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all His miracles which
our fathers told us about, saying, 'Did not the Lord bring us up from
JDG 6:14 And the Lord looked at him and said, "Go in this your
strength and deliver
JDG 6:15 And he said to Him, "O Lord, how
shall I deliver
JDG 6:16 But the Lord said to him, "Surely
I will be with you, and you shall defeat Midian as one man."
JDG 6:17 So Gideon said to Him, "If now I have found favor in Thy
sight, then show me a sign that it is Thou who speakest
with me.
JDG 6:18 "Please do not depart from
here, until I come back to Thee, and bring out my offering and lay it before
Thee." And He said,
"I will remain until you return."
JDG 6:19 ¶ Then Gideon went in and prepared a kid and unleavened bread
from an ephah of flour; he put the meat in a basket and the broth in a pot, and
brought them out to him under the oak, and presented them.
JDG 6:20 And the angel of God said to him,
"Take the meat and the unleavened bread and lay them on this rock, and
pour out the broth." And he did so.
JDG 6:21 Then the angel of the Lord put out the end of the staff that was
in his hand and touched the meat and the unleavened bread; and fire sprang up
from the rock and consumed the meat and the unleavened bread. Then the angel of
the Lord vanished from his sight.
JDG 6:22 When Gideon saw that he was the angel of the Lord, he said,
"Alas, O Lord God! For now I have seen the angel of the Lord face to
face."
JDG 6:23 And the Lord said to him, "Peace to you, do not fear; you
shall not die."[25]
Isaiah saw God in his
temple.
ISA 6:1 In the year of King Uzziah's death, I
saw the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe
filling the temple.
ISA 6:2 Seraphim stood above Him, each having six wings; with two he
covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.
ISA 6:3 And one called out to another and said,
"Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of hosts, The whole earth is full of His
glory."
ISA 6:4 And the foundations of the thresholds
trembled at the voice of him who called out, while the temple was filling with
smoke.
Isaiah was used to walking in and out of Kings palaces
and talking with Kings.
Ezekiel 1 and 8
EZE 1:27 Then I noticed from the appearance of His loins and upward
something like glowing metal that looked like fire all around within it, and
from the appearance of His loins and downward I saw something like fire; and
there was a radiance around Him.
EZE 1:28 As the appearance of the rainbow in the
clouds on a rainy day, so was the appearance of the surrounding radiance. Such
was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it,
I fell on my face and heard a voice speaking.
EZE 8:2 Then I looked, and behold, a likeness as the appearance of a man;
from His loins and downward there was the appearance of fire, and from His
loins and upward the appearance of brightness, like the appearance of glowing
metal.
EZE 8:3 And He stretched out the form of a hand and caught me by a lock
of my head; and the Spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven and brought me
in the visions of God to Jerusalem, to the entrance of the north gate of the
inner court, where the seat of the idol of jealousy, which provokes to
jealousy, was located.
Daniel describes the same
person
DAN 7:9 ¶ "I kept looking Until thrones
were set up, And the Ancient of Days took His seat; His vesture was like white
snow, And the hair of His head like pure wool. His throne was ablaze with flames, Its wheels were a burning fire.
DAN 7:10 "A river of fire was flowing And
coming out from before Him; Thousands upon thousands were attending Him, And myriads
upon myriads were standing before Him; The court sat, And the books were
opened.
John’s vision
REV 1:12 And I turned to see the voice that was speaking with me. And
having turned I saw seven golden lampstands;
REV 1:13 and in the middle of the lampstands one like a son of man,
clothed in a robe reaching to the feet, and girded across His breast with a
golden girdle.
REV 1:14 And His head and His hair were white
like white wool, like snow; and His eyes were like a flame of fire;
REV 1:15 and His feet were like burnished bronze, when it has been caused
to glow in a furnace, and His voice was like the sound
of many waters.
REV 1:16 And in His right hand He held seven stars; and out of His mouth
came a sharp two-edged sword; and His face was like the sun shining in its
strength.
REV 1:17 And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet
as a dead man. And He laid His right hand upon me, saying, "Do not be
afraid; I am the first and the last,
What does Imago Dei in Genesis 1:26 mean?
Moses
asked this question in Genesis 33 and was given a
audio-visual lesson on the Godhead.
Moses was placed in the crack of a rock and got to see God. But I am getting ahead of myself. I’d like to take each section of the Holy
Scripture and look at it a piece at a time.
1.
Physical
What does it mean to be made in God’s
image? Luke 2:52 “And Jesus kept increasing in wisdom
and stature, and in favor with God and men.”
If just one of these verses are not figurative, then Eloheim has a body.
God
has parts as men have parts. We look
like God, or more appropriately, God made us to look like Him.
Some scholars consider God’s description of himself as figures of speech called anthropomorphisms. But if just one of these verses is not figurative, then Eloheim has a body. Let’s look at the following:
Genesis 1:27 And God created man in His own
image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
If we take the Bible literally, Genesis 1:26 Then God said,
"Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them
rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle
and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the
earth." 1:27 And God created man in
His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created
them.
“Our image,” in English; or “Imago Dei” in Latin; “imagen de Dios” in Spanish, all of these versions have the same
understanding, we mortals, humans, have bodies fashioned from one not unlike
God’s. If we have bodies and if there is
a God, this verse clearly states we were created in God’s image. This is the crux of the argument that God has
a body.
Genesis 2:7 Then the Lord God formed man of
dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and
man became a living being.
In “His own Image” the deeper I contemplate what God
looks like, the more I realize “His own image, in the Image of God” is the
key. So lets
look at some of the sides of this passage.
God indicates he has a human physique,
including hands, face, mouth, eyes and arms and olfactory and speak and
eat. If these things are true God has at
least five senses. Let’s look at some of
these human characteristics that God gives to himself.
ARM OF The
LORD
Deuteronomy 33:27 The eternal God is your refuge, and
underneath are the everlasting arms.
Psalm 89:10, "Thou
Thyself didst crush Rahab like one who is slain;
Thou didst scatter Thine enemies with Thy mighty arm."
Psalm 89:13 Thou hast a mighty arm: strong is thy hand, and high is thy right hand. {a...: Heb. an arm with might} (KJV)
He will gather the lambs with His arm, and carry them in
His bosom Isaiah
40:11
LUK 1:51 "He has done mighty deeds with
His arm; He has scattered those who were proud in the thoughts of their heart.
Isaiah 51:9 ¶ Awake, awake, put on strength,
O arm of the LORD; awake, as in the ancient days, in the generations of old.
Art thou not it that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon?
Isaiah
53:1 ¶ Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed? {report: or, doctrine?: Heb. hearing?}
John
12:38 That the saying of Esaias the prophet might be
fulfilled, which he spake, Lord, who hath believed
our report? and to whom hath the arm of the Lord been
revealed?
(KJV)
Power Bible
BACK OF GOD
EXODUS 33:23 "Then I will take My hand away and you shall see My back, but My face shall
not be seen."
ISAIAH 50:6 I gave My back to those who
strike Me, And My cheeks to those who pluck out the
beard; I did not cover My face from humiliation and spitting. (KJV)
Psalm 129:3 The plowers plowed upon my back: they made long their furrows.
CHEEKS (only reference in Bible to
God) and beard
Isaiah 50:6 I gave My back to those who
strike Me, And My cheeks to those who pluck out the
beard; I did not cover My face from humiliation and spitting.
EARS
Psalm 18:6 In my distress I called upon the
Lord, And cried to my God for help; He heard my voice out of His temple, And my
cry for help before Him came into His ears.
SENSE OF HEARING
God has a SENSE OF HEARING
DEU 4:28 "And there you will serve gods,
the work of man's hands, wood and stone, which neither see nor hear nor eat nor
smell. The indication here is that God
can do all of these and more.
PSALM 18:6 In my
distress I called upon the Lord, And cried to my God for help; He heard my
voice out of His temple, And my cry for help before Him came into His
ears.
DEU 4:34 "Or has a god tried to go to
take for himself a nation from within another nation by trials, by signs and
wonders and by war and by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm and by great
terrors, as the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes?
DEU 4:36 "Out of the heavens He let you
hear His voice to discipline you; and on earth He let you see His great fire,
and you heard His words from the midst of the fire.
2 Samuel 22:7 "In my distress I called
upon the LORD, Yes, I cried to my God; And from His temple He heard my voice,
And my cry for help [came] into His ears.
2 Kings 19:28 'Because of your raging against
Me, And because your arrogance has come up to My ears, Therefore I will put My
hook in your nose, And My bridle in your lips, And I will turn you back by the
way which you came.
2 Chronicles 6:40 "Now, O my God, I pray
Thee, let Thine eyes be open, and Thine ears attentive to the prayer [offered]
in this place.
Psalm 34:15 The eyes
of the LORD are toward the righteous, And His ears are [open] to their cry.
Psalm 92:11,
Psalm 130:2 Lord, hear my voice! Let Thine
ears be attentive To the voice of my supplications.
Isaiah 37:29 "Because of your raging
against Me, And because your arrogance has come up to
My ears, Therefore I will put My hook in your nose, And My bridle in your lips,
PHI 2:6 who, although He existed in the form
of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped,
PHI 2:7 but emptied Himself, taking the form
of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.
COL 1:15 And He is
the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation.
1 Peter 3:12 "For the eyes of the Lord
are upon the righteous, and his ears attend to their prayer, but the face of
the Lord is against those who do evil." (NASB)
REV 1:15 and His feet were like burnished
bronze, when it has been caused to glow in a furnace, and His voice was like the sound of many waters.
THE EYE OF THE LORD:
Psalm 33:18 Behold, the eye of the Lord is on
those who fear Him, On those who hope for His loving kindness,
Psalm 34:15, "The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous, and His ears are open to their cry."
1 Peter 3:12 "For the eyes of the Lord
are upon the righteous, and his ears attend to their prayer, but the face of
the Lord is against those who do evil." (NASB)
FACE OF GOD
Exodus 33:20 But He said, "You cannot
see My face, for no man can see Me and
live!" 33:21 Then the Lord said,
"Behold, there is a place by Me, and you shall stand there on the
rock; 33:22 and it will come about,
while My glory is passing by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock and
cover you with My hand until I have passed by.
Numbers 6:24, "The Lord make His face shine on you, and be gracious to you."
Isaiah 50:6 I gave My back to those who
strike Me, And My cheeks to those who pluck out the
beard; I did not cover My face from humiliation and spitting.
Jeremiah 44:11 ¶ "Therefore thus says
the Lord of hosts, the God of
Psalm 27:9 Do not hide Thy face from me, Do
not turn Thy servant away in anger; Thou hast
been my help; Do not abandon me nor forsake me, O God of my salvation!
Exodus 3:6 He said also, "I am the God
of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of
Jacob." Then Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
Exodus 33:23 "Then I will take My hand away and you shall see My back, but My face shall
not be seen." Moses sees God twice and lives
FEET
Psalm 18:9 He bowed the heavens also, and
came down With thick darkness under His feet.
HAND OF THE LORD:
Exodus 7:5, "And
the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I stretch out My hand on
Exodus 24:11 Yet He did not stretch out His
hand against the nobles of the sons of Israel; and they beheld God, and they ate and drank.
Exodus 24:12 ¶ Now the Lord said to Moses,
"Come up to Me on the mountain and remain there,
and I will give you the stone tablets with the law and the commandment which I
have written for their instruction."
Two consecutive verses, one states God has a
hand the other begs the question, how did God give Moses the tablets without a
physical hand? I know, God can do
anything…but God states in verse 11 “His hand”
Exodus 7:5, "And the Egyptians
shall know that I am the Lord, when I stretch out My
hand on
Psalm 18:10 And He
rode upon a cherub and flew; And He sped upon the wings of the wind. When I think of riding a horse, I need legs
to go around the animal and I need hands to hold the bridle. While this may be figurative language, there
are two cherubs or cherubim that sit atop the gold crusted Ark of the
Covenant.
EXODUS 25:19 "And make one cherub at one
end and one cherub at the other end; you shall make the cherubim of one piece
with the mercy seat at its two ends.
Everything seems to have a body. God gives a view of cherubs in Ezekiel 1
Exodus 33:23 "Then I will take My hand away and you shall see My back, but My face shall
not be seen."
God appears to use his hands in many
ways. He can bring pestilence and he can
create and wipe tears away.
Exodus 9:3 behold, the hand of the Lord will
come with a very severe pestilence on your livestock
Exodus 33:22 and it will come about, while My
glory is passing by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you
with My hand until I have passed by.
Genesis 2:7 Then the Lord God formed man of
dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and
man became a living being.
Apparently, God has not only hands to form
man, but opposing thumbs to create man in the clay. Somehow God can breathe, indicating he has
lungs and a mouth or nose and did use Mouth-to-mouth to bring man to life.
2 Samuel 24:16, "When the
angel stretched out his hand toward
Isaiah 25:8 He will swallow up death for all
time, And the Lord God will wipe tears away from all
faces, And He will remove the reproach of His people from all the earth; For
the Lord has spoken.
Isaiah 59:1 Behold the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that
it cannot save.”
REV 6:5 ¶ And when He broke the
third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, "Come."And
I looked, and behold, a black horse; and he who sat on it had a pair of scales
in his hand.
Revelation 21:4 and He shall wipe away every
tear from their eyes; and there shall no longer be any death; there shall no
longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed
away."
God appears to have hands to wipe tears like
a parent wipes tears. Maybe he even uses
Kleenex or handi-wipes.
HEART
Man after God's own HEART. while this may be figurative, God is comparing David's heart to his heart.
ACT 13:22 "And after He had removed him,
He raised up David to be their king, concerning whom He also testified and
said, 'I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after My
heart, who will do all My will.'
MOUTH
There are around 300 references to “The Word
of the Lord,” in the NAS Bible. Psalm
33:6, "By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the
breath of His mouth all their host."
2 Thessalonians 2:8
And then that lawless one will be revealed whom the Lord will slay with
the breath of His mouth and bring to an end by the appearance of His
coming; [not only can he talk but he has
breath.]
NAKED
When the Holy Writ describes Adam and Eve walking with God in the Garden, they were naked. If God had been walking with clothes on, or not looked like Adam, I think innocent children would know the difference. Why do you wear clothes and I don’t? It is entirely possible God looks like every other man. Isn’t this the concept of Imago Dei?
My granddaughter, Julia, at three, she is innocent but knows who has clothes on and who doesn’t. “He/she is naked,” “I want to get naked” is not uncommon to hear in our house.
NOSE
Genesis 8:21 And the Lord smelled the
soothing aroma; and the Lord said to Himself, "I will never again curse
the ground on account of man, for the intent of man's heart is evil from his
youth; and I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done. While this passage doesn’t specifically speak
to a nose, it indicates God has the sense of smell. If one as a sense of smell and a
mouth, they should have taste.
NOSTRILS
PSA 18:8 Smoke went up out of His nostrils, And fire from His mouth devoured; Coals were kindled by it.
SHOULDERS
Isaiah 7:14? ”And the government will rest on
His shoulders; And His
name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,”[26]
Sit
Seated at right hand of God
1KI 22:19 And Micaiah said, "Therefore, hear the word of the Lord. I saw the Lord sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven standing by Him on His right and on His left.
1KI 22:20 "And the Lord said, 'Who will entice Ahab to go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?' And one said this while another said that.
1KI 22:21 "Then a spirit came forward and stood before the Lord and said, 'I will entice him.'
1KI 22:22 "And the Lord said to him, 'How?' And he said, 'I will go out and be a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.' Then He said, 'You are to entice him and also prevail. Go and do so.'
1KI 22:23 "Now therefore, behold, the Lord has put a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; and the Lord has proclaimed disaster against you."
LUK 22:69 "But from now on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the power of God."
EPH 1:20 which He brought about in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead, and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places,
COL 3:1 If then you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.
ACT 7:55 But being full of the Holy Spirit, he gazed intently into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God;
ACT 7:56 and he said, "Behold, I see the heavens opened up and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God."
MAT 19:14 But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.
MAR 10:14 But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto
them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of
such is the
LUK 18:16 But
Jesus called them unto him, and said, Suffer little
children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the
If Jesus has a bottom, butt, gluteus Maximus in which to sit, then He has a lap as he sits. The same lap If God can sit, then God has a lap. A lap to put little children in and to say, “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”[27]
God has a shadow
Can a spirit have a shadow?
PSA 89:46 How long, O Lord? Wilt Thou hide Thyself forever? Will Thy wrath burn like fire?
PSA 91:1 He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High Will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.
Psalm 57:1, "Be gracious to me, O God, be gracious to me, for my soul takes refuge in Thee; and in the shadow of Thy wings I will take refuge, until destruction passes by."
God has a seat in Psalm 18:
Bodily actions
PSALM 18:35 You give
me your shield of victory, and your right hand sustains me; you stoop down to
make me great.
http://www.carm.org/open/anthropomorphisms.htm
PSALM 18:9 He bowed the heavens
also, and came down With thick darkness under His
feet.
PSALM 18:10 And
He rode upon a cherub and flew; And He sped upon the wings of the wind.
PSA 91:4 He will cover you with
His pinions, And under His wings you may seek refuge;
His faithfulness is a shield and bulwark.
While all of these passages may be anthrophorphisms, if we are made in the image of God, why
do we call them figures of speech? I
believe the most common or standard way to understand all these passages that
show God to have a body, and our body is created in his image and for Him to
use his body much as we do.
Voice
6. What does God sound
like?
All references to God having the voice like
waters
Psalm 29:3 The voice
of the Lord is upon the waters;
Jeremiah 10:13 When He utters His voice,
there is a tumult of waters in the heavens, And He causes the clouds to ascend
from the end of the earth; He makes lightning for the rain, And brings out the
wind from His storehouses.
Jeremiah 51:16 When He utters His voice, there
is a tumult of waters in the heavens, And He causes the clouds to ascend from
the end of the earth; He makes lightning for the rain, And brings forth the
wind from His storehouses.
Ezekiel 1:24 I also heard the sound of their
wings like the sound of abundant waters as they went, like the voice of the
Almighty, a sound of tumult like the sound of an army camp; whenever they stood
still, they dropped their wings.
Ezekiel 10:5 Moreover, the sound of the wings
of the cherubim was heard as far as the outer court, like the voice of God
Almighty when He speaks.
Ezekiel 43:2 and behold, the glory of the God
of
Revelation 1:15 and His feet were like
burnished bronze, when it has been caused to glow in a furnace, and His voice was like the sound of many waters.
Revelation 14:2 And
I heard a voice from heaven, like the sound of many waters and like the sound
of loud thunder, and the voice which I heard was like the sound of harpists
playing on their harps.
Revelation 19:6 And
I heard, as it were, the voice of a great multitude and as the sound of many
waters and as the sound of mighty peals of thunder, saying, "Hallelujah!
For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns.
Mark 9:7 Then a cloud formed, overshadowing
them, and a voice came out of the cloud, "This is My
beloved Son, listen to Him!"
The voice is one we can understand in our own
language.
We want people to appreciate what we “do” and
create. This is the idea of
worship. For us to tell God what he is
and how good he is at what he does. God
is the only one we are supposed to worship.
Habakkuk 3:3-4 HAB 3:18 Yet I will exult in the Lord,
I will rejoice in the God of my salvation.
Habakkuk 3:19 The Lord God
is my strength, And He has made my feet like hinds' feet, And makes me
walk on my high places.
There are characteristics God possesses we do
not.
BRIGHTNESS or Glory (Hebrew: Kabod,
Greek: Doxa) OF GOD
1CO 11:7 For a man
ought not to have his head covered, since he is the image [GK: statue] and
glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man.
Hebrews 1:3 And He is the radiance of His
glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the
word of His power. When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the
right hand of the Majesty on high;
Ezekiel 1:28 As the
appearance of the rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day, so was the appearance
of the surrounding radiance. Such was the appearance of the likeness of the
glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell on my face and heard a voice
speaking.
Ezekiel 10:4 Then the glory of the Lord went
up from the cherub to the threshold of the temple, and the temple was filled
with the cloud, and the court was filled with the brightness of the glory of the
Lord.
Exodus 16:7 And in
the morning, then ye shall see the glory of the LORD; for that he heareth your murmurings against the LORD: and what are we,
that ye murmur against us?
Exodus
16:10 And it came to pass, as Aaron spake unto the whole congregation of the children of
Israel, that they looked toward the wilderness, and, behold, the glory of the
LORD appeared in the cloud.
Exodus
24:16 And the glory of the LORD abode upon mount Sinai, and the cloud covered
it six days: and the seventh day he called unto Moses out of the midst of the
cloud.
Exodus
24:17 And the sight of the glory of the LORD was like devouring fire on the top
of the mount in the eyes of the children of Israel.
Exodus 40:34 ¶ Then a cloud covered the tent
of the congregation, and the glory of the LORD filled
the tabernacle.
Exodus 40:35 And
Moses was not able to enter into the tent of the congregation, because the
cloud abode thereon, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle.
Leviticus 9:6 And Moses said, This is the thing which the LORD commanded that ye should
do: and the glory of the LORD shall appear unto you.
Leviticus 9:23 ¶ And
Moses and Aaron went into the tabernacle of the congregation, and came out, and
blessed the people: and the glory of the LORD appeared unto all the people.
Numbers 14:10 But all the congregation bade
stone them with stones. And the glory of the LORD appeared in the tabernacle of
the congregation before all the children of
Numbers 16:19 And Korah gathered all the congregation against them unto the door of the
tabernacle of the congregation: and the glory of the LORD appeared unto all the
congregation.
Numbers 16:42 And it
came to pass, when the congregation was gathered against Moses and against
Aaron, that they looked toward the tabernacle of the congregation: and, behold,
the cloud covered it, and the glory of the LORD appeared.
Numbers 20:6 And
Moses and Aaron went from the presence of the assembly unto the door of the
tabernacle of the congregation, and they fell upon their faces: and the glory
of the LORD appeared unto them.
1 Kings 8:11 So that the priests could not
stand to minister because of the cloud: for the glory of the LORD had filled
the house of the LORD.
2Chonicles 5:14 So that the priests could not
stand to minister by reason of the cloud: for the glory of the LORD had filled
the house of God.
2 Chronicles 7:2 And
the priests could not enter into the house of the LORD, because the glory of
the LORD had filled the LORD'S house.
2 Chronicles 7:3 And when all the children of
Israel saw how the fire came down, and the glory of the LORD upon the house,
they bowed themselves with their faces to the ground upon the pavement, and
worshipped, and praised the LORD, saying, For he is good; for his mercy endureth for ever.
Psalm 104:31 ¶ The
glory of the LORD shall endure for ever: the LORD shall rejoice in his works. {endure: Heb. be}
Isaiah 35:2 It shall blossom abundantly, and
rejoice even with joy and singing: the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it,
the excellency of Carmel and Sharon, they shall see the glory of the LORD, and
the excellency of our God.
Isaiah 40:5 And the
glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for
the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.
Isaiah 58:8 Then shall thy light break forth
as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth
speedily: and thy righteousness shall go before thee; the glory of the LORD
shall be thy rereward. {be...:
Heb. gather thee up}
Isaiah 60:1 Arise, shine; for thy light is
come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee. {shine...: or, be enlightened; for thy light cometh}
Ezekiel 1:28 As the
appearance of the bow that is in the cloud in the day of rain, so was the
appearance of the brightness round about. This was the appearance of the
likeness of the glory of the LORD. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and
I heard a voice of one that spake.
Ezekiel 3:12 Then the spirit took me up, and
I heard behind me a voice of a great rushing, saying, Blessed
be the glory of the LORD from his place.
Ezekiel 3:23 Then I arose, and went forth into
the plain: and, behold, the glory of the LORD stood there, as the glory which I
saw by the
Ezekiel 10:4 Then the glory of the LORD went
up from the cherub, and stood over the threshold of the house; and the house
was filled with the cloud, and the court was full of the brightness of the
LORD'S glory. {went up: Heb. was lifted up}
Ezekiel 10:18 Then the glory of the LORD
departed from off the threshold of the house, and stood over the cherubims.
Ezekiel 11:23 And the
glory of the LORD went up from the midst of the city, and stood upon the
mountain which is on the east side of the city.
Ezekiel 43:4 And the
glory of the LORD came into the house by the way of the gate whose prospect is
toward the east.
Ezekiel 43:5 So the spirit took me up, and
brought me into the inner court; and, behold, the glory of the LORD filled the
house.
Ezekiel 44:4 ¶ Then brought he me the way of
the north gate before the house: and I looked, and, behold, the glory of the
LORD filled the house of the LORD: and I fell upon my face.
Habakkuk 2:14 For
the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the
waters cover the sea. {with...: or, by knowing the
glory}
Luke 2:9 And, lo,
the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round
about them: and they were sore afraid.
2 Corinthians 3:18 But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord. {by the...: or, of the Lord the Spirit}
Only God is able to forgive sins, Jesus could forgive sins.
MAR 2:6 But there were some of the scribes sitting there and reasoning in their hearts, , MAR 2:7 "Why does this man speak that way? He is blaspheming; who can forgive sins but God alone?"
MAR 2:8 And immediately Jesus, aware in His spirit that they were reasoning that way within themselves, said to them, "Why are you reasoning about these things in your hearts?
2.
Mental.
God's attributes are three: omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence.
I. The Identity of God
A. God is living
B. God is personal
C. God is Spirit
II. The Transcendence of God
A. God is Infinite
B. God is Eternal
C. God is Unchanging or Immutable
III. The Character of God
A. God is Holy
B. God is love
C. God is a God of Truth
Williams theology
Its Supernatural Design and Spiritual Significance
by E.W. Bullinger
http://philologos.org/__eb-nis/three.htm
These
are the three things we want. The
reasons for our cell phones is to know where my wife is and she me. I want to know enough to defeat those that
argue with me. I want to be at home and
work at the same time. I want to be in
Northern California and the
Nothing man starts to do
can he not accomplish.
Genesis 11:6 And the Lord said, "Behold,
they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they
began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for
them.
Isaiah 55:8 "For My thoughts are not
your thoughts, Neither are your ways My ways,"
declares the Lord. 55:9 "For as the
heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways
higher than your ways, And My thoughts than your thoughts.
Exodus 32:14, "So the Lord changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people."
2 Samuel 24:16, "When
the angel stretched out his hand toward
Genesis 9:16, “When the bow is in the cloud, then I will look upon it, to remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” God has some way to view the rainbow. God has a memory. God keeps his promises.
Luke 11:17 But He knew their thoughts, and
said to them, "Any kingdom divided against itself
is laid waste; and a house divided against itself falls.
1 Chronicles 28:9 "As for you, my son Solomon, know
the God of your father, and serve Him with a whole heart and a willing mind;
for the Lord searches all hearts, and understands every intent of the thoughts.
If you seek Him, He will let you find Him; but if you forsake Him, He will
reject you forever.
Psalm 40:5 Many, O Lord my God, are the
wonders which Thou hast done, And Thy thoughts toward us; There is none to
compare with Thee; If I would declare and speak of them, They would be too
numerous to count.
3. Spiritual
Holy
Righteous
The Glory of God
Psalm 34:15, "The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous, and His ears are open to their cry."
Psalm 89:10, "Thou
Thyself didst crush Rahab like one who is slain;
Thou didst scatter Thine enemies with Thy mighty arm."
1 Samuel 3:10 God is standing…
Numbers 14:30 Turn your face against them
Other - Wings
Psalm 57:1, "Be gracious to me, O God, be gracious to me, for my soul takes refuge in Thee; and in the shadow of Thy wings I will take refuge, until destruction passes by."
http://www.carm.org/open/anthropomorphisms.htm
A being who is LIGHT
1 Timothy 6:16 who alone possesses immortality and
dwells in unapproachable light; whom no man has seen or can see.
Ezekiel 1:4 ¶ And as I looked, behold, a
storm wind was coming from the north, a great cloud with fire flashing forth
continually and a bright light around it, and in its midst something like
glowing metal in the midst of the fire.
Matthew 17: transfiguration
Mark 9:2 ¶ And six
days later, Jesus took with Him Peter and James and John, and brought them up
to a high mountain by themselves. And He was transfigured before them;
Mark 9:3 and His garments became radiant and
exceedingly white, as no launderer on earth can whiten them.
Mark 9:2-3 “And He was transfigured before them;
9:3 and His garments became radiant and exceedingly white, as no launderer on
earth can whiten them. KJV translates
this “no fuller on earth can white them”
The NIV states, “His clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone
in the world could bleach them.”
The word “radiant,” “stilbo”
can be translated “to shine”
Moses and Elijah were present. Moses EXO 34:33 When
Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil over his face.
Wes,
I was working on the Hebrew word, hod, translated into English as splendor, majesty, vigor, used eight times in scripture.
1CH 16:27 Splendor and majesty are before Him,
PSALM 8:1 (For the
choir director; on the Gittith. A
Psalm of David.) O Lord, our Lord, How majestic is Thy name in all the
earth, Who hast displayed Thy splendor above the
heavens!
PSALM 21:5 His glory is great through Thy salvation, Splendor and majesty Thou
dost place upon him.
PSALM 45:3 In Thy splendor and Thy majesty!
PSALM 96:6 Splendor and majesty are before Him, Strength and beauty are in His
sanctuary.
Psalm 104:1 Bless the Lord, O my soul! O Lord my God, Thou art very great; Thou
art clothed with splendor and majesty,
Jeremiah 22:18 Therefore thus says the Lord in regard to Jehoiakim
Habakkuk 3:3 ¶ His splendor covers the heavens, And the earth is full of His praise.
There are at least two songs that jumped out at me in these eight verses.
Bless the Lord all my soul and all that is with in my bless your Holy Name.
O Lord, our Lord, How majestic is Thy name in all the earth,
By the way, do you know what a gittith is?
Personality:
Job 38-41 shows God’s power.
Emotional
God likes to be told he did a good job and is
doing a good job. The meaning of praise, is to tell God he is great and he did a good job.
Habakkuk 3:3b His splendor covers the
heavens, And the earth is full of His praise.
http://www.oldpaths.com/Archive/Davison/Roy/Allen/1940/holyspirit.html#II
Human actions –
changed mind, relented, remembered, rested
Exodus 32:14, "So the Lord changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people."
2 Samuel 24:16,
"When the angel stretched out his hand toward
Genesis 9:16, “When the bow is in the cloud, then I will look upon it, to remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.”
Genesis 2:2, "And by the seventh day God completed His work which He had done; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done."
Human emotions - sorrow, jealousy, pity, regret
Genesis 6:6, "And the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart."
Exodus 20:5, "You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me."
Judges 2:18, "...for the Lord was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who oppressed and afflicted them."
1 Samuel 15:35, "And
Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death; for Samuel grieved
over Saul. And the Lord regretted that He had made Saul king over
Love of God
Social aspects of man. We look forward to being with others.
What emotions does God have? Is this redundant?
Anger, love, compassion on whom
I will have compassion,
Gracious: Numbers 6:24, "The Lord make His
face shine on you, and be gracious to you."
Angels: Psalm 33:6, "By the word of the Lord the
heavens were made, and by the breath of His mouth all
their host."
Psalm 18:7 ¶ Then
the earth shook and quaked; And the foundations of the mountains were trembling
And were shaken, because He was angry.
Psalm 18:8 Smoke went up out of
His nostrils, And fire from His mouth devoured; Coals
were kindled by it.
The Everyday Guide to God Amy Ng Wong
Lewis Sperry
Chafer’s, Systematic Theology includes a fairly traditional theology
with a list of personality traits as well as a list of “Constitutional
Attributes”
PERSONALITY CHARACTERISTICS
Achievement
Doing one's best in objective or difficult tasks and achieving recognition
Deference
Being agreeable to accepting the leadership of others and avoiding unconventionality
Orderliness
Organizing one's work and habits and planning ahead systematically
Exhibition: Behaving so as to attract attention to one's self by appearance, speech, and manner
Autonomy: Doing as one chooses independently of others' opinions and avoiding conformity
Affiliation: Participating in friendships, sharing things with friends, and forming attachments to them
Sensitiveness: Analyzing motives and putting oneself in other people's shoes in order to understand their behavior
Neediness: Seeking encouragement and support from others and appreciating being aided when in need
Dominance: Being a leader who supervises or wields influence over others
Abasement: Feeling oneself blameworthy and inferior to others and experiencing timidity
Nurturance: Assisting those less fortunate and giving moral support to others
Change: Participating in new activities and fashions and liking novelty in one's life
Endurance: Remaining with a task until it is completed and being able to work without being distracted
Heterosexuality: Engaging in social activities with the opposite gender and being interested in related matters. God created sexuality, male and female but he is always described in the masculine.
Aggression: Attacking contrary points of view and expressing disagreement or criticism of others openly
http://www.psychodecorating.com/psydecsc/Perschar.html
I’m not sure how accurate this list is and it is certainly not complete. As I see God as having
Anger of God
The
Holy Spirit is Grieved
1 Thessalonians 5
Humor Psalm 18? Seat of God or humor of God
Jealous God
Common sense: Exodus 33:3 "Go up to a
land flowing with milk and honey; for I will not go up in your midst, because
you are an obstinate people, lest I destroy you on the way."
Exodus 32:11 Then Moses entreated the Lord
his God, and said, "O Lord, why doth Thine anger
burn against Thy people whom Thou hast brought out from the
Exodus 34:6 Then the Lord passed by in front
of him and proclaimed, "The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and
gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth;
Deuteronomy 4:25 ¶ "When you become the
father of children and children's children and have remained long in the land,
and act corruptly, and make an idol in the form of anything, and do that which
is evil in the sight of the Lord your God so as to provoke Him to anger,
Deuteronomy 6:15 for the Lord your God in the
midst of you is a jealous God; otherwise the anger
of the Lord your God will be kindled against you, and
He will wipe you off the face of the earth.
Joshua 23:16 "When you transgress the
covenant of the Lord your God, which He commanded you, and go and serve other
gods, and bow down to them, then the anger of
the Lord will burn against you, and you shall perish quickly from off the good
land which He has given you."
Judges 2:12 and they forsook the Lord, the
God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt, and
followed other gods from among the gods of the peoples who were around them,
and bowed themselves down to them; thus they provoked the Lord to anger.
PSALM 18:7 ¶ Then
the earth shook and quaked; And the foundations of the mountains were trembling
And were shaken, because He was angry.
PSALM 18:8 Smoke went up out of
His nostrils, And fire from His mouth devoured; Coals
were kindled by it.
PSALM 18:9 He bowed the heavens
also, and came down With thick darkness under His
feet.
PSALM 18:10 And
He rode upon a cherub and flew; And He sped upon the wings of the wind.
Judges 8:3 "God has given the leaders of
Midian, Oreb and Zeeb into
your hands; and what was I able to do in comparison with you?"Then their anger toward him subsided when he said
that.
2 Samuel 6:7 And the anger of the Lord burned
against Uzzah, and God struck him down there for his irreverence; and he died
there by the ark of God.
1 Kings 15:30 and because of the sins of
Jeroboam which he sinned, and which he made Israel sin, because of his
provocation with which he provoked the Lord God of Israel to anger.
1 Kings 16:13 for all the sins of Baasha and the sins of Elah his
son, which they sinned and which they made
1 Kings 22:53 So he
served Baal and worshiped him and provoked the Lord God of
1 Chronicles 13:10 And
the anger of the Lord burned against Uzza, so He
struck him down because he put out his hand to the ark; and he died there
before God.
2 Chronicles 28:25 And in every city of Judah
he made high places to burn incense to other gods, and provoked the Lord, the
God of his fathers, to anger.
2 Chronicles 29:10 "Now it is in my
heart to make a covenant with the Lord God of
Ezra 8:22 For I was ashamed to request from
the king troops and horsemen to protect us from the enemy on the way, because
we had said to the king, "The hand of our God is favorably disposed to all
those who seek Him, but His power and His anger are against all those who
forsake Him."
Ezra 10:14 "Let our leaders represent
the whole assembly and let all those in our cities who have married foreign
wives come at appointed times, together with the elders and judges of each
city, until the fierce anger of our God on account of this matter is turned
away from us."
Nehemiah 9:17 "And they refused to
listen, And did not remember Thy wondrous deeds which
Thou hadst performed among them; So they became
stubborn and appointed a leader to return to their slavery in
JOB 4:9 "By the breath of God they
perish, And by the blast of His anger they come to an
end.
JOB 9:13 ¶ "God will not turn back His
anger; Beneath Him crouch the helpers of Rahab.
JOB 21:17 ¶ "How often is the lamp of the wicked put out, Or does their calamity
fall on them? Does God apportion destruction in His anger?
JOB 32:2 But the anger of Elihu
the son of Barachel the Buzite,
of the family of Ram burned; against Job his anger burned, because he justified
himself before God.
Psalm 27:9 Do not hide Thy face from me, Do
not turn Thy servant away in anger; Thou hast been my help; Do not abandon me
nor forsake me, O God of my salvation!
Psalm 56:7 Because of wickedness,
cast them forth, In anger put down the peoples, O God!
Psalm 74:1 (A Maskil
of Asaph.) O God, why hast Thou rejected us forever? Why does Thine anger smoke
against the sheep of Thy pasture?
Psalm 78:31 The
anger of God rose against them, And killed some of their stoutest ones, And
subdued the choice men of
Isaiah 51:22 Thus says your Lord, the Lord,
even your God Who contends for His people, "Behold, I have taken out of
your hand the cup of reeling; The chalice of My anger,
You will never drink it again.
Jeremiah 7:20 Therefore thus says the Lord
God, "Behold, My anger and My wrath will be poured out on this place, on
man and on beast and on the trees of the field and on the fruit of the ground;
and it will burn and not be quenched."
Jeremiah 42:18 ¶ For
thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, "As My anger and wrath
have been poured out on the inhabitants of
Ezekiel 38:18 "And it will come about on
that day, when Gog comes against the
Joel 2:13 And rend
your heart and not your garments. "Now return to the Lord your God, For He is gracious and compassionate, Slow to anger,
abounding in loving kindness, And relenting of evil.
Micah 7:18 Who is a God like Thee, who
pardons iniquity And passes over the rebellious act of the remnant of His
possession? He does not retain His anger forever, Because
He delights in unchanging love.
James 1:20 for the anger of man does not
achieve the righteousness of God.
Revelation 14:10 he also will drink of the
wine of the wrath of God, which is mixed in full strength in the cup of His
anger; and he will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the
holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.
God has a seat / sense of humor? in Psalm 18:
What did Abraham see?
GEN 17:22 ¶ And when
He finished talking with him, God went up from Abraham. Eloheim 2370
Genesis 18:1 Now the Lord [3068, Yhwh, Jehovah] appeared to him
[Abraham is the antecedent in 17:26, Strong’s number 85, exalted father] by the
oaks of Mamre, while he was sitting at the tent door in the heat of the day.
GEN 18:3 and said, "My lord [Adon], if now I have found favor in your sight, please do
not pass your servant by.
GEN 18:22 ¶ Then the men turned away from
there and went toward Sodom, while Abraham was still standing before the
Lord.[YHWH] Jehovah’s name was so pure
to the Hebrew scribes they used the abbreviation YHWH. This Jehovah walked to Abraham, talked with
Abraham and ate a meal of bread, cottage cheese and steak.[28]
Talked GEN 18:5
"And they said," So do, as you have said. "
GEN 18:8 And he took
curds and milk and the calf which he had prepared, and placed it before them;
and he was standing by them under the tree as they ate.
Eating
GEN 18:12 And Sarah laughed to herself,
saying, "After I have become old, shall I have pleasure, my lord [Adon] being old also?"
GEN 18:13 And the Lord [YHWH] said to
Abraham, "Why did Sarah laugh, saying, 'Shall I indeed bear a child, when
I am so old?' Tell
the future
GEN 18:14 “Is anything too difficult for the
Lord? [YHWH] omnipower
GEN 18:15 Sarah denied it however, saying,
"I did not laugh"; for she was afraid. And He said, "No, but you
did laugh."
Reads minds, why was she afraid, because she knew she was talking to
GEN 18:15 Sarah denied it however, saying,
"I did not laugh"; for she was afraid. And He said, "No, but you
did laugh." Knows the future, can
change the future, YHWH
What did Hagar see?
GEN 16:6 But Abram
said to Sarai, "Behold, your maid is in your power; do to her what is good
in your sight." So Sarai treated her harshly, and she fled from her
presence.
GEN 16:7 ¶ Now the
angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, by the
spring on the way to Shur.
GEN 16:8 And he said, "Hagar, Sarai's maid, where have you come from and where are you
going?" And she said, "I am fleeing from the presence of my mistress
Sarai."
GEN 16:9 Then the angel of the Lord said to
her, "Return to your mistress, and submit yourself to her authority."
GEN 16:10 Moreover, the angel of the Lord
said to her, "I will greatly multiply your descendants so that they shall
be too many to count."
GEN 16:11 The angel
of the Lord said to her further, "Behold, you are with child, And you
shall bear a son; And you shall call his name Ishmael, Because the Lord has
given heed to your affliction.
GEN 16:12 "And he will be a wild donkey
of a man, His hand will be against everyone, And
everyone's hand will be against him; And he will live to the east of all his
brothers."
Genesis 16:13 Then she called the name of the
Lord who spoke to her, "Thou art a God who sees"[El Raah]; for she said, "Have I even remained alive here
after seeing Him?"
D.
What did Jacob/Israel see?
Genesis 32:24 – 30 Then Jacob was left alone,
and a man [ish, 376, man, this is the same word used
of Adam ] wrestled with him until daybreak. 25 And when he saw that he had not prevailed
against him, he touched the socket of his thigh; so the socket of Jacob's thigh
was dislocated while he wrestled with him.
26 Then he said, "Let me go, for the dawn is breaking." But he
said, "I will not let you go unless you bless me." 27 So he said to him, "What is your
name?" And he said, "Jacob." [yaaqob, 3290, son of Issac]
28 And he said, "Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but
II. What did the Prophets see?
Ezekiel 1, especially..
verse 26
Daniel 7:9 ¶ "I kept looking Until thrones were set up, And the Ancient of Days took His
seat; His vesture was like white snow, And the hair of His head like pure wool.
His throne was ablaze with flames, Its wheels were a
burning fire.
What did the apostles see?
2CO 4:4 in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
ACT
23:11 ¶ But on the night immediately following, the
Lord stood at his side and said, "Take courage; for as you have solemnly
witnessed to My cause at
Philippians 2:5-11. In this passage Paul speaks of Christ as one “who, although He existed in the form [Greek morphe] of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped”.[29] The word morphe in biblical Greek means “the set of characteristics which constitutes a thing what it is”. This is in reference to the nature of a thing. This contrasts with the word schema that is generally translated “form” but having the sense of shape or appearance rather than substance.
John
1:18
JOH
1:18 No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten God, who is in the
bosom of the Father, He has explained [showed the way] Him.
Philip asked and Jesus answered his question.
MAR 9:2 ¶ And six
days later, Jesus took with Him Peter and James and John, and brought them up
to a high mountain by themselves. And He was transfigured before them;
MAR 9:3 and His garments became radiant and
exceedingly white, as no launderer on earth can whiten them.
MAR 9:4 And Elijah appeared to them along
with Moses; and they were talking with Jesus.
MAR 9:5 And Peter answered and said to Jesus,
"Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; and let us make three tabernacles,
one for You, and one for Moses, and one for
Elijah."
MAR 9:6 For he did
not know what to answer; for they became terrified.
God can be seen.
In the fall, we lost much, but God
created much more than we give credit.
This is God speaking.
GEN 3:22 Then the Lord God said,
"Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and
now, lest he stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and
eat, and live forever"-- 3:23 therefore the Lord God sent him out from the
garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken.
Nothing
man starts to do can he not accomplish. Genesis 11:6 And the Lord said, "Behold,
they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they
began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for
them.
IV. The God that can’t be seen. The problem of the
Invisible God.
A.
Problem stated
So far we have been discussing a God that can
be seen. But two of my better friends
passionately brought up the verse, "God is spirit, and those who worship
Him must worship in spirit and truth."[30]
Red faced pounding on their knee, when I
brought up the subject of viewing of God.
Adam Clark is among those that feel God is invisible and states, “, for
we find God putting him into a cleft of the rock, covering him with his hand,
and passing by in such a way as to exhibit a human similitude.”[31] Each and every time we read the Hand of the
Lord, or the Eye of the Lord they would count this up as a anthropomorphism
.
Many that would seek to view God might have
the verse, "You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, or
any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water
under the earth.”[32]
1
Timothy 6:16 is even stronger, “who alone possesses immortality and dwells in
unapproachable light; whom no man has seen or can see. John 1:18 “No man has seen God at any time; the
only begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained
Him.” Hebrews 11:3 By faith we understand that the worlds
were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of
things which are visible.
Even Job, in the Old Testament "Behold,
I go forward but He is not there, And backward, but I cannot perceive Him; When He acts on the left, I cannot behold
Him; He turns on the right, I cannot see Him.[33]
Hebrews 11:3 By faith we understand that the worlds
were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of
things which are visible.
There are many sides to God. My dad frequently kidded about the lady whose
husband had to hug and chalk, hug and chalk to hug all of her. We don’t understand ourselves, much less God.
LXX, Exodus 33:18 “And Moses says, Manifest thyself to me.”
NASB EXO 33:18 Then Moses said, "I pray Thee, show me Thy
glory!"
Verse 18. Show
me thy glory] Moses
probably desired to see that which constitutes the peculiar glory or excellence
of the Divine nature as it stands in reference to man. By many this is thought to signify his
eternal mercy in sending Christ Jesus into the world. Moses perceived that what God was now doing
had the most important and gracious designs which at present he could not
distinctly discover; therefore he desires God to show him his glory. God graciously promises to indulge him in
this request as far as possible, by proclaiming his name, and making all his
goodness pass before him, Ex 33:19. But at the same time he assures him that he
could not see his face-the fulness of his perfections
and the grandeur of his designs, and live, as no human being could bear, in the
present state, this full discovery. But he adds, Thou shalt
see my back parts, yrxa ta
eth achorai, probably meaning that appearance which
he should assume in after times, when it should be said, God is manifest in the
flesh. This appearance did take place, for we find God putting him into a cleft
of the rock, covering him with his hand, and passing by in such a way as to
exhibit a human similitude. John may
have had this in view when he said, The Word was made
flesh and dwelt AMONG us, full of grace and truth, and WE BEHELD HIS GLORY. What this glory was, and what was implied by
this grace and truth, we shall see in the succeeding chapter. Adam clark commentary power bible
The term “seen” horao 3708g 65 times in NT
John 1:18 “No man has seen God at any time; the
only begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.”
John
1:1-14 is about the God that comes in flesh
Hebrews 11:24-27 By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused
to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter;
11:25 choosing rather to endure ill-treatment with the people of God, than
to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin;
11:26 considering the reproach of Christ greater riches than the
treasures of Egypt; for he was looking to the reward. 11:27 By faith he
left
Moses left Egypt with a faith strong enough,
it was as if he had seen God, even before he saw God in the crack in the rock.
2 Corinthians 4:18[34] while
we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen;
for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen
are eternal.
JOH 5:37 "And the Father who sent Me, He
has borne witness of Me. You have neither heard His voice at any time, nor seen
His form.
JOH 6:36 "But I said to you, that you
have seen Me, and yet do not believe.
JOH 6:46 "Not that any man has seen the
Father, except the One who is from God; He has seen the Father.
JOH 8:38 "I speak the things which I
have seen with My Father; therefore you also do the things which you heard from
your father."
JOH 9:33 "If this man were not from God,
He could do nothing."
JOH 9:34 They answered and said to him,
"You were born entirely in sins, and are you teaching us?" And they
put him out.
JOH 9:35 ¶ Jesus heard that they had put him
out; and finding him, He said, "Do you believe in the Son of Man?"
JOH 9:36 He answered and said, "And who
is He, Lord, that I may believe in Him?"
JOH 9:37 Jesus said to him, "You have
both seen Him, and He is the one who is talking with you."
JOH 14:9 Jesus said to him, "Have I been
so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? He who has seen
Me has seen the Father; how do you say, 'Show us the
Father'?
JOH 15:24 "If I had not done among them
the works which no one else did, they would not have sin; but now they have
both seen and hated Me and My Father as well.
1PE 1:8 and though you have not seen Him, you
love Him, and though you do not see Him now, but believe in Him, you greatly
rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory,
1JO 1:1 What was from the beginning, what we
have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we beheld and our hands
handled, concerning the Word of Life—
1JO 1:2 and the life was manifested, and we
have seen and bear witness and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with
the Father and was manifested to us—
1JO 1:3 what we have seen and heard we
proclaim to you also, that you also may have fellowship with us; and indeed our
fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.
1JO 3:6 No one who abides in Him sins; no one
who sins has seen Him or knows Him.
1JO 4:12 No one has beheld God at any time; if
we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us.
1JO 4:20 If someone says, "I love
God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love
his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.
3JO 1:11 Beloved, do not imitate what is
evil, but what is good. The one who does good is of
God; the one who does evil has not seen God.
Every good story needs a
problem in the plot line before we resolve to the satisfactory conclusion. When discussing what God looks like, I have
had two good friends turn red and act like something is amiss as they quote,
"God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth." John 4:24.
In my reading for this paper, I came across
1 Timothy 6:16 which is a much larger problem to my
quest, “who alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light;
whom no man has seen or can see.”
Holiness of God/Problem of Sin
Adam and Eve in the Garden of
Eden could walk, talk, and see God. Once
we sinned we could not see God “eyeball to eyeball.” Moses could see his back. To view his face, Moses would die. We see the image of the Invisible God. COL 1:15 And He is
the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation. While we cannot see God the Father, we can
see Jesus an exact representation of God.
This is where we need to believe scripture and not design
our own understanding. God cannot be
seen. Jesus is the image of God. If we need a TV picture of God, we look to
Jesus.
There are 10 things of the millions God could have given
us he wants and doesn’t want us to do in the Decalogue. One of these ten is to make a graven image of
God. He wants us to worship him, not an
image. I believe we would do God a
disservice by drawing a picture or turning clay into God’s image in this
paper. But in our mind’s eye, we see
what can’t be seen,
John 20:29. Hebrews 11:1
John 14:9 Jesus said to him,
"Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me,
Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; how do
you say, 'Show us the Father'?
Man is more than just a worm. In the great chain of being, Man is near the
top, even as we loose innocence and gain our sin nature.
In the fall, we lost much, but God
created much more than we give credit.
GEN 3:22 Then the Lord God said,
"Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and
now, lest he stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and
eat, and live forever"-- 3:23 therefore the Lord God sent him out from the
garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken.
Nothing
man starts to do can he not accomplish. Genesis 11:6 And the Lord said, "Behold,
they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they
began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for
them.
This is God speaking.
V.
Theophanies: Seeing the invisible God
"The Angel of
the Lord: " Genesis 16:7ff, 21:17, 22:11, 15ff, 18:1-19:1, 24:7, 40,
31:11-13, 32:24-30; Exodus 3:6, 13:21, Ezekiel 1:10-13. Seen in the
theophanies, or pre-incarnate appearances of the Son of God in the OT (See I
Corinthians 10:3 NT).
There are very few people in the Bible that
are described by looks.
Absalom,
Leah,
Esther
come to mind.
Discuss each
What does the Bible say Jesus looked like?
Jesus had a beard, Isaiah 50:6;
Jesus was not good looking Isaiah 53
Isaiah 6, 53, Daniel , Ezekiel 1:10-13, Apoclypse 1
Is God talking in figures of Speech,
or does the Arm of the Lord mean the arm of the Lord?
Theophanies
GENESIS 32:24 Then Jacob was left
alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.
GENESIS 32:25 And
when he saw that he had not prevailed against him, he touched the socket of his
thigh; so the socket of Jacob's thigh was dislocated while he wrestled with
him.
GENESIS 32:26 Then he said,
"Let me go, for the dawn is breaking." But he said, "I will not
let you go unless you bless me."
GENESIS 32:27 So he said to him,
"What is your name?" And he said, "Jacob."
GENESIS 32:28 And he said,
"Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel; for you have striven with
God and with men and have prevailed."
GENESIS 32:29 Then Jacob asked him
and said, "Please tell me your name." But he said, "Why is it
that you ask my name?" And he blessed him there.
GENESIS 32:30 So
Jacob named the place Peniel, for he said, "I have seen God face to face,
yet my life has been preserved."
Theophany [J]
See also Angel of the Lord
http://bible.crosswalk.com/Dictionaries/BakersEvangelicalDictionary/bed.cgi?number=T690
THEOPHANIES of JESUS
There are more Theophanies in the Bible that relates to Jesus in many
ways.
·
On
Volcano
Ex 19:18-20
18
Divine Manifestations
H.C. Leupold, Exposition of Genesis, Vol 2, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, 1942 pg 881f
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/2003-January/024410.html Genesis 32:29 Why do you ask? "Why are you asking this name of mine?"
New Chapter on Preexistence of Christ Divine Manifestations
http://bible.gospelcom.net/passage/?search=GEN%2032:30&version=31;9;
|
Genesis 32:30 |
|
New International Version (NIV) 30 So Jacob
called the place Peniel, [a] saying, "It is
because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared." Footnotes: Genesis 32:30 Peniel means face of God . |
http://www.about-torah.org/Teachings/Wrestling.htm
|
Genesis 32:30 And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: "For I have seen G-d face to face, and my life is preserved." |
Jacob then offered one of the highest forms of worship to the man. He named the place of the struggle after his experience. The name he chose was Peniel: "I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved."
What did Psalmist see?
What did the Prophets see?
Daniel
Ezekiel
What did the apostles see?
Hypostatic
2TH 3:5 And may the Lord direct
your hearts into the love of God and into the steadfastness of Christ. [agape of Theos
into the ….. christos] two different people.
On the other hand, there are many passages where Jesus and the Father can be perceived as being distinct to each other. For example, if someone comes to Jesus it was the Father that brought him there (6.37). He was on earth doing the works of the Father (7.18) and his teaching weren't his own but the Father's (7.16,17).
The book of John tells us of some attributes and works that show that clearly that whatever the Son has the Father also does. Some of them are:
1). Like the Father the Son is Glorious - The Son has glory in itself (1.14), but while on earth it was his work to bring the glory of the Father to men (17.4) so that they may see it revealed in a powerful way. It's therefore his aim to glorify the Father (14.13). On the same way, the Son doesn't glorify himself because this is a work of the Father does (8.54).
2). Like the Father the Son Gives Eternal Life - According to 5.21 the ability to give life to the death is an attribute that belongs to both the Father and the Son. This life is the eternal life promised to those who believe in the Son, which is the perfect will of the Father (6.40). This eternal life comes from the commands given by the Father that the Son brings to earth (12.50). Actually, eternal life means the knowledge of both the Father and the Son (17. 3).
3). Like the Father the Son has Power to Judgment - The Father is the one who stands with the Son to make judgment (8.16). Even though it says that the Father judges no one (5.22) it doesn't mean He has no power to do so, but that he has transferred all the authority to the Son to exercise it (5.27).
4). Like the Father the Son Upholds the Believers - The very act of bring someone to believe in the Son is carried out by the Father (6.37, 44). It's the Son that feeds his sheep (10.9,10) but it's the Father that protects them so that no one can snatch them from his hand (10.29).
The Father honors those who serve the Son (12.26). Both the Son and the Father sends the Counselor that stands besides the believers (14.16). When someone keeps the Son commands, he together with the Father comes to live in him (14.3). Eventually, when the Son comes back to his people he'll take them to his Father's house (14.2,3), because they belong to him (17.6).
SOBRINHO 32380 NT500B JN C16 January 22, 2006
Including the transfiguration.
MAT 17:1 And
six days later Jesus took with Him Peter and James and John his brother, and
brought them up to a high mountain by themselves.
MAT 17:2 And He was transfigured
before them; and His face shone like the sun, and His garments became as white
as light.
MAT 17:3 And behold, Moses and
Elijah appeared to them, talking with Him.
MAT 17:4 And Peter answered and
said to Jesus, "Lord, it is good for us to be here; if You wish, I will
make three tabernacles here, one for You, and one for Moses, and one for
Elijah."
MAT 17:5 While
he was still speaking, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them; and behold, a
voice out of the cloud, saying, "This is My beloved Son, with whom I am
well-pleased; listen to Him!"
MAT 17:6 And
when the disciples heard this, they fell on their faces and were much afraid.
MAT 17:7 And Jesus came to them
and touched them and said, "Arise, and do not be afraid."
MAT 17:8 And
lifting up their eyes, they saw no one, except Jesus Himself alone. NASB
MAR 9:2 ¶ And
six days later, Jesus took with Him Peter and James and John, and brought them
up to a high mountain by themselves. And He was transfigured before them;
MAR 9:3 and His garments became
radiant and exceedingly white, as no launderer on earth can whiten them.
MAR 9:4 And Elijah appeared to
them along with Moses; and they were talking with Jesus.
MAR 9:5 And Peter answered and
said to Jesus, "Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; and let us make three
tabernacles, one for You, and one for Moses, and one
for Elijah."
MAR 9:6 For
he did not know what to answer; for they became terrified.
MAR 9:7 Then a cloud formed,
overshadowing them, and a voice came out of the cloud, "This is My beloved Son, listen to Him!"
MAR 9:8 And
all at once they looked around and saw no one with them anymore, except Jesus
alone. NASB
Miracles
Raising the dead to life.
God gives life, God
What did Jesus look like?
II. The God that can’t be seen
http://www.mechon-mamre.org/jewfaq/god.htm
God is Incorporeal
Although many places in scripture and Talmud speak of various parts of God's body (the Hand of God, God's wings, etc.) or speak of God in anthropomorphic terms (God walking in the garden of Eden, God laying tefillin, etc.), Judaism firmly maintains that God has no body. Any reference to God's body is simply a figure of speech, a means of making God's actions more comprehensible to beings living in a material world. Much of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed is devoted to explaining each of these anthropomorphic references and proving that they should be understood figuratively.
Maimonides: Guide for Today's Perplexed
The
problem of the Invisible God. 1 Timothy
6:16
III. The God that can be seen
through a glass darkly
Christophanies and Theophanies
Angel of the Lord
IV. The God that can be seen
In scripture there are many that
have seen and even wrestled with God
The first mention of the Angel of the Lord is used in Genesis 16:7. Let’s read the passage and make some comments on this passage.
Genesis 16:7 Now the angel [malak, messenger] of the Lord [YHWH] found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, by the spring on the way to Shur. 16:8 And he said, "Hagar, Sarai's maid, where have you come from and where are you going?" And she said, "I am fleeing from the presence of my mistress Sarai." 16:9 Then the angel of the Lord said to her, "Return to your mistress, and submit yourself to her authority." 16:10 Moreover, the angel of the Lord said to her, "I will greatly multiply your descendants so that they shall be too many to count." 16:11 The angel of the Lord said to her further, "Behold, you are with child, And you shall bear a son; And you shall call his name Ishmael, Because the Lord has given heed to your affliction. 16:12 "And he will be a wild donkey of a man, His hand will be against everyone, And everyone's hand will be against him; And he will live to the east of all his brothers."
16:13 Then she called the name of the Lord [YHWH] who spoke to her, "Thou art a God [EL] who sees"; for she said, "Have I even remained alive here after seeing Him?"
For years I have read this passage on one side and studied the Angel of the Lord on the other and one day while meditating on topics related to this paper, I realized what Hagar was stating, In essence, she was there, she saw this angel, she says, Wow, I am still alive after seeing YHWH. We study words, and question who this angel of the Lord is, Hagar looked (Genesis 16:13 c) and saw God and then spoke her mind while talking to herself.
To my mind this is a defining passage. It is a first mention of the phrase Angel of the Lord. In Genesis 22:1 the Angel of the Lord communicates with Abraham from heaven regarding sacrificing his only son. In Exodus 3:2, the Angel of the Lord is in the middle of a never consumed blackberry bush[35] and Eloheim speaks. The Angel of the Lord could be the fire and Eloheim could be sending his message through a speaker phone, but it would be crowed in the bush. To my understanding this passage is actually indicating Eloheim is actually angel of the Lord.
The angel of the Lord speaks to Gideon and when Gideon understands who it is, he is terrified, expecting to die.
Judges 6:21 Then the angel of the Lord put out the end of the staff that was in his hand and touched the meat and the unleavened bread; and fire sprang up from the rock and consumed the meat and the unleavened bread. Then the angel of the Lord vanished from his sight.
Judges 6:22 “When Gideon saw that he was the angel of the Lord, he said, "Alas, O Lord God! For now I have seen the angel of the Lord face to face."
Judges 6:23 And the Lord said to him, "Peace to you, do not fear; you shall not die."
The Angel of the Lord speaks to Manoah and Manoah even asks the name of the Angel of the Lord and the Holy Writ says, JDG 13:18 But the angel of the Lord said to him, "Why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful?" [pilli] Isaiah[36] reveals the name of God as Wonderful. The angel of the Lord ends the conversation with both Gideon and Manoah by going up in the flame of the sacrifice offering.
2CH 18:18 -22 And Micaiah said,
"Therefore, hear the word of the Lord [YHWH]. I saw the Lord [YHWH] sitting
on His throne, and all the host of heaven standing on His right and on His
left.
Isaiah 6:1-6
ISA 63:1 Who is this who comes from Edom, With
garments of glowing colors from Bozrah, This One who
is majestic in His apparel, Marching in the greatness of His strength? "It
is I who speak in righteousness, mighty to save."
Ezekiel 1:
ACT 7:55 But being full of the Holy Spirit, he gazed intently into
heaven and saw the glory of God [Theos], and Jesus standing at the right hand
of God [Theos]; ACT 7:56 and he said, "Behold, I see the heavens opened up
and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God [Theos]."
light
2CO 4:4 in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
2CO 4:5 For we do not preach ourselves but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your bond-servants for Jesus' sake.
2CO 4:6 For God, who said, "Light shall shine out of darkness," is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
What can be known
of how this God looks like
conclusion
I thought about this for some time and
decided my last chapters would be about the holiness of God and the awesomeness
of God’s character.
We first see the word “holy” in a interesting passage.
EXO 3:5
Then He said, "Do not come near here;
remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is
holy ground."[37]
Holy dirt seems like a
oxymoron.
Holy is a Four-Letter Word
I. God
is Holy
According to the Internet, there are 773, 692
words in the Bible. The word Holy is
used 526 times in the NIV Bible and 581 times in the NAS Bible. By ratio of words this is a major teaching of
the Bible.
6944, qodesh,
apartness, sacredness
On the week of July 31, 2002, Pope John Paul
canonized Juan Diego as a saint. Saint,
sanctify and holy all have virtually the same definition and appear to come
from the same word. Saint is the noun,
Holy is the verb.[38] Most
Protestants believe all Christians are saints, Philippians 4:21, “Greet every
saint in Christ Jesus. The brethren who are with me greet you.”
A.
Scriptural Examples
The Sabbath is holy. Genesis 2:3 And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on
it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done. Holy in this usage is to set apart. Saturday is to be different or set apart for
rest.
My
son, Ben, has been carefully reading the Old Testament and got to the giving of
the decalogue on Mt. Sinai and added many facts to my
understanding of the term holy. In Exodus 24:1, “Then He said to Moses, "Come up to the
Lord, you and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu and seventy of the elders of
74 men
walked up to the top of
Exodus 24:10 “and they saw the God of
Apparently, it rained and there were
earthquakes while Moses was getting the 10 commandments. PSALMS 68:8 The
earth quaked; The heavens also dropped {rain} at the presence of God; Sinai
itself {quaked} at the presence of God, the God of
The Most Holy Place was holy. Exodus 26:33 “Hang the curtain from the clasps
and place the ark of the Testimony behind the curtain. The curtain will
separate the
The altar and all it touches will be
holy. Exodus 29:37”For seven days make
atonement for the altar and consecrate it. Then the altar will be most holy,
and whatever touches it will be holy.”
All the furniture of the tabernacle was to be
holy. Exodus 40:9 "Take the anointing oil and
anoint the tabernacle and everything in it; consecrate it and all its
furnishings, and it will be holy.”
The Israelites were to determine what is
holy. Leviticus 10:10, “You must distinguish between the holy and the common,
between the unclean and the clean,”
If we are to evaluate and make judgments, we
need to know what the word “Holy” means.
It may seem easy to decide God is holy, but how about which piece of
furniture is holy?
B. Define Holy
1. holy: 6944, godesh apartness,
sacredness (325)
2. sanctify: 6942, gadash to be set apart or consecrated
3. saints: 6918, gadosh sacred or holy (2) Psalm 16:3
C.
What is holy?
Let’s go to Exodus 3:5 "Do not come any closer,
"God said. "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are
standing is holy ground." Even dirt
is holy. Now what makes one square inch
of dirt different than another inch of dirt?
Most ladies that clean their houses choose to consider all dirt, grime
and dust as gone. The answer of course,
God is in this place,
burning a bush on this ground.
Where God is, there is holiness, because God is without sin, he is
different, apart, separate and unique.
Holy becomes much less sanctimonious if we
use the word “separate” or “different” rather than holy. Holy has all kinds of sidebars that fog up
the window of our understanding. The
longer you have been in church, the more fog is likely to be on your
window. Apart and separate are good
accurate words you can substitute for holy.
So what does the word “Holy” mean? My book[41]
of Old Testament words tells me the word comes from Canaanite temple
prostitutes. At first, this really
bothered me, then I realized God isn’t pious, he is
Holy. God understands me far better than
the temple prostitute is different than other women. The word is separate. If you wish, Our Father in Heaven, separate
is your name.” God isn’t like other God’s. God is unique. He is unlike others. He is separate and alone. God is holy!
D. Universe or Polyverse
If
there were other God’s like Jehovah, we would call our universe a polyverse. But our
God has crated a universe that while his lowest thought is higher than our
highest thought [Isaiah 55:9]. Yet as
we look at spiral galaxies and realize these are millions of millions of years
away and apparently each dot is a separate star indicating how large God’s
playground is and how small we are, we come to our best grip of who God is.
God is awesome. God is holy.
And when we decide our school needs this-or-that because the government
school is this-or-that we tread on very thin ice. When we decide that because the government
calls a church a corporation, we are a corporation instead of a hospital that
heals souls, we walk where angels fear to go.
“What’s
wrong with it?” is the wrong question.
“What brings us closer to our Savior?” is the right question. God is proud to be different. We should worry when we are trying to be like
everyone else.
II. If we are going to talk about things
holy, What is sin?
A. The middle letter of Sin is "I". It
is impossible for us to think of others first all the time. We want to do what
we want to do when we want to do it. We treat others when it is convenient for
us. We immediately feel uncomfortable or angry when this is pointed out. This is the "I" in Sin. The core of
mankind is sin.
Why
does a baby cry? It feels a need that isn't satisfied. Did you hear that “I”? Let us rewind, the Baby is happy. Then, what is happening? A wet diaper. Not long after the bed becomes cold and the
acid begins to work on the baby soft skin.
The cry is nature saying, “Hey, you are not taking care of me like I
need to be taken care of.” The cry in
the night is frequently, “I want to be held and loved.” While it doesn’t seem this is sin, it does
seem to be the sin nature. So much is
this the core of our being, we see it as keeping us alive.
B.
Selfishness is another way to describe sin. The need
to be first in line in kindergarten or fastest on the freeway. It is making sure the guy passing on the
right can’t make it into traffic in front of you. It is selfish to walk over or talk over
another. It is the girl that is unhappy
because her girlfriend is happy with her ex-boyfriend. It is the very need to be first across the
finish line. From capitalizing our
names, to indicate we are important to needing a short line at the bank or
supermarket. Selfishness is not putting
others first. God made us, why can’t God
control us? Because of our need to do what we want to do. It is our time, never mind what trivia we
would be doing if we weren’t standing in line these minutes.
Sidebar: When we make things like robots, we create them
to do what we request. It is a point of
our sin nature. When God created us, he created a being that could spit in his
face, and so we did. God made us for
fellowship, but allows us to do our desires.
In creating us, shows yet another venue to his awesome nature. We have a God to be worshiped and praised.
You say, “Hey, I’m a teacher, I help people every day.” I’m a clerk in the store. I help people at the bank. I scrub floors, or help heal people. So when we help others, we want something
that satisfies us because it is the “I” that needs to be fed. We expect recognition, money, fame, an article in the paper, a slap on the back, a good word,
the way you think someone will think about you if you do the good deed and we
like Elijah run to the desert of ourselves when it doesn’t happen.
C. We frequently think of Sin as murder or
gossip. Murder kills the body, gossip kills the soul. Murder (I hate him), stealing (I want what he
has), and lying (I want to get out of trouble or get him in trouble) and are
simply symptoms of our nature.
D. Sin
is pride. Because Cain’s offering wasn’t
as good as Abel’s offering, Cain gave his brother a
splitting headache. Pride, by the way,
also with an “I” as the middle letter, is the essence of Sin. Why would Paul say, “For the love of money is
a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from
the faith, and pierced themselves with many a pang.” 1
Timothy 6:10. Discretionary
money allows us to do what we want to do-when we want to do it. I’m a great sinner; it is one of the things I
do best. I can think of all kinds of
things I can’t afford today, that with ten million dollars I could do. Hey, let the poor and needy suffer one more
day, I want my Lear jet to bring me a hot Chinese dinner from
E.
Inversely, no part of God is sinful.
Therefore God is love. Like a
good father, he has a man to man talk with us in 1 John 4:11 when he says,
“Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” God can do anything he wants-the way he
wants-when he wants it. God is
love. God naturally goes outside of
himself. The closer you get to God, the
more you feel his care. Why, do we
deserve it, absolutely not. We get His love and care because it is God’s
nature to love even the unlovely.
F.
Frequently, we read stories about people that do amazing things to save
other people from danger. They hang off
cliffs. They fly airplanes thousands of
miles in 100 degree below zero weather to drop medication to a dying
doctor. They fly helicopters a distance
beyond safety in order to pluck a sick seaman off a sinking ship. In a real
sense this is holiness. If they are the
most ungodly individuals in the world, they are showing God’s image in their
behavior on the day of their bravery.
James 1:22 But prove yourselves doers of the
word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves. Holiness is action. God loved us so much he sent his Son to die …
so we would not perish [John 3:16].
Holiness or Sanctification is allowing God to
be first in our lives. Holiness is a way of thinking. It is leaving ourselves
behind and putting God first then others next.
It is arranging our priorities correctly. It is putting the
"I" in “Sin” the part of our psyche in second place to our
Savior. Two verses come immediately to
mind. James said, “This is pure and
undefiled religion in the sight of God our God and Father, to visit orphans and
widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” [James
1:27]. And John the Baptist said it best
not long before he lost his head over a pretty girl’s dance, “He must increase,
but I must decrease.” [John 3:30].
PRACTICAL HOLINESS
On Monday night I went to a meeting and it
has taken until this morning to come to a critical mass. If you missed it God’s name is Holy. “Our Father in Heaven, Holy is your name.”[42] God
is proud of his badge of holiness much as a virgin walks into her marriage
bed. If God’s name is Eloheim then his
nickname is Holy
The first time we run across the word holy is
at the Burning Bush.
“Then He said, “Do not come near here: remove your sandals from your feet, for the
place on which you are standing is holy ground." [43]
In Exodus 19, immediately before the Ten
Commandments God tells
In the Decalogue, one of the commands is to
“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.”[45]
So what does the word “Holy” mean? My book of Bible words[46] tells me the word comes from Canaanite
temple prostitutes.[47] At
first, this really bothered me, and then I realized God isn’t pious, he is
Holy. God understands me far better than
the temple prostitute is different than other women. A virgin walking to her marriage bed is
holy. She is separate and alone unto her
husband. As they walk into the marriage
suite, he turns and looks into her eyes, she looks into his, they are not like
the millions of others, they are different than all others, they
belong to each other from this day forward.
“Our Father in Heaven, separate is your name.” The word is different. If you wish, Our Father in Heaven, different
is your name.” God isn’t like other
God’s. God is unique. He is unlike others. He is separate and alone. God is holy! .
If there were other God’s like Jehovah, we
would call our universe a polyverse. But our God has created a universe that while
his lowest thought is higher than our highest thought.[48] Yet
as we look at spiral galaxies and realize these are millions of millions of
years away and apparently each dot is a separate star indicating how large
God’s playground is and how small we are, we come to our best grip of who God
is.
God is awesome. God is holy.
And when we decide our school needs this-or-that because the government
school is this-or-that we tread on very thin ground.
“What’s wrong with it?” is the wrong
question. “What brings us closer to our
Savior?” is the right question. God is
proud to be different. We should worry
when we are trying to fit into the cosmos and be like everyone else.
ON HOLINESS, REPRISE
“Our Father in Heaven, Holy is your name” Matthew 6:9
"Pray, then, in this way: 'Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy
name. Luke 11:2 And He said to them,
"When you pray, say: 'Father, hallowed be Thy
name. “
One of the only characteristics Jesus
mentions of God in the prayer he was teaching his students (the disciples) was
that God was holy. What does holy
mean? Defined this word holy means , to make holy, consecrated, sanctify or set apart,
alone.
When Moses took off his sandals at the
burning bush. God gave us a visual of what holiness is all
about. Things will be different when we
meet God. God was letting Moses know he
needed to slow down,[49] he wasn’t going anywhere soon. Moses was now in God’s presence. Moses was set apart, even as he was a
shepherd in a desert.
Moses had the ability to walk into God’s
presence as no man in history. When
Moses prayed, God listened. We know this
because Moses’ words are written in the pages of the Holy Writ.[50]
When Moses spoke, God listened. When God spoke, Moses usually listened. These two were friends. Moses spent 40 days and nights on the top of
Mt. Sanai and was close enough to God he brought
enough of God off the mountain his face was so unearthly because of the exo-luminescence the people were afraid of Moses and he had
to wear a veil.
Exodus
34:29 ¶ And it came about when Moses was coming down from Mount Sinai (and the
two tablets of the testimony were in Moses' hand as he was coming down from the
mountain), that Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because of
his speaking with Him. 34:30 So when Aaron and all the sons of
When Moses asked to see God, the fact man
could not look at God’s face and live is a visual of God’s holiness.[51]
Much of the Pentateuch was written to show the
Israelites how to be different from the nations around them. Some of them we understand like the sexual
admonition not to lie with anyone other than your spouse. But why, the food
requirements?
Holy means separate. God
and sin are antonyms. All the way
through the Old Testament God’s revelation of himself is to be apart from any
form of sin. Heaven is a place without
sin.
The Church today does not understand God or
God’s holiness. In fact, other than
singing Holy, Holy, Holy in church, most of us know
very little about holiness.
We don’t understand why Moses should be
punished for “only” hitting the rock when he was told to speak to it.
God said the first time, Exodus 17:6
"Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock at Horeb;
and you shall strike the rock, and water will come out of it,
that the people may drink." And Moses did so in the sight of the
elders of
The second time God said, Numbers 20:8
"Take the rod; and you and your brother Aaron assemble the congregation
and speak to the rock before their eyes, that it may yield its water. You shall
thus bring forth water for them out of the rock and let the congregation and
their beasts drink."
In verse 20:11 states Moses Struck the rock
twice. Most of us, would say, “Oh well,
what’d you expect, the people provoked him and he lost it and hit the rock
instead of talking to it. What’s the big
deal?”
God considered this serious enough that even
though Moses could bring forth water from a rock and split the
Deuteronomy 32:51 because you broke faith
with Me in the midst of the sons of Israel at the waters of Meribah-Kadesh,
in the wilderness of Zin, because you did not treat
Me as holy in the midst of the sons of Israel.
:52 "For you shall see the land at a
distance, but you shall not go there, into the land which I am giving the sons
of
Moses hit instead of talking to the rock and
he did “not treat God as holy”. We don’t
understand why Nadab and Abihu were killed for playing with strange fire.
Leviticus 10:1 Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons
of Aaron, took their respective firepans, and after
putting fire in them, placed incense on it and offered strange fire before the
\Lord\, which He had not commanded them.
Numbers 3:4 But Nadab and Abihu died before
the \Lord\ when they offered strange fire before the \Lord\ in the wilderness
of Sinai; and they had no children. So Eleazar and Ithamar served as priests in the lifetime of their father
Aaron.
Numbers 26:61 But Nadab and Abihu died when
they offered strange fire before the \Lord.\
Apparently, these two priests added something
to the fire. It is unclear what they
did. But they apparently added something
and died before they even got to the holy place. Died “before Jehovah” indicates they never
made it to the holy place.
May the Lord bless this discussion on
Theology Proper. Selah.
Body
Soul/Spirit (this is taken from The Everyday
guide to God, Amy Ng Wong
Absolute
Psalm 86:8-10 “Among the gods there is none like You, O
Lord; nor are there any works like Your works.”
Almighy, Job 37:23, “We cannot imagine the power of the
Almighty, yet he is so just and merciful
that he does not oppress us.”
Beautiful, Habakkuk 3:3-4, His glory
God’s characteristics
God has a seat in Psalm 18:
PSALM 18:7 ¶ Then
the earth shook and quaked; And the foundations of the mountains were trembling
And were shaken, because He was angry.
18:8 Smoke went up out of His nostrils, And
fire from His mouth devoured; Coals were kindled by it. 18:9 He bowed the heavens also, and came down
With thick darkness under His feet. 18:10 And He rode upon a cherub and flew; And He sped upon the wings of the wind.
ISAIAH 45:23 "I have sworn by Myself,
The word has gone forth from My mouth in righteousness
And will not turn back, That to Me every knee will bow, every tongue will swear
allegiance.
Genesis 1:26-7 exegesis.
What did Adam and Eve see when God
What did Moses see?
What did the prophets see relating to the
image of God?
Isaiah 50:6 I gave My back to those who
strike Me, And My cheeks to those who pluck out the
beard; I did not cover My face from humiliation and spitting.
Isaiah 53:2 For He grew up before Him like a
tender shoot, And like a root out of parched ground; He has no stately form or
majesty That we should look upon Him, Nor appearance that we should be
attracted to Him.
Isaiah 53:3 He was despised and forsaken of
men, A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; And like one from whom men
hide their face, He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.
Isaiah 53:4 ¶ Surely our griefs
He Himself bore, And our sorrows He carried; Yet we
ourselves esteemed Him stricken, Smitten of God, and afflicted.
Isaiah 53:5 But He was pierced through for
our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; The
chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, And by His scourging we are
healed.
What did the disciples see when relating to
the image of God?
Shikinah glory
ISAIAH 45:23 "I have sworn by Myself,
The word has gone forth from My mouth in righteousness
And will not turn back, That to Me every knee will bow, every tongue will swear
allegiance.
Heaven
Rainbows may be the closet thing to
heaven. Ezekiel 1:28
EZE 1:28 As the
appearance of the rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day, so was the appearance
of the surrounding radiance. Such was the appearance of the likeness of the
glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell on my face and heard a voice
speaking.
Fire smoke lightening
2 Chronicles 7:1 ¶ Now
when Solomon had made an end of praying, the fire came down from heaven, and
consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices; and the glory of the LORD
filled the house.
4 At the sound of their voices the doorposts and
thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.
5 "Woe to me!" I cried. "I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean
lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the
King, the LORD Almighty."
6 Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in
his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 With it he touched my
mouth and said, "See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away
and your sin atoned for."
I want to know God’s thoughts--the rest are details.—Albert
Einstein
HAB 3:3 ¶ God comes from Teman, And the Holy One from
HAB 3:4 His radiance is like the sunlight;
He has rays flashing from His hand, And there is the
hiding of His power.
EXO
24:10 and they saw the God of Israel; and under His feet there appeared to be a
pavement of sapphire, as clear as the sky itself.
EXO 24:11 Yet He did not stretch out His
hand against the nobles of the sons of Israel; and they beheld God, and they ate and drank.
REV
1:10 I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and I heard behind me a loud voice
like the sound of a trumpet,
JOH
5:35 He was a burning and a shining light: and ye were willing for a season to
rejoice in his light. KJV
ROM
2:4 Or do you think lightly of the riches of His
kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God
leads you to repentance?
REV
15:8 And the temple was filled with smoke from the glory of God and from His
power; and no one was able to enter the temple until the seven plagues of the
seven angels were finished.
God looks like his church.
Acts 1:8- God disappears into heaven and two
angels come you get to see him again at the rapture.
9.
Inference [rule 10]
3.
Move to the next key word, concept, etc. in the text and start over with these
steps and rules.
Once one discovers the first mention of a word, you may want to
look at other mentions of the word. The
Precedent – is the word or concept defined in another part of scripture where a
precedent is set. This step helps us
discover if any precedent exists by which you need to interpret the word or the
theological concept. Mainly this step is done in the cross referencing
step. If you did not find a prior
occurrence of the word or concept when you cross-referenced the passage, it
would be wise to do it now.
One example is in the parables, there are occasions when Jesus defines
terms within the explanation of the parable – in other parables with the same
terms, you may be able to apply the same definition in the parable you are
studying (you still need to apply all the other rules however, for it may be
defined differently even if Jesus defined it another way in another parable).
The
Third rule is to see the text in a historical perspective. In five words, we need to know who wrote the
book, who the books was written to,
Congratulations! You are a Bible scholar!
A Theologian! A student of God’s Word!
I am trying to
write a paper for my Th.D. If there is a way to find the
spelling of
1. Write the interpretation in your own words.
2. Give an example of how we can apply it in our lives (if applicable).
As I began to research the term “Image of
God” I found very frequently the Latin term “Imago Dei” came up, in both books
and the Internet. Bla, bla, bla
Introduction
I. Quick summary of the rules of Hermeneutics we
are "playing" by. All scripture is given by God! Some is
poetry, first use, figures of speech, golly gee, Wally, how about the other
points? Anthropomorphism, etc.
God can be seen
II. The God that can be seen in
the Pentateuch.
A. What does Imago Dei in Genesis 1:26 mean?
1. Physical
a. hand
b. face
c.
brightness, light
d. voice, etc and etc
e. What does God sound like?
f. God has five senses
2. Mental
Luke 2:58
3. Spiritual:
holiness???
4. Emotional
a. Personality traits
b. anger, jealousy, humor, Jesus
wept
B. What did Abraham see?
C. What did Hagar see?
D. What did Jacob/Israel see and feel?
III. The God that can be seen in the
Prophets
A. The vision of the Ezekiel
B. The vision of Daniel
VI. The God that can be seen in
the NT or What did the apostles see and hear?
a. The vision of John
b. What did the 12 see?
c. What did Jesus say about himself?
V. God can’t be seen: The problem of the Invisible
God.
All passages on the God we
can't see
John 4:24
1 Timothy 6:16
A. Problem stated
B. Holiness / Problem of Sin
VI. Winding down: The God that
can be seen. Trinity, hypostatic union,
God the Father can’t be seen in our sinful world. God in bodily form created man. El / Eloheim and John 1:1
(here or in C02.)
VIl. Theophanies: Seeing the
invisible God (problem, good fit, but what needs to be said that isn’t said in
Abe, Hagar, Jake, C02 above?
Conclusion
Is that all there is? So what?
VII. APPENDIXES
A. Names of God
B. Insight (best 2 pages
on real vs. image you will ever read)
C. Fire/Smoke/coal
(I don’t want people to walk away from this paper thinking God is
just superman.)
“I want to know God’s thoughts--the rest are details.”
—Albert Einstein
http://gallery.bcentral.com/GID5138551DD508582-Albert-Einstein.aspx?page=1
I
cannot believe God would choose to play dice with the universe.
Dios 20061028
I. The God that could be seen
“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’”
In many ways this is the ultimate proof text for our discussion on what does God look like? God looks like we do, or more correctly, we look like God looks.
According to the Genesis account of creation, Adam and Eve talked with God in the Garden of Eden each evening. If this were a natural communication, this would expect God and man to have normal bodies with eyes, ears and a mouth to share ideas back and forth.
II. The God that can’t be seen
III. The God that can be seen through a glass darkly
Christophanies and Theophanies
Angel of the Lord
GEN 16:7 Now the angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, by the spring on the way to Shur.
GEN 16:8 And he said, "Hagar, Sarai's maid, where have you come from and where are you going?" And she said, "I am fleeing from the presence of my mistress Sarai."
GEN 16:9 Then the angel of the Lord said to her, "Return to your mistress, and submit yourself to her authority."
GEN 16:10 Moreover, the angel of the Lord said to her, "I will greatly multiply your descendants so that they shall be too many to count."
GEN 16:11 The angel of the Lord said to her further, "Behold, you are with child, And you shall bear a son; And you shall call his name Ishmael, Because the Lord has given heed to your affliction.
GEN 16:12 "And he will be a wild donkey of a man, His hand will be against everyone, And everyone's hand will be against him; And he will live to the east of all his brothers."
GEN 16:13 Then she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, "Thou art a God who sees"; for she said, "Have I even remained alive here after seeing Him?"
For years I have read this passage on one and studied the Angel of the Lord on the other and one day while meditating on topics related to this paper, I realized what Hagar said, In essence, she was there, she saw this angel, she says, Wow, I am still alive after seeing this God. We study words, Hagar saw God
IV. The God that can be seen
2CO 4:4 in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
2CO 4:5 For we do not preach ourselves but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your bond-servants for Jesus' sake.
2CO 4:6 For God, who said, "Light shall shine out of darkness," is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
What can be known
of how this God looks like
Ezekiel 1:4 -21 And as I looked,
behold, a storm wind was coming from the north, a great cloud with fire
flashing forth continually and a bright light around it, and in its midst
something like glowing metal in the midst of the fire. 5 And within it there were figures resembling
four living beings. And this was their appearance:
they had human form. 6 Each of them had
four faces and four wings. 7 And their
legs were straight and their feet were like a calf's hoof, and they gleamed
like burnished bronze. 8 Under their
wings on their four sides were human hands. As for the faces and wings of the
four of them, 9
their wings touched one another; their faces did not turn when they moved, each
went straight forward. 10 As for the
form of their faces, each had the face of a man, all four had the face of a
lion on the right and the face of a bull on the left, and all four had the face
of an eagle. 11 Such were their faces.
Their wings were spread out above; each had two touching another being, and two
covering their bodies. 12 And each went
straight forward; wherever the spirit was about to go, they would go, without
turning as they went. 13 In the midst of
the living beings there was something that looked like burning coals of fire,
like torches darting back and forth among the living beings. The fire was
bright, and lightning was flashing from the fire. 14 And the living beings ran to and fro like
bolts of lightning.
Now as I looked at the
living beings, behold, there was one wheel on the earth beside the living
beings, for each of the four of them. 16
The appearance of the wheels and their workmanship was like sparkling beryl, and
all four of them had the same form, their appearance and workmanship being as
if one wheel were within another. 17
Whenever they moved, they moved in any of their four directions, without
turning as they moved. 18 As for their
rims they were lofty and awesome, and the rims of all four of them were full of
eyes round about.
19 And whenever the living beings moved, the wheels
moved with them. And whenever the living beings rose from the earth, the wheels
rose also. 20 Wherever the spirit was
about to go, they would go in that direction. And the wheels rose close beside
them; for the spirit of the living beings was in the wheels. 21 Whenever those went, these went; and
whenever those stood still, these stood still. And whenever those rose from the
earth, the wheels rose close beside them; for the spirit of the living beings
was in the wheels.
This is probably the best view of God in the
Bible. Like the Tabernacle, there is the
court yard, the holy place and the holy of holies where only the High Priest could
attend once a year. I believe the three
heavens (2 Corinthians 12:2) line up with this division and the first heaven is
the home of the sun, moon and stars, the second heaven where we will stay and
the Holy of Holies where God resides in splendor and majesty. It may be the place the twenty-four elders throw
down our crowns at his feet.[53]
The glowing metal in Ezekiel 1:4 sounds like the
other views of Jesus. In Revelation 1:15
John writes that, “ His feet were like burnished
bronze, when it has been caused to glow in a furnace”
[Revelation 14:14]
CONCLUSION
In the conclusion you bring all of your information together in one short, concise, and clear page or two. You once again draw the attention of your readers to what you wanted them to learn through your work, how you caused that learning to take place, and what you expect them to do with the learning they now have.
****
"I knew when I started this paper, it would not be
easy. God cannot have a body because a
body limits his ability to be omnipresent.
God has a body, because how does a spirit walk with the patriarchs? God is a spirit because John states
categorically “God is a Spirit.” God has a body because Moses saw the splendor of God including his
head, back and arms. Over 100 times in Scripture we hear
about the eye of the Lord, the ear of the Lord, God turned his face, God walked
with Adam and Enoch.
We accept the
idea that the Bible is our basis for faith and practice. Many of us say, but because we don’t
understand, we don’t truly believe, God the Father, God the Son and God the
Spirit are one. We say we believe it,
but this paper would not be necessary if we truly believed what we confess.
Conclusion to the matter
One of my most pressing concerns in writing
this paper is that someone would walk away, feeling Eloheim was no more than
Jupiter / Zeus. Jupiter was the god of
the air on
I don’t want anyone to walk away from these words believing because God
looked like a man, he was a man; possibly another Jupiter. God is God and there is none beside him in
glory, beauty or purity.
APPENDICES
Here is where you enter the lists if you have used any. It is also the place you enter any research data from which you took information used in the Dissertation.
APPENDIX I
ALL THE BIBLICAL NAMES OF GOD[55]
Old Testament (The Hebrew Scriptures, or Tanach):
ABHIR: 'Mighty One', ("to be strong") Genesis 49:24;
Deuteronomy 10:17; Psalm 132:2, 5; Isaiah 1:24, 49:26, 60:1.
ADONAI: Lord in our English Bibles (Capitol letter 'L ', lower case, 'ord') (Adonai is plural, the sing. is "adon"). "Master'' or "Lord" 300 times in the OT always plural when referring to God, when singular the reference is to a human lord. Used 215 times to refer to men. First use of Adonai, Genesis 15:2. (Exodus 4:10; Judges 6:15; 2 Sam. 7:18-20; Psalm 8, 114:7, 135:5, 141:8, 109:21-28). Heavy use in Isaiah (Adonai Jehovah). 200 times by Ezekiel. Ten times in Daniel 9.
ANCIENT OF DAYS: (attiq-yom, aged-day) Daniel 7:9, 13 and 22
BRANCH: (tsemach), The Branch: Zechariah 3:8, 6:12; Isaiah 4:2; Jeremiah 23:5, 33:15.
EL: God ("mighty, strong, prominent") used 250 times in the OT See Genesis 7:1, 28:3, 35:11; Numbers 23:22; Josh. 3:10; 2 Sam. 22:31, 32; Neh. 1:5, 9:32; Isaiah 9:6; Ezekiel 10:5. El is linguistically equivalent to the Moslem "Allah," but the attributes of Allah in Islam are entirely different from those of the God of the Hebrews.
In Hebrew, the singular word for God is El,
the dual tense is Elah, and to indicate three or more
the word Elohim is used. Elohim
is the word translated "God" in Genesis 1:1.
[56]
EL-BERITH: "God of the Covenant" Used of Baal in Judges
9:46. Probably used originally to refer to the God of
EL-GIBHOR: Mighty God (Isaiah 9:6)
EL-OLAM: "Everlasting God" (God of everlasting time)
Genesis 21:33; Psalm 90:1-3, 93:2; Isaiah 26:4.
EL ROI: "God of
Seeing" Hagar in Genesis 16:13. The God Who opens
our eyes.
ELAH is Aramaic, "god." Elah appears in the Hebrew Bible in Jeremiah 10:11 (which is in Aramaic, and is plural, "gods"). In Daniel (the Aramaic sections) Elah is used both of pagan gods, and of the true God, also plural. Elah is equivalent to the Hebrew Eloah which some think is dual;
Elohim is three or more. The gods of the nations are called "elohim." The origin of Eloah is obscure. Elohim is the more common plural form of El.
Eloah is used 41
times in Job between 3:4 and 40:2, but fewer than 15 times elsewhere in the OT.
See the Catholic Encyclopedia entry on Elohim. [57] Many names include but not exclusively:
ELOHIM: God (a plural noun, more than two, frequently used with
singular verbs); Elohim occurs 2,570 times in the OT,
32 times in Genesis 1. God as Creator, Preserver,
Transcendent, Mighty and Strong. Ecclesiastes, Daniel and Jonah use Elohim almost exclusively. See Genesis 17:7, 6:18, 9:15,
50:24; I Kings 8:23; Jeremiah 31:33; Isaiah 40:1.
EL ELYON: 'Most High" (from
"to go up") Deuteronomy 26:19, 32:8; Psalm 18:13; Genesis 14:18;
Numbers 24:16; Psalm 78:35, 7:17, 18:13, 97:9, 56:2, 78:56, 18:13; Daniel 7:25,
27; Isaiah 14:14.
EL SHADDAI: God Almighty or
"God All Sufficient." 48 times in the OT, 31 times
in Job. First used in Genesis 17:1, 2. (Genesis 31:29, 49:24, 25; Prov. 3:27; Micah 2:1; Isaiah 60:15, 16, 66:10-13; Ruth
1:20, 21) In Rev. 16:7, "Lord God the Almighty."
The Septuagint uses Greek "ikanos" meaning
"all-sufficient" or "self-sufficient." The idols of the
heathen are called "sheddim."
EYALUTH: "Strength" Psalm 22:19.
FATHER: Numbers 1:9; I Sam. 16:6; Exodus 4:22-23; 2 Sam. 7:14-15;
Psalm 2:7; Isaiah 63:16, 64:8; Mal. 1:6.
JEHOVAH: (LORD in our English Bibles all capitals.) Yahweh is the covenant name of God. Occurs 6823 times in the OT First use Genesis 2:4 (Jehovah Elohim). From the verb "to be", havah, similar to chavah (to live), "The Self-Existent One," "I AM WHO I AM" or 'I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE" as revealed to Moses at the burning bush, Exodus3. The name of God, too sacred to be uttered, abbreviated ( . . . . ) or written "YHWH" without vowel points. The tetragrammaton. Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings use Jehovah almost exclusively. The love of God is conditioned upon His moral and spiritual attributes. (Daniel 9:14; Psalm 11:7; Leviticus 19:2; Hab. 1:12). Note Deuteronomy 6:4, 5 known to Jews as the Sh'ma uses both Jehovah and Elohim to indicate one God with a plurality of persons.
JEHOVAH-JIREH: "The Lord
will Provide." Genesis 22:14. From
"jireh" ("to see" or "to
provide," or to "foresee" as a prophet.) God always
provides, adequate when the times come.
JEHOVAH-ROPHE: "The Lord
Who Heals" Exodus 15:22-26. From "rophe"
("to heal"); implies spiritual, emotional as well as physical
healing. (Jeremiah 30:17, 3:22; Isaiah 61:1) God heals body, soul and spirit;
all levels of man's being.
JEHOVAH-NISSI: "The Lord
Our Banner." Exodus 17:15. God on the battlefield, from
word which means "to glisten," "to lift up," See Psalm 4:6.
JEHOVAH-M'KADDESH: "The
Lord Who Sanctifies" 20:8. "To make whole, set apart for
holiness."
JEHOVAH-SHALOM: "The Lord
Our Peace" Judges 6:24. "Shalom" translated "peace"
170 times means "whole," "finished," "fulfilled,"
"perfected." Related to "well,"
welfare." Deuteronomy 27:6; Daniel 5:26; I Kings
9:25 8:61; Genesis 15:16; Exodus 21:34, 22:5, 6; Leviticus 7:11-21.
Shalom means that kind of peace that results from
being a whole person in right relationship to God and to one's fellow man.
JEHOVAH ELOHIM: "LORD
God" Genesis 2:4; Judges 5:3; Isaiah 17:6; Zeph.
2:9; Psalm 59:5, etc.
JEHOVAH-TSIDKENU: "The Lord
Our Righteousness" Jeremiah 23:5, 6, 33:16. From "tsidek"
(straight, stiff, balanced - as on scales - full weight, justice, right,
righteous, declared innocent.) God our Righteousness.
JEHOVAH-ROHI: "The Lord Our
Shepherd" Psalm 23, from "ro'eh" (to
pasture).
JEHOVAH-SHAMMAH[58]:
"The Lord is There" (Ezekiel 48:35).
JEHOVAH-SABAOTH: "The Lord
of Hosts" The commander of the angelic host and the armies of God. Isaiah
1:24; Psalm 46:7, 11; 2 Kings 3:9-12; Jeremiah 11:20 (NT: Rom. 9:29; James
5:24, Rev. 19: 11-16).
JUDGE: Psalm 7:18, 96:13.
KADOSH: "Holy One"
Psalm 71:22; Isaiah 40:25, 43:3, 48:17. Isaiah uses the expression "the
Holy One of
`
KANNA: "Jealous"
(zealous). Exodus 20:5, 34:14; Deuteronomy 5:9; Isaiah 9:7; Zechariah 1:14,
8:2.
PALET: "Deliverer"
Psalm 18:2.
YESHA: (Y'shua)
"Savior" Isaiah 43:3. Jesus is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew
"Joshua." The latter is a contraction of Je-Hoshua.
("Christ", the anointed one is equivalent to the Hebrew Maschiah, or Messiah).
GAOL: "Redeemer" (to
buy back by paying a price). Job 19:25; For example,
the antitype corresponding to Boaz the Kinsman-Redeemer in the Book of Ruth.
MAGEN: "Shield" Psalm
3:3, 18:30.
MELEKH: "King" Psalm 5:2, 29:10, 44:4, 47:6-8, 48:2,
68:24, 74:12, 95:3, 97:1, 99:4, 146:10; Isaiah 5:1, 5, 41:21, 43:15, 44:6;
52:7, 52:10.
THE SUN OF RIGHTEOUSNESS Malachi 4:2.
http://www.aboundingjoy.com/Bible%20studies/Names%20Of%20God.htm
TSADDIQ: "Righteous
One" Psalm 7:9.
ZUR: "God our Rock" Deuteronomy 32:18; Isaiah 30:29.
Isaiah calls Messiah "Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God (El Gibhor), Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace" (Isaiah
9:6).
'Attiq Yomin
(Aramaic): "Ancient of Days," Daniel 7:9, 13, 22.
SHAPHAT: "Judge"
Genesis 18:25
SHEPHERD Psalm 23, 79:13, 95:7, 80:1, 100:3; Genesis 49:24; Isaiah
40:11.
SHILOH GEN 49:10 "The scepter
shall not depart from
THE FIRST AND LAST: Isaiah 44:6,
48:12. Revelation 1:8
"The Angel of
the Lord: " Genesis 16:7ff, 21:17, 22:11, 15ff, 18:1-19:1, 24:7, 40,
31:11-13, 32:24-30; Exodus 3:6, 13:21, Ezekiel 1:10-13. Seen in the theophanies, or pre-incarnate appearances of the Son of God
in the OT (See I Cor. 10:3 NT).
APPENDICE II
New Testament Scriptures for Names of Jesus
Advocate: 1 John 2:1
Bishop:
Branch, Isaiah 4:2, 14:19, Jeremiah 33:15, Zechariah 6:12, John 15:4
Chief Cornerstone,
Christos: is equivalent to the Hebrew 'Messiah' (Meshiach), "The Anointed One." Christ (521)
Daystar:
Deliverer:
Despotes: "Lord" 5 times: Lu. 2:29; Acts 4:24; 2 Pet. 2:1; Jude 4; Rev. 6:10.
First Born,
Great High Priest;
Guardian of our Souls:
Head of the Body,
Hupsistos: "Highest" Mt. 21:9
I Am: Jesus upset his generation especially when He said, "Before Abraham was, I AM," John 8:58. Note also his claim to be Jehovah in such phrases as "I AM the Light of the world," "the bread of life," living water," "the Resurrection and the Life," "the Way, Truth and the Life" in John's Gospel. From the Hebrew OT verb "to be" signifying a Living, Intelligent, Personal Being. In Hebrew, this is the singular, state of being. These three letters state an ever living being. http://aomin.org/EGO.html IAM
Immanuel,
Jesus: Derived from the Hebrew "Joshua" (Y'shua) or "Je-Hoshua" meaning JEHOVAH IS SALVATION.
King Of Kings:
Kurios: "Lord" Found some 600 times in the NT.
Last (or Second) Adam,
Lamb of God;
Lamb Slain before the Foundation of the World;
Logos: "The Word of God" John l; Rev. 19:13.