GOD SIGNS Yesterday Today & Tomorrow: God within Limits

GOD SIGNS Yesterday Today & Tomorrow: God within Limits: God within limits, this is what we have of God in the Bible. The Bible story is a story that comes to us by way of three historical events...

God within Limits

God within limits, this is what we have of God in the Bible.  The Bible story is a story that comes to us by way of three historical events.  These three events share a similarity.  This similarity is what makes the God of the Bible so radically different than the Gods of all other religions.

            What is typical in religion is to view power as God’s greatest attribute.  In the Bible, however, it is not God’s power that is the focus of His character.  It is God’s restraint of power that is the real story of history, and the Bible, and what we see of God in the real world today. 

The Bible knows God as a covenant making, covenant keeping God.  Covenant is the common element of the three God events spoken of.  In fact, the idea of covenant is so pervasive in the Bible that to view the Bible given any other perspective other than covenant is to (philosophically) cause real harm to the Bible and to Christianity in particular.

What the Bible is about is how God has encountered humanity through the covenants of Abraham, Moses and Jesus.  What covenant means to a relationship is that there are boundaries in place that define that relationship. 

Covenant is much like a marriage.  It’s a relationship built on promises.  When two people enter a covenant they promise to do certain things for the other person in the covenant.  These promises obligate one to do as they have said they would.  To enter a covenant means to restrict one’s self in regards to certain future actions, actions based on the promises one has sworn to uphold. 

In the Bible, this is what we know of God and of the type of relationship God wants and has with humankind.  The Bible is not just a story of a loving God.  It is the story of a loving God who has made certain promises in regards to His love.  

            Can God act and do how and whatever it is that He wants to do?  Yes.  God would not be God if all things did not submit to him. God restraining himself assumes also that God would have something to restrain.  In the Bible, God is understood to have unlimited power.  This unlimited power is what we know of as being restrained by God.     

  There is really no other context by which to understand the cross.  God becoming a man, subjecting Him self to abuse and death on a cross, these are acts of deliberate limitations taken on by God- but not limitations just for the sake of limitations.  God limits Himself in regards to the promises He has made in covenant.

It is when people point to signs of God that have nothing to do with the covenant He has established that I become a skeptic.  Dreams, visions, God manipulating our reality to get what He wants out of us… are these really things promised in the New Covenant?  No.