God Is Personal

The Earthly Paradise, Jan Bureghel

Sharing some devotional reading with you today from Knowing God Through the Year.

Right from the start, the Bible's story is told in such a way as to impress on us the twin truths that the God to whom we are being introduced is both personal and majestic. Genesis reveals the personal nature of God expressed in vivid terms. He deliberates with himself, saying, "Let us..." (Genesis 1:26). He brings the animals to Adam to see what Adam will call them (2:19). He walks in the garden calling to Adam (3:8-9). He asks people questions (4:9). He comes down from heaven in order to find out what his creatures are doing (11:5). He is so grieved by human wickedness that he repents of making them (6:6-7). Representations of God like these show us that God is not a mere cosmic principle, impersonal and indifferent. Rather, he is a living Person, thinking, feeling, active, approving of good, disapproving of evil, interested in his creatures all the time.

~ J.I. Packer

And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, 

and there he put the man whom he had formed.  

And out of the ground the LORD God made to spring up every tree  

that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.  

The tree of life was in the midst of the garden,

and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The LORD God took the man  

and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. 

And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, 

"You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 

but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat,

for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."

Then the LORD God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; 

I will make him a helper fit for him."

Genesis 2:8-9, 15-18

Painting ~ The Earthly Paradise, 1607-1608, Jan Brueghel 1568-1625

Wikimedia Commons public domain