Then when our boys were little, we read to them, and now,
when we get the chance, we read to grandkids. But we had lost touch
with the companionable practice of reading to one another.
So a few years ago we resumed. We had been reading the “One
Year Bible” together in the morning, but we started to read other books at night.
Just a few times a week, for 20-30 minutes at a stretch. It's been fun.
Somehow we got the idea to tackle Frame. The book is
ginormous – nearly 1200 pages. But it’s broken into 52 chapters, so we thought,
how about trying to read it in a year?. A chapter a week doesn't seem too
daunting.
Reading a theology book probably sounds dull or abstruse.
Sometimes it is. But we decided not to read it like we were studying for a
test. We are reading to be more amazed about our great God.
Maybe we don’t always quite understand what Frame is saying, but then in
another page or two he opens up some wonderful vista of understanding
about the Lord’s nature that blows our minds.
Let me share one of those times.
The other night we were just finishing chapter 19: “The
Self-Contained God.” We were on the topic “Can God Suffer?” Frame says that God, in His transcendence, may grieve, but does not suffer loss or
injury. He is and always will be God. But in the incarnation, the Son does
suffer injury and loss, and so, yes, God does suffer.
Frame’s presentation was, I thought, a little
dry. But he ended the chapter with a quote from a great theologian of another generation,
B. B. Warfield. This one got to both of us. By the time I quit reading, we were both wiping our eyes. It reminded us that sometimes the guys with big brains also
have big hearts.
We have a God who is capable of self-sacrifice for us….Now, herein is a wonderful thing. Men tell us that God is, by very necessity of His nature, incapable of passion, incapable of being moved by inducement from without; that he dwells in holy calm and unchangeable blessedness, untouched by human sufferings or human sorrows forever…
Let us bless our God that it is not true. God can feel; God does love. We have Scriptural warrant for believing, as it has been perhaps somewhat inadequately but not misleadingly phrased, that moral heroism has a place within the sphere of the divine nature: we have Scriptural warrant for believing that, like the hero of Zurich, God has reached out loving arms and gathered to his own bosom that forest of spears which otherwise had pierced ours.
But is not this gross anthropomorphism? We are careless of names; it is the truth of God. And we decline to yield up the God of the Bible and the God of our hearts to any philosophical abstraction. We have and we must have an ethical God – a God whom we can love, in whom we can trust.Amen, and oh, glory!
