12/27/2024 – Day 187 – Proverbs – Chapters 8 – 9 / 1) The nature and essence of God; and 2) What is man’s relationship to God?
Here is Halley’s Bible Handbook’s summary for Chapters 8 and 9:
“Wisdom, personified as a woman, inviting all to her banquet of Best Things: in contrast to lustful women, calling to the simple, ‘Stolen waters are sweet’ (9: 13-18).”
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If you search on “Day 187”, you will find three prior posts from previous cycles on today’s reading.
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For today, I locked into 8:17: “I love those who love me, and those who search for me find me.”
Now, I had to read this slowly and carefully, but here is John Gill’s commentary for this verse, where he takes it to the core: Man’s need for God:
https://www.biblestudytools.com/commentaries/gills-exposition-of-the-bible/proverbs-8-17.html
Now, let’s connect it to the “Pocket Handbook of Christian Apologetics” by Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli (ISBN 13: 978-0-8308-2702-2) excerpt on pgs. 33 – 34:
Chapter 4: “The Nature of God” under the section “God is omniscient and omnipotent” :
“To say that God is omniscient and omnipotent means that there can be no real barriers to God’s knowing or acting. Apart from himself, God has created everything there is to be known and sustains it in being. So is it conceivable that there is something he could not know or not have power over? It is impossible to think of something as thwarting God’s will, unless God himself allows the thwarting — as in the human free choice to sin. But that is a circumstance that presupposes omnipotence and therefore is not an argument against it.
But some may think that we have said too little. They see a great distance here between the loving Father revealed in Scripture and the infinitely mysterious Creator revealed in philosophical speculation. And we admit this: the kind of love revealed in Jesus is far greater than what we could hope to know from philosophy. That is precisely why Jesus revealed the Father to us. If we could learn all we need to know about God from philosophy, we would have not need for divine revelation. Having said this, what philosophy has given us is not without worth. It shows that, at every moment of our existence, we depend on our Creator for everything; our existence, our intelligence, the intelligibilities our intelligence grasps, the goods we strive for — even the free choices by which we strive for them.“
Soli Deo Gloria!
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Questions for fellowship generation, the lifelong sanctification process:
- What does the text reveal about God’s character?
- How has this reading generated prayer for you and/or us?
- What themes stand out to you in this bible study?
- How does our reading fit into the bigger picture (creation, the fall, restoration, etc.)?
- What verse(s) jumped out at you like never before? Is it explainable at this point?
- Do you have any questions you would like to put before the group as to how to interpret any particular verse(s) in our reading. Let scripture testify to scripture: Share with us where you sense contradiction between passages elsewhere.
- What did you find convicting and inspiring at the same time? Share with us how the Spirit of God is working within you as a messenger, both within and outside of our fellowship group.
- Share with the group how our study is calling or confirming to you a new mission to glorify God in our times.