God is love

D.v. I'm preaching on 1 Jn 4 on Sunday AM.

I remember thinking about this once but I can't remember what I thought!

Is God's love more essential to him than his other attributes (virtues or dispositions)?

John also tells us that "God is light", of course.

Could we say "God is holiness", "God is justice", "God is wisdom", "God is wrath" etc.?

I guess we need to dig out our notes on the essence and attributes of God, eternality and divine simplicity and so on.

God's love is clearly fundamental to his Trinitarian life in a way that wrath is not.

Man-sized God

So often we want a manageable man-sized God.

Man-size tissues are pretty big, as far as tissues go, but a man-sized god is a pathetic little god who is too small for us.

Men and women actually need God-sized God.

The amazing thing is that in Jesus, God became man-sized, as it were, while he also continued to fill the universe and uphold creation itself, even as he walked about within it. Jesus is not a god we can put in our pockets, but he is God revealed to men as a man, a God men could touch and handle and known.

"Goddy"

I found myself telling Baby Jono (a.k.a. Jonathan) today that it was very kind of "Goddy" to give him so many toys.

I'm not sure "Goddy" is an appropriately reverentail title for the Almighty but with all the Mummy and Daddy-ing and so on it seemed to trip off the tongue rather easily.

I guess some might see so kind of justification for the term in Jesus' called the Father "Abba", which is sometimes said to be something akin to "Daddy," although my New Testament tutor at Oxford claimed "Dad" is perhaps closer to the feel of the Aramaic?