Consequently, the light of God affects that soul the way the light of the sun affects a diseased eye. It causes pain. God's love is too pure. The soul, impure and diseased by its selfishness, is shocked and repelled by the very purity of God. It cannot understand the suffering caused by the light of God. It has formed its own ideas of God: ideas that are based upon its natural knowledge and which unconsciously flatter its own self-love. But God contradicts those ideas.

A kindergarten teacher was observing her classroom of children while they drew, occasionally walking around to see each child's artwork. As she got to one little girl, who was working diligently, she asked what the drawing was. The girl casually replied, "I'm drawing God." The teacher paused and said, "But no one knows what God looks like." Without missing a beat, or looking up from her drawing, the girl replied, "They will in a minute."

"If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated."

If God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it. If God had a wallet, your photo would be in it. He sends you flowers every spring and a sunrise every morning. When you want to talk, He'll listen. He could live anywhere in the universe and yet He chose your heart. And remember that Christmas gift He sent you in Bethlehem? Not to mention that Friday at Calvary. Face it. He's crazy about you! Remember: God answers knee-mail!

In public worship our habit is to slouch or squat; we do not kneel nowadays, let alone prostrate ourselves in humility before God. It is more characteristic of us to clap our hands with joy than to blush with shame or tears. We saunter up to God to claim his patronage and friendship; it does not occur to us that he might send us away. We need to hear again the apostle Peter's sobering words: "Since you call on a Father who judges each man's work impartially, live your lives in reverent fear." In other words, if we dare to call our Judge our Father, we must beware of presuming on him. It must even be said that our evangelical emphasis on the atonement is dangerous if we come to it too quickly. We learn to appreciate the access to God which Christ has won for us only after we have first seen God's inaccessibility to sinners. We can cry "Hallelujah" with authenticity only after we have first cried "Woe is me, for I am lost." In Dale's words [R. W. Dale in his book ATONEMENT], "it is partly because sin does not provoke our own wrath, that we do not believe that sin provokes the wrath of God."

The attempt to make God just in the eyes of sinful men will always lead to error.

The very strength and facility of the pessimists' case at once poses us a problem. If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator? Men are fools, perhaps; but hardly so foolish as that. The direct inference from black to white, from evil flower to virtuous root, from senseless work to a workman infinitely wise, staggers belief. The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never have been the ground of religion: it must have always been something in spite of which religion, acquired from a different source, was held.

God is "easy to please but hard to satisfy"

Musician Michael Card said in an interview: Again and again in China I talked to people who had never heard of Christianity, never heard of Jesus, never heard a single word from the Bible. Yet through nature and their God-given conscience, many believed in God. Not only did they believe God existed, they had derived some understanding about His loving character because he provided food, water, and a beautiful world. One old woman told me, "I've known him for years. I just didn't know his name."

Being contrary to God's nature, sin is repulsive to him. He is allergic to sin, so to speak.

In 1997, a rapidly moving blaze destroyed the Philadelphia home of Luz Cuevas. It was concluded that, tragically, the fire had killed and completely consumed her 10-day old infant daughter, Delimar. Amid the charred rubble of the family home, the small body was never found. The family grieved and slowly moved on with life. Six years later, Luz Cuevas was invited to a child's birthday party. There, a small dimple on the face of a six-year-old girl triggered an overwhelming instinct in Luz. She quietly told her sister, "Look. She's my daughter." The sister thought Luz was losing her mind, but the mother could not be convinced she was mistaken. Telling the little girl she had gum in her hair, Luz managed to take a few strands of hair from the child in hopes a DNA test would prove her instincts right. Subsequently, the Philadelphia police confirmed that the child was Delimar, Luz's lost daughter. Delimar had been kidnapped and raised by Carolyn Correa, who started the fire to cover the crime. After six years of "death," she returned home to be with her real family, very much alive. Just as this mother knows her daughter, so God knows us to an infinite degree.

It cannot be that any creature should know him as he is and not desire him. --

"You sum up the whole of New Testament teaching in a single phrase, if you speak of it as a revelation of the Fatherhood of the holy Creator. In the same way, you sum up the whole of New Testament religion if you describe it as the knowledge of God as one's holy Father. "If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God's child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all." Citation: J. I. Packer, Knowing God, p. 182;

Trinitarian formulations Matt. 28:19, "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit," (three persons, one name) 2 Cor. 13:14, "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all." Eph. 4:4-6, "There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling; 5one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all." 1st Corinthians 12:4-6, “There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all men.” 1st Peter 1:2, “who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and sprinkling by his blood”

There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite. No being could attain a "perfect badness" opposite to the perfect goodness of God; for when you have taken away every kind of good thing (intelligence, will, memory, energy, and existence itself) there would be none of him left.

Nothing really good can be accomplished without genuine suffering. The higher the achievement, the higher the price. There is no greater thing than sanctity, and therefore one must be ready to pay the highest price. To suppose that God would admit to His close friendship pleasure-loving people who want to be free from all trials is ridiculous.

What you must know about hell is that hell is part of divine mercy. God does not make hell. God cannot make anything bad. Hell is a place where those, who are turned away from God forever, hide from Him. They are least miserable in hell, not most but least.