Reprint of the original, first published in 1877.

For more than forty years, pastor R. Kent Hughes has shared the gospel with thousands of people and raised the standard of expository preaching in North America and beyond. To celebrate his legacy and pay tribute to his years of ministry, fifteen of Hughes's friends and colleagues from across the globe, including J.I. Packer, Wayne Grudem, John MacArthur, Peter Jensen, and D.A. Carson, examine what it means to be an expository preacher. Among the contributors are professors, a university chaplain, a college president, and urban church planters-living testimonies to Hughes's wide influence ...

Does God hate certain people or does He love everyone? Is He jealous of anyone? Does He struggle with anger? Is He looking for people to be terrified of Him? Is He self-centered and vindictive? Can He be provoked easily? Does He lead people astray? Is He punishing children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren for the sins of their forefathers? Some argue that the Bible teaches that God is the one who accomplishes all of this. Sadly, some have reached these incorrect conclusions because they were unable to appreciate the figurative and idiomatic language of Scripture. This book, “Understanding Hebrew Idiomatic & Figurative Language,” teaches us how portrayals of God, when examined from the perspective of the Ancient Near Eastern culture from which Scripture was written, give us a truly stunning image of the God who is exactly like Jesus.

We appropriately use the Bible as our foundation for all Christian belief and practice because we rightly recognize it as God’s written Word. Why then is there such a lack of clarity on the God that this book is supposed to reveal to us within its pages? Why does He claim to be good, compassionate, and merciful while He is accused of hardening hearts, tempting people, causing sickness and accidents, etc. in so many other places? The issues arise from our failure to accurately understand and apply the “idiom of permission” to our reading and study of this holy text. In this book, Pastor Troy J. Edwards provides the scholarly evidence that the Bible uses the idiom of permission frequently, and he discusses how the application of this idiom will resolve many issues related to our understanding of God’s character.

In this book, How? We will look at a number of God’s acts recorded in the Bible, those acts that upon a superficial reading of Scripture, paint Him as malicious, harsh, hypocritical and in some cases, worse than the humans whose sin He punishes. Hopefully when you see the explanations that the Word of God itself offers you will see the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in a new light. Some of the questions this book attempts to answer are: How Does God Reveal His Wrath? How Does God Bring Judgment? How Does God Create Evil? How Does “God’s Hand” Go Against Sinners? How Does God Punish? How Does God Kill? How Does God Smite? How Does God Curse? How Does God Tempt? How Does God Deceive? How Does God Harden Hearts? How Does God Destroy? How Does God Send Sickness?

There are sincere worshippers of Christ who are quite ignorant of how to deal with difficult passages in the Bible that might be used by God’s enemies to paint a false picture of Him. Many remain confused as to how to deal with passages that seem to go against what they know by their experience is a loving God. I believe that these daily devotions can assist believers in this endeavor. When one meditates daily on the truth of God’s character then they will not be easily swayed by those who speak against it. They will see that there are better ways to understand the passages often presented by those who choose to denigrate God’s character.