Life is unpredictable, and that unpredictability can leave us feeling completely powerless. But we serve a God who is all-powerful. In this episode of Clearview Today, we continue our Getting to Know God series by exploring the omnipotence of God — and the harder question underneath it: if God is all-powerful, why doesn't He always step in?

We work through what omnipotence actually means — that God is able to do all He wills to do — and why the things people raise as "limits," like the fact that God cannot lie or sin, actually strengthen His power rather than weaken it. We talk through the classic "can God make a rock too heavy to lift" puzzle, why God owns logic rather than being bound by it, and why so many of our questions about His power are really questions about His wisdom, justice, and mercy. And through the illustration of a father who lets his child receive a painful shot because it's for their good, we get honest about why an all-powerful God sometimes allows pain.

The heart of the episode is Jeremiah 32, where God tells the prophet to buy a field in his hometown just as the Babylonian army breaks through the gates — the worst possible time to buy land. It looks like defeat. But God's power isn't shown by driving Babylon away; it's shown in the promise that one day He would bring His people back. Obedience in the face of what looks hopeless is exactly where God's omnipotence shines.

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Over the course of your life, you will change dramatically — you are not the same person you were ten or twenty years ago. But aren't you glad that's not true of God? In this episode of Clearview Today, we continue our Getting to Know God series with one of His most steadying attributes: His immutability, the truth that God never changes.

We work through the difference between God's incommunicable attributes — the ones we can never share, like self-sufficiency and changelessness — and the communicable ones He extends to us, like holiness and love. We talk about why this isn't just a fun fact but something that puts us back in our proper place, makes our worship real, and gives our relationship with God real weight. Along the way we wade into some deep water: the eternal nature of Christ, what it means that He was manifested in our realm two thousand years ago, and why we can only touch God through the humanity of Jesus.

The episode lands somewhere intensely practical. If you're walking through something painful right now, the fact that God never changes is exactly what you can hold onto. You may not be able to trust your own flesh and blood — you may not even be able to trust your own thoughts and emotions — but you can trust a God who is who He has always been, and whose promises still hold thousands of years later.

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To exist, we need oxygen, food, water, and shelter. God needs none of it. In this episode of Clearview Today, we continue our Getting to Know God series with one of the attributes that's hardest for us to grasp because it's so unlike us: the self-sufficiency of God.

We talk about why this truth is so difficult for dependent beings like us to accept — how a power outage, a plane ride, or an unexpected health scare quietly reminds us how little we actually control. From there we get honest about prayer: how a false sense of self-sufficiency shows up in how little time we spend with God, why treating prayer like a coin in a slot machine misses the point entirely, and why "get to the point" praying is closer to the real thing than the template prayers we recite without meaning. Dr. Abidan Shah shares a recent night of being wide awake at three in the morning and how the Holy Spirit turned those restless hours into some of the most meaningful prayer he's had.

We also draw the crucial distinction between God's communicable attributes, the ones He shares with us like holiness and love, and His incommunicable ones like self-sufficiency, which we can never possess. And we land somewhere deeply reassuring: being dependent on God does not make you meaningless. You are fearfully and wonderfully made, and He delights in you.

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"We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses." But where are they — in heaven, on earth, or somewhere else? In this episode of Clearview Today, we continue our Getting to Know God series by exploring one of the most fascinating and least-preached ideas in Scripture: the "Christ time," and what it means to walk the hall of faith as if those who've gone before us are cheering us on right now.

We work through Hebrews 11 and 12, where the writer invites us to step by faith into another realm and see Abraham, Moses, and Ruth not as figures from a dusty past, but as witnesses running alongside us. We talk about why the Word of God is living and powerful, how entering the Christ time reframes the way we read Scripture, and how this truth steadies us in our own moments of doubt, stress, and decision. Dr. Abidan Shah also shares the story of his own father walking out into the night with nothing but the clothes on his back, and why he now counts him among that same cloud of witnesses.

We also draw a clear and important line: this is not the culture's idea of ancestors watching over you. Satan always offers a counterfeit, and apart from Jesus Christ there is no access to God's time at all. This is a real realm, opened only through Christ, and it's meant to help you run your race with endurance.

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Everything we experience in this world is temporary — and yet we serve a God who is eternal and outside of time. How do we even begin to wrap our minds around that? In this episode of Clearview Today, we continue our Getting to Know God series with one of His most staggering attributes: His timelessness.

We work through what it actually means that God is eternal — that He has no beginning, no end, and no succession of moments, and that He sees all of history equally vividly. He is just as present in George Washington's day as He is in this moment, and just as present in your future. We also take on the question every philosophy student thinks is a checkmate — "well then who created God?" — and walk through why God stepping into time for our sake, in the person of Jesus, changes everything.

The conversation lands where it matters most. Because you are bound by time, the present is all you truly have. Don't live trapped in the past, don't presume on a tomorrow that isn't promised, and don't put off the one decision that carries into eternity. It's a deep episode, but a deeply practical one.

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If God is invisible, how did people in the Bible see Him? Scripture says two things that sound impossible to reconcile: "no one has seen God at any time," and yet "the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend." In this episode of Clearview Today, we work through how both can be true.

We start with what it means that God in His essence is unseeable — using the strange, heavy experience of standing at a casket to illustrate the difference between a body and the person who once filled it. From there we explore the visible manifestations of God throughout Scripture, the pre-incarnate appearances of Christ, and Stephen's vision of Jesus standing at the right hand of God.

Then we get to the harder question: if people once saw God, why won't He show Himself to us now? The answer runs in two directions. First, faith — the people who saw Him face to face still walked away, so seeing was never what produced belief. And second, God's holiness — to reveal Himself fully, in His inner essence, would not comfort us. It would destroy us. We close where the whole conversation lands: without faith, it is impossible to please God.

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How do you make an invisible God visible? It's the mission statement of our church — and one of the most important questions in the Christian life.

In this episode of Clearview Today, we dig into the invisibility of God: what Scripture means when it says God is spirit, why His inmost essence can never be seen by us, and why that doesn't make Him any less real. We work through Jesus' conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, the way children grasp an unseen God through the eyes of faith, and the simple illustration of the wind — you can't see it, but you can see everything it does.

From there we talk about how God makes Himself visible through His people. It isn't enough to only preach the truth, and it isn't enough to only love and serve — Christ becomes visible when the truth of God and the people of God come together. We close with St. Patrick's breastplate prayer and a simple challenge: when people look at you, do they see Jesus?

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If God is all-powerful, why can't He simply forgive sin and be done with it? It's one of the most common objections to Christianity — and the answer reveals something most of us have never considered about what our sin actually costs.

In this episode of Clearview Today, we wrap up our study on the holiness of God by looking at why forgiveness was never free. Dr. Abidan Shah uses a simple illustration — a borrowed pen, broken and handed off — to show what happens every time we take something that belongs to God and twist it. Mercy is easy to give when it costs you nothing. But real forgiveness always has a price, and someone has to pay it.

We walk through Leviticus 17:11 and why blood represents both death and life, why the Old Testament sacrificial system was only ever a placeholder for the real thing, and how nearly every ancient culture on earth — Aztec, Egyptian, Hittite, Scandinavian, Irish — understood instinctively that someone had to die. What sets Scripture apart is that God didn't demand a substitute from us. He provided one Himself.

The episode closes in Isaiah 53, written centuries before the cross and describing it in detail, and then lands somewhere practical: the response to all of this is humility. There is nothing in you that you can take credit for. Begin every day grateful, and give yourself back to the God who paid for you.

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We know God is holy — but what does that word actually mean? In this episode, we pick up where yesterday's conversation left off and work through what Scripture reveals about the holiness of God: that He is absolutely pure, and that He is awful in the truest sense of the word — full of awe, a consuming fire.

We look at what happened every time someone encountered that holiness directly, from Moses hiding his face to Isaiah crying out that he was undone. We also talk honestly about how easy it is to carry a diminished, distorted view of God — bringing Him down to our level the way the Greeks did with their gods — and why the standard of righteousness was never the person next to us, but God Himself. The episode closes with real pastoral guidance: look at your sin honestly, but don't stay there. Conviction is meant to lead you to confession, forgiveness, and healing.

Dr. Shah writes a personal letter every week — reflections on Scripture, faith, and living it out with clarity and purpose. Join the family: https://abidanshah.com/join-the-family/

If you enjoyed the show, please like and follow our Facebook and Instagram pages, and also subscribe to our YouTube channel. This is an excellent way to stay connected to the Clearview team and ensure you don't miss a thing. Another great way to support the show is to use promo code TODAY when checking out at mightymuscadine.com.

To learn more about Clearview Church, visit us at clearviewbc.org. If you have any questions or want to contact us, email us at [email protected] or text us at 252-429-6069.

Check out the links below for more content from Dr. Shah and the Clearview team!

Read - https://abidanshah.com/books/
Watch - https://www.youtube.com/@abidanshahphd
Listen - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sermons-by-abidan-shah-ph-d/id619888508
Clearview Worship - https://open.spotify.com/artist/2m3OQUdBsucUTj6AFHg81S

Support the show

Dr. Shah writes a personal letter every week — reflections on Scripture, faith, and living it out with clarity and purpose. 

GET THE LETTER 

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It's easy to relate to God through attributes we can grasp — love, grace, forgiveness. But holiness is different. In this episode, we continue our Getting to Know God series by starting where Scripture starts: not with God's love or His creative power, but with His holiness, the central attribute that everything else about Him rests on.

We talk about why holiness is so hard for us to even discuss — because sin is so woven into who we are that we've grown numb to it — and why understanding the weight of sin is the doorway to understanding God at all. From the temple vessels to the stained-shirt problem to the truth that even one sin is enough to separate us from a holy God, we work toward a beautiful conclusion: you can't truly grasp the love of God until you first grasp His holiness.

Support the show

Dr. Shah writes a personal letter every week — reflections on Scripture, faith, and living it out with clarity and purpose. 

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