THE EXISTENCE AND ATTRIBUTES OF GOD
By Stephen Charnock
Edited by Mark Jones. Updated and
unabridged
Crossway. 1760 pages. £88.99
ISBN 978 1 433 565 908
What Crossway has achieved in this fine reprint of The Existence and Attributes of God is to modernise the language and add many more resources for the contemporary reader.
Charnock possessed remarkable exegetical skill and has a rare gift for beautifully expressing his ideas in elegant prose and skilful use of metaphors and analogies.
There are discussions on various aspects of the character of God: God’s Eternity, Existence, Wisdom, Power, Holiness, Knowledge, Omnipresence, Goodness, Patience, Dominion and Immutability. There is also a chapter on Spiritual Worship and another on Practical Atheism. Each attribute is discussed in detail with continuous practical application throughout. The discourses on Spiritual Worship and God’s Patience are topics that provide much-needed instruction for the 21st-century church.
At the beginning of each discourse the editor includes a summary of the chapter under discussion. This set is enhanced by extensive general and Scriptural indexes. Charnock’s use of Scripture was prolific, and his application of particular verses is full of penetrating insight, so it is helpful for the Bible student to be able to look up Charnock’s take on a particular text. The editor writes: ‘I can think of no book from the past several hundred years that can help the church today quite as well as Charnock’s Several Discourses upon the Existence and Attributes of God’.
