What do condescension and accomodation mean in relation to God?

And so, beloved friends, does God display, in His various dealings with us, His various attributes; in one thing His holiness shining out preeminently, in another His truth, in another His love, and so on. Thus He adapts His greatness to our littleness, speaking to us in language that we are able to bear, that we may apprehend Him more as He desires we should.

In the midst of all this, we get positive revelations from God, given in order to act upon men in this state. In this last case, I get inspired testimony of what God's own mind is. Yet even here grace has adapted it to the conscience and spiritual information possessed, and God's dealings with men in such or such a state. If He deigned to deal with them, thus He must in condescendence have done for their blessing. He leads them up and onward indeed; but it is them He is to lead. A gracious father speaks to his child according to what suits it, yet never what is unworthy of himself: it is worthy of him to suit himself to it. So has God dealt with men, with Israel. How else could He have dealt with them, if He meant them to be morally developed?

And so His divine word. Man's limited nature makes limited things (we spoil the instrument in applying it to something else) and limited words. God's infinite and creative nature has, in His revelation, given what is according to His nature, though suited to man's. The source is infinite; the application is to what is finite. Hence what is simple in itself is various in application. Hence, even in the language which expresses it, we have a finite instrument used to express an infinite mind. This must be different from a finite instrument used to express a finite mind. Even in the last case it is imperfect, as the comparison of the different languages shews; but, in respect of God's thoughts, though He who uses it is God (and hence it is perfectly used for thoughts not learned but only to be expressed), that which is used must have a fulness and elasticity and power, which it had not with man. He who would reduce the force of language used for inspired communications — as the rationalists, and alas! inconsistent Mr. Jowett — to the measure of the mind of the speaker or hearer, denies the inspired communication altogether. Hence, too, the language of scripture is eminently figurative. It uses physical facts and terms to express moral ideas; but the consequence is, we must have the moral ideas themselves to understand the words, as Jowett admits. But then the force of the words is measured by the ideas I have, not by the simple theory expressed by the words at all. All language is figurative when any moral subject is spoken of. I talk of a lovely picture of virtue, and so on. Our life is spent in such figures the moment I leave materialism. But man cannot speak of divine things truly, because he does not know them; his language cannot in itself be formed directly on them, save in falsehood. When God speaks of them (and this is revelation), He does for our sakes condescend to use human language, but fills it with that which is divine. And the intelligence of the language is in the measure of the intelligence of the truth conveyed. He who would reduce the meaning to the human meaning of the words denies the thing altogether, makes nonsense of it besides, by making divine things human in their conception. He is simply an infidel in fact that denies the communication of the divine mind. That God should communicate His thoughts to man, to sinful, corrupt, narrow-minded man, and all be understood according to the human limit of human expressions, is an absurdity upon the face of it. It denies what it professes to admit, and this is Mr. Jowett.

We see God, and the glory of God, but we see them here on this earth and adapted to our condition, that is, the Lord took account of the capacity that we as creatures have, in revealing them to us.

The communications of God are adapted to the position of those who historically received them. This brings us into intelligence of all the counsels of God, for He reveals Himself in His authority, His wisdom, and His sovereignty in these counsels, as He makes Himself known in His nature by the revelation of Himself in Christ.

We ought to be always so sufficiently alive to the grace of God, in giving us figures and types of persons and things (which otherwise we should never be able to understand), as to refuse to take the smallest liberty with the subjects which He thus brings within our reach, and about which He desires to interest us.

Nor is this enough to say — for if the Lord teaches us in this way, they are His own deep thoughts and purposes in Christ His Son. It is not that we should reduce these things to the level of our own ideas, but that our minds should be helped and lifted up out of their own littleness, so as to comprehend the ways of God towards us, and the principle of His actings in grace now, or in the glory by and by. The Hebrew servant is one of the lessons, given us by divine wisdom and love for this end, and shows us the Christ, in His faithful and devoted service to God, and in the midst of the relations which brought Him into this world.

The truth is the declaration of God's will and power, first as Creator and Ruler, then of His mind, yea of Himself; the Son being the expression of it when He became flesh. But this makes known the truth about man — "without strength." God has used human words, and His wisdom has shaped them to convey His meaning. We recognise the vehicle, it is our common speech. The words are of every-day use and employed about earthly things. God has used them for heavenly things, and this use exalts human language to the highest place among earthly gifts. Was not language formed for this purpose specially, that man might know and be a channel for the truth?

Now, such language is not the random expression of human ignorance, but "the words which the Holy Ghost teaches"—words chosen by infinite wisdom to clothe and convey to our knowledge, so far as we are capable of entering into it, the truth of God on the matter in hand.

Further we must ever remember that man’s language is inadequate to fully express Divine ideas. Man’s language is bounded by time and sense, and has deteriorated through sin, but in studying the Scriptures we find the Spirit of God often takes up man’s words, stamps them with a larger, fuller meaning, and instead of deteriorating, as under the influence of man’s sin, they are lifted to a high and sure place under the Divine influence.

But here lies a difficulty. Human language is suited to express human relationships and things within the sphere of human conceptions and ideas and is therefore deficient to describe adequately the divine being of the eternal God and the uncreated relationship that must exist essentially without beginning or end between the three persons of the Triune God. Whatever expressions God uses to reveal to us these divine things must necessarily be couched in human language that we humans are liable to wrest and distort by reading into them our own human ideas if we at all attempt to reason about what God says about Himself and our pride of reasoning ever inclines us to do so.