Accommodation is the doctrine that God, in revealing Himself, condescends to the limited capacity of His creatures, adapting the manner and form of His communication to what finite and fallen men can receive—much as a parent stoops to the level of a child. Calvin gave the doctrine its classic expression: God, he says, “lisps” with us as nurses are wont to do with infants, speaking in baby-talk not because His knowledge is small but because ours is, accommodating the loftiness of His being to our slender comprehension. Hence Scripture speaks of God in human terms—His arm, His eyes, His repenting, His coming down to see—not because God has a body or changes His mind, but because such anthropomorphic language conveys real truth about Him in a form we can grasp. So too the Word describes the natural world as it appears to the ordinary observer (“the sun rose”), employs the categories and idioms of its first hearers, and unfolds revelation progressively, as a teacher leads pupils from the simple to the profound. Rightly understood, accommodation magnifies God’s kindness and safeguards both His incomprehensibility and the truthfulness of His Word: what He accommodates is true, though not exhaustive. The doctrine becomes a corruption only when it is twisted into a license for error—the claim that God accommodated Himself to the mistaken beliefs of the ancients, endorsing falsehood, so that Scripture may teach things that are simply untrue. True accommodation means God speaks truly in a way we can understand; it never means He speaks falsely to suit our ignorance.