Magic based on God?

[metabolicjosh]

So If we had to split the powers of god up into about 5 realms, what realms would they be? The Idea is that mages can control one of these aspects on a very minor level.

Any Ideas?

I kinda came up with
Space
Time
Matter
Energy
Life

How would we limit the abilities? Or maybe make them more vague?

[Hyena]

Say, have you ever heard of Mage: The Ascension? It wasn't about god there, rather, but it still handled different spheres of influence pretty well and similiar to what you want.

[JeenLeen]

Say, have you ever heard of Mage: The Ascension? It wasn't about god there, rather, but it still handled different spheres of influence pretty well and similiar to what you want.

To elaborate on this (since I like taking about Mage), the Spheres are:

Correspondence -- space and location (includes scrying, teleportation, bilocation, etc.)
Entropy -- order and chaos, luck, decay and stability
Forces -- manipulation, transmutation, and creation of forces (fire, gravity, light, etc.) as well as negative forces (silence, darkness, etc.)
Life -- manipulation, transmutation, and creation of living things, including healing or harming
Matter -- manipulation, transmutation, and creation of non-living things, including (at high levels) supernatural materials
Mind -- stuff like mind control, mental illusions, rewriting memories, as well as augmenting one's own mind
Prime -- the magic that governs magic. (Needed to create things out of nothing.)
Spirit -- manipulation, transmutation, and creation of ephemera, the spirit-stuff that makes up spirit realms. Also visiting and summoning spirits.
Time -- looking through time and haste/slow powers. At high levels, time travel (but the Paradox system of Mage keeps you from changing the past in significant ways)

A concept of Mage is that, with some combination of the Spheres, a mage can do anything. The more advanced (higher Rank) in a Sphere, the more different and complex things you can do.
I could see using the basic magic system and augmenting it for whatever purposes you want for your want.

As for limitation of abilities, it depends on how you want the powerlevel for your game. In Mage, you are limited by Arete (basic understanding of the universe, sorta) and Rank (how well you understand a given Sphere.) Mages cannot buy a Rank higher than their Arete. Thus, only mages with deep understandings can control the more powerful magicks.
Mages are also limited by Paradox, the "stop messing with reality" part of reality that basically smites mages for messing with reality. If mages do something that is obviously magic on earth, they get Paradox; too much, and things go bad. (To put it simply.) This seems not to fit the setting you envision, but maybe it could work: if a mortal channels too much divine energy and impacts the world too much, the divine energies do random things?

Do you envision something like each magic-user has a 'divine spark' and that is how they use power?

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Similarly, one can divide it up according to the New World of Darkness Mage the Awakening, which is very similar but a little more... gnostic, and I think fits an idea of divine origin of Magic a little better.

In this, there are 10 spheres of magic called Arcana, but they're paired. In each pair, stemming from the same 'source', one is considered the 'subtle' Arcana and one the 'gross', with the 'subtle' one being closer to the 'source' of the two Arcana. For your purposes, you could consider that the 'subtle' Arcana is closer to God, whereas the 'gross' Arcana is a more earthly representation of the 'subtle'.

The pairs are: Fate (subtle) and Time (gross)
Mind (subtle) and Space (gross)
Death (subtle) and Matter (gross)
Prime (subtle) and Forces (gross)
and lastly Spirit (subtle) and Life (gross)

So in each one, you have a 'pure' form that relates to more conceptual things (destiny, consciousness, entropy, magic/symbols, and souls/spirits) and a 'base' form that relates to concepts more easily understood by non-magicians. The actual abilities each one gives you is in some cases different than Mage the Ascension given below. Most of them are pretty obvious or described below (Space is the old Correspondence, for example).