If you need CDs, you can let April Gordon know, she'll be happy to help you. So tonight, I wanted to get us started by looking at a few of these questions taken from the children's catechism. OK, we'll see how we do. Just a couple more quick announcements. I want to remind you that if you would like to put this together in a notebook, that's a good idea. Over time, you'll have all these resources that you'll have available for you as the pastors and I lay this out for us. And I want to encourage you. We've listed resources from last week, and we added some more for this week. I'm sure over the weeks and months ahead, the other pastors will lay out a few resources for you. Very helpful. When I quote from a resource, I'll hold it up to tell you what I'm reading from. So you get a sense, oh, I want that one. OK, so you know, hey, if I'm going to spend some money, you know, what's the best one? And I'll try to cue you up for stuff like that, OK? Couple questions from the children's catechism. Who made you? Of course, the answers at the bottom upside down like we get in our newspaper. But who made you, we would all say together? God made me, right? Excellent children. What else did God make? Oh, y'all are either very good at reading upside down or you were just wonderful children. Why did God make you and all things? That's right for his glory, I think, is what I heard. How can you glorify God? I think that's what the rabble sounded like in the wilderness. Kind of leeks, onions, fish, Egypt, right? So I wanted us to work our way through this a little bit. Let's just in particular look at number six, is there more than one true God? No, there's only one true God. Number seven, in how many persons does this one God exist? God exists in three persons. Number eight, who are the three persons, the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit? And then number nine, if you just walked up to somebody on the street and said, what is God? You know, you would get a lot of different responses. You might get a person's name. You might, from a teenager, they might name somebody who happens to be popular this week. But for us, when we answer the question, what is God number nine? We say, God is a spirit and does not have a body like men.
Look at number 10, where is God? God is everywhere. Number 11, can you see God? No, I cannot see God, but he always sees me. Number 12, does God know all things? Yes, nothing can be hidden from God. You know, if you just stop and think about those last two combined together, that's pretty daunting. If you think about that as an educated adult, look at number 13, can God do all things? Yes, God can do all his holy will. There's some things that God cannot do, right? Is it possible for God to make a rock that's so big he cannot lift it? Our C-Sproul says, if he can make it, he can lift it. All right. But we also know in some of you were kind of tugging at the loose threads on that last question, you were saying basically, God cannot lie. And what you're basically saying is God must act according to his character. Okay, and we're gonna kind of work our way through. Now, just for a little bit of a review, I'm on the second page or the flip side of the first page, depending on how hand out Savvy you are. I wanna do a little review about Holy Scripture. I want you to recognize how valuable the Holy Scripture is. I want you to imagine that this is a forest. And in the forest, now some of you might know this church is a little better than I do, but which direction is south and in this room? So I'm in good shape, okay, because I wanna go north. Let's say to everybody, we're in a big forest, I'm gonna get out of that light. And I say, hey, I wanna go north, but I'm in a forest and I'm lost and I'm confused, I don't have my direction, so I pull up my compass and I notice that the general direction is north. And this is the way they train boy scouts, by the way, they take these boy scouts out and they train them on how to use their compass, they take them through the classroom and everybody kinda gets them to work. Then they take them out into a forest and they kinda let them go. And they say, fine, do north and walk through the forest and end up doing north. And what some of the boys do is they just kinda fine, do north and go, well, that's kinda that direction. They get started and they hit a tree and they kinda wander over here. And they're like, well, that's kinda over that way. I guess I'll keep going over this way. And they wander their way. But the boys who do the best job are the boys who put their back up against a tree and they find do north. And they go straight for another tree, just a few steps away. They'll go right up to that tree. They get around the other side of the tree, put their back against it and go do north again. They'll go a few steps, they'll get around and do the same thing. So they come out the other side, perfect, do north. What I have found in my walk with the Lord is that if I do not reset my compass every day, according to the true North that's revealed in God's word, I wiggle, I waggle, I get off track. I get around and I end up in the wrong spot and I have to continually bring back to do north. Now, why did I tell you that story? I wanna tell you that our daily relationship with the Lord through his word is so critical. And you might think the older I get, the less I need that. No, no, maybe the older we get, the more we need it, because the closer we get the glory. Everything about that? Every day that passes, you're one day closer to glory. I don't care if you're 15 or 90, it's one more day, you're closer to glory. Are you headed toward the Lord? How would you know? Well, because God revealed Himself according to His word. How do we know about God? Do we just think we kinda come up with our own concept of God? People who come up with their own concept of God, do you know what they do? They think, well, this is how I am. So God must kinda be like me. That's the way they come up with ideas about heaven. If someone's not a Christian and they love, let's say they love the fish. They think about heaven and they're like, you know, I think heaven is wind. You get up there and you throw your line out and you catch a big and every time, right? That's just kinda, we kinda go at it backwards. We think I'll extrapolate from my human experience to the eternal and we miss it. Why? Because we're so limited, our revelation is limited to our unique experience. And so what does God do? God reveals Himself to us. He reveals Himself in two ways. General revelation, which is general knowledge about God, given to the general populace, all humanity. What special revelation? Special revelation is given to God's people. And so we have the privilege, the people in this room, I would think for the most part, are people who've come under not only general revelation, but they've also had God reveal Himself to them through special revelation. So it's very important for us to recognize. Our thoughts about God are defined by the Word of God. That's why we started this lesson last week studying God's Word. You might think, yada, yada, yada, that is not that big of a deal. Oh, yes, it is. Because some people, when they start talking about God, just start talking about God. Well, who do you think God is? He's the sweetest, a grandmother you could ever imagine. They have not based their thoughts about God on anything authoritative. You remember that word? I dropped it on you about four times last week. God's Word is authoritative in our lives. And it gives us an authoritative definition of who God is and who we are. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that in reviews. So if I were to ask you, what kind of theologian you are, you might say, well, I'm not a very good one. Or I'm a bad one. Or you might say, I'm not a theologian. Well, you're wrong there. You are a theologian. Because everyone has thoughts about God. Everyone has thoughts about God. They might be wrong, but their thoughts about God. That makes them a theologian. Because the word theology means they ask, which is God, anology, the study of the study of God, theology. Everyone has a concept of God. So everyone's a theologian. Now, what I want us to do a little bit tonight is I'm gonna push your brain just a bit. I know some of you liked that last week. Some of you didn't. But I'm gonna stretch your brain a little bit and help us recognize something. The Holy Spirit accompanies God's word so that we acquiesce to God's word. acquiesce is maybe a word you don't use all the time but it means to submit to or to surrender. John Calvin says that the Holy Spirit rests on God's people in such a way that when they read the word of God, they acquiesce to it. They surrender to it because it's the authoritative word of God. So in the first week, we covered basically question one out of the Westminster Confession of Faith. It says God has revealed Himself in nature to such a degree that man is without excuse for his disobedience. Even so, the scriptures are needed for salvation so we discuss the necessity of scriptures for salvation. That's what we covered last week. Now what I want you to do tonight is I want you to recognize another statement that comes from chapter two of the Confession. It says there is but one living and true God. Infinite in being and perfection and pure personal spirit, self-existent. We're gonna spend the remainder of our time unpacking that and I've tried to give you a bit of a framework so that you could run on and I laid out a couple thoughts for you, a monotheist, for instance. A monotheist is, and just take the words apart, mono means one, theist is this view of God. So a monotheist is someone who believes there's one God.
We're monotheists. We believe there's one God in three persons. We'll unpack that toward the end of the lesson. We're not polytheists, right? Just take the word poly is mini. We're not polytheists. What's an example of polytheists in the Bible? Think of Exodus when we had the plagues and what God was doing is systematically destroying the gods of the Egyptians. They worship the Nile River. He turned into blood. They worship frogs. He overwhelmed them with frogs, right? He systematically overcame and showed that he's the one true God and he destroys these polytheists. I also want you to think of a word, it's a hinotheist. And a hinotheist is an unusual person. It's very common in our day and age, but a hinotheist is someone who believes there's not one supreme God, but there are many gods who are to be worshiped without denying the validity of any other God. Now, what this immediately does is it removes all logical potential for a supreme being. If you just are a bit of a logician, you know that if there is not one supreme being, then there are no supreme beings. And so, I wanted to unpack this a little bit. And I thought what I would even do is give you a couple of scriptural illustrations there. The polytheists there in Exodus 7 to 11, I gave you a couple of other examples. By the way, a subset of a polytheist might be an animist. If you've traveled much in third world countries, you could go to Mexico. Let me see, you could go to Africa as a continent, third world. You could go to Miami. I don't know if you've been there recently. It's kind of like a third world country. But a pretty cool place. You get the best Cuban sandwich, but we'll talk about that another time. An animist is someone who believes the rocks and the trees and the animals each have their own power. And so, they're very superstitious. And you'll meet these people all around the world as becoming more and more popular in the United States as we continue to degenerate in our ability to think and reason. And as we deny the one true living God, this example of a hinotheist is found there in 1 Samuel 5. I don't know if you remember your Old Testament history very well, but the arc of the covenant is in a foreign territory. And they put the arc in next to their God. Do you remember their God's name? Just out of curiosity. Anybody remember that God's name in 1 Samuel 5? Who said that? They gone right there. I have a book for you. This is called a Vangelism in the Sovereignty of God by J.I. Packer. You read that and you won't sleep at night. I think Joel is actually gonna cover that at some point. He'll straighten out. Deagon, they actually put the arc next to Deagon. And you remember what happened the next morning? Deagon was spaced down, right? I think like one of his arms broke off. They setting back up. Deagon lost to the one true living God. So we are monotheists. And I want us to think about Romans 1, 25 to 32. Anyone who is not a monotheist in a biblical sense of that word has some major problems. And I'm gonna read about them in Romans chapter 1, 25 to 32. Romans 1, 25 to 32. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie. And worshiped and served created things rather than the creator who is forever praised, amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way, the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for other men. Men committed in decent acts with other men and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, god-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful. They invent ways of doing evil. They disobey their parents. They are senseless, faithless, heartless, rootless. Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things, but also approve of those who practice them. If you have not seen that manifest in the United States in your lifetime, I want to buy you a cup of coffee, right? Because this is exactly the path and the degeneration of our beloved United States. So I say all that to say, we are monotheists. And I want you to have a strong recognition of what that term means simply because I want you to feel comfortable using terms when you talk to people. I want you to feel comfortable having a sense of what these things mean and why they're important to us. One more passage I want to end on a bit of a positive note here is Deuteronomy six, four to five. Deuteronomy six, four to five. Some of you know it by heart. It's known by one word by orthodox Messianic Jews or by Christians who've had a little exposure to the Hebrew. Does anyone know what one word summarizes this here in Deuteronomy six? Shema. Who said that over here? Who said that? Oh, who else, right there? More? Mary, you got that one too? Well, I'll bring more books. I have a book for you. I'm just trying to encourage the kids. Nice work on that Shema. It's the Hebrew word and it means to hear, okay? And so the Shema is the word to hear. Interestingly enough, the word for obedience in the Hebrew as well as in the Greek is the verb that's related to hearing. The assumption is this. If you hear and understand, you will obey. This is a bit of a trick question, but did you hear that? Yeah. Interesting that both of those languages, the core of obedience is hearing with the intent of obeying. I received an email from a person who's becoming a good friend of mine and they just started coming to the church and they said, man, I'm gonna be teaching a Bible study and I am so motivated because we're gonna teach John and man, I'll be really listening carefully to your service, right? And well, that makes sense. If you were gonna leave here and train your children or your grandchildren or your neighbor or your friend, you would really be eating this stuff up, right? Because you're like, what do you say that? And so I'm so glad to see so many of you are really absorbing this. Now, what I wanna do at this time is I wanna take a bit of a turn and I think it's gonna be very helpful for us. I wanna talk a little bit about God proper. God proper basically means it's the word for theology, if you will. Theology is the study of God. And so I wanna walk us through some basic things about God and you'll see in your notes here, it says, God is incomprehensible but not indescribable. Now, remember something. Comprehensible means exhausted. In other words, we will never fully exhaustively understand God. But he's describable, right? He's, we are able to apprehend some information about him. Apprehension relates to knowledge, okay? So I wanted to kind of throw those two terms at you here. The idea that God is incomprehensible in that we will never exhaustively fully understand God but he's apprehendable because he's describable.
We can understand some of the things about God. And so what I'm gonna try to do now is talk a little bit about God here and just allow you to absorb some of these thoughts. And I actually took the time to write all this down for you and type it out. I wasn't going to. And I thought, you know, I'm just gonna be a sweetheart on this one. And I'm just gonna write it out for you. I may not do it next week, so don't get lazy on me. Herman Bavink in Doctrine of God says that in creation, God is, I'm gonna give us a few sections here to help us think a little bit about how God is describable. Okay? We cannot know Him exhaustively but we can understand some things about here because He's described. In Isaiah 31, 4, He's referred to as a lion. In Deuteronomy 32, 11, He's an eagle. In Isaiah 53, 7, put this famous passage, He's a lamb. He's a hen in Matthew 23, 37. He's the sun in 84, 11. He's the morning star in Revelation 22, 16. A light in Psalm 27, 1, a torch. Revelation 21, 23, a fire. In Hebrews 12, 29, a fountain in Psalm 36, 9, a rock. In Deuteronomy 32, 4, a hiding place. In Psalm 119, 14, a tower in Proverbs 18, 10, a shadow. In Psalm 91, 1, a shield. In Psalm 84, 11, a temple in Revelation 21, 22. Let's look at Deuteronomy 32. I'm going to highlight one of these each time so you can just kind of hunker down in the word as well as get this overall sense of this wave of information that God has revealed Himself in a way that He can be described. I'll answer why in a little bit. I just want you to enjoy a little bit. Kind of take a hot bath in these beautiful nouns that God uses to identify Himself. Deuteronomy 32, I'll start in verse 10. In a desert land, He found Him. In a barren and howling waste. He shielded Him and cared for Him. He guarded Him as the apple of His eye. Like an eagle that stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them on its opinions. The Lord alone led Him. No foreign God was with Him. This sense of God's personal care for His people. He's trying to communicate that through the names and images that He gives Himself. What about from human experience? Boven goes on and talks about the bridegroom in Isaiah 61-10. The husband in Isaiah 54-5, a father in Deuteronomy 32-6. Judge in King in Isaiah 33-22. A man of war, some translations have translated that warrior, God is a warrior in Exodus 15-3. He's a builder and a maker. He's a shepherd, Psalm 23-1. He's a physician, Exodus 15-26. Let's look at Exodus 15-3. It's a wonderful passage. If we all live long enough, you'll probably hear me preach at some time. Listen to the context of this. Found in Exodus 14, beginning on verse 29. The Israelites went through the sea on dry ground with a wall of water on their right and a wall of water on their left. I've only seen that at one place. It was Disneyland in California. That day only they messed it up because then jaws came out and that didn't fit. It was a few thousand years off, wrong coast. Then 29, but the Israelites went through the sea on dry ground with a wall of water on their right and on their left. That day the Lord saved Israel from the hands of the Egyptians and Israel saw the Egyptians lying dead on the shore. And when the Israelites saw the great power, the Lord displayed against the Egyptians, the people feared the Lord and they put their trust in him and in Moses his servant, then Moses and the Israelites sang a song to the Lord. I will sing to the Lord for he is highly exalted. The horse and its rider he hurled into the sea. The Lord is my strength and my song. He has become my salvation. He's my God and I will praise him, my Father's God and I will exalt him. The Lord is a warrior. The Lord is a warrior. He wants to identify himself to us in a way that means so much to us personally. You may not recognize it, but the Lord's fighting for you even right now. The Lord's protecting you against the accusations of the evil one. The Lord sustaining you even at this moment against our enemies. The next thing I wanted to notice is this idea of human actions. It's on the next page. It says, God is knowing Genesis 1821. He's remembering Genesis 8.1, seeing Genesis 1.10, hearing Exodus 2.24, smelling Genesis 8.21, tasting Psalm 115. One of my favorite things about God is he loves a good barbecue. You know, think of all those burnt sacrifices. Have you ever come home and you pull into the, you kind of start driving down the neighborhood. You got to wind it down and you're like, I smell some charcoal. Wait a minute. Whoo! Someone's barbecuing some chickens. You know, I'm going to find them. And, well, is that, there's this smell it represents. It's beautiful. You can't wait. You start to slobber a little bit. Well, the Lord smells that sacrifice. And he smells our life as made righteous through Christ. And through Christ, we're fragrant. We smell good. I don't want you to miss the Scriptures here. When it starts to talk to us about these human actions of God. And then we have some human emotions attributed to God. We see joy in Isaiah 62, 5. We see grief in Psalm 78, 40. We see anger in Jeremiah 7, 18, and 19. Love in John 3, 16, hatred in Deuteronomy 16, 22, wrath in Psalm 25. And we get this idea of jealousy in Deuteronomy 6, versus 10 to 15. I'm trying to stay in Deuteronomy. I love Deuteronomy. I believe it was Jesus' favorite book. And in Deuteronomy, what's happening here is that people are getting ready to go into the Promised Land and Moses has rounded them up. And he begins to give them some instructions, instructions for them and for their children. And he's encouraging them to implement these things. In verse 10 of Deuteronomy 6 says, When the Lord your God brings you into the land, He swore to your fathers to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So where are they? Okay, they've left Egypt. They've made it. And now they're passed Mount Sinai. They've received the law that the Lord has given them. And now they're getting ready to enter the land. And he's given them some instructions. He says, a land with large flourishing cities. You did not build houses filled with all kinds of good things. You did not provide wells. You did not dig vineyards and olive groves. You did not plant. Then when you eat and are satisfied, be careful that you do not forget the Lord who brought you out of Egypt. And he goes on and he says that the Lord is a jealous God. And you know, I don't think I've told Laura this story. But when I was a junior in high school in Arizona, we went to the lake one summer. About five of us piled in one of the family station wagons and we went to the lake. And we spent three or four days at the lake. We didn't have a change of clothing. We didn't have any food. We just went to the lake, right? Kind of like high school kids do. And I met this girl. And I don't think I really need to describe this girl to you. Basically she just walked around in a bikini the whole time we were there. And to summarize this girl, I think I'm just going to tell you her name. Her name was Bambi. And I started to develop just a little bit of a relationship with Bambi. And I'll never forget as we were heading back to Phoenix from Lake Apache. And we were going back because we had a baseball game. We played summer league there. And Tony Green and our catcher got in the car and he's honking the horn. Pinsley getting the car. Getting the car. He's like, oh, getting the car. So I'll see you, Bambi. And Bambi looked at me with these big brown eyes. And she said, don't forget me. And I happened. I want you to hear something. I want you to hear the God of the universe saying don't forget me. He's using the language of a lover. He's using the language of a boyfriend, a girlfriend. He's using a relational language.
And he's saying don't forget me. When you are receiving blessing, when your bank accounts are filled and you have a beautiful home and you live in the comfort that we live here in Chattanooga. I want you to hear the Lord say don't forget me. Don't forget me because you're okay. Don't forget me because things are well. Clean to me because I love you. You see, he's using the language that causes us to lean in and say oh my goodness. He really cares about me. He's got feelings for me. Now some people want to say God doesn't have feelings. They're wrong. I mean, they're just wrong. We just went through. We just went through how many verses? That talked about God's emotions. But what God is, he is not controlled by his emotions. You know, one of the defenses you can use in the court of law is I lost my temper and I killed him. It's just in the heat of the moment. In Texas, that works all the time. My friend was a district attorney in Dallas, Bill Hill. And he looked at me one time. He said, I want you to know something about Texas now that you live here. He goes in the court of law. You can kill somebody. And your defense can be he needed killing. How do you plead? Not guilty, sir. He needed killing. And the judges say, tell me about it. Well, let's talk this baby through. What do you do? What happened? Right? Well, I want you to have this sense that God is emotional. But he's never controlled by his emotions. He doesn't fly off the handle. And all of a sudden, oh okay, send Jesus back. Let's wrap this thing up. I've had it. Thank God. And then lastly, God metaphorically uses human body parts to describe himself. He talks about his face in Exodus 33.20. Also, countenance can be used there. He talks about his eyes in Psalm 11. For his ears in Psalm 551, he hears. He listens. His nose in Deuteronomy 3310. In fact, in the Hebrew, sometimes when they're trying to portray that somebody's angry, it says their nose is red. You ever seen this somebody when they're really, really, really mad? The face is red. That's a euphemistic Hebrew. It's like an idiomatic saying in Hebrew. He's got a mouth Deuteronomy 83 lips. Job 11.5. He's got arms and neck and hand and fingers and heart. Now, why have I labored this with you? So what's the point? First of all, all creation reveals something about God. All creation reveals something about God to us. All creation reveals something about God to us. You should be able to look at a tree and think, man, the Lord made that. Or an insect and think God is sustaining the being of that insect. So all creation reveals something about God to us. Secondly, scripture uses, here's a big word, anthropomorphic. I'll break it down for you. Think anthropos, man, morphic form, man's form, anthropomorphic. Scripture uses anthropomorphic language to describe God. Why? So we'll understand. So we have a sense of God speaking to us in terms that we can understand. Anthropomorphic language, anthropos, man, morphic form. So God uses this language so that we in our feeble finite fallen minds, three Fs, feeble finite fallen minds, can grasp something about God as he's described to us. Thirdly, God made the universe so that it would show the magnificence of his character. God made the universe so that it would show the magnificence of his character. Whoever had gone snorkeling and seen all those different fish, and you're thinking, these fish are doing the same thing every day all day. I just see them once in a while when I go on a trip. Why did God make all those colors? Why did God do that? Why did He make all of us different? Right? God is so magnificent. He's creative. Okay, I wanted you to just think about this a little bit. Let me read Psalm 148, 3, 7 to 11, and 13. You'll see it in our worship service this Sunday. Praise him, Son and Moon. Praise him, all you shining stars. Praise the Lord from the earth. You see monsters in all deeps. Fire and hail, snow and frost. Stormy wind, fulfilling his command. Mountains and hills. Fruit trees and all cedars. Kings of the earth and all peoples. Let them praise the name of the Lord. For his name alone is exalted. His glory is above heaven and earth. Many times when I hear a bird singing, I think he's doing what he's made to do. He's praising God. And why should I let a bird out praise God? Why should I let a bird out praise me? I should be praising the Lord all the time. And so it's this beautiful imagery we have about the Lord. Now, I want to make a bit of a transition and I want to talk about God's incommunicable attributes. I know I've thrown a few words at you that you don't use in everyday language unless you're married. You understand the term incommunicable, right? You get that. I've put it in parentheses and that is attributes that God does not fully share with us. Those are incommunicable attributes. There are attributes that he does share with us, but not in the fullest sense of that. You know, I don't really need like a lectern. I need like a table or something and have so many notes. I want to begin on one of God's incommunicable attributes. And I'll just give you a few. Let's talk about 17 minutes less. And let's end it at 727. That would be fun. If I do that, we don't have quite as much time. Number one, incommunicable attributes, unchangeable-ness. God is unchanging in his being. Perfections, purposes, and promises. I've quoted from Herman Bobbink, right? Now I'm quoting from Wayne Grudum in his systematic theology. It's an expensive book. It's a thick, expensive book. And it's going to cost you like 50 bucks if you buy it. But you'll live out of that thing for the rest of your life. If you have a Kindle and you can download it, you can download it for about 20 to 25 bucks. Okay, in case you wanted that way. So I just wanted to give you my reference. So if you're thinking, okay, Christmas is coming. You know, nobody knows what to get me. Tell them systematic theology, Wayne Grudum. Get all the grandkids to chip in. Instead of another tie. Another way of saying that God is unchangeable is that he's immutable. He's immutable. Listen to this from scripture Psalm 102, 25 to 27, Psalm 102. Of old you laid the foundation of the earth. And the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you endure. They will all wear out like a garment. You change them like Raymond, and they pass away. But you are the same. And your years have no end. I want you to get this idea that God is unchangeable. He's immutable. He's constant. I could go into a lot of detail on each of these. And I'm just not going to. I'm going to introduce it. Give you a definition, a scripture verse, and then I move on. Otherwise, literally, we could camp on each one of these attributes of God for a long, long time. And maybe you'll do that in your own personal time with the Lord as you take some time to meditate on these. The second incommunicable attribute, meaning that we share this attribute with God but not fully. And that is the idea that God is eternal. What does it mean to be eternal? It means that God has no beginning or end. He has no succession of moments in his being. Another way of saying this is that God sees everything all at the same time. Remember when you went to school and you started and you took math. You're so excited. You started doing one plus one and two plus two and three plus three. Then you graduated to your multiplication tables and it's five times five, 25. You're so excited to know all those. You work your way through and eventually you get to the point in math and most of us hit this point about seventh grade. Where are we just like, why? What happened to Mary had six apples and Billy ate three. How many apples? I could hammer those all day every day. But you reach a level in math where you just start to lose it. Why is that? We're discursive learners. You learn a little bit at a time. You have math one before math two. You have algebra one for algebra two. You have algebra two before you move on to trigonometry. Right? All these different sequences. That's how we learn. God knows everything all at the same time. Just let's soak in that for a moment. Just get a sense that there's no such thing as a sequence to God. Let me give you a verse. Revelation one eight. The Alpha and the Omega says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. I want you to revel and worship God because he is a God who is eternal and that he's a God who's unchangeable. And then thirdly, let's talk a little bit about God's omnipresence. Omni is a prefix that means all. So you would say all present. What does that mean? It means that God does not have size or spatial dimensions and is present at every point of space with His whole being. I'm going to read that again. Try to get your brain around this by the way. You won't, but try. God does not have size or spatial dimensions and is present at every point of space with His whole being. You know, I heard somebody erroneously teach that hell is the absence of God. I'm sitting in a seminary class. I'm listening. I'm paying attention. And they say hell is the absence of God. And maybe you've heard somebody say that. And I'm not trying to beat anybody up. We're all in the process of learning. But I sat there and I said, well, if God is omnipresent, how could he be absent from hell? And so I went up after class and I asked the professor and I said, I'm a little confused and he looked at me. He goes, wow, I never thought of that. I want to think about that. And then before the next class, he came up and he says, I think I have it. He goes, hell is the presence of God in the form of His wrath. Does that just get you a little bit? Hell is the presence of God. But in the form of His wrath, while heaven is the presence of God in the form of His grace, very powerful. When you begin to think about God being present and the thought that we're present with God right now, there's nowhere we can go to be outside of His presence. And many of you know the passage in Psalm 139. I'm going to read you a punishment passage out of Amos 9. If you ever need a good weapon, read Amos. If you just ever think things are just cruising along here. I'm a self-righteous fool. Lord, straighten me out. Go run to Amos. He will help you. Not one of them shall flee away. Amos 9, 1 through 4. Not one of them shall flee away. Not one of them shall escape. Though they dig into shule. From there shall my hand take them. Though they climb up to heaven. From there I will bring them down. Though they hide themselves on the top of Carmel. From there I will search out and take them. And though they hide from my sight at the bottom of the sea. There I will command the serpent and it shall bite them. And though they go into captivity before their enemies. There I will command the sword and it shall slay them. And I will set my eyes upon them for evil and not for good. You might think, why'd you do that? Well, I just want us to have the whole council of God's word. What does that mean? It means, as a preacher, we're responsible to teach the entire word of God. We don't just kind of pick and choose the cute, fun ones. Right? Where everybody kind of... Jesus is a friend. He's a friend next to you. Jesus is a friend. So sing along. Right. You have to have this sense that I am under God's judgment. And his wrath I justly deserve. And I've been saved by my righteous Jesus Christ. Hallelujah and glory to Christ. And so when you think about God as being everywhere all at the same time. I want you to think about not only heaven but also health. Now, I've only got a few moments. Let's talk a little bit about God's communicable attributes. What's nice about a series like this is we can always pick up a little bit. Communicable. And I put in parentheses there for you. God more fully shares this with us, okay? And you can understand the idea of eternality. Do we share that at all with the Lord? Well, yes, we do. I mean, we don't have an eternity past because we have a birthday. But we have an eternity future. So we have a sense of eternity. Even as we live our lives, we get a sense of time and movement. But what might be some of God's communicable attributes? I want you to take a thought about the idea that God made us in his image. Right. Go to Genesis 1. If you'd like. He made them male and female in his image. So men and women are both created in the image of God, which means in some ways we're like him. Well, how are we like him? Well, first of all, we have a spirituality about us. We're spiritual beings. We're body spirit beings. You need to recognize in John 4.24 says God is spirit. And we have spirit in us. God breathed into Adam. He didn't breathe into the animals. An animal doesn't have an ongoing everlasting spirit. A human being does. We share that with the Lord. We're spiritual beings. Another thing that we have in common with God is knowledge. This idea that God is omniscient. You know, he knows everything all at the same time. Well, we share this idea of knowledge because we do learn. And we can understand. And we can apprehend information. You're apprehending information tonight. For some of you, this is a great review. For others, you're like, oh, I never thought of it. I've never quite seen it organized like this before, right? You're apprehending knowledge about God. And so in that sense, while we're not all knowing, God knows everything. He is perfect in his knowledge. According to Job 37-16, we know that we can learn. And we can gain understanding. In fact, the theme of John's Gospel in chapter 20 verse 31 speaks of, I've written this so that they may believe, and in believing, have life in the name of Jesus. So we can know. In fact, I would say, if you were going to force me to summarize everything about the Lord in one sense, he's created us to know him. Go ahead, read your Bible this year, read it all the way through. And just mark every time it says that, you're my God and I'm yours. Mark every time the Lord says, I'm your God and your mine. I want you to know me. I want you to know me so that you have this love that I have you understand it. Let me give you one more, and then I'm going to talk just a moment about something that I think will be very helpful for you. Wisdom. God has given us wisdom. What does it mean to be wise? Well, it means to take what you know about God and implement it in a practical way of living. God is always in that everything God does is always a wise decision. We know in Romans 8, 28, it says that God works all things together for good. That's God's wisdom being manifest in His people. He's the only God I know who can take our disasters and turn them into beautiful trophies of grace. I've experienced that in my own life. He calls us according to His purpose. He's going to manifest His love on us and in us, and He's going to bring about blessing and glory to us. Let me just touch on these last two points, the idea that God is dependent on the creature for nothing. When God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit were in eternity past before the beginning, they weren't kind of leaning against a cloud saying, you know what, we want to play golf tomorrow, but we really need a fourth. They weren't in heaven in their triune glory saying, I'm going to lonely, how are you feeling Jesus? God did not create us out of any need. He is a self-existent being. He doesn't need anything. He's the only free being in the universe. He's the only being He can do exactly what He wants to do, the way He wants to do it, when He wants to do it. He's the only free being. We'll unpack a little bit about free will when we get to that part. But God is truly the only free being. There's nothing contingent or uncertain to God. He knows everything. And the word I want you to learn tonight is the word assayatee. And when you think of that term, I want you to recognize it's a term that means God is self-existent. He doesn't need anything else outside of Him in order to exist. And you might go to Acts 17, 24 and 25, or Exodus 3, 14. Now, I want to close with a bit of a negative example, but it's gripping. It's gripping because these are the people you're living among. There's a man named Bertrand Russell, not sure if you remember Bertrand Russell, mathematician, philosopher. And he wrote a book called Why I Am Not A Christian? Catchy title. Why I Am Not A Christian? And he grew up in a world where he had bought into kind of a traditional cosmological argument. That's a whole night in itself, right? What's a cosmological argument? He bought into an argument that because things exist, they must have a first cause. In other words, something must have caused them to exist. As Bertrand grew up and he began to be exposed to other thinking, he began to think, well, now wait a minute. What if God had a first cause? What if God's really a creature like I am? And he said, that's why I'm not a Christian. So, R.C. Sproul in a little book I recommended to you in his chapter on the Triune God. Tells a little bit about Bertrand Russell. He said, Russell decided that the classical argument for God's existence was fallacious in an era. Russell maintained that position until his death, failing to realize that it was built on a faulty definition of the law of causality. You might be thinking law of causality. R.C. anticipates, the law of causality teaches that every effect must have a cause. Not that everything must have a cause. Effects by definition are caused by something outside of themselves. However, we need not assume that everything is an effect. Temporal, finite, dependent, or derived. There's nothing irrational about the idea of a self-existent eternal being who has the power of being within himself. In fact, Thomas Aquinas goes on to say that it is a logical necessity that for a being to exist something had to have this quality of assayity, this self-existent power. You might think, wow, what a way to end the night. I liked it up until that. Could you tell us more about Bambi? No, I will not tell you anymore about Bambi, but I will tell you about R.C. R.C. was a 16-year-old boy in Dallas when I met him, dying of cancer. R.C. was a brilliant mathematician. He scored in the top 99 percentile as a 16-year-old in the entire world on high-level mathematical testing. He made perfect scores on his SAT as a junior in high school. Pretty bright kid. I go to R.C. to visit him in the hospital because he's dying of cancer and one of our little girls from church was dying of cancer in the same ward. So I got to know R.C. when he finally got through his protocol, they said you could go home for a while, R.C. We don't know how long you're going to live, but you're going to die soon. And so R.C.'s dad, who's an atheist, called me and he said, hey, I heard you talking to Callie about God. Would you come talk to R.C. about God? And I said, well, Charlie, you're an atheist, right? And he goes, yeah, but we need help. I'm like, I'll come over. I met him over at Charlie's office and read one of me to teach him about God. So I started teaching him some of these attributes about God that we've been talking about tonight. And he goes, I don't get it. He's like, I just can't get it. I just can't get it so I can't believe in it. And he's upset. And he's emotional. His dad's kind of veins are popping out on his forehead. He's like, wow, this is not going well. And I said, oh, Holy Spirit, help me. And I leaned across the table and I uttered a phrase that changed this boy's life. I said, the finite cannot fully comprehend the infinite. And Rhett blinked a couple times. And then he prayed to receive Christ with me. Isn't that exciting? So if somebody comes up to you and wants to tell you why they're not a believer, I want you to be able to tell them why you are. And help them to see that the finite will never fully comprehend the infinite. And God is infinite. And we worship him. He is describable. And he's rational. And we can believe in him in the power of the Holy Spirit. Let's pray. Father, to think that you're right here with us, father, son, and Holy Spirit, you're omnipresent. We just marvel at you. Just to try to describe you, Lord, is just overwhelming. Thank you for your word. Thank you for your special revelation you've given us so that we can at least have some words to describe you. And to help our finite, fallen, feeble minds grasp by faith, who you have revealed yourself to be. Oh, and we worship you, Lord, and we praise you. And we love you. And Lord, we won't forget you. Thank you for uttering those tender little words. Don't forget me. Oh, God, we haven't forgotten you tonight. We worship you. We pray in Jesus' name. And all God's people say, Amen. Good evening.