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| Order Of Worship (Liturgy) Hymn 4 Psalm 139:1,4 Psalm 115:1,5,6 Hymn 1 Psalm 67 Scripture readings: Isaiah 55; Matthew 3:13-17 Catechism lesson: Lord's Day 8 |
Beloved congregation of Christ,
Suriname is the only Dutch-speaking country in South America. I had the opportunity to visit there on a short-term mission trip way back in 1992. My cousin and I were wandering the streets of Paramaribo when we met this guy who was interested in talking to us. He was riding a motorbike and came up alongside us and stopped. We were obviously foreigners and he wanted to know why we were there. We told him that we were Christians and we were helping to build a Christian school. We started chatting about God. Eventually he went off on a big rant. I can still hear him after all these years telling us God is crazy – I think it was because of all the evil in the world. We tried to explain that God is good and wise, but he just kept on insisting that God is crazy.
It can happen that we get confronted with the question of who God is and what he’s like. People hear we believe in God and then want to know more about this God we say we believe in. And of course, like that guy in Suriname, people will often want to share their own opinions about God. In 1 Peter 3:15, the Bible teaches us to be prepared to give an answer in these sorts of situations.
My goal in this sermon is to help you be prepared to answer questions about God. Lord’s Day 8 of our Catechism is the first Lord’s Day dealing with the Apostles’ Creed. And it starts with a brief look at the structure of the Creed. The Creed is organized according to the persons of the Trinity and each of their works. That leads us to QA 25 about the Trinity. This is the only place in our Catechism that deals directly with the persons and works of the Triune God. So it makes sense to take this opportunity to spend some time learning what the Bible says in response to the question: Who is God?
We’ll learn about:
- Three wrong answers
- Three biblical truths
It’s generally not a good idea to learn your theology from pop music. Back in the early 90s, there was a popular song from Bette Midler entitled “From a Distance.” The refrain of this song said that “God is watching us...from a distance.”
That’s an old false teaching about who God is and what he’s like. The technical name for it is deism. Deism is often described as God being like a clock-maker. At the beginning he created everything. Then he wound it all up. And then he stepped back from it and he just lets it run. God isn’t involved with his creation at all. He isn’t near, isn’t present and, in some versions of deism, he doesn’t even know or care what is happening with his creation.
There are a couple of things that make deism attractive. One is that it still answers the question of origins. There’s still a Creator ultimately behind everything. But deism is also attractive because if God is at a distance, if he isn’t really involved with his creation, then we’re not accountable to him. So deism is both intellectually satisfying and morally permissive. That makes it a desirable option for many people.
The Bible tells us that God is present and involved with his creation. Think of what we just sang from Psalm 139. Where ever we may go, God is there: “Where can I from your Spirit flee? Where will you not be near to me?” Elsewhere in Psalm 139, God tells us that when we’re conceived in our mothers’ wombs, it’s because of his involvement. Anytime a human being comes into existence, God is present and working.
Our second wrong answer about who God is has to do with a denial of God’s providence. This error is known as open theism. Open theism teaches that God has relinquished his total sovereignty over the world. When we experience things that are difficult, those things just happen to us by chance. God doesn’t send those trials to us – they just happen. They’re out of his control. And he watches on the sidelines and grieves with us as we go through our bad luck.
Sadly, you’ll find this error in popular Christian books. It’s not a fringe teaching. You can find it in authors like Philip Yancey, John Eldredge, and Greg Boyd.
Open theism is attractive because it seems to be a good way to answer the problem of evil. The problem of evil has to do with why there’s evil in this world when God is all-good and all-powerful. Open theism answers that question by saying that God is all-good, but he has given up his total sovereignty. So he’s not responsible for the bad stuff we experience. Instead, you can chalk it up to chance or bad luck. It’s just the way things go.
On the other hand, the Bible teaches God’s absolute sovereignty over everything. He is in control of the things we experience as good, but also in control of the things we experience as bad or hard. For example, in Psalm 71:20 the Psalmist says that God has made him see many troubles and calamities. There are numerous other passages saying something similar. And how do we reply to the problem of evil? We have to remember that whatever happens, God has a good and wise purpose for it. The main place we go to see that is the cross. At the cross, horrible evil was done to an innocent man. But God had an infinitely good and wise purpose in it, namely our salvation. As we look to Christ, and as we look to his cross, we see the ultimate answer to the problem of evil. If God had a good purpose behind that, then surely he has a good purpose behind whatever it is we’re going through too.
The third wrong answer about God is pantheism. ‘Pan’ means ‘all’ so pantheism is the idea that everything is God. I am God, you are God, the earth is God, the animals are God, the planets are God. Absolutely everything is divine.
Today pantheism is often connected with another ‘ism,’ environmentalism. Many environmentalists believe that everything in nature is divine. Every force and working of nature is God. Usually the language used to describe the pantheistic conception of God is feminine. So you’ll hear about Mother Nature or about the goddess Gaia, the ancestral mother of all life, the personification of the earth.
Pantheism attracts people because it provides a spiritual basis for the environmental movement. The environment is not just physical matter, there’s something higher about it that makes it worth protecting. Moreover, you can be a pantheist and still largely live your life the way you want to. The pantheistic god isn’t personal, and so for most people who hold this view, such a god isn’t going to hold anyone to account for their choices. There is no ultimate justice in pantheism, but the trade-off is that you have a lot of ethical freedom in this life. And people want that more than anything.
Contrary to pantheism, the Bible teaches what we call the Creator-creature distinction. There is a Creator who exists distinctly from what he has created. One of the clearest places where we find this distinction is in Isaiah 64:8, “But now, O LORD, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand.” That kind of language is also found in Jeremiah 18 and then it comes back in the New Testament in Romans 9. You can't confuse the clay with the potter and you can’t confuse God with his creation.
So there you have three wrong answers to the question “Who is God?” We looked at deism, open theism, and pantheism. Now we’ll switch over to look at three biblical truths about who God is.
Our starting place here is what we confess in Lord’s Day 8 about the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity is often mentioned as evidence that the Christian faith is illogical. How can someone be both three and one at the same time? However, what we need to remember is that the Trinity shouldn’t be thought of as 3 = 1. If the doctrine were saying that 3 = 1, then we could agree that it’s contradictory and nonsensical. But that’s not what the doctrine says. The doctrine says that God is three in a way different from the way he is one. God is three in terms of persons. There are three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God is one in terms of his essence or being. So we say three persons, but one in essence. When we put it that way, there’s no contradiction or problem with being logical.
Now the word “Trinity” isn’t found in the Bible. That’s a word that came along later to describe what the Bible teaches. However, the concept of the Trinity is definitely found in Scripture. We can see something of it in what we read from Matthew 3. That passage describes the baptism of Jesus. As he came up from the water, the Holy Spirit descended upon him like a dove. Then the voice was heard from heaven, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” It was the voice of God the Father. He stated that Jesus is his Son. So we have these three distinct persons in this scene: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And from elsewhere we learn they are equally God.
In the Gospels, Jesus prays to his Father – and the Bible teaches that you can only pray to God. The Father is God. In Titus 2:13, Paul writes about “waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ.” Jesus Christ is God. And in Acts 5, we read first that Ananias lied to the Holy Spirit and then that he lied to God – same person. The Holy Spirit is God. The distinct persons of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all together God.
The doctrine of the Trinity is vitally important. It’s important because it’s biblical, but also because it’s at the foundations of the gospel. If we don’t understand the Trinity, we really don’t understand the biblical gospel.
J.I. Packer once suggested that we think of a trail or track up a mountain. When you walk along the track, you’re focussed on the track instead of the mountain. If you were really really focussed, you could rush to the top of the mountain without even really paying any attention to the mountain. Packer said, “I once climbed a mountain whose name I did not discover till four years afterwards. Now, when you state the gospel you take a path up a mountain: and the Trinity is both the name and the nature of the mountain you have under your feet the whole time.” The Trinity undergirds the gospel. J.I. Packer was exactly right. Let me explain how.
In his love for sinners, the Father sent his Son into the world to take on our human flesh. The Son of God agreed to do this and he came as one of us. He humbled himself. Jesus lived a perfectly obedient life and then went to the cross to pay for our sins. The Father raised him from the dead on the third day. After Christ’s ascension into heaven, he poured out his Holy Spirit on his church so that she would be empowered to go to the ends of the world with the good news of what he’d done. The Holy Spirit would work with the Word to bring about in millions more the new birth and faith in Christ. All of this is part of the gospel. This is why our Catechism reminds us not only that the Apostles’ Creed has a Trinitarian structure, but also that the Creed contains “all that is promised us in the gospel.” It all fits together.
The next biblical truth we’ll learn about is monotheism. “Mono” means “one.” So monotheistic religions are those which hold to a belief in one God. Christianity is monotheistic. So are Judaism and Islam.
However, Islam claims that Christianity is not monotheistic. Because we believe in the Trinity, they say we believe in three gods. This is one of the major problems with the Qur’an, the Islamic holy book. The Qur’an is supposed to be the final perfect revelation from God. But when it describes what Christians believe about God, it badly mangles the doctrine of the Trinity. According to the Qur’an, Christians believe that God the Father had sexual relations with Mary, the second person of the Trinity, and through that produced Jesus, the Son of God. So according to Islam, the Trinity consists of three gods: Father, Mary, and Jesus. Clearly the Qur’an is not a reliable source for what Christians believe.
Yes, we believe in the Trinity, but we are also monotheistic. The Bible teaches monotheism. The classic Bible passage is Deuteronomy 6:4, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” And Isaiah 45:5 is in the Christian Bible too, “I am the LORD, and there is no other, besides me there is no God…”
This is nothing new to most of us, I think. It’s pretty basic to Christianity. However, being monotheistic in principle is much different to being consistently monotheistic in practice. This is why the First Commandment has to tell us, “You shall have no other gods before me.” In principle, we all agree that there are no other gods. There is only the one true God. But, in practice, people often do have other gods. We also know them as idols. You and I have a tendency to have them too.
There are many, many things that human beings can turn into false gods. We make created things into ultimate things and we can even become enslaved to them. Reputation, money, sex, alcohol, food, appearance, sports, and the list goes on. This temptation doesn’t leave us when we’ve become Christians. Being a Christian means that we confess our struggle to be consistently monotheistic. It means we go to our Father and ask for and receive forgiveness through Christ. And it means we rely on the power of the Holy Spirit to stay in the fight to be consistently monotheistic. Monotheism is the Christian way, and it’s to be the way both in principle and in practice.
The last biblical truth we’ll learn about is God’s incomprehensibility. This is one of God’s attributes or characteristics. What it means is that we will never be able to fully comprehend God. We can understand what he has revealed about himself to us. But because God is God, because he is so infinitely greater than we are, we will never be able to entirely grasp him and his ways. If we would be able to do that, that would make us greater than God. And that’s impossible.
God teaches us his incomprehensibility in what we read from Isaiah 55. In verse 8, he said that his thoughts are not ours and his ways are not ours. Then in verse 9, he ups the ante and says that his ways are higher than ours, and his thoughts higher than ours. Higher than heaven is above the earth -- which is essentially saying, infinitely higher. There’s no comparison. They’re in totally different categories.
Why is God’s incomprehensibility important to understand? It has to do with humility and trust. Humility means we have to know our limits. There are certain things we’re just not going to understand when it comes to God. He tells us what we need to know, but he doesn’t always tell us what we want to know. Perhaps in the future he will tell us some of the things we want to know, but he hasn’t promised us that. Nowhere does the Bible say that in heaven we’ll have answers to all our questions. But the Bible does say that we will be perfectly content in heaven. Those questions will no longer be important to us. They won’t matter anymore, because we’ll be fixed in love and wonder at the beauty of God. We’ll be perfectly happy in communion with our Lord Jesus.
But for right now we have to hear what God’s Word tells us about being humble before him. Know that we can’t know everything when it comes to God. He is incomprehensible. And then what follows from that is trust. Because we’ve seen the cross, we know that God can be trusted to bring good from evil. From the cross, we know that our Father is loving, good, and wise. When we have the cross, we have what’s most important. So we don’t have to know everything about him, we don’t have to understand all his ways. We can calm ourselves and say, “I know what’s most important about him, I know the cross and the Saviour who hung there. Because of that, I can trust him. I will trust him.”
Of course, there’s so much more that could be said about God and who he is. If you look at article 1 of the Belgic Confession, there’s a list of God’s attributes. That list is a good summary, but it isn’t even exhaustive. There are many more things that could be added. That’s how wonderful God is. Let me encourage you to meditate regularly on what he’s like. Study his Word to find out what he’s like. When you read a Bible passage, ask yourself, “What is this passage teaching me about what God is like?” And as you do those sorts of things, you’ll find that you’ll be better prepared when someone asks you, “Who is God?” AMEN.
PRAYER
Our Triune God,
We worship you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We worship you for who are you and what you’ve done, especially in the gospel. We look to you as our one and only God. And we pray that what we believe about you in principle would become more consistently practiced in our lives too. Please help us with your Holy Spirit to put our idolatry to death. O God, we acknowledge as well that your ways are higher than ours, and your thoughts are higher than ours. We don’t always understand you and why you do what you do. Please help us with your Spirit to remain humble. Please help us to keep trusting your love, your wisdom, and your goodness. You are our Creator God, you are our Redeemer, and you are the one restoring us. Thank you for revealing yourself to us. Please give us your grace so we can be your instruments to reveal you to others too.
* As a matter of courtesy please advise Dr. Wes Bredenhof, if you plan to use this sermon in a worship service. Thank-you.
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