1 - Attributes of God, Lesson 1, Part 1

As we start the new Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Systematic Theology, if you are an enrolled student of the academy, just as a footnote early on, you should have gotten an email from the academy to have your syllabus.

That's one of the benefits to being a student. You'll have a syllabus that comes with being a student. It was sent to you Lesson 1. Only Lesson 1 was sent because the rest of it will be printed, Lord willing, this week and you will have that in the mail and it will be ready for you for next class.

So be looking for that in the mail this week, but if you do have your syllabus with you for those who are students, I encourage you to open up and we will begin right away in Lesson 1. And looking very forward, what we hope to do in these classes, and in case you want to know just how much material is going to be covered, here's my notebook.

This much material is what we're going to cover. Just a little bit of information. There'll be four books that we're going to cover over probably the next year. It will probably take us that long to get through all of this.

There's about 40, say 48, 49 lessons at least, and I'm not exactly known for getting through an entire lesson in one time. That doesn't have to do with the fact that I'm a preacher and I like to speak.

It has to do with the fact that I want to make sure you get all of the material that I could possibly give to you. So, if some of you are wondering, or if you watch this later, you should see a much better picture than in any of the previous shows.

We are now recording in high definition. You'll see, hopefully in a couple of weeks' time, a new intro for the show. So a lot of things going on. If you were part of our School of Biblical Harmoneutics, you'll see that this will be much updated from that, although we're going to be redoing those shows.

If you haven't gone through the lessons on the Biblical Harmoneutics, I encourage you to go to the YouTube channel and watch those. The reason I would do that is because those are going to help you tremendously in what we're going to do now, because what we're really doing is building off of that.

We spent about 18 -19 weeks learning how to properly interpret the Word of God so that we can understand the right way to take a passage of Scripture and understand its meaning, its authorial intent, what's the right interpretation.

Now that we've done with that, now what we're going to do is go through our Bibles and look at all the different categories that we have for different theological issues, and we're going to pull them together and we're going to create what's called a systematic theology.

That is where we systematize the study of God. And you say, whoa dude, study of God theology, that's like those Ivy League brainiacs in the universities and the seminaries. They can handle that. I'm just some dweeb, I don't understand all that big heavy stuff.

If you're a Christian, you should be a theologian. If you're a Christian, you should be studying God. That's what theology is. Theo, God, ology, study of. It's the study of God. When we become a Christian, we start a lifelong pursuit on the study of who God is, what does He desire.

Do you ever wonder, what is God's will? I have a certain situation in my life, what's God's will? The better you know God and His word, the better you'll be able to answer that. This is what we're going to look into.

Have you ever had people debating over theological things and you just didn't want to weigh in because you weren't sure which was really right, or you felt like you have to go and ask your pastor when you hear something new, someone mentions something and you just don't know what it is?

We're going to help you through these lessons to learn how to take the word of God, systematize it and understand what God's word says about Himself and a whole lot of other topics. What's the right way to run a church?

Are tongues for today or not? Should we be in a church even? Is Jesus Christ God? Is the Holy Spirit God? What exactly is the Trinity? What role does Jesus play in my life today? What does it mean to say that I'm regenerated?

What came first? Was I regenerated and then believed or did I believe and then was regenerated? These are just but a few of the many issues that we're going to cover over the next several weeks. So if you're a student, I encourage you to take your lesson one study that you were emailed out and that way you'll see that this is going to be different than the hermeneutics study we did because now I got news for you.

We're upping the ante. It's time for you to take notes. We're going to have fill in the blanks. If you have your syllabus, you're going to see that you have some blanks so no more chatting in the chat room.

I know some of you guys go off in the chat room and you're going crazy. You think I don't see what you're posting but actually I get to see it later. So I do see all those snide comments about the shirts I wear and whether I look like a monk or some other craziness, whether size being out of control in the chat room.

But the thing is that you're going to have to take notes especially if you're a student because you're going to have some fill in the blanks and those things are there to help you remember some of the more important issues that we're going to be bringing up.

And so what we want to do is we're going to go through, we're going to be going through these classes. It is going to be a systematic theology that we're going to look at book one. And book one is, we're calling it God's throne room.

So let's look. What are we going to cover in book one? Well we're going to start with looking at the doctrine of God. We're going to see in this lesson, the next three lessons actually, we're going to describe the attributes of God.

Then we're going to look at the names of God and what exactly is the Trinity or Triunity. After that we're going to look at the doctrine of Jesus Christ, His deity, His humanity and His ministry. After that we'll take a look at the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

The doctrine of the Holy Spirit and in there we will see the person of the Holy Spirit because that often comes under attack. We're going to look at the ministry of the Holy Spirit and then we're going to deal with understanding biblical tongues because there's confusion that many have on that subject.

After that we're going to take a look, being that we're in God's throne room, we're going to look at angels and we're going to see the differences between holy and evil or holy and unholy angels. And then we're going to take a special lesson just to look at the finite being, not the omnipresent being, but the finite being of Satan.

Now today we're going to start with section one and we are going to look at the doctrine of God. And in developing an understanding of who God is, there is only one source to which we may turn in order to understand the Word of God and that is the Word of God.

So we're going to turn to the scriptures. We're going to first take a look at Isaiah chapter six. Isaiah chapter six. And this is what, because there's a number of practical things that we can learn from the study of the doctrine of God and we want to study those out.

So when we look at Isaiah six, you can read along what's on the page here as I read, but let's read this. It says, in the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up, and the train of his robe filled the temple.

Above him stood the seraphim, each had six wings. With two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.

The whole earth is full of his glory. And the foundation of the thresholds shook at his voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said, Woe is me, for I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.

For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. Then the seraphim flew to me, having his hand in a burning coal, and he took with the tongs of the altar, and he touched my mouth and said, Behold, this has touched your lips, your guilt is taken away, your sin is atoned for.

And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send and who will go for us? And then I said, Here I am, send me. And he said, Well, we'll stop there. And so what we have here is we see three different things that we can learn from Isaiah.

We can learn that first, Isaiah changed, that the scripture changed, or actually the knowledge of God changed his view of self. Did you see in that passage that Isaiah, when he came face to face with God, suddenly felt his, he recognized his sin.

He saw his guilt before a holy God. Now there's a whole lot more that I'd like to dig into with this, because this passage, and I encourage you to not just stop, I stopped at verse 8, but keep reading to see what he was commissioned to.

We actually have, if you want, I believe there is a message on the website for Striving for Eternity that covers this passage, the paper may be up there too, and the written messages, that deals with the full thing of what is successful missions or successful ministry.

And so you'll see that it's really, we kind of preach just the last part of who shall I send, who will go for us. But we first see that when he sees God, he says, I am undone, I'm a sinner. Which is the second thing, it changed his view of his sin.

You know, we tend to not look at our sin too much. We tend to have a kind of a light view of our sin, we compare ourselves to other people who are worse than us, or we will tend to look at our sin, and because we're used to it, where we don't challenge ourselves with seeing how sinful we really are.

But when we study the scriptures and understand who God is, we have a greater appreciation and a greater understanding of our sinfulness. Now the third thing that changed was Isaiah's view of his service.

And this is what we see, we want to get a better understanding of who God is to change our life in our self, in our sin, and in our service. And we saw that with Isaiah, he was ready to go and serve the Lord.

And to know God better will better equip you to follow his commandments. He commands us in 1 Peter 1 .16 to be holy as he is holy. What does that mean? Well, this is why we better understand who God is.

To better understand God is to understand what the Bible says about God, enable for us to refute various false doctrines. Now if you're on Facebook, you see that all the time. I don't think there's a week that goes by that somebody doesn't approach me on Facebook to ask me what I know about something.

There's a new one that I had never heard of, it seems pretty cultic almost, that just started up a church in Pennsylvania, but they've kind of spread out. And so someone's contacted me, what about them?

Someone recently that asked me about the Church of Christ, what do they teach? Well, they teach something called baptismal regeneration. What does that mean? Well, the better you understand theology, the better you understand these things and whether they're right or wrong.

Now, I'm going to say this as we go through these classes, there's going to be things I'm going to say, this is what I think Scripture teaches. And I want you to understand that this is based on my study of the Scriptures.

I'm not infallible. That shouldn't surprise any of you who know me well. I see you, yeah, stop laughing over there, some student snickering. I see you, I hear their laugh all the way from over here. But the reality is that none of us are infallible.

And it's going to be the greatest day when we sit before Christ and He corrects all of our theology. It's like the only time I can't wait to be corrected because I know that that correction is going to come from a source that is infallible.

And so there's going to be some things and I will encourage you, contact us. You disagree with me, that's fine. We don't mind. Contact us, email us at academy at strivingforeternity .org. Email us and let us know where you disagree with us.

It's fine to disagree. Have no problem with that. Just make sure you deal with Scripture. Remember the lessons we learned on biblical hermeneutics. Don't give me your experience and say that I'm wrong based on your experience.

Because I'll give you mine and say you're wrong based on mine and you won't like that very much. Because the reality, we need to base it on the Word of God. Are we going to be 100 correct? Well, I am.

I don't know about the rest of you. No, you already know I'm teasing. No, but we are going to want to be studied, to show ourselves diligent, okay? So there's going to be things that many of you will disagree.

I mean, Cy will get real active on, you know, wanting to baptize those babies and we're going to say that that's wrong. We'll discuss it. What does it, why do people do that? Why do people believe in a believer's baptism versus infant baptism?

What are those differences? These are things that the better we understand, the better we can argue against false teachings. Now, is baby baptism a false teaching? Well, no, I'm teasing. But there are different views on that.

We want to make sure that we are at least approaching it with a consistent hermeneutic, a consistent interpretation of the Scriptures, okay? So, number three there in your notes, to know God in a greater way will develop a reverence in the life of a believer.

Now, there are some people, someone on Facebook was just asking who's read a book, you know, and they gave the title. And my response was that book is very fluff. It's very light in theology. It's very light in its teaching.

And, you know, that's very popular nowadays. There's just tons of Christians, or at least professing Christians, that want light, fluffy stuff. And I understand that. However, you know, taking that light, fluffy stuff doesn't get you a higher reverence for God like the deep theology will.

The way I'd like to illustrate it is if you've ever been in a pool and you've taken a ball and you kind of stick it down maybe and just barely underwater and you let go and you watch it pop up. It only comes up a couple of inches.

It doesn't fly out of the water. And, you know, you kind of notice that the deeper you go, the higher it flies. And so you get curious and you push it down as far as you can, or maybe you're like my sister and I, where one of us gets to the bottom, that way the other one can watch it fly out of the air.

Well, the same is true with our theology. The deeper you go in your theology, the higher the worship. Do you want to have high worship? Dig deep into the Word of God and the study of who God is. You want to have that feeling of just being in such close relationship with God that you feel His presence with you all the time?

Then dig deep into the study of the Word of God. You want to grow in a greater appreciation for your relationship with Jesus Christ? Start studying theology. This is where we gain a greater reverence for who God is.

Another one, and this leads right into it, I almost kind of gave it away, but to understand all that God has revealed about who He is will enable us to better praise Him. It helps us to better praise Him.

And so we're going to begin today, tonight in this lesson, looking at the attributes related to God's deity. Now let me start by saying what is an attribute? An attribute, attributes are distinguishing characteristics or qualities that describe the nature or being or essence of someone or something.

Now in relation to God, attributes are those things which are inseparable to who God is. It's what constitutes God. So we're compelled to attribute these characteristics to God. And if you remove these things, you don't have God.

You remove some of these attributes, He is no longer God. And when we specifically talk of the attributes of deity, as we're going to see, these are attributes only of God and He must contain all of them.

Now these attributes were not caused or affected or some sort of work that God is. It's not something that becomes God. That becomes important because certain religions, Mormonism, Latter-day Saints, would say that as we are men, God once was, and as God is, we can be.

In other words, the belief is that God was once a man like you and I and we can become God. We can eventually have the attributes God. That would say that there was a time where God didn't have these attributes.

God always had these attributes. God never was without these attributes. These are things that define God. They cannot grow and they cannot change. The attributes are discussed as those things that are revealed to us, but they are not the sum total of who God is.

God is greater, we're going to see, than we can understand it. But because God is also a triunity or trinity, all three persons of the trinity have these attributes applied to them. When we look at the attributes related to the deity, these are attributes or qualities which cannot be separated from the idea of who God is.

This is true for each one of the persons of God. To remove any one of these is to remove God. He's no longer God. If you say God is not one of these attributes, He is not God. If you want to say that you have these attributes, then you're claiming to be God.

This becomes important when we look at who Satan is because we're going to see that people talk about Satan and they attribute to him an attribute that is only an attribute of deity. And so, we are going to see that these attributes or qualities cannot be separated from the idea of who God is.

They cannot grow and they cannot change. They are revealed to us, but they're not the sum total of God. And attributes may be ascribed to any person of the Godhead. Now, attributes related to God's deity are attributes which God alone, and that's the blank that you have there in lesson one under section one, God alone possesses, which are true only of God.

So, let's begin and let's take a look at these several attributes that we have. The first attribute that's true of God is His incomprehensibility. Incomprehensibility, let me define that for you. Incomprehensibility is defined as impossible to comprehend.

Though man can know God, God cannot be fully known. And man needs not know God completely to know Him certainly. So, your blanks there are that it is impossible to comprehend. That's what it means. God cannot be fully comprehended.

Now, the fact that God cannot be fully comprehended does not mean we can't know anything about God. It means that we can't know Him completely. But we can know Him certainly. Those things that He has revealed to us, we can know with certain.

And that's what we're going to look at. We're going to look at those things that He has revealed to us certainly. But we will never know Him completely. Let's look at some scripture on that. Psalm 145 verse 3 says, Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised.

And His greatness is unsearchable. He is unsearchable. Now, this is important to understand. You will see. If you are talking to people, you are going to see how this attribute of God comes into play.

I have this all the time, especially with Muslims. Because they will get to a point where they will say, Well, I cannot understand the Trinity. It doesn't make sense. How could God have died? How could Jesus be God and the Father be God at the same time?

How could Jesus be on the cross and dead if He's God? That doesn't make sense to me. My best response is, Yeah, I can't comprehend it either. I can't. I can't understand those things. I don't understand the dual nature of Jesus Christ, how He's 100 man, 100 God.

I don't understand the trinity of God. Three persons, Father, Son, and Spirit, all in one Godhead. It doesn't make sense to me. I cannot comprehend it. But the thing I'll say to a Muslim is, Is God incomprehensible?

In other words, is God greater than our ability to understand? The answer is yes. God is greater than our ability to comprehend Him. And we can only comprehend what He has revealed to us. And therefore, when we look at this, we should sit there and realize very quickly that if someone says, Well, I can't comprehend the Trinity.

Well, I have news for you. You're supporting Scripture then. That shouldn't be difficult. If I can completely comprehend God, then I have a man-made God. I have a God that was created in the mind of a man because a finite being like me has the ability to comprehend Him.

That's how you know you have a man-made religion. You have a man-made religion when you can fully comprehend who God is. You know, Mormons struggle with that. They try to answer, Where did God come from?

You know, people ask that all the time. Okay, you don't believe in eternal things, or sorry, in eternal energy. Or, you know, like there had to have been a beginning to the universe because it had to be created.

Well, who created God? Mormonism tries to answer that. They say He was born on a planet called Kolob and He had physical parents. That answers the question? That doesn't answer it. That presents a whole new problem.

Where did God's parents come from? I mean, here would be a simple way of asking it. Always good to ask questions. I did this with one lady who used to work for me when I was a supervisor many years ago.

And I had asked her, Let me ask you a question. If God, because she was a Latter-day Saint, I said, If God created, did God create all things? And she said, Yes. I said, Did Jesus Christ create everything?

Yes. I said, Was God the Father on a planet Kolob, born there? She said, Yes. Did He have physical parents? Oh, yes. And what about Jesus Christ? Was He born on Kolob? She said, Oh, yes. He had physical parents?

God the Father and a physical mother? Yes. I said, Okay, this is the question now that I have trouble with. How did God the Father create the planet Kolob and His parents before He was born? And furthermore, how did Jesus Christ create the planet Kolob and His grandparents before He was born?

I'm just not understanding this. And she got so frustrated she got up and left work early saying she was sick and they never wanted to have a conversation with me again. Why? That doesn't answer the question.

What they're doing is they're trying to comprehend someone we can't comprehend. But let's not fear that just because we cannot comprehend everything about God that somehow we can't know God at all. There's some that go to that extreme like, Well, you can't know God.

He's completely transcendent from us. He's far beyond us. You can't comprehend Him. God is otherly, but He transcends time and space. And He has written to us so that we can know the things that He has revealed to us.

Okay, so God is incomprehensible. That's just the first one. So there's a chance of me getting through this lesson. Yeah, right. But let me say this. Let me give you one passage of Scripture. And as being those who are students of the Striving for Eternity Academy, you know that you get to have a one-hour question and answer after the class.

And you're going to hear many times I'm going to bring this passage up. But it is Deuteronomy 29 .29. And Deuteronomy 29 .29 says basically that the secret things belong unto the Lord, but that which He has commanded to you, teach, obey, and teach to your children.

That's basically a paraphrase of it. But there are things we cannot comprehend of God. But those things He has revealed, those things are the things we study. And those are the things we obey and teach to others.

I do not have to obey the things that God has not revealed because I don't know it. And there's people who sit there and just say, well, you know, God would be this way. If God existed, God would be like this.

Really? Why would God have to be like the way you describe and not the way He describes of Himself? Or there's different religions that'll say, well, God is this way. How do you know that's true? You know, just because, as a Buddhist or a Hinduist would say, well, everything's an illusion.

And everything, you can't know anything. And to say, you know God, that would be like insane. And yet, how do they know that's true? You know, God has revealed Himself to us, all right? But we have to also understand that we can't know everything about Him.

God is greater than us. If we could understand everything about God, we would be God. And I got news for you. You would not make a good God. Neither would I, all right? I would probably make a far worse God than you, but that's all right.

That's how we know that Mormonism can't be right, right? Any human that becomes God, yeah, okay. Let's move on to the next one. Letter B in your book there. Immutability. What does immutability mean? Well, let's take a look at that.

Immutability is defined as that God's nature is incapable of change. It is incapable of change. So let's look at a verse of Scripture here. And we're going to look at Hebrews chapter 13, verse 8. Jesus Christ, and remember that these attributes apply to all of the members of the Trinity, but Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

And that's what we have. We can look at James 1 .17. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father of light, with whom there is no variation or shadow of change. And this is good to know.

This is important to know because this reveals to us that God's nature or essence is made up of attributes that don't change. That's good, isn't it? I mean, isn't it good to know that His faithfulness won't change?

He's not going to be faithful today and not tomorrow. He promises you eternal life, but hey, that was just to Paul. Today it's all different, right? That He may be loving today, but tomorrow, forget that.

He doesn't love. He may be completely all-knowing and all-powerful and all-good and all-long-suffering, but tomorrow it all changes. No, this is very important to understand that there is no variation with God.

I like how James says it, that there's no variation or shadow of changing. Has the idea that there's not even a hint of it. That even as He passes, but no shadow of changing. This does not mean that God's attributes and actions will not change, okay?

Or attitudes, I'm sorry. His attributes never change, but His attitudes and His actions change. We see that throughout time. God dealt differently with Adam and Eve than He did with Abraham. He dealt with Abraham different than He did with Moses.

He dealt different with Moses than David. David different than the New Testament believers. Each one of these, He dealt with a different dispensation or covenant. He had different ways of dealing with His people.

He had different rules that He set out. Different expectations and different things that He did. His attitudes and His actions did change over time, but His character never changed. That's an important thing to note the difference.

And due to His inimmutability, He cannot change His mind. Thus, any promises that were made will be kept. The things that God promises will not change. These are things He's not going to change about Himself.

And as each of these attributes that we look into of God are discussed, it is important to note that they cannot change in any way related to His attributes. So, we saw that He's incomprehensible, beyond our ability to understand.

We see that He is immutable, which means without change. Let's look at letter C. He is infinite. He is infinite. I don't know if we're going to finish this today, but we're going to see how far we go.

Let's define this. God is infinite, meaning that God has no limits or bounds outside of His nature. Now, if you say He has no limits, and those are your blanks there. God has no limits or bounds. No limits or bounds outside of His nature.

God is infinite in His existence, in time, in space, in knowledge, in power, and in presence. And if you have your syllabus notes, you have those six things. And we're going to dive into each one of those.

But God is infinite in His existence, in time, in space, in knowledge, in power, and in presence. If I was a good preacher, I'd probably find a P for each one of those so I can literate them. But, hey, I guess I'm just a bad preacher.

Hey, preacher starts with a P. Hey! No kidding. All right. There's certain things about God that when we look at He is infinite, all right, and that means that when I say that within His nature, some people will say, well, if God has no limits and God's not limited by anything and has no boundaries, can God tell a lie?

Well, Titus makes it clear that God cannot lie. Can God cause us to sin? God cannot cause us to sin. Why? It is outside of His nature. God's nature is such that He cannot lie. James says God cannot tempt us with evil.

Therefore, when we look at these things, God is infinite. He is infinite in that He is without boundaries and limitations. Let's look at a scripture verse that shows that. 1 Kings, and there's many other verses that we could turn to.

And if you have a syllabus, you have a list of other verses and other passages there to look up. And I encourage you to look them all up. But 1 Kings 8, verse 27. But will God indeed dwell on earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this house that I have built.

And so what you have here as you see, this is a case where Solomon has built the temple and he's talking. And he's saying here, okay, God is beyond limitation. God is infinite in a positive assertion of His boundlessness.

God is infinite in comprehension to men. Men are finite. God is immeasurably greater than we can comprehend. He's not subject to limitations or some external determinatism. Okay, there's not some external force upon God in any way.

Now this becomes important. This is what we mean when we say God is free. He's free. From any boundaries or limitations. But you say, well, why is that important? Well, very later on, we're going to talk about things like free will.

Is there such a thing? Well, free would mean that we have no limitations or boundaries. Does our will have limitations and boundaries? Think about that. We're going to get into it in much more detail.

We don't want to leave you hanging though. Just ask yourself whether our will is influenced and enslaved to our sin nature. If the answer is yes, then we really don't have a free will. We have a will.

So we can act. We can do things. We can carry out actions. But what is it that we carry out? We don't have a free will until we get saved. Because that's when the Holy Spirit indwells us and frees us from that bondage.

God is the only essence that existed prior to what we would call creation. But yet, even though He existed before the space, time, matter, contortium, even though He existed outside of that, God still comes into space and time and matter.

So God, what we see is that it's important to remember that man is subject and dependent upon space and time and matter, but God is not. But God can reach into those things. He can bound Himself even temporally.

Jesus Christ, God in flesh, He bound Himself as a man. And that's what we have. So we're going to pick up here next week on letter D, but we're going to look here. And this one could really be number one because it's really a subtitle under the other.

But we are going to pick up here. So what have we seen so far? We saw that God is incomprehensible. He is immutable. And He is infinite. And they all start with the letter I. So maybe we're stopping there because we alliterated.

Yeah, that'd be insane. Hey, that starts with I. No, but we're going to, we want to stop there and pick up. We want to give time for, as we do with each class, with some different things and ending. But if you have questions, if you want to contact us, even if you're not an enrolled student, these lessons go out free.

They're free of charge so that they can go around the world. And we do know they are being watched around the world. I know they're being watched in the UK. I know they're being watched in China. Don't let them know that because it's kind of illegal.

They just haven't, we haven't, you know, gotten on their radars. But the UK, in Ireland, in Canada, in India, in China, these are some of the places I know that this show is being watched free because they have the internet.

But you know what? This stuff is expensive to do. And so those students that are enrolled students, those people who have gone and gotten the yearly membership, and we're going to, we're probably going to change some things up in the future with that.

But for right now, if you enroll, you get the School of Biblical Harmonetics and the School of Systematic Theology book one, at least. And so that helps us to keep these things on. But if you have questions, even though you can't get on the Q &A that we're going to have after the show at the top of the hour, you can still email us.