17 - The Triune God, Part 1

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18 - The Triune God, Part 2

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Well, welcome to another edition of the

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Striving for Eternity Academy. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity. You can get all the details about the ministry at strivingforeternity .org.

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I will be your teacher today or instructor. My name is Andrew Rappaport.

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I happen to actually be the president of Striving for Eternity. But that aside, we're going to be having other instructors and other classes as we, as you take more classes, you'll be introduced to more people.

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That aside though, we welcome you here, glad to have you with us. If you happen to already have a syllabus,

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I would suggest you pull it out now. The syllabus is a study of the major Western religions.

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That is our topic that we're going into in this school of world religions.

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We're doing an introduction to the major Western religions. That's what we've been going over.

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If you want to pick up a copy of the syllabus, if you don't have a syllabus and you want to pick up a copy, you can go to store .strivingforeternity

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.org, store .strivingforeternity .org, pick up a syllabus.

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They're $25 each, give or take, and you can get one.

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What's the advantage of the syllabus? Well, most of the stuff that we did in the first half of this class was based off my book, which you can also get there, by the way, just to throw the plug,

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What Do They Believe? which is a systematic theology of the major Western religions.

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That was looking at what they believe. Now what we're looking at is, okay, what do we believe?

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What is a Christian response to these? That's something you're not going to find in the book, What Do They Believe?

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So the syllabus would be helpful there. The syllabus that you can get there is going to go over the material we're looking at now.

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What we're trying to do here in this, this is going to be lesson number eight. We're going to look at the doctrine of God.

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Now we're going to break this up into two categories, okay, and so we'll probably deal mostly with the description of God this week and then the

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Triunity or Trinity next class. We'll see.

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We may get into some of the Trinity, but those are the two areas when we look at people who have issues with Christianity, when you look at these different religions, you look at other religions and you will find that they often have a problem when it comes to who

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God is. And then we look at the

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Trinity where there's a whole other area where we need to correct things. By the way, the Trinity is not a problem.

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I often hear people talk about the Trinity as if it's a problem. The doctrine of the Trinity is a solution.

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It's a solution. It's not a problem. The problem is we can't comprehend God completely. And because we can't comprehend

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God completely, we have a problem. The Trinity is the solution to that problem.

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The Trinity is a way of defining God so that we can better understand what

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He has revealed of Himself to us. Remember last lesson, if you go back and remember, last lesson we talked about that for Christians the ultimate authority is

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God's Word. God reveals Himself in two ways, natural, supernatural, general, using nature, or special,

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His revealed Word. The only way we can know from God is what He has revealed to us about Himself.

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And so even though we may not fully comprehend everything that there is to know about God, we can't fully comprehend

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Him. But just because we can't fully comprehend Him doesn't mean He hasn't revealed some things about Himself that we should know.

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And that's what we're looking at now. We're going to look at this view of God and what He has revealed about Himself to us so that we can be better equipped to answer these different world religions as there are disagreements.

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Now, one of the things that's been kind of popular recently is that people are saying that Jewish people,

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Muslims, and Christians all worship the same God. No.

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It's not like that. Even within what many people say is Christianity, they'll group

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Roman Catholics, Biblical Christians, Latter Day Saints, Jehovah Witnesses, every other group, and they'll say, see you're all

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Christian. No. There are some specific things that we have to recognize.

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If you have a different God, then you're not worshipping the same person, the same being.

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Okay? So, when we speak of God, the Jewish people do not see

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God as a trinity, nor do the Muslims. Christians do. Right there you see a difference of what describes

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Him. If I tried to explain, let me put it this way, if I tried to explain to you that I know your friend John, and I tell you your friend

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John is 6 '4", of darker complexion, and he's built like a linebacker, and you explain, no, no, no, my friend

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John is pale as can be, 5 '2", and a tiny little stick.

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It won't take you very long to realize we may have the name correct, but that's about it.

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Right? Two different people. Why? Because when you look at the being, the individual, you go, okay, something different about those two.

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They're not the same person. We talk about God as a being.

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If you have a different description of God, then you don't have the same

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God. Now it doesn't mean there's two gods. There's the one true God that actually does exist, and then there's false gods that different religions have created.

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That's just the way it is. So, when we look at that, okay, we need to say which

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God are we talking about. And you can't just say everyone worships the same God.

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And for that reason, we want to start by looking at the descriptions of who God is.

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Because that's going to help us understand the nature of God. Then we want to look specifically at the

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Trinity, because that comes under attack by Jehovah Witnesses and even Latter -day Saints mess with that.

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But you even see it within some, what we'd say Christian circles, by popular preachers like TJ Jakes, but he believes in a thing called modalism.

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As we look at that, that's an error, it's actually a heresy. Why? Because it's a different God.

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Real quick, since I brought it up, I should define it. So the biblical view of a Trinity is three persons, one

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God. Modalism is the idea that there's three modes of God. So he was

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God the Father in the Old Testament, he came as God the Son, and now we know him as God the Holy Spirit.

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Three different modes, but one God, one person, okay? We're going to see next class that that doesn't work because we see that these three separate individuals actually communicate to one another.

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So they can't be separate modes, they're separate people. We're going to talk about that and why that's important.

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So let's start. If you have your syllabus, grab it. We are on lesson number eight, so get a hold of that.

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And as we see here, there is one, that's your blank there, there is one living and true

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God. An infinite, all -knowing spirit, perfect in all his attributes, one in essence, eternally existing in three persons,

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Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each equally deserving worship and obedience.

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That is one very long sentence. But it's an important one.

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We're going to try to unpack this a little bit. But this is the reason you want to get the syllabus, by the way.

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And actually some of these lessons may be coming out hopefully this spring in a short little book that I'm going to do that's just going to be a

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Christian theology book, a starter on Christian theology. It'll be a very short one, so be looking for that.

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I don't know what the title of that's going to be yet, but that's in progress. So that aside. But this is why you want to get the syllabus, so you can have this here.

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So I'm going to read this again, then we're going to break this down. There is one living and true

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God, an infinite all -knowing spirit, perfect in all his attributes, one in essence, eternally existing in three persons,

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Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each equally deserving worship and obedience.

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Now that's a packed definition, because what I'm trying to do in that definition is kind of be real specific so that we get rid of all the error of those other false religions that we've talked about.

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So let's look at that. He is one. We know this in one of the most known passages to any

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Jewish person, and that's called the Shema, out of Deuteronomy 6,

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Shema Yisrael Adonai Adonai Adonai Echad, Hear O Israel, the

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Lord our God, the Lord is one. This is something that is recited very often, when

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I say very often, it's daily by Orthodox Jews, by not as Orthodox, those that just go to synagogue once a week.

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You're going to hear it every week in synagogue. If you ever go to a Jewish home and you see on the doorpost, you'll see on the doorpost a little metal with a scroll inside that's covered in there, it's called a mezuzah.

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This is the passage that's in there. That's how important this text is to the Jewish people. Deuteronomy 6, 4 -10 is what you're going to find in that scroll.

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It's what's recited weekly. But what do you have? He's saying, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,

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Echad. One God. We do not believe in multiple gods.

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We believe in one God. This is different than what

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Mormonism would teach. We're not saying that God the Father is just one of many gods.

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It removes all of the different views, Hinduism, Buddhism, that have many gods.

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Any religion with multiple gods, it eliminates them. So now, who's in the camp?

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Well, you'd have Christians, and I'm using that in a broad sense because you're going to include

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Roman Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses will believe there's one God, Islam believes there's one

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God, Judaism would believe there's one God. But we've just eliminated a whole lot of other religions that have a plethora of gods.

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So, one living and true God. Now He's living and true.

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He's alive. He's not a dead God. He's not a God who started everything and then poof, went out of existence or just walked away.

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He's also the true God. In other words, when we talk about God, He's the one that actually is.

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The issue is many people think they're worshiping the true God. They're not. They have a wrong view of God.

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We're talking about the one true God. He's infinite. He's outside of time.

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He's outside of matter. He's outside of space. He is infinite in all directions.

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He's ever -existing. And if you want to get into more detail, we have classes on our systematic theology classes.

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When we started that, we looked at the attributes of God. It's the first several lessons that we looked at. And when you look at the attributes of deity, we talked about His infiniteness.

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That He's infinite, outside of time, space, matter. He's all -knowing.

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Omniscient is what it's called. He knows everything, past, present, future. He's a spirit.

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We know this, actually, let's look at John 4.

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God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit.

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This eliminates those views like Latter -day Saints that believe that God was once a man.

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God is a spirit. He's perfect in all

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His attributes. So this eliminates a God that has to learn.

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So when you have within Christianity, you have those that believe that God doesn't know everything, that He's learning, it's called open theism.

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God is open to learning things. He doesn't know all things. This eliminates it. This is now showing even within Christendom, do you see how this definition is being very specific?

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He's perfect in all His attributes. He's one in essence, not one in person, but one in essence.

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In other words, God, in essence, is one. He's eternally existing.

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This just eliminated the Jehovah Witnesses' view of Jesus being created.

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Eternally existing in three persons, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, equally deserving worship and obedience.

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So when we look at this, and if you have the syllabus, you have all the different passages that you can look up that support all that I've given, but when you look at this, what we're doing is we're limiting this.

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Now when we have this definition of God, you've really limited it to much of Protestant Christianity.

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I say much of that. You have your Lutherans, your Baptists, your Presbyterians, Reformed Churches.

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Roman Catholics too would actually fit within that definition. They have an accurate definition where Roman Catholics, we would say, go astray is in what we looked at last week with biblical authority.

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They add to the text and they've taken the focus off of God and put it on the church.

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But when you look at what their view of God is, they have an accurate view of the right

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God. They're just worshiping Him in the wrong way. They also have some problems when they add

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Mary to having divine attributes. So there's things like that. But that is the definition.

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Now let's look at the description. Let's take a look at the attributes of God.

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Let's start... So God orders and deposes all things according to His own purposes and grace.

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So let's look at some passages for that. Psalm 145. Psalm 145 says,

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The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.

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The Lord is good to all, and His mercy is over all that He has made.

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We also have, this is 1 Corinthians 8 .16,

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1 Corinthians 8, sorry, 8 .6, 1 Corinthians 8 .6

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says, Yet for us there is one God, the

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Father, from whom all things, and for whom we exist, the one

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Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things, and through whom we exist.

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Now notice in this, don't take away just yet, notice in this, there is one God, He's described in two different, you have the

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Father and the one Lord. Now the Holy Spirit isn't mentioned here, but this is the thing that people get confused because we see

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God mentioned speaking often of just the Father. And they think that because God the

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Father is mentioned that it must only be speaking of the Father. All three members of Trinity can't be spoken of as God.

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Often you'll see God mentioned and it refers specifically to the

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Father, and you'll see it referenced in difference to the Son or the Spirit. Now in that passage that we just looked at, you can see that it's one

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God, the Father, and the one Lord. And that one

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Lord is specified as Jesus Christ. So they're both mentioned as the one

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God. That'd be a problem unless you have a Trinity, that's the problem, the

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Trinity is the solution. So we see here though that God orders all things. God's the one in control,

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He does things for His purposes. I know, I understand those professing atheists, they just don't like that.

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It's not fair that God makes the rules and not them. I'm sorry, but to me, many of the professing atheists just sound like little crybabies.

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They sound like kids that want the candy or the hand in the cookie jar, and it's just not fair that Mommy and Daddy get to make the rules.

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Grow up! That's what I feel like saying to them, it's like, you didn't create the universe,

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God did. He knows better than you. I was asked to review a video of an atheist trying to answer why

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Christianity, why God can't exist. And it's interesting because the whole thing he's arguing is because it doesn't make sense.

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If God created, basically He would have to do it this guy's way. He would basically have to create everyone as a puppet.

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That'd be the only way God could do it if God really existed. Because we're not puppets, God didn't exist.

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You know what, if God created us all like puppets, you know what the atheist would claim? It's not fair, God didn't give us a will, we can't choose.

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He just forces us. I mean, they're never going to be happy. Why? Because they're like little children, complaining to someone that created the universe and knows everything.

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And they think they will know a better way to organize things than God. I think

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I'll trust God, right? I think He knows better. So He orders all these things, but He is the creator of all things.

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We see this, you can look at Genesis 1. We're not going to have time to read all of Genesis 1. But read

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Genesis 1. He is the creator of all things. Let's just look at Ephesians 3, verse 9.

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Ephesians 3, 9. And to bring to light for everyone that is the plan of the mystery hidden for the ages who created what?

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All things. He created all things. We could look in Isaiah 45,

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I think it is, and we'll look at that actually later. He created all things. We could look at Colossians 1, 15, 16, 17.

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He created everything. Everything that was created was created by God. He created everything.

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And as the only absolute, all -powerful ruler of the universe, a term for all -powerful would be omnipotent.

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We've looked at the attributes of God. We've talked about Him being omnipotent, all -powerful. He could do everything in His nature.

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This is the problem that those professing atheists have. They think God, God can't exist.

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It's not fair for God to create a universe where, you know, basically they're saying everything doesn't work the way they think it should.

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There's evil in the world. If God's all -powerful, there shouldn't be evil in the world. Well, God has

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His plans and His purposes, but He can't do things outside His nature. He can't lie.

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He can't, you know, can God pick up a stone? Can God make a stone so big He can't move it? You know, can

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God make a square circle? I mean, you know, silly things like that are just not worth answering, actually.

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But as the only absolute and omnipotent ruler of the universe, He is sovereign in creation, in providence, and in redemption.

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Let's look at Psalm 103 .19. Psalm 103 .19, the

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Lord has established His throne in the heavens, and His kingdom rules over all.

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We also see this in Romans 11, in verse 36, for from Him and through Him and to Him are all things.

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To Him be the glory forever, amen. And I add an amen to that amen.

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That's the reality. He is in charge. I understand there are some who just don't like that.

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My simple answer to you, if you don't like that, you're not going to like this too bad.

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I mean, get over it. You're the creation, not the creator. And that's really what atheism tries to do, is remove the creator and say there is no creator so we are basically the closest thing to God that there is.

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Okay? You look at other religions, Mormonism, right? It is the belief that you can become

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God. Hinduism, Buddhism, it's the idea that you can become God, that God is within you.

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You look at New Age movement, the God within you. You see this in the prosperity gospel. I wouldn't really, they would say they're

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Christian, but the prosperity gospel is believing that God is within you. You are a little

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God. God, when you talk like this, you're falling into the very trap of Genesis 3, what caused the fall.

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Okay? And so when you do that, you've got a problem because you have a different God.

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God is not like us. We don't become God. When you have a system that's falling into that trap, it's going to be different than what the

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Bible teaches. We are the creation and that's the thing that professing atheists don't like.

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And atheism is a religion, it is. You know, get my book,

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What Do They Believe? In the introduction, I give a definition of religion and it fits.

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Why? Because part of that definition is trying to get an understanding of the origin, significance or end of the universe, along with a bunch of other things, that affect behavior.

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Isn't it that the professing atheists have these big banners in their whole ad campaign, good without God?

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They're trying to argue for morality, they're trying to argue for their behavior, okay?

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They're trying to argue it from their universe, their study of the universe, right? So I think it fits.

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That aside though, what they're trying to do is remove God because if you remove God, now they are not accountable to anybody.

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That's the real issue. And so here we have is, as we go on to look at a description,

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God has an all -inclusive plan that He designed for His own glory.

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That's your blank there, glory. He has an all -inclusive plan that He designed for His own glory.

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All things will come to pass. This is, we can see in Ephesians 1 .11.

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In Him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of Him who works, all things according to His counsel,

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His will. We actually just saw it previously when we looked at Romans 11, where all things work together for His glory, okay?

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You see here, it's His plan. He's working it out. He continually upholds, directs, and governs all of creation and events.

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We see this in one of those Old Testament books, 1 Chronicles 29 .11.

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Yours, O Lord, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is

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Yours. Yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and You are exalted as head above all.

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So, you see here, He's got this plan. He's working it out.

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Even though we have a will and we choose things, the things we choose is part of His plan.

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Without Him forcing it, that's the thing. He can force it. We talk about God's will. This isn't really signed in the notes, but just real quick.

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We talk about God's will. God can direct things in the way He wants because He's all -knowing,

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He's outside of time, so everything that happens to us in time, it's the same now to Him. He understands it all.

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He sees it all at the same period, but He doesn't learn things. We cannot comprehend omniscience.

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We can't comprehend a being that knows everything, what we would call past, present, future. He knows the real.

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He knows the possible. He knows the outcome of every decision you never made and how that affects everyone else.

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That's a knowledge we can't comprehend, okay? God knows everything.

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And knowing everything, He can take things and force things to happen, or He can redirect things.

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He can do stuff and bring things about so we're redirected, so we do things that we think is according to our will, but He redirects it so that our will is changed and we don't want to do this anymore, we want to do that.

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He does that with everyone that becomes a believer in Jesus Christ because suddenly He changes them from the inside.

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He dwells within them and suddenly the sins they used to want to do, they don't have a desire to do. That's a redirection.

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He can do things like that, or He can let us have our choices and we choose things that He will work with as part of His plan.

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Can we comprehend it? No. That's why the very first attribute of God that we did in our Systematic Theology class was the incomprehensibility of God, that we can't fully comprehend

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Him. But that doesn't mean that we can't comprehend that which He's revealed to us. That which

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He's revealed to us, that's what we're studying, that's what we're looking at. Now, in His sovereignty, and I understand some people have a real hard time with that because they think man should be sovereign.

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Notice, again, I'm kind of limiting here, right? Who God is in a proper view within what

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I would say Biblical Christianity. What does God reveal about Himself? It doesn't matter, someone wants to call

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Christian one thing and someone wants to say, well, this is a Christian, you know. Some people call it, it's called the

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No True Scotsman Fallacy, okay? In the idea of who's the true

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Christian? So when you say someone's not a Christian, well, how can you say they're not a true

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Christian? Well, I would base it on what the Bible says. That's last lesson on Biblical authority.

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God has a definition of what a Christian is. It's having a proper view of who God is.

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If you have a wrong view of God, you can't be a Christian, okay? If you don't believe

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Jesus is God, Scripture says you can't be a Christian, okay?

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So you have to have a right view of God. And here the thing is, what I'm saying is, it doesn't matter what men say is the right view.

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It matters what is the right view, okay? And so what we want to do is we want to look at who

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God is. And as we do this, we realize that there's some groups, even within what we would say

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Christianity, that have a wrong view of God. When you have these groups that make man God, in other words,

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God has to submit to man's prayers, man's authority, that men say things and God has to sit back and go, oh, oh, okay, he wants that, let me give it to him, oh, oh,

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I didn't see that coming. No. God knows when we pray. He wants us to pray anyway, and even though he knows how he's going to answer it, he wants us to pray anyway.

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He actually ordains both the means and the ends. He wants us to pray to bring about what he's going to do, but he's going to bring it about because he wants to bring it about, but he's going to bring it about through our prayer.

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Can I comprehend that? No. Can you comprehend that? No. Why? We're not God. Sorry, that's it.

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We're not God. Now, in his sovereignty, and I understand some people don't like that word, oh well, in his sovereignty, he is neither author nor approver of sin, nor does he abridge the accountability of moral, intelligent beings.

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Let's look at that. He's not the approver of sin. Let's go to the Old Testament first, Habakkuk 1.

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There we go. In Habakkuk 1, we see, this is Habakkuk 1 verse 13.

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We see it says, you who are purer of eyes than to see evil cannot look at wrong.

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Why do you idly look at traitors and remain silent when the wicked swallows up man more righteous than he?

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So one of the things is, God cannot look at wrong, but he's not the author of it.

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Now, there is the passage that says that God is the author of calamity, that he created good and calamity, or evil.

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And so people say he's the author of it because he created it. Well, he created everything, and he created an environment that allows for evil to have come in.

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And he could have sovereignly stopped it. He chose not to. Another passage is 8, this is a longer one.

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John 8, John 8, 38, John 8, 38 -47,

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John 8, 48 -37. I speak of what

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I have seen with my father, and you do what you have heard of your father.

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They answered him, Abraham is our father. Jesus said to them, if you were of Abraham's children, you would be doing the works that Abraham did.

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But you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth I have heard from God.

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This is not what Abraham did. You are doing the works of your father did.

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They said to him, we are not born of sexual immorality, we have one father, even

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God. Jesus said to them, if God were your father, you would love me, for I came from God, and I am here.

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I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what

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I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires.

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He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him.

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When he lies, he speaks of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

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But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me.

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Which one of you convicts me of sin? If I tell you the truth, why do you not believe me?

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Whoever is of God hears the word of God. The real reason you do not hear them is because you are not of God.

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Wow, that is a strong message, and people say we should be like Jesus, Jesus was loving.

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Wow, that is a strong message. Another passage, I do not have a slide for this,

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James chapter 1. James says that not only can

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God not be tempted by evil, he cannot tempt with evil.

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So this is part of his nature. He cannot tempt us with evil. So what we see here is that we cannot hold him accountable for evil.

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Thank you, someone just walked into the studio. They are trying to secretly, you see them?

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My wonderful bride just walked in to give me something to drink. I am guessing that she heard that my voice is a little raspy, sorry.

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Alright, well you should have gotten me something to drink. Then you would have to leave the control, besides you are not even me.

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Well, why don't you ship me something to drink? I am talking to the, for folks that don't know, the engineer is actually not in studio.

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So, they control from afar. Which is why things sometimes don't work as well as they should.

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So, what we have here is that he is, when we look at God, he works within the things we do.

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This is 1 Peter 1. 1 Peter 1 .17 If you call on him as father who judges impartially according to each one's deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile.

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So, what you have here is whose deeds, look at what it says, whose deeds, who was doing the deeds?

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They were. Okay? So, what you have is, you have a case where God is going to work within the fact that we are responsible for our own actions.

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Even though God has this plan. God has a plan, as I said, he's got this gracious plan that is chosen from eternity past.

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Where he has chosen those who he would have as his own, according to Ephesians 1 .4

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-6. He saves them from sin, who come to him through Jesus Christ.

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He adopts them as his own. All those that come to him, this is

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John 1 .2, Romans 8 .15, Galatians 4 .5, Hebrews 12 .5

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-9. You look at all this, yet, we have a responsibility. We are responsible.

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We sin, God is not, our sin is not held against God. We can't blame God for our sin.

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Our sin is our doing. Our salvation is God's doing. Even though we make choices, the reality is there is a responsibility and God can work within that.

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There's a lot of confusion in there. There's a lot of things people don't understand. People that end up making stuff up because they're trying to rationalize and reason something that man can't comprehend.

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What we're talking about is what God has revealed to us and let's stop there. The things we can't comprehend, let's just admit it.

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We're human. Let's look at letter B. This is part 2 of the description. I can get through this part quickly.

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God is not a man. It's very simple. God is not a man. The essence of God is totally and completely spirit.

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That's your blank there. The essence of God is totally and completely spirit.

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This is the invisible source of personality. John 1 .18,

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Romans 1 .20, Colossians 1 .15, 1 Timothy 1 .17, 1

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Timothy 6 .15 -16. I don't have time to look those up. You can look those up. But what you have there is that you see that God is a spirit.

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God does not fit within physical nature, though He can work within it.

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God is not physical or material. Now, we have this issue then, what about Jesus Christ?

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He's God. He became a man. He is a man today.

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He never stopped being a man. He's fully God, fully man. But His divine nature is fully

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God as spirit, in essence spirit. Because He took on a human body doesn't mean

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He's only a human body. So we have to understand that.

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But when you have like in Mormonism that God was once a man, there's problems there.

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We're going to look at that a little bit more specific. But thus, God is not dependent.

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This is when we talk about that He's infinite. He's outside of matter. He's not limited, restricted, or subject to matter or space in any way.

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He can work within it. We can see God show up and talk to Abraham. And He can eat with him.

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He can come within nature but He's not limited to the material universe, to matter or physical.

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He's not restricted by it. In other words, there's things you and I can and cannot do because we are restricted by our physical bodies and by the material universe, material world.

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He's not. He's not subject to it. As applied to God, God is infinite in matter.

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Statements in Scripture that refer to God, and this is where the confusion comes in, especially within Latter Day Saints.

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Because there's Scriptures that refer to God in physical forms. These are called anthropomorphic expressions.

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Anthropomorphic. Anthro meaning man. Morphic meaning form.

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Where God comes in the form of a man or is spoken as having the form of a man.

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They are figures of speech. So a theophany is when God comes. God Himself, Theo, is

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God. Ophany is this idea of appearing. So it's God appearing as a man.

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And in that, He's spoken of having qualities of a man. These are figures of speech which assist men in better understanding

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God and His or her acts. They do not ascribe bodily parts. When it says that God sees, it doesn't mean

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God has eyes like you and I to see. But how can you explain sight?

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How can you explain the things that we take for granted in seeing things, in observation?

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We see things. And try explaining sight to a blind person.

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A person who is born blind. You can't explain something. They've seen nothing but darkness.

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They can feel things. But they just cannot comprehend what you're seeing.

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That's why when you see someone that can see for the first time. There was someone, I got to see a YouTube video of a person born blind.

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That they had a surgery where they could see for the first time. And it was overwhelming to them. They took it in.

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They were in awe of what they saw. Why? Because they couldn't see it before. No one could explain sight to them.

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So God's way of thinking, what God can see, He can't explain to us in any other way than using things that we can understand.

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How do you explain things, colors, to a blind person? You're going to do it through texture.

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Because they can't see things. So you're going to do it through things they can feel. That's what you end up doing.

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The reality is that you have to take it from what they understand. And when

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God is spoken of as having human likeness, body likeness, it's because God is trying to reveal

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Himself in a way that we can comprehend. Now, the problem when you say that God has these attributes, because He's spoken of as having sight, or eyes,

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He must have eyes. Well, God's also referred to in the Psalms as having wings and feathers like a chicken.

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To describe the behavior of a mother hen. So what do we have?

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We have these things that Scripture describes. As figures of speech, to better ascribe to us, better help us understand things we can't comprehend.

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When Scripture states that God appears to man in times past as a physical being, these statements, as I said, are called theophanies.

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And theophanies were divine manifestations. That's your blank there. Theophanies were divine manifestations, adjustments for man, not glimpses of God.

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It's not someone that had a glimpse of God. It's a manifestation, an adjustment for man.

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So He's manifesting Himself in a way that man can see. It's not a glimpse of God, because if we saw

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God, we'd be dead. Even when you have

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Moses, and he wants to see God, and God says, you'd be dead.

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So what happens? Hide in the cleft of a rock. Hide your face, and I'll let my glory just pass by.

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And just as his glory passing by, Moses' face, when he came down from the mountain, was so radiant that people made him put a veil over his face, because they couldn't look at Moses until that radiance faded away.

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When you have Isaiah in Isaiah 6, he doesn't see God. He sees His manifestation of God.

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And what happens? He sees His own wickedness, and the wickedness of His people. God, get away!

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When Peter is in the boat, and recognizes Jesus, and realizes He is God, what does he want?

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Get away from me, Lord! Because I'm so sinful. If we had a full grasp of God, if we had a full view of God, not seeing a manifestation of Him, an adjustment for us to be able to see

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Him, but seeing a glimpse of God, it would kill us. We would not be able to stand our sin.

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It would actually kill us. So, the reality is that when you have these anthropomorphisms, there are ways of speaking to help us understand

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God when God reveals Himself to us. And when we see these theophanies, it's not

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God coming where He's actually a man. It's God manifesting

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Himself in a way where He's adjusting Himself for us. But that's not all that God is.

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That's just this manifestation of Him. Now, next class, what we're going to look at is, we're going to look at the

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Trinity. We're going to look at the triune nature of God. That's going to be next lesson.

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I encourage you to get a syllabus. Go to the store, store .strivingforetourney .org.

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Buy a syllabus. You can get it there. It is going to be helpful. You're going to go through all that stuff. If you do want to study the other world religions, you want to get that in book form, you can go to the store and pick up my book,

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What Do They Believe? You can also email us at academy at strivingforetourney.

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If you have any questions about this or any other lessons, please go to academy at strivingforetourney .org.

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You can also, another way, you can go to the website and donate monthly. We greatly appreciate that.

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Go to strivingforeternity .org. Donate monthly. Another way you can donate is go to smile .amazon

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.com and you can look up Striving for Eternity. They give us a percent. We've been getting those checks in.

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I'm very grateful for those. When people are just spending on Amazon, Amazon is sending us half a percent.

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Really appreciate that. I want to also encourage you with two last things. One, please consider hosting your church, your homeschool group, whoever.

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I'm going to be speaking in the fall to a men's conference on Bible Interpretation Made Easy.

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So please consider hosting a Bible Interpretation Made Easy seminar. The Ohio Fire is coming up April 8th and 9th.

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Phil Johnson, Dr. White, that's Dr. Thomas White. And if you just were let down, you went,

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Oh, not James White? That's only because you haven't heard Thomas White. He's the president of Cedarville University and he really handles

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God's Word well. So I'm looking forward to this. Two great men that handle God's Word.

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We're going to be talking this year. The theme for this year is going to be the Word of God.

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So all the messages will be focused around that. Phil Johnson, Thomas White, myself will be speaking.

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That's going to be coming up in Ohio, Columbus, Ohio area. You can go to ohiofire .org

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to get all the details on that. And until next class, I want to remind you to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.

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Striving for eternity. Striving for eternity.