None Greater (part 4)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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Think about this as a description of magnitude. It makes us think that if we just press harder, if we push through that next plateau, if we do a little bit more, if we try a little bit more, we can get to how much more.

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But the right thing to do is recognize that that is not a measure of magnitude. It is essentially a commentary on God's super eminence.

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That make sense? Any questions before we get going? Dave? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Or that God condescends past the asymptote for us, right?

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But that is, as we studied in the last few weeks, that is the filter or the method by which he reveals his truth to us.

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Bob? Sure. Yeah, sorry about that.

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Oh, it's technology, is what I know. So if you think of, in math terms, an asymptote is a line that can't be crossed.

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So if you have a parabola, do you know what a parabola is? You think? Do you think? You have a curve that is extending in the infinite, in some direction, and the slope of the curve is always getting closer to completely vertical or completely horizontal.

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But it gets infinitely close to it and can never cross it. So if I'm walking to that wall, and I walk halfway, and then

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I walk halfway, and then I walk halfway, and then I walk halfway, I will never actually touch the wall because I can get infinitely close to it, but I can't actually get there.

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That's what an asymptote is. Does that help? Sorry. See me after class.

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OK, so that's the review of supereminence from last week.

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So conveniently, this segues well into chapter three, which is what we're going to talk about for the rest of the morning.

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19th century gave us a lot of crazy ideas. The Enlightenment was over.

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The scientific age was over. We're in this kind of post -Enlightenment idealism, utilitarianism, pragmatism,

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Marxism, existentialism kind of time. And man's ideas of God were changing.

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God was not changing, right? Because we already discussed that God is immutable. Man's ideas of God were changing, right?

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This Enlightenment culture had begun to fashion God as not a

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God who has created things in his own image, but the other way around, right? It had begun to fashion

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God into his image. God had become, in the minds of the culture, like the

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Greek gods of old, larger -than -life caricatures of themselves. Barrett says, the creature is not made in the image of the creator, but God the creator in the image of the creature.

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Then he quotes a few people. I texted this to Corey yesterday. Barrett quotes a lot of people whose theology

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I would not recommend you follow in total. We talked about how

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Aquinas and the A -team, the

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A -team. We talked about how the A -team is all Roman Catholics. Well, guess what? I've got here a Roman Catholic reverend and an

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Eastern Orthodox guy who is part of the Democratic Socialists of America. We'll take the quote, and we'll leave it there.

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So we've got to check on Barrett, by the way. We're a little worried about this guy. But Brian Davies, this Roman Catholic reverend, calls this idea, this idea that we've now kind of fashioned

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God into our own image, as something called theistic personalism. Theistic personalism.

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This is the idea that God is still God, right?

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At least they say that. Oh, and these guys aren't saying that. They're just characterizing this idea.

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I should at least be fair to them. This idea that God was still a deity, but personified by humanity, or these attributes that we see in ourselves, right?

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David Bentley Hart, that's the Eastern Orthodox guy, he talks about this same idea.

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And he talks about it and calls it monopolytheism. Monopolytheism.

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Sound like a weird word? It's got mono and poly in it. That doesn't really make sense, right?

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It doesn't. It's a complete oxymoron. But the point that he's making is that what we would typically see in a polytheistic belief system, right, where each

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God exhibits all of these traits, Loki the trickster, we all know about him these last few weeks, that they're all encapsulated in one

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God, but it's consistent with a polytheistic worldview. Monopolytheism is what

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David Bentley Hart would kind of describe this mentality as. And ultimately, there's many problems with a belief system like this, but ultimately it abandons the first attribute of God that we just spent three weeks studying, which is what, does anybody remember?

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The incomprehensibility of God. Our inability to comprehend him. So if God is now described as the post -asymptotic, super eminent idea, like the paragon of all humanity in every possible way, then we can understand that.

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We get that. But that problem, it leads to a contradiction of scripture.

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We had all these passages last week. Revelation 1, I am the alpha and the omega.

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I am the Lord. Beside me, there is no savior. I am the way, the truth, the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

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These are exclusive descriptions. There's nobody like this God. Nobody like this God. Can somebody read

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Jeremiah 10 .6 for me? There is none like you. None. Nobody.

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Nunca. Whatever word you need to come up with that means no. There is none like you. And our monopolytheistic worldview would suggest that there are lots of people like you.

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They're just not as good as you. And that's a problem. This is not a

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God about whom you can be casually analogical. There's our analogical word, our analogy word, our comparative word again.

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We cannot be casually analogical. God is super eminent, and he is fundamentally different from us.

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You may remember, maybe not, I mentioned something two weeks ago, I was talking about the incomprehensibility of God.

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We're really starting to dig into this idea of incomprehensibility or the ineffability of God.

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Does anybody remember what ineffable means? It's another $0 .25 word for Sunday morning. Yes. Inexpressive with words, right?

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Something is said to be ineffable if you can't describe it. Like you just can't.

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I don't know. That game was awesome. I can't even. The words don't work for that. That's what ineffable is, right?

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So we talked about how ineffable God was. But one thing I talked about was the idea of awe. Awe, like awesome is in our vernacular now.

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And it means, I don't know, something kind of cool is awesome. But that's not really what awesome means.

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Scientists have linked the emotion, this is my men's health quote, have linked the emotion of awe with lower levels of pro -inflammatory cytokines, which are proteins that signal the immune system to work harder.

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So it is healthy for you to be in awe. Uh -oh.

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There's an inside joke happening over here. See Trey after class. There is health benefits to this idea of being in awe.

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But really, the only reason why I bring this up is because when was the last time you read something in scripture about God or even a study or something and you were truly awestruck?

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Or maybe, I see it on Facebook all the time, apparently half of our congregation climbs mountains on Saturday mornings for some reason.

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And you see these huge, these amazing vistas, right? And it's pretty awesome.

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How many times are you, in your average daily life, truly, genuinely awestruck?

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It doesn't really happen that much. It doesn't. And it's because of our, well, it's because of the internet, really.

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But I mean, it is. Like, the circus when I was a kid was awesome.

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I mean, you didn't see stuff like that. But now, it's like, hey, it's a circus. Whatever. You should be on America's Got Talent. So this is not in my notes.

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I'm, oh, man. All right. My point is that when we properly understand the failings of the post -Enlightenment characterization of God, when we properly recognize but not understand, when we properly recognize

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God, then we are truly in awe of him.

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Or more likely, we're not standing like slack -jawed, but we're on our faces, right? Why are you describing the floor of the temple?

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Well, because you're on your face. If you are not humbled when you consider

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God, Houston, we have a problem, right? Our God is a supereminent, awesome, incredible God.

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So any more questions before we keep going? What's that? So Charlie's talking about this idea that supereminence as a construct which represents how much greater, infinitely greater

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God is than us in any given communicable attribute. And I think that's the key that maybe

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I didn't do a good job of expressing. Supereminence really describes communicable attributes. These are the attributes that God gives to us, or I don't want to say delegates, but grants to us in a lesser form.

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Supereminence describes those things. Charlie's point was, well, there's a limitation to that because, again,

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I'll get there. There's a limitation to that because God is not expressed merely by attributes that we can describe.

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God is fully ineffable. And so there are an infinite number of attributes of God that we can't even begin to conceive of, and those attributes aren't really described by supereminence because supereminence is a recognition of our failure of an analogical worldview, analogical perspective.

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Does that pretty much nail it? We'll get there. OK. So let's see.

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So Barrett says, being unlimited in size, which is this thing that we're talking about with supereminence, is not the full picture when we talk about God.

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He says, we should not make the mistake of thinking the difference between the creator and the creature is simply a difference in size.

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To do so is to assume that God can be measured as if he were merely a bigger version of ourselves.

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That's this problem that we talked about. And we've touched on things like, oh, it's like the

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Greek gods, or it's like a polytheistic worldview. Those are kind of the same thing. Barrett calls this the superhero syndrome.

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The superhero syndrome. And I don't watch the show, but I think that there might not be a better example of this than the show

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The Boys. Familiar with The Boys? I do not recommend you watch the show. I saw a trailer, and the trailer was gross, so don't do that.

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It's this idea that these superheroes basically recognize that they have all this power, and so they more or less dominate the world.

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They're second -class citizens, or people, and all this other stuff. So I don't recommend you watch the show, but what it does is it shows superheroes that are not like Superman, that are not these paragons of virtue.

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They realize that their power is so much greater than that of humans that they can dominate them and control them, and do whatever they want.

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That's a very Greek kind of story, isn't it? So that's the superhero syndrome, this idea that God is just this better version of ourselves.

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So two weeks ago, we talked about God's incomprehensibility in two things.

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We said that God was incomprehensible in his magnitude, and also in his what?

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In his quiddity. That's the fun word. In his essence, in his quiddity, right?

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Aquinas says, to be unlimited in size is not the same thing as to be unlimited in essence.

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For even if there existed bodily things of unlimited size, like fire or air, these would still be limited in essence, limited to a particular species by their form, and to a particular individual by the species of their matter.

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Here's my quote for the day. You ready? God's infinity is characterized by being infinitely infinite.

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I thought it was a quotable sentence. Does anyone remember, other than Steve, the answer to the question

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Pastor Mike posed to Sinclair Ferguson, what is God doing right now? Come on, that's cheating.

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Charlie, right?

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He is simultaneously, perfectly exercising all of his attributes, or perfectly exercising all of his attributes simultaneously, to make me feel better for reading what's in my notes.

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God has infinite depth. This is another xy coordinate thing,

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Bob, so stick with me. God has infinite depth, or magnitude.

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His attributes are infinite in magnitude. And he also has infinite breadth, or essence.

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This is my analogical, finite way of trying to describe something that's infinite. So God can fully exercise all of his attributes, depth, infinity, in that kind of siloed attribute direction that we kind of talk about.

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But he can also fully exercise all of his attributes, of which there are way more than we could possibly conceive, because they are infinite.

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This is what Anselm is talking about when he calls God the fullness of being itself, the absolute plenitude of reality upon which all else depends.

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OK, so we have an infinite height, an infinite depth, the magnitude of any given attribute that we would categorize,

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God's love, God's mercy, God's grace, whatever that thing might be, but also an infinite breadth, in the sense that there are an infinite number of things that God is able to do, or things that describe who

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God is. Infinite height, infinite. With me? We got this? OK.

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Herein lies the end of the protracted prologue of this book. That's a lot of P words.

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I was up late when I was writing that. OK, that is really the introduction to this book.

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All of that stuff that I just said, and Cory said last week, and I said it before that, and Cory said it before that, and also that Barrett said in the book, that's how it works.

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That's the intro. The rest of our study seeks to answer this question, which is, what must be true of God if he is to be that than which nothing greater can be thought?

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So all of this is just establishing and kind of painting the picture of, no, really, God is greater than we can possibly imagine.

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In light of that, what must be true about God? So in the process of opening this up and describing this and doing all this work, we actually answered the first question.

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What might be true of God if he is to be that of which nothing greater can be thought? He, by definition, is incomprehensible.

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Dave? AUDIENCE MEMBER 1

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We're going to talk away. Kind of, yeah.

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I mean, that's not an inaccurate way to put it, but there's also, it's an idea that we can kind of get our heads around the idea without being able to fully explain the idea.

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And so it takes some work to get to the point where we can recognize it without understanding it,

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God's incomprehensibility. Corey looks like he's about to say something. And all of this goes back to a quote from Anselm that Corey gave us in the first week that,

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I think at the time, in and of itself, was pretty incomprehensible, because that's how he writes.

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Anselm, not Corey. But I think now, in light of all this, it's a little bit easier to understand. I'm not even going to read it,

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I'm just going to explain it, which is to basically say this. If God is truly the greatest thing, if he is truly incomprehensible, height, depth, and every way, we cannot comprehend him.

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Because if we could, then we could imagine, oh, but what if it was a little bit more? So we can't get our arms around it.

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Because if you can carry something, then you can imagine putting something else on top. And that's kind of this idea.

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And Anselm's quote, it's in the book, you can find it. That's what he's talking about.

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If God truly is this magnificent thing that we cannot conceive of, then guess what?

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We cannot conceive of him. That's what Anselm was saying. So as we begin to get into the rest of the book, as we begin to tick off these attributes, and we will, it would be good for us to remember, as I described them, the depth and breadth of God, the infinite depth and the infinite breadth of God.

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We've talked about how we can't conceive of anything greater than him. And this goes exactly back to Charlie and his commentary on the limitations of supereminence.

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We can't just look at attribute silos and say, OK, well, they're infinitely high.

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We can't conceive of them within the context of this silo. But we can recognize that there are infinite attributes.

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Barrett says this. He says, oxymorons are not welcome in God talk, in talking about God.

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We would never say, God is infinitely finite. Which is, essentially, if you take this idea of supereminence and you shove it into attributes of God by Pink or Tozer or whatever, which are great books, but if that's where you stop, if that's where you restrict your study, that's what we're saying when we do that.

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We're saying God is infinitely finite. A finite being is, by definition, limited. An infinite being is, by definition, unlimited.

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To be infinite is to be unbounded, unlimited, and unrestricted.

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Put positively, not via negativa, to be infinite means

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God is his attributes in an absolute sense, since he is the fullness of being. But it also means that we would never get to the end of the list of attributes to list about God, because if we could, then

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God would be infinitely finite. This is our problem. Infinite in each attribute, finite in the number of attributes.

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And that makes no sense. So here

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Barrett starts to list examples. We start to get into some kind of attribute description stuff. We start to say,

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OK, well, if God is infinite, let's analyze some stuff. Barrett says, if God is dependent on the created order, then he cannot be infinite.

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If God is dependent on the created order, then he cannot be infinite. What are some ramifications?

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Let's workshop this a little bit. What are some ramifications of this, the things that God has created?

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Sure. Sharon. That sounds about right.

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OK. OK. Quote from the book, if God is dependent on the created order, then he cannot be infinite.

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I'm fine with that. I do.

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Shockingly, I do. Oh, sure. Yeah, it's a chicken and egg problem.

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100%. Well, listen, I went with the easy one, which was, if God is dependent on the created order, then he cannot be

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If God is dependent on the created order, i .e. us, that would mean that we would have to choose to submit to him to be saved.

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If God's salvific decree required us to do good works, then that would mean that God is subject to the created order, which, as Sharon said, makes no sense.

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Right? So just in this very brief logical assessment, we have now denied salvation by works, which is pretty good for a few

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Roman Catholics. So I thought that was interesting. God is entirely infinite.

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God's essence is unbounded, immeasurable, unfathomable, and inestimable in every way.

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Charnock rightly notes that no perfection is wanting to God.

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God is the embodiment of all perfection. No perfection is wanting to God. But despite the logical sense that is

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God's necessary infinite nature, which is something that we can't really conceive of, because we don't have infinite revelation, we have this problem, this inconsistency.

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How do we deal with this? How do we deal with all these infinite attributes? What do we do? We talked about this idea of divine baby talk before.

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Remember that? What is that, by the way? Does anybody remember kind of what that idea is?

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Exactly. That's exactly right. So when we think about how we talk to a baby, babies probably understand more than we give them credit for.

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But we're, you know, that's divine baby talk, right? Or, well, it's not divine baby talk, but that's human baby talk.

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It's this idea that God describes for us things in ways that we can understand, right?

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And so this is actually our first pillar when we go back to the pillars on which we rested this entire argument, which is that God is only revealed to us through the lens or method that he provides.

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This is the lens or method that he provides. I don't actually have my Bible. I don't know. It's in my backpack, which is with an interest somewhere.

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I was going to hold up my Bible. It says in here, hold up your Bible. I can't do that. Even my phone's over there. So that's the lens or method that he provides.

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That is the revelation. It's not infinite. Thank you, Steve. It is not infinite. It describes infinite things, but it in and of itself is not infinite, otherwise those printing presses would still be going.

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So in our finite revelation, we can start to look for descriptions of God's attributes to begin to draw the picture of who

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God is, right? And that is the story of the Christian life. As we seek to know more about him so that we can become more like him, we cannot understand scripture unless we've been quickened, unless we've been saved.

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And we cannot or would not desire to submit to scripture unless God made us able to do so.

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And that is how we are more sanctified. Did you have something? So we've already established that we describe things in analogical ways, and you're asking me to describe what it's going to be like in a place where there is no sin?

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I can't help you. We're going to have that look on our face, like when you see babies that are taking in the world and everything is new.

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That's going to be us all the time, all the time. Yeah, definitely some of that, too. Charlie, did you have something?

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I don't think I've ever seen a video like that where the person wasn't driven to tears. Well, boredom is welcome in my house because it leads to kids doing chores, so it's fine with me.

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I'm going to skip a lot because it's already 9 .50. And Barrett closes this chapter with talking about the gospel and how we can reckon with an infinite

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God, and how do we satisfy an infinite God, which is what's necessary for salvation.

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And so here we go. I'm going to attempt to draw together the way that we present the gospel and some of these high theology concepts that we're talking about.

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This is the gospel presentation as we hear it and as we teach it, as we explain it. God is perfect, right?

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That's where we start. God is what? God is creator and God is judge, right?

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These are the simple terms that we give our kids. God is perfect, he is creator, he is judge. He can do whatever he wants with his creation.

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We are the army men in the sandbox. God is the one who is controlling all things. We are sinners.

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We have wronged a thrice holy God. Our sin, the gravity of our sin, is calculated not by what we have done, but by who we have done it to.

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And so when we commit a finite sin in our world, bounded by time, in this space -time continuum, we have committed a sin against an infinite

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God. And subsequently, one sin deserves an infinite death. How do we accommodate for that?

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How do we handle this? It is appointed for man to die once, and then judgment.

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So if we have more than one sin, and I've been awake for three hours, so I've got more than one today, how do we accommodate for all of those sins?

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We can't pay for them all. And that is why God sent his son. God sent

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Jesus Christ to Earth, made incarnate, not created, but made incarnate, so that his son might live perfectly, live a perfect life without sin, that life that we couldn't live.

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Don't be bored, this is still interesting. And die a death that he didn't deserve, because he didn't sin, so there was no death required.

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But here's the great, magnificent transaction. Because God was incarnate as a man, his death could atone for the sins of man.

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But because Jesus Christ is God, he is infinite. And so his death could atone for the sins of all of his people, all of the sins for all of his people.

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And so we know that atonement was accepted. Why? There is no gospel without the resurrection, because God raised him from the dead.

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He defeated death. And so we respond to that with repentance, with trust, and with submission to Jesus Christ.

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That's the gospel message. Amen? Encapsulated in this, we see some of the same truths that we've been studying.

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This is not a perfect analogy, no analogy is, but I think that we can get our arms around this,

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I think. God has an infinite essence, infinite magnitude.

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Mankind, man has a finite essence and a finite magnitude.

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Jesus Christ as the incarnate man, not in totality, but as the incarnate man, infinite magnitude, finite essence.

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Seems like a contradiction, because how do you put those two things together? But that is how he could die for us, because his essence was the same as our essence as the incarnate man.

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Again, not as the totality of who Jesus Christ, the son of God, is, but as the incarnate man. And that is how he could die for us, same essence, infinite magnitude.

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Immeasurable greatness of God's power, immeasurable riches of God's grace, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him.

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Let's pray. Father in heaven, thank you for today. Thank you for this study, this encouragement of who you are in truly just ways that we ought to study you more, but it is so difficult.

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I just praise you that we're given this opportunity to do this. Thank you for the work of Matthew Barrett in providing these truths to us.

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Thank you, Father, for illuminating scripture for us that we might understand them better. I pray for Pastor Steve as he brings the word to us this morning, that you would bless his preaching and that you would bless the totality of our worship of you today.