2023 BBC Bible Conference - Session One "Divine Blessedness"

Bethlehem Bible Church iconBethlehem Bible Church

1 view

0 comments

00:00
Well, thank you so much for your hospitality. It is a pleasure to be here and to be able to share with you and encourage you.
00:06
This is my first time to New England. And so, and I'm so thankful we came the right week as we're looking at pictures and Mike was harassing me about all the snow last week.
00:15
And I've lived in California and Hawaii my whole life. I have blood like fruit punch.
00:21
So I don't know how you all survive out here but God bless you for doing so. And I'm thankful to be here with the confidence that you love the gospel.
00:32
And more importantly, or because of that, you know how to rightly distinguish it from the law and understand the goodness of God in our
00:42
Lord Jesus. And I want us to start there and ask this question, what is good about the gospel?
00:49
Or maybe even a more fundamental question, what is the good? The answer to both of those questions,
00:56
I hope you know, is the same. It's God. What we wanna do in the time that we have this evening and tomorrow,
01:05
God willing, is consider nothing less than why we exist. The very fundamental basis of reality and how all of happiness is found in God alone.
01:19
That's our great aim. And this is our purpose. I wanna put it out in front and center.
01:25
And it's very simple. And it's our only main aim here this weekend is that we wanna be assured.
01:33
And if you leave tomorrow and this is true, then we will have accomplished our purpose. That you are assured that God loves you and that he created you and has redeemed you if you are in Christ to be happy in him now and forever.
01:49
That's our simple aim. To know that God loves you and to be assured of why that's the case and how he wants you to be happy in him forever.
01:58
God has communicated himself to us so that we would have joy in his joy.
02:06
That is the why beneath creation, redemption, and the coming consummation.
02:12
That we all would have joy in the joy of God. And that's what we're aiming at this weekend.
02:19
How can we be assured of this? Or speaking at it logically, how do we account for that?
02:25
How do I account for that in my mind and understand, especially in the difficulties and vicissitudes of life, how do
02:32
I know that God loves me and wants me to be happy in him? To do that, we need to consider
02:37
God and to deepen our knowledge of him. So that's what we aim to do. I believe you've got a handout and it's mostly just a conglomeration of some of the quotes
02:47
I wanna use so you have those with you and you don't have to worry about trying to write somebody down as we're talking, but it'll be a point of reference to you and we'll consider much in God's word.
02:57
But that is our aim, to understand how we can have joy in the joy that God has in himself.
03:04
And to do that, we need to know about him. And this is basic really to loving
03:09
God. We cannot grow in assurance or devotion or love for God without knowledge.
03:19
The modern assumption that we may have encountered that doctrine hinders love and joy is simply wrong.
03:27
And we don't really believe it because we don't operate that way on any other of our relationships.
03:33
Augustine in the fourth century, and there'll be a lot of Augustine in our time together, he said that no one can love a thing that is quite unknown.
03:41
To love, we must know something about someone even in relationships.
03:48
J. Gresham Mason said that every human relationship is bristling with dogma. That is the reason you love those you love is because of what you know about them.
03:57
You know truths about them, you know who they are and your love deepening grows and relationship to your knowledge and doctrine of them growing.
04:06
And older theologians understood that this was the point of theology.
04:12
Now theology has become something a bit different on the other side of the enlightenment. But if we go before that, older theologians knew that the whole point of all that we say about God according to his word is that we would grow in love and joy for him.
04:27
Just a couple samples, William Perkins said, "'Theology is the science of living blessedly forever.'"
04:35
Do you wanna know how to be happy forever? Theology addresses that. Jehonas Macovia said, "'Theology is a discipline partly theoretical, "'partly practical, teaching the way of living well "'and blessedly into eternity.'"
04:50
So theology, what we think and say about God and how we think of him is about how we live and sojourn to eternal joy.
05:00
It's about how we have contentment and blessedness in God. And the reason we have far less joy in our generation is because we've forgotten the knowledge of God, the source of all joy.
05:12
We've lost our grip on what is, on reality, because we've lost the
05:18
God who is. And when you do that, you lose understanding why everything exists.
05:24
And if we forget God, we will forget ourselves. And that's fundamental. The knowledge of God and the true knowledge of ourselves are intertwined and inescapable.
05:34
So for example, Augustine, in probably one of the greatest sentences ever written outside the Bible, in the beginning of the
05:40
Confessions, he wrote this, "'You move us to delight in praising you, "'for you made us for yourself, "'and our hearts are restless till they find rest in you.'"
05:53
So in that sentence, Augustine says in the middle, the most fundamental fact of existence,
06:00
God made us for himself. We exist for God. And it explains the subjective experience he then takes from that.
06:08
That's why we rejoice to praise him, and we are restless without him. The reason joy is found in communion with God and restlessness and anxiety exists without him is because we were made for God.
06:23
We were, he created us for himself. Over 1 ,000 years later, John Calvin started his institutes with the same observation.
06:31
He said, all our wisdom is intertwined in two parts, the knowledge of God and of ourselves. And then he wrote, man never attains to a true self -knowledge until he has previously contemplated the face of God and come down after such contemplation to look into himself.
06:47
Here's the thing. Knowing yourself, who you are and why you are, and having contentment and joy is impossible until we consciously know the
07:01
God who made us, because he made us for him. This is why what we're doing this weekend is astoundingly relevant for whatever else has been bothering you up before this evening, about our culture, about society, about ourselves and our life.
07:21
Theology is really the only proper starting point to begin addressing any of the things that we're concerned about.
07:28
The reason our culture has lost its mind on truth, beauty, and goodness is because it has forsaken the only ultimate basis for any of it.
07:38
G .K. Chesterton said, when the first effect of not believing in God is you lose your common sense.
07:45
And he's exactly right. And the reason we see so much nonsensical things today is because we've quit believing in the one who is.
07:53
And that's not only true for thinking about ourselves in terms of common grace and in society, but it's also true for what we think about the gospel and Christianity.
08:04
Knowing God is the fundamental fact of our faith. And it's connected to every other idea.
08:10
If your idea of God is wrong, then your idea of the God -man, the
08:16
Lord Jesus Christ, will be wrong. And then our understanding of his work in the cross and resurrection will be wrong, and so on.
08:24
Everything begins with who God is. E .L. Maskell said, logically and essentially, the doctrine of God is the fundamental doctrine of the
08:33
Christian religion, for according to its teaching, everything other than God depends on him and exists for his glory.
08:39
In other words, we get God wrong, we'll get Christ wrong, we'll get the gospel wrong, we'll get the
08:44
Bible wrong, we will get everything else downstream wrong, because everything else is downstream from God.
08:51
And so this is fundamental. If we're gonna understand and worship and walk before God, the reason that the gospel has so often been turned into a therapeutic message without any of the biblical contours of righteousness and sin and justice and redemption by the work of Christ is because God has been lost, and God has been forgotten as we think about the gospel.
09:16
And that reminds us that the direction of the gospel is always
09:21
Godward. The good of the gospel is God. Think of the familiar words of our
09:28
Lord Jesus in Matthew chapter 11, verses 28 and 29. I'm sure many of us maybe have them memorized or at least know a large part of them.
09:36
Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
09:42
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
09:54
What rest is the Lord Jesus offering to all who would come to him?
10:01
Now, often when people read those verses disconnected from Matthew 11, they fill in their own concepts of rest, and it goes in varied directions, in a self -directed or even a therapeutic way, but we forget what
10:15
Jesus said right before these words in verse 27 of Matthew 11. All things have been handed over to me by my
10:21
Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the
10:28
Son chooses to reveal him. Why did the Son come?
10:34
To reveal the knowledge of God the Father, so that in him we might have rest.
10:42
You see where Augustine got his great line? Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you. Christ came that we might have rest in God.
10:52
His, our joy would be fulfilled in him. We are brought to rest in God. That is the great good of the gospel.
10:59
By Jesus' work and by faith alone in him, we have rest in our
11:04
God and we call him Father. And then we have joy and we can tell others. That's what
11:10
Peter says in 1 Peter 2, verse 9. He says, you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
11:27
The word that Peter uses there in 1 Peter 2, verse 9 for excellencies is about as close as we get in the
11:32
New Testament to the word attributes. It refers to intrinsic characteristics, the intrinsic worth, or what we might say, perfections.
11:43
And that's what we're gonna do this weekend is consider the perfections of God. And we'll consider more tomorrow, but we'll have to remember that God technically doesn't have attributes.
11:54
We ascribe these things to him as he's revealed them to us in his acts of creation and especially in his word.
12:03
We, Psalm 29, we ascribe to the Lord. We attribute perfections to him.
12:09
And if there's a categorization, a categorization of attributes that we'd prefer, the one that's probably most common is communicable and incommunicable.
12:18
But one that might help us tend a little better to understand things is absolute and relative. We think of God as he is absolutely in himself apart from and prior to creation and God as he relates to what is not
12:33
God, to his creatures, to creation. And we'll consider a lot about what is true of God absolutely this weekend because that governs and it dictates everything else that we say about God as we think about his love and his holiness and his goodness.
12:49
And they're typically forgotten today and often misunderstood today as we have not thought well in recent generations about God and the church and we need to recover some of these things were taken for granted in centuries before us.
13:02
So that's what we're gonna do this weekend, Lord willing. And what I wanna do is cover God's divine blessedness this evening.
13:09
And then tomorrow morning, we'll look at God's incomprehensibility and infinity. And then we'll also look at his aseity and simplicity and then we'll end considering his immutability and impassibility.
13:22
And if all those sounded like 10 cent words you have no reference for, don't worry, we'll get there. We'll plow the field and it will all make sense by the end.
13:30
But we're gonna walk through these absolute attributes of God and consider again how our hope and joy is found in our eternal
13:39
God and the God who made us and he wants us to have that rest in him. Matthew Henry said, referred to this as the pleasantness of a religious life.
13:48
He said, it's not only one of the privileges of our religion that we may rejoice but has made one of the duties of it. We are defective in our religion if we don't live a life of complacency of God in his being, his attributes and his relations to us.
14:01
It should be a constant pleasure to us to think that there is a God, that he is such a one as the scriptures revealed him to be a being infinitely wise and powerful, holy, just and good that this
14:12
God governs the world and gives laws to all the creatures, that he is our owner and ruler, that in his hand our breath is, in his hand our times, our hearts and all our ways are.
14:22
Thus certainly it is and thus it must be and happy are those that can please themselves with these thoughts as those must needs be a constant terror to themselves who couldn't wish it were otherwise.
14:35
They who thus delight in God have always something and have something very commanding too to delight in, a fountain of joy that can never be either exhausted or stopped up to which they may always have, those who delight in God always have something.
14:58
In fact, they always have everything and they have an infinite fountain of joy to which we always have access through our
15:05
Lord Jesus Christ. And that's where I want us to begin our time this evening. And if you have your Bible with you and Pastor Mike's already kicked us off well in First Timothy, I want you to turn to First Timothy, please, and let's spend some of our time meditating there and then moving through the rest of scripture.
15:22
We wanna think of First Timothy about God as our fountain of joy.
15:27
But I want us to begin in chapter one. In First Timothy chapter one, the
15:35
Apostle Paul gives one of the great absolute statements of the gospel in verse 15.
15:41
You're probably familiar with it. First Timothy one verses 15, the saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance.
15:50
Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom
15:55
I am the foremost. Christ came to save sinners.
16:02
It's wonderful and true and succinct. And what Paul's doing in this chapter, he's essentially evangelizing the false teachers he's already described and he'll return to again in chapter six.
16:12
He's basically saying that just as I have been redeemed as I was such a great opponent to the church, you can too because Christ Jesus came to save sinners.
16:21
And now as we see this absolute statement of the gospel, work back to verse 11 and consider how
16:28
Paul introduces it. He refers to the gospel of the glory of the blessed
16:34
God with which I have been entrusted. The good news, the gospel of the
16:42
God who has brought us to himself and he is blessed. That is a remarkable statement, though it may not have jumped out to you the first few times you've read it.
16:54
It's a statement about who God is absolutely in himself. And God is absolutely blessed.
17:03
Our blessedness is always dependent. It's always contingent on circumstances being met on the right conditions.
17:12
You see that in scripture, Psalm one begins with blessed is the man who. Jesus begins the sermon on the mount with the beatitudes, blessed are those who.
17:22
And that's how it always is for us. We are blessed when conditions are met.
17:28
But God we're told is just blessed. Apart from, prior to, and without anything else that exists in creation,
17:37
God is blessed. God is happy. To be blessed is to be in a state of happiness or joy.
17:45
And God's blessedness, now that you've hopefully had it pointed out to you, you'll notice how often it shows up in scripture.
17:51
It's a common description and praise to God. David, for example, in first Chronicles 29 verse 10 prayed this, blessed are you,
17:59
O Lord, the God of Israel, our father, forever and ever. Our adoration and our seeking
18:08
God is rooted in the incomprehensible wonder that God is forever blessed.
18:16
Why? Well, Paul explains God's blessedness in the doxologies that envelop this epistle in first Timothy.
18:25
He explains the household in which we live is God's household and that we are to show in the world as he says in chapter three.
18:31
But in chapter one, verse 17, we have the first doxology. As Paul writes in first Timothy 1, 17, to the king of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only
18:43
God, be honor and glory forever and ever, amen. And then we just had it read, let's read it again in first Timothy chapter six, verses 15 and 16.
18:54
Paul again writes of he who is the blessed and only sovereign, the king of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, who no one has ever seen or can see, to him be honor and eternal dominion, amen.
19:15
Now here, Paul in these doxologies, give some of the attributes of God that account for his blessedness in chapter one and chapter six.
19:25
And I want you to first to notice that they're mostly negations. They're mostly negations that is describing
19:31
God by taking away and denying what he is not. That is taking away creaturely aspects to God and denying those.
19:41
We must negate and when we do that, when we describe God by negation, what we're doing is acknowledging that who
19:49
God is is beyond all that we can fathom. And that we cannot give a comprehensive definition of infinite perfection.
19:56
John Norton, for example, said it's manifestly known that God is much more difficult to know what
20:01
God is. And so you have negations like in verse 17 of chapter one, he's invisible, he's without visibility.
20:09
That is God's not composed of matter. God's not corporal, you can't see him.
20:14
Now this doesn't make God an amorphous force like in some sci -fi movie, but it acknowledges his infinite fullness.
20:23
So in chapter six, verse 16, Paul says that he dwells in unapproachable light.
20:30
Psalm 104, verse two says that God covers himself with light like a garment. You remember
20:37
Moses asked to see God's glory in Exodus 33 and how does God reply? You cannot see my face for man shall not see me and live.
20:45
He can't be comprehended. What you see, you comprehend. How do you see infinity?
20:54
No one can see God in himself. Human perception and comprehension cannot take in infinite, eternal, boundless light.
21:04
So we can't see God. Further, Paul gives both in chapter one and chapter six here refers to God's immortality.
21:14
So in chapter one, verse 17, he says he's immortal. He cannot perish. But notice what
21:20
Paul does in chapter six, verse 16. He increases it and says he alone has immortality.
21:29
And notice what Paul is doing there. He's being very careful theologically because who else is immortal?
21:36
Well, in a sense, we are. We're mortal people with immortal souls.
21:42
But is our immortality like God's immortality? Well, no, ours is granted.
21:47
It's given to us. We were created. We came into being. God sustains our being. God alone has immortality that is immortality.
21:56
His immortality is on a whole other order of existence, not granted by anyone, sufficient in himself, caused by no one.
22:05
And we see another way here that we describe God, not just by a way of negation, but by the way of perfection.
22:12
That is even the things that we share with God, we have to remember there is an infinite different distance between us and God and a distinction of his infinite perfection.
22:23
So we say, we could say I'm immortal. Yes, God is immortal. Yes, but really what we mean is God alone has immortality.
22:31
He is the giver of life. He is the very source of life and goodness himself.
22:38
We have immortality, but it's derived from God. God is immortality.
22:43
He is the source of life. So David can write in Psalm 36, verse nine, that with you is the fountain of life.
22:51
All life comes from him. And that implies what else we see here, not just his immortality and his invisibility, but we see his eternality.
23:01
In chapter one, verse 17, Paul describes God as the king of the ages. In chapter six, verse 16, he describes him as having eternal dominion.
23:12
Now, eternity is not endless time. Time is not a thing.
23:19
Time is a measurement. Time is a measurement of movement that comes from creation.
23:26
It's a relation between things that change in the world. That's why we measure it the way we do by the rotation of the earth and the sun.
23:35
Time's not a realm. It's a measurement of the created realm. We are created, and so we change.
23:44
It's said no man steps into the same river twice, because he's not the same man.
23:49
You're constantly changing, even when you don't perceive it. And it's not the same river as it keeps flowing through you.
23:56
But God, with creation, is outside of him. Time is not like, as Isaac Watts says for us, an ever -flowing stream bearing all its sons away.
24:06
Time, for God, is like a lake, and it's all before him. And he's outside of it.
24:14
He's eternal. God's life has no beginning and no end. It's all at once.
24:20
It's never progressed. It's never grown. God's never developed. Infernate perfection has nothing to develop.
24:27
It's never changed, altered, or corrupted. God's eternal. He transcends the succession of change we call time.
24:36
And so, he's blessed. Even in our happiest moments, what do we know?
24:45
It's a moment. It's going to end. The happiness I experience right now will not go on forever.
24:53
But God is eternally blessed. Always blessed.
25:00
And all that we've said of God, just observing here in Paul's doxologies in 1 Timothy, by negating what is creaturely or imperfect, and by ascribing to him infinite perfection, we are saying what
25:13
Paul says here in chapter six, verse 15. He is the blessed and only sovereign.
25:19
So, we are saying that God is personally, powerfully, perfectly, and perpetually happy.
25:28
God is eternally happy in himself. God is boundless, without circumference, without containment.
25:38
There's no chronology into which he's fixed and subject to. His blessedness is from everlasting to everlasting.
25:45
In fact, God's blessedness never began. It has no starting point.
25:51
And his blessedness cannot cease any more than he could cease. It's who he is.
25:57
What we have in the idea of God's happiness and his blessedness is a rare positive description of who
26:06
God is in himself. Who is God? He is happy. If you could, as it were, sit
26:14
God on an interview platform and ask him, what's it like being
26:20
God? What's your experience of being God? God's answer would be, blessed.
26:29
It's blessed. It's joyful. It's happy. I have the perfect knowledge of perfection.
26:36
So, I'm happy. Edward Lay, we'll get to know him a little bit this weekend as well, he said this, in himself and of himself,
26:44
God does perfectly enjoy himself and this is his perfect happiness. He lives a most perfect life, abounds with all perfect virtues, sets them at work himself in all fullness of perfection, and in all this, enjoys himself with inconceivable satisfaction.
27:02
He's blessed. The Baptist John Gill said that all the attributes of God center and terminate on his blessedness.
27:10
That is to say, when you've said all that we can say about God and all the attributes you know, what we're pointing to is the fact that God is happy in himself, eternally.
27:22
Louis Bailey wrote this, from all these attributes arise one, which is
27:27
God's sovereign blessedness or perfection. Unmeasurable possession of joy and glory, which
27:34
God has in himself forever, and, note this, is the cause of all the bliss and perfection that every creature enjoys in its measure.
27:43
So notice what our friend Bailey said. He said that blessedness is the comprehensive conclusion of all of God's perfections.
27:51
That is, when you've said all you can say about God, what you say is he is blessed, and, secondly, that's the cause of every creature's joy.
28:01
The root of every joy is that God has joy in himself.
28:06
So the reason that goodness and joy exist is because God is blessed.
28:14
You can share that with your unbelieving friends. Everyone in the world wants to be happy.
28:21
Why? Why is that the universal disposition of every man, woman, and child on the face of the planet?
28:28
Because God is happy, and created us to be happy in him.
28:35
And our universal longing for joy is a reflection and echo of the garden when
28:41
God breathed life into dirt to find joy in their creator. Happiness exists because God is happy.
28:49
Benedict Pictet said that who would not call God happy who is in need of nothing, finds all comfort in himself, possesses all things, is free from all evil, and filled with all good.
29:01
And if you want a short definition of blessedness, that's pretty good right there. Why is God blessed? He is free from every evil.
29:08
He is full of every good. So he's blessed. No evil, full of every good.
29:14
And by evil, we don't just mean free of what's morally wrong. We mean even the limitations of creation.
29:22
God is blessed because he's boundless. There's no limits to him. There's no limits to his ability.
29:28
And all that we say in negating what is creaturely in God and ascribing perfection to him is describing
29:34
God as blessed. And what we're doing here and beginning to get a glimpse of is the absolute and sheer otherness and radical difference between God and us.
29:49
And this has to control everything else that we think and say about God.
29:55
And we must always remember that he is absolutely blessed. And all the other perfections and attributes we'll talk about account for and support and explain why
30:07
God is the blessed one. So as scripture gives us literal and absolute descriptions of God, that he is love, for example, of course the blessed
30:19
God is love himself. The Psalms say that you are good and do good.
30:26
The reason God does good is because he is goodness. That's who he is. It's proper to God.
30:33
And we'll get later at the end of our time tomorrow, this is also why we ascribe things like immutability and impassibility to God.
30:43
In fact, you could lay alongside blessedness in First Timothy, the word impassibility and we're getting at the same thing.
30:51
It's impossible for God to undergo changes of state that in any way disturb his blessedness.
30:58
He's joyful eternally in himself. And God's joy is not a passion or an emotion.
31:05
It's not something he's moved into by another. It's not something he has to be created in him.
31:11
He is blessed. It's the pure perfection of his being. So Thomas Adams said this, "'God's glory is never left off.
31:20
"'There's no interruption of his blessedness. "'There's not a moment where he is less happy.'"
31:27
Now that means that when we read in our Bibles that God has been angered or sorrowed or grieved, it must be that we are confronting some kind of figure of speech or what theologians say is an improper ascription to God.
31:43
And by improper, they don't mean wrong or somehow that the Bible's saying something false. What they're saying is God, as we'll talk about this, is accommodating himself to us, that we might understand his infinite acts and that we might have something of a grasp of who he is in his relationship to us.
31:59
And we have to think carefully about what the scripture is revealing proper to the God who is blessed.
32:07
Now let me ask you this. Why is it good news to know the gospel of our blessed
32:14
God? Why is it good to know that the God who saves us to himself in the
32:21
Lord Jesus Christ is blessed, especially if we're not?
32:28
Is it good news to know you were redeemed by a blessed God if you're miserable and depressed?
32:38
I want you to think about that. You're not quite ready to answer it, but you will tomorrow.
32:44
So I gotta get you to come back tomorrow morning. So, for now, the half answer
32:51
I wanna leave you with this evening is that the knee -jerk reaction of modernity is incredibly short -sighted and it's ultimately hopeless.
33:02
So sometimes you may hear in very philosophical terms or just in common conversation, if we're not happy, how could
33:12
God ever be happy? I'm miserable. What good does it do for me to know that God is happy?
33:20
But here's the truth. If God isn't happy, then no one can or ever will be happy.
33:32
Even further, if God isn't happy, happiness doesn't exist.
33:39
It's a delusion. It's an illusion in your mind. It's not real.
33:44
It's not coming and it never will. And what we have right now, that's as good as it gets, period.
33:56
Theologian Fred Sanders said this, "'If God's not happy, nobody's happy. "'If
34:02
God's not the fountain of blessedness,' listen, "'then God doesn't have blessedness to give us "'or to bring about.'"
34:11
That's the key. If the source of all good isn't blessed, then blessedness isn't real.
34:20
And our desire for joy and blessedness and happiness is a material delusion. It's a physical phenomenon.
34:26
And that is not, friends, good news. But God is blessed, absolutely.
34:34
And His gift of joy to us in Christ to bring us to Himself, it reminds us it comes from the sheer gratuity of His goodness, the fullness of life and joy in Himself.
34:50
What Owen said is the ineffable mutual in -being of the Father and the Son in their eternal love in the
34:56
Spirit and out of the overflow of that joy, God has moved to create and to redeem.
35:03
I want us to end our meditation on blessedness and I want us to think about that. I want to think about it in three ways, in creation, revelation, and redemption, and think of the significance of God's blessedness.
35:19
Let's think first about creation. If God is blessed in Himself, then what must we say then about the act of creation?
35:30
It wasn't out of need. God doesn't need anyone or anything to be happy.
35:36
That means creation is utterly gratuitous and free and ultimately mysterious.
35:43
One writer said this, the real miracle is not that God exists, but that the world does.
35:50
God cannot but be, but that He in whom nothing is lacking should confer existence on us, that ought to stagger our minds, it ought to stagger our minds that the blessed
36:03
God brought us into being, that we're even here, that Massachusetts and the
36:10
United States and the world and the cosmos exists is a wonder because He needs nothing.
36:18
God loves not out of need. Augustine said that God loves out of the abundance of His generosity, out of sheer gratuity.
36:27
God created to spread His joy and goodness. That's what the Puritan Richard Sibbes, who was known as the sweet dropper, that's what he said.
36:36
He said this, God's goodness is a communicative and spreading goodness.
36:42
If God had not a communicative spreading goodness, He would never have created the world.
36:48
The Father, Son and Holy Spirit were happy in themselves and enjoyed one another before the world was.
36:55
God delights to communicate and spread His goodness. Why does everything exist that is not
37:05
God? Because the Father, Son and Spirit were happy in Himself and God delighted to spread that goodness to others.
37:14
Sheer gratuity, utter grace. And this has been the answer that Christians have given.
37:21
William Bates, for example, said, as there was no matter that is nothing else beside God, there was no motive to induce
37:28
God to make the world but what arose from His goodness. For He is an all -sufficient being, perfectly blessed in Himself.
37:35
His majesty is not increased by the adoration of angels nor His greatness by the obedience of nature.
37:41
Neither was He less happy or content in that eternal duration before the existence of any creatures than He is since.
37:48
Only free and unexcited goodness moved Him to create all things that He might impart being and happiness to the creature, not enrich
37:58
His own. God created to impart being and happiness to us.
38:08
We are here out of the wonder of God's goodness and blessedness and joy.
38:15
And He made us to find our joy in Him. Jonathan Edwards said, there's an infinite fullness of all possible good in God.
38:24
And he goes on to say, it seems a thing amiable and valuable in itself that this infinite fountain of good should send forth abundant streams as there is an infinite fullness of joy and happiness.
38:36
These should have an emanation to become a fountain flowing out in abundant streams as beams from the sun.
38:44
Creation is the utterly gratuitous, completely free, unconstrained act of God to spread
38:52
His goodness. That should dispel any of those blasphemous caricatures that somehow
38:59
God is cold, inert, aloof. We exist because God has joy in Himself and delighted to spread
39:08
His goodness to His creatures. And this explains everything that's wrong with the human race in Adam.
39:16
We want happiness without the God who made us to have happiness in Him. And that dog won't hunt.
39:25
It doesn't work. God made us for Himself. That is why we delight to praise
39:30
Him. And this means something else very important for us. For us as people, what we are and who we are has intrinsic goodness.
39:46
And that is an important message for Christians in the church today to our world that has lost sight of this fact.
39:52
The first message of our world that rejects what is according to nature is that what is according to the creation and God's design is inherently good and has inherent joy attached to it.
40:08
There's a benevolence in God's design. There is goodness to being and what is.
40:16
And it's derived from our good God. That means when we're talking with our friend or neighbor, whatever they feel inside, whatever dysphoria they have, whatever they think they should be or not be, we have to start with the fact that what we are is good by definition because the
40:37
God who created us is good and He created all things to spread His goodness.
40:42
So design, creation, nature, they matter and they're attached to our happiness and they come from the goodness of God.
40:53
That's creation. Let's think about revelation in scripture and God's blessedness and how this helps us think about the
41:02
Bible, perhaps from a different angle. What if the reason scripture exists is because it's an invitation for us to have joy in God?
41:14
Do you think of the Bible that way? An invitation to joy that God has given us.
41:20
In Psalm 119, verse nine, we have a familiar text. How can a young man keep his way pure?
41:27
By guarding it according to your word. Of course, that's absolutely true. We walk a path of purity and gratitude to God by guarding
41:35
God's word, but too often, that principle gets abstracted from scripture and reduced to, well, if you wanna be holy, you just memorize and study the
41:45
Bible. You just pound it in. It's like a collection of moral principles that you just, you get them down and it becomes really not much different from any other moral discipline or other philosophy.
41:56
But the logic of that stanza in Psalm 119 comes three verses later in verse 12.
42:02
And do you know what the psalmist says in Psalm 119, verse 12? Blessed are you,
42:08
O Lord, teach me your statutes. Why do we long to hide
42:14
God's word in our heart? But it comes because it comes to us from the God who is infinitely blessed in himself and we wanna be happy in him.
42:23
Lord, you are blessed. Teach me your Bible. Give me joy in you.
42:29
I wanna know you and I wanna know how to be happy in you. Later in verse 68 of the same
42:36
Psalm, Psalm 119, we see the same thing. You are good and do good. Teach me your statutes.
42:41
I wanna know goodness. I wanna be close to you. I wanna know what goodness means. And the more you grasp of God's greatness and goodness and his ineffable wonder, the more you treasure what a gift his word is to us.
42:58
God spoke to us that we would have delight in him. And we should never take for granted the fact that God has revealed himself to us, the
43:07
God who is infinite, beyond, uncontained and boundless. It's not just a matter of course that he decided to speak to us.
43:14
It comes too from the sheer gratuity of his goodness that God would spread that goodness and joy to us and accommodate the infinite mind of God to little creatures and speak to us in words that we would understand, that we might know something of him.
43:31
It's a testimony of grace. Sometimes I get told that reflecting on the doctrine of God is just gonna get us too far away from the
43:39
Bible and we shouldn't do that. It's the exact opposite. It helps us understand what the
43:48
Bible even is. It is a remarkable gift of our only good and blessed
43:54
God who has spoken to us that we might know him and know him especially in his son, the word made flesh as he comes to us from its pages.
44:06
So reflecting on the doctrine of God shouldn't remove the Bible from you, it should return it to you in fresh and powerful ways with a renewed appreciation that we have the self -disclosure of the boundless and blessed
44:19
God who's communicating to us. And that brings us then thirdly to think about God's blessedness related to our redemption, our redemption in Christ.
44:30
What scripture says about us in sin in Romans 1 verse 25 is this, we exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.
44:48
We gave off eternal joy for death and destruction because the devil is a liar and murderer from the very beginning.
44:57
But God the son, he assumed human nature and came incarnate as the
45:04
Christ and he was called in Mark 14, the son of the blessed.
45:10
And he took on the finitude of human nature that the boundless blessed
45:15
God would become a man of sorrows that we might through him be returned to the source of joy in God.
45:28
The son who is blessed forever assumed humanity in the person of Christ and he wept, he lived our sorrows, he became a curse for us because cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.
45:45
And he did so that our sorrow wouldn't be eternal but that it would turn to joy and to rescue us in him.
45:57
In salvation through the person and work of the Lord Jesus, God has given us the greatest joy possible, himself,
46:08
God. And by faith and union with Christ, we return to commune with the source of all true happiness,
46:15
God. So what David says in Psalm 16, in your presence there is fullness of joy, at your right hand there are pleasures forevermore.
46:26
Martin Luther said, when I possess Christ, I possess all for he is pure righteousness, life and eternal blessedness.
46:36
Christ came to bring us to eternal joy in God and that the sorrow we know in this world by our sin and the due justice of the curse would not be eternal but would be temporal and that the final word on our lives and on our souls would be pleasures forevermore in our blessed
46:57
God. And that's what happens now as his word comes to us by faith and we behold the glory of the
47:04
Lord who is joy and we are sustained in our joys increased until one day our faith will give way to sight and we will have what is called the beatific vision, the blessed vision of the glory of God in Jesus Christ.
47:18
And it's called beatific because it gives blessedness to all who have it eternally and we will finally have the end of our existence met.
47:28
We will have joy in God forever because he is joy and if we're in Christ, he's brought us to himself.
47:36
300 years ago, not far from here, the man Jonathan Edwards was bothered by the doctrines of the sovereignty of God.
47:45
He said it appeared like a horrible doctrine to him. But in 1721, he was reading 1 Timothy and he came across these doxologies that we just looked at and he said this, as I read these words, there came into my soul a sense of the glory of the divine being, a new sense, quite different from anything
48:02
I'd ever experienced before. I thought with myself how excellent a being that was and how happy I should be if I might enjoy that God and be wrapped up to him in heaven and be as it were swallowed up in him and be as it were in heaven forever.
48:19
That's what we get in the gospel. We get God, God in his glory, his incomprehensible beauty, moving in sovereign grace to bring sinners powerfully to himself and have eternal joy forever.
48:34
And it's all revealed in the gospel of the glory of our blessed God. Amen, let me pray and thank
48:42
God for our time. Father, we thank you for these meditations upon your blessedness and joy.
48:49
We pray that they would be a motivation for our communion with you in prayer and worship for our fellowship with one another and even to share the good news of your son with others.
49:01
That they, like us, might be beggars who seek you by grace and that we might rest in contentment upon your goodness as you have sent your son to bring us back to you.
49:13
Help our contemplations and our meditations be upon your goodness and your glory. We pray you would sustain us as we continue to consider your ineffable perfections this weekend that our assurance and our courage and our joy would only increase in you.