God the Father, What We Believe, Part 4

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Beacon. Always Building. Theology Proper is the study of God the

Father. Very important study because many people have to know and get right who

God is. We're going to start a study into God. We're going to look at God the Father, God the

Son, God the Holy Spirit, starting today with the Father. One, two, three!

Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.

This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Well, welcome to The Wrap Report. I am your host, Andrew Rappaport, with my trusty sidekick,

Bud the Wiser. How you doing, Bud? I am doing well, Andrew. Thank you. How are you?

I am doing better than I deserve. I don't doubt that. Everyone thinks that I got that from—who's the guy that does the finances?

Dave Ramsey, I guess he says that. Everyone thinks I got that from him. I've been using that. I actually got it from the dean or the president of my seminary.

Everyone just called him Chief, but E .R. Jordan would always say that. I liked it and picked it up from him.

Now, we do have another podcaster that uses that, and that is Richard Story from Voice of Reason.

So, people think that I've got it from him, or maybe some think he got it from me, but I don't even know where he got it.

But it is true. I am doing better than I deserve. It's actually a great conversation starter. You should try it. When people ask you how you're doing, say, better than I deserve.

Even when you are on the phone making service calls and you ask them how they're doing, they say fine.

They naturally say, how are you doing? Better than I deserve. And people will be like, well, don't you deserve the best?

Oh, no. No, because of my sins, I deserve hell. I deserve eternity in a lake of fire because you, like all of us, like me, have broken

God's law. But God has given me eternal life that's more than I deserve. So, I can very quickly get into a gospel conversation.

I'd like to go back and change my answer now since your piety has oozed forth.

No, it has been, like, it really has been a great way of starting gospel conversations.

So, I've enjoyed it. So, today what we want to do, Bud, is we're continuing our series. This is part four in our

What Do We Believe series. And we're looking at the doctrinal statement from Striving for Eternity.

We've looked at the holy scriptures. We're going to enter now into the section of God. And if folks want to get to that, just go to strivingforeternity .org.

Go to the About, and then under About is What We Believe. And if you look at What We Believe, there's seven sections there.

And all you've got to do is open one of them and expand that out. And you can see the one that we're dealing with is the one on God.

And the one that we have here that we're going to look at is this first section is

God the Father. And there's a lot packed in here. But before we get into this, just a couple of things,

Bud, if you would. Maybe Mr. John Calvin had something to say on why studying this is important.

Could you help us? I can do that. And I appreciate you asking because I mentioned it before we started.

I'm like I was trying to prep. And this is what came to mind. And a lot of folks will know this from Calvin's Institutes.

Chapter 1, he opens with this classic observation where he says, quote,

Wisdom, that is, which deserves to be called true and assured, broadly consists of two parts, knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves.

He goes on to say the purpose of the first of these, the knowledge of God, is to show not only that there is one

God whom we all must worship and honor, but also that he is the fount of all truth, wisdom, goodness, righteousness, judgment, mercy, power and holiness.

And he goes on to say no one ever attains clear knowledge of self unless he has first gazed upon the face of the

Lord and then turns back to look upon himself. So this is a critically important topic.

Yeah, I mean, this is where we start. And the statement doesn't go into this. But when you look at all of your theology, it's a study of God.

One of the things I find disheartening, if that's the best word to use, there are many people that do theology and as they're getting into different things, whether it is soteriology, the study of salvation, eschatology, the study of end times, ecclesiology, the study of the church.

In each of these different areas there's lots that could be discussed. One of the things I don't see people do, unfortunately, is ask how does this reflect back to God?

Now, if it's theology, it all goes back to God. And one of the things that is a very good study to do if you're going to study theology is to start with studying the perfections of God, his nature, his attributes, who he is.

Because any study of theology will go back to who God is. I find that many of the things that people debate theologically can be resolved by looking at the attributes of God.

Let me give a quick example why this is important. Some people will make an argument that say, when it comes to how we get saved, they're trying to wrestle with different texts of scripture.

And there's a common phrase I hear from people saying, well, when it comes to election, what

God did was look down the tunnels of time and he saw who would be saved.

And then knowing that who would be saved based on their belief, he elected them before the foundation of time.

Now, that seems like a good statement that would satisfy and solve the problem of how we could have free will and yet God elected us before the foundation of time.

However, when you look at that argument and put it in light of who

God is, you have problems. Why? Well, first off, it says that God is bound by time because he had to look through time.

So he's no longer eternal. Everything's not an eternal now to him. He's a being that is dependent upon time and he doesn't know everything because he didn't know who would be saved.

He had to look through time to figure it out and then make a decision based on what someone did in their free will.

So what you now have is a God who's not eternal and not omniscient. Is that the God of the Bible?

No. So that tells you there must be a different solution to this problem. That argument is not a good solution.

And this is the importance of understanding the perfections of God. Now, we don't get into that here, but I just want to, as a preface to our discussion today, mention that we should always go back to those perfections.

In fact, if you take our course on systematic theology at Striving Fraternity, go to the Striving Fraternity Academy and look at the course on systematic theology.

What do we start with? The attributes of God. Why? Throughout the 80 classes that we have, or about 80 classes,

I'm constantly going back to those attributes because that is where we're going to see how to answer many of the theological things that we have.

Now, we will see some of these attributes in this section, both this week and probably what we'll finish up with in the next episode, because I don't know that we'll get through the whole thing in one.

But what I want us to note here is that we have to always go back to that, even if I'm not laying them all out here.

If you want to see all those attributes, you can go to the Striving Fraternity, go to the store, and at our store, we have a quick reference sheet on the attributes of God.

I think it's only $2 .50 to get one. There's a bundle if you want to get all three of our reference cards.

Buy two, get one free, basically. But if you get that, it's all of the attributes categorized with scripture references so you can look it up.

And that'll help keep your mind straight when it comes to these things. So I hope those things might be helpful tools for you.

Now, Bud, as we get into this, before we start looking at this passage, let us just quickly have a quick word from our sponsors, because we want to make sure that we honor our sponsors who are keeping this show on the air.

We can't really say they're on the air because it's digital, but okay. But the show is sponsored by MyPillow.

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Again, 1 -800 -873 -0176. And use promo code

SFE so that they know that we sent you. Now, Bud, if you wouldn't mind, let's start with God the

Father. This is a longer paragraph. If you could read, and maybe, well, just try to read through this.

I was going to say whether to include all the Scripture references, because there's a number of them, but it would be helpful for folks to have them if they don't have it looking, if they're not looking at it.

So could you read God the Father? I will. Okay.

God the Father, the first person of the Trinity, orders and disposes all things according to His own purpose and grace.

See Psalm 145, 8 and 9, and 1 Corinthians 8, 6. He is the creator of all things,

Genesis 1, 1 -31, and Ephesians 3, 9. As the only absolute and omnipotent ruler in the universe,

He is sovereign in creation, providence, and redemption, Psalm 103, 19 and Romans 11, 36.

His fatherhood involves both His designations within the Trinity and His relationship with mankind.

As creator, He is father to all men, Ephesians 4, 6, but He is spiritual father only to believers,

Romans 8, 14, and 2 Corinthians 6, 18. He has an all -inclusive plan that He designed for His own glory and all things that come to pass,

Ephesians 1, 11. He continually upholds, directs, and governs all creatures and events, 1

Chronicles 29, 11. In His sovereignty, He is neither author nor approver of sin,

Habakkuk 1, 13 and John 8, 38 -47. Nor does He abridge the accountability of moral, intelligent creatures, 1

Peter 1, 17. He has graciously chosen from eternity past those whom

He would have as His own, Ephesians 1, 4 -6. He saves from sin all who come to Him through Jesus Christ.

He adopts as His own all those who come to Him, and He becomes, upon adoption, father to His own,

John 1, 12, Romans 8, 15, Galatians 4, 5, and Hebrews 12, 5 -9.

Okay, so let's start with the first part of this. When we look at this, when we look at the doctrine of God, this really could be broken into three subsections.

God the Father, which we call theology proper. Then we have God the

Son, dealing with Jesus Christ, which is often called Christology, study of Christ.

And then we have noumenology, which is the study of the Holy Spirit, God the

Spirit. So, those are the three that we could see them broken down. I give you the theological terms so that if you hear them, you know what they are.

We want you to be educated. And if you do know what they are, well, then you shouldn't mind repetition.

So, because we want to reach people of all spiritual walks, wherever people are, we want to help you in furthering your walk.

And so as we look at theology proper, the study of God the Father, this is typically where you'd also get into discussion of the

Trinity. And we're going to discuss that as we go out throughout, especially with the

Son. But one of the things that I want to start with, with this, that isn't so much mentioned here with the

Trinity, is many people think of the Trinity as a problem. You'll hear sometimes people will say that, different cults and different groups, will say the

Trinity is a problem. That's a problem for them because they cannot understand that. They cannot understand the Trinity. Understood.

Let me give you a simple way to work through that in case that you speak to maybe a

Muslim and they make the argument that the Trinity is a problem because they can't comprehend it.

Ask this question, and notice I'm going to get back to the attributes of God. Is God greater than our ability to understand

Him? The answer is yes. What we have revealed from God, as we saw in the last episodes, is what

God's revealed to us is self -revelation. We can't go beyond that. We can't go beyond a knowledge of God from other than what

He's revealed to us. But He hasn't revealed everything. There's more to God than what He's revealed, and that's what we don't understand.

So when someone comes and says that they don't understand the Trinity, therefore it's wrong, then you know that they have a

God of their own making because they can fully understand their God. And if their God is something they can't comprehend, they reject it.

So that's a God of their own liking, their own making. The Trinity is a solution to a problem.

The problem is that the Father is called God, the Son is called God, the Spirit is called God. The Father does the works that only

God can do. The Son does works only that God can do. The Spirit does works that only God can do.

The Father has attributes of God. The Son has attributes of God. The Spirit has attributes of God. And yet, they're distinct from one another and separate from one another.

They could be at the same place at the same time and separate from one another. So we could see at Jesus' baptism, you hear the voice of the

Father, you see the Son standing there, and you see the Holy Spirit descending as a dove.

You're going to see that all three are involved in creation, the work of God. They're all three, and by the way, in Isaiah 44, 24,

God says He did that alone. So they're all involved in creation. They're all involved in the resurrection of Christ.

They're all involved in salvation. So you see that they have the unity, and yet there's a distinction.

How do we resolve this problem? The definition of the Trinity. The Trinity resolves the dilemma of how the

Father, the Son, and the Spirit all have the attributes of God, the titles of God, are called

God, do the works of God, and yet they're separate and distinct from one another but exist in the same, you know, could exist in the same time and same place.

In other words, that ignores things like modalism, partialism, these different errors in the views.

So I wanted to lay that as a foundation as we look into theology proper. Let's start with God the

Father, the first person of the Trinity, because I wanted to give that all.

That Trinity is something that people don't often think about. Now, some will say, well, this didn't come about until the 3rd century.

That is true. That's true. The word Trinity didn't exist. It's not in the Bible. But if you're going to argue that because Trinity is not in the

Bible, therefore the Trinity doesn't exist, Bible doesn't appear in the Bible. I guess you have no

Bible. There's a lot of words that are not in the Bible. Omniscience isn't in the

Bible, but we know that God is omniscient because it defines it. It gives the reason of it. So we see the

Trinity taught in the Bible, but the Trinity as defined, three persons, three separate distinct persons in one

Godhead, that is a definition to solve the problem of how we have these three separate distinct persons that are all one being

God. How is that? Well, that definition provides that. So the first person in that Trinity is

God the Father. That's who we're going to look at today. The first part of this says, He orders and deposes all things according to His own purpose and grace.

Now, this is the thing. There are many who end up, right off the bat,

I'm addressing issues in this statement because there are many people who will get into trying to argue for human free will being so important to God that the way they will speak is as if God is subservient due to man's free will.

That's one issue. Another issue you see, such as in Word of Faith, is they will make

God subservient to man that somehow what man's desires, God so loves man that He created man that He just sits in Heaven waiting for man to tell

God what to do. And when you name it and claim it, God is somehow obligated to give it.

With these two areas, what you end up seeing, there's other examples, but you see that what many people do is they're making

God subservient to man. Who becomes God then? Man. What is it that we saw in Genesis 3?

What is it that happened at the garden? What did the serpent say to Eve? God, you want to be like God?

God's telling you not to eat of that fruit because you're going to be like God. What was the temptation?

Being like God. And that hasn't been any different throughout the centuries.

Man still wants to be like God. And so that is what we end up seeing.

And very subtly. But the serpent deceived Eve very subtly as well. So the first thing that we have to do when we're going to discuss

God, the first person of the Trinity, the Father, we have to realize that He orders and disposes of all things.

Everything. Everything. He is in control. I like how R .C. Sproul used to say it. There is not an atom out of God's control.

He is in control of everything. Now people say, so does He cause evil? Well, yeah. He's in control of everything.

He allows it. Now this will get into something that I'm sure we're going to deal with in greater detail later, but He allows people to have a will.

But He's still in control of everything. We can't fully comprehend that. It doesn't mean

God causes everything. Now we tend to think basically you have an action -reaction, right?

Every cause has to have something that caused it. So there has to be some action for that cause.

Because of that thinking, we end up thinking that somehow God can only work the way things work here on earth.

God hasn't revealed everything about Himself. There's a whole lot more to the universe than we can comprehend.

And so God is in control of everything because He says so, but that doesn't mean that He forces things, okay?

And that's the distinction that we have to be aware of. This is an important starting point when we speak of God the

Father because much of the rest of this is going to be based on this. That He does everything, and why does

He do it? For His own purpose. So when my kids were young, bud, I used to catechize them.

Basically for folks that don't know what that means, catechism is a way of training children by asking a question and they give an answer.

And you work through it so they'd memorize the question and the answer. And there were many times as we were doing that, and I'm teaching them theology, that they would ask questions.

Why did God create the universe? And for many of those answers, it would be because He wanted to. My kids started to learn that many of the things that we can't comprehend, the answer is because God wanted to.

And we don't know beyond that. For adults, sometimes the simple answer that we give to the kids is the ones for adults because God wanted to.

It was for His purpose. Deuteronomy 29 .29 is one that, when

I teach theology, comes up very often because it says, and I'm trying to get there, but my

Logos is not working. There we go. The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may observe all the words of the law.

So God hasn't revealed everything, but what He has revealed, that we obey, that we do.

There are plenty of things that we can ask questions about, and we will. You may be asking, as you're listening to Bud and I discuss these things, and say, you know, what about this?

Well, Deuteronomy 29 .29 may come into play because there's many things we just don't have an answer to.

I was thinking about when, you know, the dialogue, the written correspondence between Martin Luther and Erasmus, and one of the famous lines that is so poignant and applicable where we are right now in our conversation, that Luther wrote back to Erasmus saying that your thoughts of God are too human.

And there is a book out there by J .B. Phillips, I think, called Your God is Too Small. And this is a risk that we all run into, even the most faithful.

We tend to not think big enough of God. We tend to make Him more human. And in Psalm, you just quoted a scripture, so let me go to one.

In Psalm 50, God points this out, and He's actually speaking to the wicked, it says in Psalm 50 .16,

but to the wicked, God says, and then you skip down to verse 21, it says, you thought that I was one like yourself.

We've got to be really careful, and a study of theology proper, this doctrine is invaluable.

Yeah, and this becomes necessary for us in looking at this. So, you know, you can look at Colossians 1, because this is more specifically referring to Christ, but we end up seeing there that He upholds everything.

And verse 19 of Colossians 1 .19 says, For it was the

Father's good pleasure for all the fullness of Him to dwell, to dwell in Him.

So the idea here is when we look at Christ and the things He did, it was for the Father's good pleasure.

That's what it's for. So we have to realize, now why does this become an important starting point?

Because one of the things we know about humanity is we are always going to try to make it about us. We're going to try to focus on self, on mankind.

You will see this even in the songs sung in many churches. Many churches sing songs about us and not

God. And what are we doing? Even if it's about what Jesus did on the cross for us, we're not lifting

God up on high when that's what the worship's supposed to be. We're lifting up what God did for us on high as if that's the most important thing.

You're going to see this in many different ways where people start to view even theology and things like that from a man -centered view.

They focus on it because that's all we understand is man. We can't understand everything about God. But we have to constantly be reminding ourselves and redirecting ourselves back to God.

So let's look at the second sentence here. He is the creator of all things.

Now, we see this in Genesis 1. The other passage that I have there is

Ephesians 1. Sorry, Ephesians 3. But I want to read from Isaiah 44 .24.

And I will credit Matt Slick from karm .org with this. When we were discussing on a show we used to do together, it's

Apologetics Live, but he used to be my co -host there and we used to do that together and someone came in arguing against the

Trinity. And Matt ended up bringing this passage up. And I never realized this passage to use it that way.

I never thought about it. Sometimes maybe you do this. You read a passage of Scripture over and over and all of a sudden a light bulb goes off when someone else uses it.

He asked the person. He took them to Colossians and said, Who created everything?

Well, Colossians 1 makes it clear that Jesus created everything that was created. That's what it says. And once he said that, and this was a

Jehovah witness, someone that believes in Jehovah's name is more important. Matt took him to Isaiah 44 .24,

which says, Thus says the Lord your God, Redeemer, the one who formed you from the womb.

I am, I the Lord, and this is Yahweh or Jehovah there, I the

Lord am the maker of all things, stretching out the heavens by myself and spreading out the earth all alone.

Now notice that. Here he's saying God the Father, or in this case Yahweh, which for Jehovah, for the

Jehovah witnesses, they have a problem with that. Jehovah created all things, but Colossians makes it clear that everything that was created was created by Jesus.

And here it says he created alone. So if, as Jehovah witnesses argue, Jehovah created

Michael the Archangel, who then created all things, and Michael the Archangel became Jesus, then he didn't do it all alone.

You see the dilemma they have. No, God the Father created all things. Creation is one of those things we're going to see.

Father, Son, and Spirit all are active in creation. They all did it because they're God. So he is the creator of all things.

This means that anything that was created, he created. Therefore, he was what philosophers would refer to as the uncaused cause.

In other words, everything that was created was created by him, but people ask the question, well, who created God? Well, there has to be something that wasn't created.

One of the things that Einstein was able to prove and science has supported is the fact that the universe had a beginning.

The time -space continuum had a beginning. Once that is true, okay, when we look at it, there's only a couple ways we can look at the universe.

It always existed. Well, science proves that it had a beginning. It created itself.

Well, that's logically impossible because it would first have to exist to be able to create itself. You only have one logical and scientific argument for the creation of the universe.

Someone or something created it. And whatever that someone or something is has to be uncreated because it would have to be that way to be able to create everything that's created.

So you have to have an uncaused cause or an uncreated creator, and that is God. What do we know about that uncreated creator?

Well, in order to create, it has to have a mind. It has to have intelligence. It has to be eternal because it has to be outside of time.

It has to be outside time, space, matter. Okay, so it has to be infinite in those three areas. Well, that being is what we call

God, and He created all things. Therefore, there's nothing that was created that He didn't create.

And, by the way, I'll throw this in, bud. He did it in six literal 24 -hour days.

All right, just for those out there, if we haven't made enough enemies yet. I prefer six days.

The statement goes on to say, As the only absolute and omnipotent ruler of the universe, he is sovereign in creation, providence, and redemption.

Now, this right here is making it clear that there are no other gods out there.

So Mormonism is wrong when it says that there's a god of this planet and there's other beings, people who used to be human, that became gods.

Now, it is kind of interesting. I think the way that Mormonism got to that is they're trying to answer the question,

Who created God? And their answer is, well, you have God the Father, or Heavenly Father, they would refer to Him, had a god of the planet

He was born on, and He got together, Heavenly Father got together with His wife and created all the spirit babies that fill the earth.

So He was a man like us. Now, this may be blowing people's minds, but in Mormonism they actually believe that Heavenly Father was a sinful man like us.

So somehow Jesus Christ was perfect, but Heavenly Father was not. He was a man like us on another planet who lived a good

Mormon life, became a god, got this planet to rule over. He and His spirit wife created spirit babies, and they populate the earth.

Now, if that sounds like science fiction to you, yeah, it is. Before there was a science fiction. I mean, son, you'd expect a sci -fi novel.

But that's what they end up teaching. And what we end up seeing with this answer is, no, there are no other gods.

Scripture is quite clear on that. There are no other gods besides God. He's absolute, and He's all -powerful in His rule.

In other words, there is nothing that's going to be stronger than Him. Your will, your choices are not stronger than His ability.

One of the things that people try to answer with that as well, Bud, that this answers, is people who try to say that God, because they have such an emphasis on God's giving man free will, and free will seems to be what reigns, man's choices.

And so this is, again, lifting up of man and actually lowering of God, making

God somehow subservient. This is called, we talked about modalism, which is, we went to Trinity.

That's when God was in three modes, modalism. So what you have there is, they'll say that God the

Father in the Old Testament, He became Jesus Christ when He walked the earth. Now He changed modes into the spirit. Well, there's another one that sounds similar to that, okay?

Molinism. Molinism is the idea that God is omniscient, so omniscient, that what

He did in eternity past, before He created the universe, He could see in His mind all the different possibilities, every possibility that every person makes.

And what He could do is know which of the, and they would call this different worlds. And so God could look at all the, every,

I mean, think about all the decisions you make and how they interact with other people. He knows how, if you change one decision in this world, what would happen in this world?

If you'd made a different decision, what would happen? He understands all those outcomes. And then He, based on human free will, the choices we made,

He chose the world that would give Him the greatest glory. Now, in that, what becomes the absolute ruler then?

It is not God the Father. It is our free will. By the way, the irony,

I think, of Molinism, Bud, is, and we had on Apologetics Live once, we had someone come in and discuss this, and it was funny to see he never thought of this, and he got trapped.

Because the whole idea of Molinism is to answer that man's free will, we have a free will, and God can't, somehow

God cannot work against our free will. But the way that He's still sovereign is that He chose this world so that within human free will,

God's still sovereign. So I asked this gentleman, in this world that God has selected, can we do anything outside of what we were going to choose?

I mean, once God chose that world, can we do anything other than what we were going to choose in that world?

And he said, well, no. Because part of his whole argument is that if God is sovereign, if He's the absolute, omnipotent ruler, then

He chooses everything, and His mind forces everything, and therefore everything is determinism.

That God determines everything that happens. We don't believe in determinism. I'm going to answer that in a second.

But this is his answer to that. So I asked him, I said, so we can't do anything outside of what we would choose in this world once God selects this world, correct?

He said, that's right. I said, so it's all predetermined by God. Because once He selects that world, we can't do anything else.

And he's like, no, because we had free will to do other things, but not in this world. Not in the world He selected.

According to you, we cannot do anything other than what we would have chosen in this world.

And he just realized he backed himself in to the very thing he was trying to deny. You see, either side of that has determinism.

When you try to say God forces everything, or when you say human will in Molinism and justify

God's sovereignty. No, the answer to this is simple. So simple we can't fully comprehend it.

But it goes back to what we talked about before, in a sense, with superintending. But in this case, what it is, is

God allows us as free moral agents. I'm not saying free will. We don't have a free will.

We are a moral agent. We can make choices between things that are good and bad, but not in the sense of getting right with God, not in the sense of giving

God glory. We make choices between this is, you know, for my own self -preservation, my own pride,

I may choose to do something that is good compared to other moral agents. That's different than saying that we can, you know, that we have a freedom to choose good by God's standard or evil.

We only have that ability to choose good when the Holy Spirit indwells us. And so what we want to focus on or look at with this is the fact that when we look at this,

God works through his own creation in such a way that, yes, he does allow some freedom in our will in the sense where we can make choices.

He doesn't force the choices, and yet he's still an absolute ruler over everything.

And he's all -powerful, so he can do it. He can accomplish anything that's within his nature. He can't do something that's outside his nature.

He can't lie. So there's things he can't do. He can't do things that are sinful, be against the very definition of what sin is, because sin is defined by a violation of the nature of God.

So he is sovereign in that way. So he's sovereign, and I'm saying in three different specific areas, creation, providence, redemption.

And we've been talking about those. Creation, the fact that he created all things. Providence is what we are talking about, these choices that we make.

And he's also sovereign in our redemption, in how we get right with God. Those are three areas that we're going to say he is the absolute, omnipotent ruler.

Any thoughts on that part, Bud? I love the discussion about free will. We are all too eager to claim this mantle for ourselves, and while doing so, restrict

God and his free will. But the fact is, when you know this God in a salvific and sanctifying way, you don't want your free will.

You want his free will. And I think we get a glimpse of that when the

Lord is teaching the disciples, pray your will be done. I don't want my will to be done.

I'm depraved. I'm a wretch. I'm saved by grace. I want what

God wants. And that's different than an unbeliever. So as you study these attributes and you study these doctrines,

God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, you come to know them and realize, I want his will.

And that's one of the little assurances that you have when you sense that, even subjectively, that suddenly, wow,

I hate the things God hates. I love the things God loves, which is different for me.

That's a wonderful assurance for you, and keep pursuing that kind of study. But you want God to have free will.

Yes. And God has, when we speak of free will, God is the one that has free will, ultimately.

We don't have a free will, and this is hard for some people to understand. We have a will that's cursed by sin.

We have a sin nature, and we cannot say that our will has freedom because everything we do is going to be, before we're saved, is going to be influenced, and because we're a slave to sin, that's what rules.

And so we have to understand that. When we understand that, then we can—

All right, let's move on with our statement here. His fatherhood involves both his designations within the

Trinity and his relationship with mankind. So let me stop there and answer that part of it.

So when we say that God's the Father, we are not saying that he somehow had the

Son as offspring. It is more of a title. Father is a title. Son is a title.

Spirit is a title. In the sense, because he's not a father the way we think of a father, that we have offspring of children, therefore the son was not some sort of offspring from the father, so the father came first, and that's how a lot of people end up thinking of it because they think of the father -son relationship.

But it's more just almost like a headship within the

Trinity, a view that the father has a certain role because when you look at this, all three of them are spirit, and yet only one's called the spirit, so how could that be?

These are not describing them in physical terms, but it is a delineation that God gives of himself for each of the persons.

We don't see names for them until Jesus became a man, and then he had a human name,

Jesus, but that was not the way they designate within the Trinity.

So the father is the designation within the Trinity, but it also talks about his relationship to mankind, and we continue on to say, as he is the father to all men.

Now, when we say he's the father of all men, I did put a clarifying thing here, but he is spiritually the father only to believers.

Why am I doing this? Well, let me pull up a passage here for us to look at, because many groups,

Jehovah Witnesses and others, will argue that we're all children of God. We're all

God's children. We're created in the image of God from Genesis. Well, what does it mean to be created in the image of God?

What it means to be created in the image of God means that we have the likeness of God in some areas.

And what does that mean? That means that we have certain attributes of God that he communicated to us, and these are sometimes called the communicable attributes.

They are the perfections of God that we also share, things like intelligence, emotions.

These are attributes of mankind. Now, if you take our class at the Striving Fraternity Academy on Systematic Theology, I break these down in attributes of deity, attributes of personality, and attributes of morality.

And the reason I do that is because what you end up seeing is that they answer specifically how

God has created things, has certain attributes that he shares with angels and with humans.

So what you end up seeing is God has attributes of deity that only

God has, but God shares with both angels and humans attributes of personality.

There's things that we have that we share in common. But then there's attributes of morality that he only shares with humans.

That is made in the image of God. There's attributes that we have unlike anything else in creation.

Animals, angels do not have those attributes. And so that's what it means to be made in the image of God.

So we share in that. So in that sense, we're made in the image of God, but we are not all children of God.

So when it becomes being children of God, it doesn't mean being born of the line of Abraham. That doesn't make you a child of God.

No, what makes you a child of God is believing in Jesus Christ, being a spiritual child of God. How do we know that?

John 1 .12. But as many as received him, sorry,

I have it memorized in the ESV. That's the problem. And I'm reading New American Standard. The switch was hard.

But as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God.

Even to those who believe on his name. So not everybody is a child of God. Only those who believe in Jesus Christ have the right to be called the child of God.

That is an important distinction. So in a sense, God is the father, as the creator from Genesis, he's the father of all people in the sense that we're made in the image of God.

But that does not mean we're all spiritually children of God. There is a distinction that we see made in scripture.

And therefore, when you have people that say we're all God's children, that is inaccurate. Because we're not all

God's children. And this is the thing that I think we end up having to see with this.

Is that as we look at who God is, he created man in his image, yes, but that doesn't make us children.

And I also want to say, because we're children, this does talk about us, we as those who are believers can speak of ourselves as brothers and sisters spiritually.

That doesn't make us actual physical brothers and sisters. We say we're children of God, but we are not physically children of God.

This answers the question of Mormonism. See, Mormonism would say that Heavenly Father had a wife, had physical union, produced spirit babies, and those spirit babies, when people have children on earth, those spirit babies get a body.

So God in Heaven, Heavenly Father is with his wife, producing more children.

Those are the spirits that get put into bodies. And that's how they say we are children of God.

In their case, it's an actual union. It's a physical relationship that creates it.

So it would be the way we would think of a child today. And that's where they get, they end up seeing the father and the son, well, they must be a physical union.

By the way, a fun thing to ask Mormons, Bud, when you come upon them, I like to ask this question,

I'll ask them, do you believe that Heavenly Father and his spirit wife produced

Jesus? And they say, yes. Okay. And you believe that Heavenly Father had a father, you know,

God of the planet he was from, and had a spirit goddess, or God had a mother.

Yes. Okay. And you believe that Heavenly Father created all things, don't you?

Yes. And Jesus Christ created all things. Yes. And I go, okay. Here's the question I don't understand.

How did Heavenly Father create the planet he was born on and his parents before he was born?

And even more so, how did Jesus Christ create the planet his father and grandfather were born on and create them before he was born?

Yeah. Right? They're trying to answer this question of where did God come from, and they create a bigger problem for themselves.

Yeah, and I thought of that earlier when you mentioned that. I'm like, you create this sort of, you know, infinite regression that you just simply can't answer.

You're just creating a loop for yourself because you won't accept what Scripture clearly teaches.

So you've, you know, you've made your problem worse. The hole's only getting deeper. And you just arbitrarily are going to pick some point to say, okay, this is where it stops.

But you don't get to do that. No. No, you don't. And that's what this is trying to say in the statement here.

Right? And this is what all this is. God's the absolute, omnipotent ruler. You don't get to make that. He defines how things work.

He defines who he is. So, you know, we have to, we can only look at what

Scripture reveals of God. But when we try to answer the questions that we can't have a knowledge to and understanding to, because it's beyond our understanding, that's the issue.

I thought about putting together a more lengthy work on the perfections of God many years ago.

And I had a title for it if I ever did it. Finite understanding of the infinite.

Because that's really what we're doing when we talk about who God is. We have a finite understanding of an infinite being.

We can never fully understand him. So, you know, when we look at that, we have to understand we are limited.

We are limited in what we can understand about who God is. And we're not even going to be able, we're so limited, we're limited by time, and we can't even finish the first paragraph.

And the only paragraph here we have on God the Father. But we try.

We'll end up picking this up again and speak about God the Father. Because the rest is, there's too much in the rest of this for us to do it justice and explain it.

But what I do hope that you're seeing is how compact every sentence of this statement is.

There's so much here that we're trying to answer and address. So many things that it is trying to correct and prevent.

What is this statement for? The reason we have a doctrinal statement like this is guardrails. They're guardrails to say, if you're outside of this, there's problems.

Here's what the problems are. You stay within the lane. This is what we think Scripture is teaching about these different areas.

And I'm trying to give you why these things are important. This is important for us to think about.

Christian, you say you love God but don't want to study theology?

You don't want to take the time? Well, let me ask you. What kind of Christian would you really be?

You call yourself a little Christ? That's what Christian means? You're a little Christ who doesn't love

God enough that you want to know everything about Him? I would have to wonder, if someone really is a

Christian, if they don't want, if they don't have a love for the one who died for them, if they don't have a love for the one who paid an eternal fine for them, you say you love

God but you don't have time for Him? You don't have time to study Him? Would I believe that, that you love your spouse but you never spend time with her or Him?

No, when people are dating, they want to learn everything they can about that person. They want to find out what their interests are.

They want to find out what they like because they want to do things to please that person. Well, how much more should we love

God, the infinite Creator, who not only created us, He sustains us.

The breath that's currently in our lungs is more than we deserve. If in His justice, if He wasn't long -suffering with us and have grace and mercy with us,

He would strike us dead the first time we committed sin. But He is long -suffering with us and He allows us to continue to live.

And He does so by His own purpose for His own glory. And He does that and we breathe and we use the very breath in our lungs to sit there and say we don't have an interest in God.

We use the breath in our lungs to maybe talk about things that gossip and sinful things.

We sit there and use our time for earthly pleasures and those become more important than studying the eternal

Creator of the universe. Do we really love God? This is why this is important.

You truly love God, then you will want to know Him. You want to know what pleases Him. You want to do what pleases

Him because you love Him. May the love of Christ so compel us that we would study theology.

Okay, that's not exactly how that verse says it. But should that not be so true? That when we think about what

Christ did for us, we should be so compelled that we want to know

Him more. We want to study everything we can about Him. This doesn't mean studying theology so we can have a big head and know all the big terminology.

Notice, throughout this episode and the others, I'm giving you the big theological terms, but I'm not just using them.

I'm giving you the meanings. We're defining them. We're explaining them. We're going into details. We're applying this.

Why? So that you can be thoroughly equipped. So that if you have error, you can spot it.

So you have a love for God. That you'd want to know Him and study more about Him. That's the reason we're going through this.

I hope this is helpful for you. I hope that you enjoy this. And I hope that you find this valuable for your spiritual growth.

And so we'll continue with this next episode. We'll probably, at some point, we may have to drop in if we got some interviews.

We're about to go to G3, Bud and I. Those that are part of the Christian Podcast community, we have a growing number of podcasters.

We should mention the latest podcast, Bud. I'll let you give a shout -out to him.

I know you know him as well, but our buddy Gene, client, has now started his

Squirrel Chatter. He's been podcasting for a little while, but he is the latest in the growing number of podcasts at the

Christian Podcast community. If you want to check them all out, go to christianpodcastcommunity .org. You can subscribe to all of them.

You can subscribe to Christian Podcast Community as an RSS feed. And so you can see all of the podcasts we have there.

If you go to shows, you can look at them by category. And we encourage you, guys, if you are getting value out of this, if you like this show, please share it.

That is how people find it. That's the best way is if all of you are sharing this on social media with your friends, saying, hey, go check this episode out.

Follow them. That helps us. But Gene in Squirrel Chatter is the latest.

And I know you were very much against having him in, right? That's not how it happened? I love

Gene. No, you told me that. Well, Gene said you would vote against him.

No, he did not say that. No, great. Go listen to Gene.

Squirrel Chatter, he's doing different devotional readings. And Gene is just a wealth of information.

I know a lot of people were excited. The beans were spilled before he was officially on by Voice of Reason Radio.

They were so excited to see that that they spilled the beans before the website was all set up.

But he is the latest. And we've got some very good podcasters coming there.

So go check out ChristianPodcastCommunity .org. See all the podcasts that are there. One that I want to encourage you is the recent one has

One Little Candle. And I've got to tell you, son, I've been surprised with that one. And I guess that doesn't sound right, but you see podcast names and people, you see all these podcasts.

We reject more podcasts than we accept in the community. And we see names of podcasts and we see people, what they want to do with their podcast.

And we're always like, sometimes it's like, oh, okay, not going to like this one probably. And One Little Candle, here's this, she's an older woman, been living a

Christian life for a long time, just has a lot of maturity, and just started podcasting.

And, you know, it's not like she's someone who studied theology, things like that. And yet just a lot of practical wisdom in a lot of different areas.

Like, she just hits, like, lots of different topics that you don't hear people talk about. And that's what

I kind of appreciate. Like, she was talking in one of the recent ones about, you know, basically how to be a grandparent. How to grandparent your grandchildren.

I'm like, you know, I thought about that going, when was the last time that I heard a teaching on being a grandfather or grandmother?

And I was like, I don't know that I've really ever heard a sermon or teaching or podcast on that.

It was like, wow, okay. Really original in some of her content. So, a lot of cool podcasts that are out there.

If you're listening to this, you obviously listen to podcasts, or even if you listen to them on the website.

But go to Christian Podcast Community, check them all out. I really would encourage you to do that. One of our other new ones, there's one, oh, what's that guy?

The Bud's Own Podcast. Yeah, that guy. Yeah. Oh, wait, that's you, Bud. I'm sorry. Wow. You've had some really good interviews there.

You've been doing, you've done, you're more of an interview show, and you've had some really good interviews. Yeah, I just, I like having folks on that, you know, they don't really have their own podcast.

They don't really have maybe a bigger platform. Not that all the 15 people that listen to me constitute a bigger platform.

But it's interesting to hear how the Lord is still at work. I mean, so many people, you know, they're concerned, they're anxious, given the times that we're in.

And I'm like, no, I know these guys. The Lord is at work. He's edifying saints. He's building the church.

So, that's really what it's about. And the Bud, obviously, is kind of my name, but Bud's in the faith.

We're saints and friends in the faith. All right. So, check out ChristianPodcastCommunity .org

to check all those podcasts out. And you know what, Bud? What's that? That's a wrap.

This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to StrivingforEternity .org.

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