Special Episode III: Weight of Majesty Introduction | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, director of Mediagratia. We spent the last two weeks in the podcast introducing you to Mediagratia's first multimedia Bible study, Behold Your God, Rethinking God Biblically.

The Weight of Majesty as a Standalone Study

This week, we want to present you with the introductory message of the second 12-week study in the series, Behold Your God, The Weight of Majesty. Now, I say the second study, but I don't mean to say that the first is prerequisite to going through the second.

Each study was designed to stand alone so that either one could be done first. As with the Rethinking God Biblically study, the heart of this study is the accompanying daily devotional workbook. You can find a PDF download of week one of The Weight of Majesty workbook on the Mediagratia blog.

Let me encourage you to be careful how you hear as we begin the intro session this week, and to download and work through that first chapter in the workbook before next week's episode, where we'll present you the week one session of The Weight of Majesty.

David’s Meditation on the Weight of God’s Majesty

In the 145th Psalm, David commends God to us by calling attention not only to what He's done, but to what He is. In the opening verses of this Psalm, we read, Every day I will bless you, and I will praise your name forever and ever.

Great is the Lord, and highly to be praised. His greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall praise your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts. Men shall speak of the power of your awesome acts, and I will tell of your greatness.

Here, David tells us, there is one being whose immensity is beyond calculation. Here is one being whose mighty deeds will be discussed from one generation to the next. But at the heart of this opening passage, there is a verse I didn't read, in which we find what David's real determination is personally.

He says this, in verse 5, On the glorious splendor of your majesty, and on your wonderful works, I will meditate. David is determined to meditate. What does that mean? To repeatedly, daily, contemplate, to hold before his mind the glorious splendor of God's majesty.

Now, in the New American Standard, these three words, glorious, splendor, and majesty, they're all very common Bible terms for us. And so, it's easy to read these kinds of terms and then skim across them quickly and think that it's just God's stuff.

But I want us to slow down and look at them, to consider what David's saying. The first word, glorious, is really a particularly rich word in the Hebrew language. Originally, it was used to describe things that had great weight.

So, a mountain was glorious. It was substantial. It was weighty. If a man was going to take a trip and he's planning his course, he has to take into consideration this mountain. It's not a light matter.

The idea entered the marketplace where things that had weight were generally things that had value. And it's the same for us today. If you buy something and it feels very light, you tend to think it's cheaply made.

The word eventually was applied to people. And in that, it meant that they were people of substance, not just empty talk. They had worth and value. And so, eventually, this word glory, which started out as weighty, became a word that was synonymous with reputation, a person's glory, or their honor.

So, David is telling us in this psalm that the splendor of God's majesty is a weighty, substantial thing. It's not a light matter. It is something that every person will have to take seriously. The next word, splendor.

This and the following word, majesty, are very similar in the Hebrew. In fact, if you look them up in the Hebrew dictionaries, you'll find that the same English words are used interchangeably to translate them.

So, you can say splendor and majesty, or you could say beauty and honor, or even glory. We might say this. God's majesty, that is the honor that belongs to a monarch, possesses a splendor or a beauty that astonishes those that view it.

Now, put them together. David is determined to daily contemplate the weight of God's majesty. And it's a majesty that possesses an amazing beauty. Psalm 145 verse 5 gives us the title for our new study.

Behold your God, the weight of majesty. But it also helps us to set the course for these next 12 weeks. Our determination, like David's, ought to be to daily contemplate, to continually hold before our mind's eye, the perfections of God, the splendor and the beauty of God's majesty, the weight of what it is to be God.

It's only found in one being, but it is always found in that being. Now, during these 12 weeks, we'll be studying God's attributes. These are things that God reveals to be true of Himself. Sometimes we call them attributes.

Sometimes we call them His majesty. Sometimes we may describe them as His perfections. Now, knowing God doesn't come natural to any of us. Sin has created a barrier between us and God. There is a darkness within.

Paul says that no one understands God. And the problem is not merely in the mind. It's a moral problem. Nobody seeks for the Lord. Nobody obeys the Lord. This full description of the problem of sin brings into question, can we even know a God like this?

This interior darkness that blinds us to God. We have ideas of God, but apart from the work of Jesus Christ, these ideas, even with Bibles in our hands, they're idolatrous. They're gods that we've fashioned in our imagination.

But a real and personal acquaintance with a living God is only brought about through Jesus Christ. I wonder if we've ever stopped and considered that in the new covenant privileges, Christ has done so much more for us than just removed our guilt, taken away our shame, given us a right to heaven.

He has brought us to God. The prophet Jeremiah records one of the clearest descriptions of the new covenant and he records it hundreds of years before the birth of Christ. God speaks to the prophet and he says this, Behold, days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant.

And he describes this new covenant. I will put my law within them, and on their heart I will write it, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. They will not teach again each man his neighbor, saying, Know the Lord, for they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest of them.

Now, don't miss what he's saying. The covenant includes a change of heart. The covenant will, of course, include the forgiveness of sin. But the covenant includes this strange, yet essential aspect that we don't often think of.

In the new covenant, you will not need to turn toward your neighbor and say, Let me tell you who God is. Because every person who is in the new covenant, by virtue of being in the covenant, will know the Lord.

Christ is not saying that there won't be teachers in the New Testament. He's not saying that churches won't have pastors. We read in Ephesians that He gives pastors and teachers to the church. He equips them for that task.

But what He is saying is this. It is impossible to be in the new covenant and not have a real acquaintance with the God of the covenant. At the end of Christ's earthly ministry, in John 17, He's praying, and He says this, This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.

But when we talk about the new covenant and knowing God through Christ, we're not talking about a thing that occurred once when we came to Him in repentance and faith, but then ended, once done, forever accomplished.

What we're talking about is a lifelong journey. So knowing God is the beginning of Christianity. But really, Christianity is a lifelong pilgrimage in which there is an ever-expanding understanding of the God that we belong to.

Listen to the Apostle Paul. I count all things to be lost in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ.

Now, we're familiar with this passage. It's Philippians 3. But let me ask you this question. How long do you think Paul has been a Christian prior to writing these words? A month? No, it's longer than a month, isn't it?

A year, perhaps. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that baby Christians say. Oh, I really want to know the Lord. I would give up anything to know Him better. The astonishing thing is, according to the best scholarship we have, Paul's been a Christian about 27 years.

I've been a Christian 27 years. Is this us? Like Paul, do we yearn to know Christ 27 years after first meeting Him? Is there still a stretching of every nerve as we open the Bible pleading with the Lord that we might know Him?

Being willing to count everything as loss? Let me ask you another question. Did this kind of adventure the adventure of knowing God and pressing on even after 27 years did it come to an end with the death of the apostles?

Did it come to an end when John put the last period in the book of Revelation? Well, no. Christian history is full of believers who felt like Paul. Let me give you just two examples. The young Scottish pastor, 19th century Robert Murray McShane, recorded in his spiritual journal when he was a young pastor, I rose early to seek God and found Him whom my soul loveth.

Who, he asks, would not rise early to meet such company? It's a good question. Who would you get up early to meet? Charles Spurgeon, the famous pastor in London of the same century, wrote this. The proper study of a Christian is the Godhead.

It is a subject so vast that all our thoughts are lost in its immensity. It is so deep that our pride is drowned in its infinity. When was the last time that our own personal pursuit of a vital knowledge of God, even though we've been Christians perhaps for many years, when was the last time that the subject of God felt so vast that we got lost in its immensity and our pride drowned in its infinity?

J .I. Packer, the author of the well-known book Knowing God, writes this. What makes life worthwhile is having a big enough objective, something which catches our imagination and lays hold of our allegiance.

And this the Christian has in a way that no one else has. For what higher, more exalted, and more compelling goal can there be than to know God? Is this our spiritual pedigree? If you've already gone through this study, Behold Your God, Rethinking God Biblically, then you will be familiar with the approach in this study.

Each week there's a DVD session and this follows a week of Bible lessons where you've, in a workbook, you've gone back to the Scriptures. Both are important, but one is more important, the workbook, because it drives us back to the Word of God.

It drives us to listen to Him ourselves. It's always helpful to hear what other believers have learned in their own pursuit of the Lord, but nothing can compare to the adventure of sitting with God and God teaching you.

Now we need to be very honest. If all the talk that we have about knowing a living God is really only religious talk, then it won't matter how you approach the study. But if a man or a woman or a child can know the living God, then we want to be very careful how we approach this.

A great deal will be said in the next 12 weeks about knowing God, but perhaps in this first session, I might just give you five realities that we need to keep in mind as we pursue the contemplation of God.

The Order of Studying God’s Attributes

The first is this. Order and connection are significant when we study the character of God. There is a definite advantage that we gain by approaching the truths of God in a very specific way, and that's reflected in the way that the workbook is laid out.

Let me explain. Historically, Bible teachers have divided the attributes of God, the perfections of God, into two categories. We can call them the greatness of God and the goodness of God. Now, because we use both of those words fairly loosely in our day, I want to be very specific as we define that.

Greatness is a word that speaks of amount, or size, extent, or even intensity. So when we say the greatness of God, we're talking about a category in which God's bigness, the immensity of God, is being examined.

So greatness deals with qualities of God which describe His immeasurable majesty, like God's self-existence, God's immutability, God's transcendence, His infinity, all power, all knowledge, all presence, eternity, sovereignty.

Goodness is a category that speaks of God's moral perfections. So we're not only talking about benevolence or kindness, as we think of the word good, but of a moral goodness, a moral beauty. There is holiness and righteousness, love, benevolence, and patience in God, but there is also, in His goodness, there is faithfulness, there is justice, and there is wrath.

It's always a temptation for us to skip over the attributes that describe God's greatness, and to run quickly to the attributes of His goodness because we feel that the attributes of goodness are more intimately connected with our unhappiness.

So, for example, it's very easy to understand why God being a God of grace and mercy affects us, but it's not so easy for us to understand how I'm going to apply to daily life the fact that God is the only self-existent being.

But if we give into that temptation and we rush past the greatness, the bigness of God, and move to the goodness of God, then we have a problem. The attributes of goodness become minimalized. They get small in our minds, and they become weightless things to us.

So, as in our own day, we can talk a lot about God's love, but people aren't so shocked if you say to them, God loves you. But part of the reason is because they have never cultivated an accurate understanding of the bigness of God, and so thinking of God as a fairly small being, if they think of Him at all, they think that He ought to love them.

When we read John Newton's Amazing Grace, we are amazed at John Newton's Amazing Grace. How can He be so amazed at a thing that we take for granted? So there's that danger. There's another danger. If you only look at His greatness, the immensity, the bigness, transcendence, well, if you don't connect that to the goodness of God, then you will end up with a being that you're viewing that is an all-powerful, all-present, irresistibly sovereign tyrant.

If God is as big and as great as He describes Himself to be, but He's not also as good as He describes Himself to be, then we would not want to be around a God like that. So the order is this. We start with greatness, and we want to enlarge by the grace of God, enlarge our small views.

But we quickly attach those to the attributes of goodness, His moral perfection. So now moral perfection, all those qualities of God's goodness, they're expanded, and they mean something to us. And the greatness of God is made beautiful by the moral perfections.

So order is important. But when we talk about order, there is one other matter. Each week in the workbook, the lessons are laid out in a basic way that represents a theological order. It begins with the overall testimony of Scripture.

So day one, if we're looking at the omnipresence of God, what does the Bible say about God's all-presence? And what do some of the best theologians say about that? So that's a general overview. But in day two, we move to some historic account in Scripture where God reveals Himself to be all-present.

And when we come to a passage where God reveals His attribute like that, there's two questions we always want to ask. What is God saying about Himself? And why does He say it? So think about God and Abram.

God says to Abram, I am the Lord God almighty, all-powerful, all-might is mine. What does it mean, almighty? So we spend some time asking that question. But another question is, why? God, why did you tell a man like Abram that you're almighty?

Why did you say it at this point in his life? If we can answer that type of a question, it does help us to know how God wants us to apply that to ourselves. Each week then moves onto a site of this attribute as it's portrayed in the person of Christ and in His work.

This is what the old writers called noon-day divinity, or the brightest type of theology. If we want to see these extraordinary truths about God reflected, the best place to look at them is in the person and work of Christ.

And then the week will end with practical applications. How do I live in light of the reality of that God? So order is important. The second, there are a couple of dangers that have to be avoided. The first is humanizing.

We think of God as one of us, just a little bigger. And then this shows up in a study like this, in this way. We tend to think of the attributes of God as being maintained by God by some effort on His part, like they would be for us.

So we think of Him as being kind of like us, just much bigger and better. For example, if you say you are an honest person, or a kind person, a patient person, or a faithful person, then you are honest, kind, patient, and faithful because you get up in the morning and you exert some energy of soul to be that kind of a person.

And the harder you work at it, perhaps, the more successful you are at it. But when we speak of the perfections of God, these are part of who He is. It's essential to Him. Or what we could say, if we can use this description, it comes naturally to Him.

He doesn't exert energy to maintain any of them. So He is holy, but not because He wakes up in the morning and says to Himself, I've got to stay away from bad things today because I'm a holy God. I need to maintain that holiness.

Holiness is effortless to God. It's what He is. He dwells everywhere. He is omnipresent, but He never travels. He knows everything, but He never studies. Think of it like this. As a human, humanness is essential to your existence.

If you're alive as a human, then you have humanness and you haven't done anything to maintain that today. So you could wake up today and you could be a very rotten human or you could be a very kind and nice human, but it doesn't matter how you act.

It doesn't matter if you even think about it. You're human. Human is essential to you. It's natural to you. God, when we read these attributes in Scripture, His greatness and His goodness, these come naturally to the Lord.

Another danger, humanizing God is one, but fragmenting God is another. When we study attributes of God, especially as we divide them up so that we can look carefully at them, it is a temptation to think that actually in reality, they dwell in God in small little compartments, nicely divided, separated from each other.

But that is not true. Theologians say that God is a unity. He is a perfect harmony. There are actually, we could say, no parts in God. So while we can look at His attributes individually, they are not in reality isolated from the other attributes.

When we look at the love of God and the wrath of God, if we were talking about a human, there would be a conflict there. But in God, these are perfectly interwoven. Really, there aren't two different things, love and wrath in God.

There's just God. And He is the God who has love, but He is also the God who has wrath. When we look at all of these attributes, we're not looking at different parts of God. We're looking at one united God, and we're turning this God before our eyes in the Scripture, and we're seeing Him from different angles.

Every attribute that we study should be built on the attributes that you studied prior to that. So in week five, you ought to have four weeks of attributes you've been looking at. And so when you come to week five, that attribute will be greatly enlarged because it's standing on the shoulders of the other four.

And the other four will be sweetened by the fact that now you've added a fifth, and you understand that they're completely at harmony with each other. Let me give you a third reality we need to grapple with.

Responding to God with Repentance and Faith

How God teaches you today will in great measure be based on how you respond to what He said to you yesterday. A basic principle of the kingdom of God is this. If truth is rejected, then God grows silent.

If truth is taken and faithfully applied, then God gives more truth. In Christ's final night with the disciples before the crucifixion, He says this in John 14, verse 21, He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me, and he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will disclose Myself to him.

And we apply that to our study. God will disclose, will manifest Himself in an ever greater manner to one kind of person, the person that took what God said last time and took it seriously. There is no study, there is no preacher that can help a person know God if that person is bent on refusing to apply what God says.

Two responses that are always required. Repentance, adjusting Myself to fit what God says, instead of trying to adjust God to fit what I live like. When you are confronted by God in the Bible, who is being adjusted, you or Him?

Repentance makes room for truth. Then there's faith, not positive thinking. But taking the things that God has revealed about Himself, and like Abram, even if all you have is his words on the page, you risk everything to live on them.

Labor, Dependence, and the Cost of Knowing God

Let me give you a fourth reality. Labor must be united with dependence. Job says in chapter 28, there are mines for silver and gold, iron is taken from the dust of the earth, copper is smelted from rock, and he describes all the risks and the labor that men will go to, to get these things.

But we read in Psalm 19 that the words of God are more precious than gold. So, we come, and we don't let anything deter us. We crash against the Scriptures, we ransack every chapter of the Bible if we have to, but we must have God.

And hard work will not deter us. We are determined to contemplate the weight of His majesty. But as you do that, there's dependence. In other words, there's a prayer that's always on your lips. God, open my eyes.

Show me Yourself. Last one. Knowing God always has a cost. I can study history and know about people in history. It doesn't cost me much, but if I'm going to have an encounter with a living God in the Scripture, if God is going to teach me about Himself through this book, then it may not be the safe event that I think it's going to be.

We may come to a study like this and say, well, I want to study this book on the character of God because it will make me a better person. But what if it unmakes you? What if it unravels you at the core?

Are you going to pay the cost? You think it will enlarge your life, make it better and bigger, but what if it takes you captive? And the things that you're seeing about God, it means that you can never live the way you used to live.

It's not a safe pastime. But if it's the God of the Bible we're getting to know, then like Paul, we too would say it's worth losing everything. John Owen, the 17th century English pastor and one of the greatest theologians of that century, gave us an insight into his heart when he said this, My goal is God himself.

At any cost, dear Lord, by any road. May the Lord make those our words too. Let's pray. Our everlasting God, you are unlike any other and we need you as much today as we ever have. So we plead with you during these 12 weeks in a special way and for your glory, will you stoop down?

Will you teach us? In Christ's name we ask. Amen.