3 Attributes of God, Lesson 2

Well, welcome to the Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Systematic Theology. We're very glad to have you with us this week on another exciting episode. We are going to be continuing our study on the Attributes of God.

We have Lessons 1 and 2 already up that we've finished, but we are going to start Lesson 1 that was in two parts. We do want to welcome a couple of new students. We have some new students with us this week, some people who have enrolled.

If you are a student, you've enrolled on our website. We encourage you to get your syllabus out. I know that there's been some videos out there claiming that our syllabus didn't exist. Some people that were putting some videos making the claim, but now they had to admit that it does exist.

I couldn't get that video to actually prove that they were out there doing that, but all 80 pages of the syllabus are there for you. I hope that each of you that are enrolled students, that you have that syllabus, that you are on Lesson 2 of the syllabus.

We're going to look at the Attributes of God Part 2, or Lesson 2, and we're going to do that today. If you have your syllabus, get that out. That is one of the benefits of being an enrolled student to the academy.

You get that 80-page syllabus. Something came in the mail tonight, or this week, and I know the person's not watching live. Look what I got. That's right, Melissa's getting married. Melissa and John, they're getting married.

I didn't think he'd actually go through with it, but wow, I guess he's going to. I'll be out of that pretty soon. It's coming up pretty close. If you're familiar with Striving Fraternity Ministries, you probably know who Melissa is.

She works for us, and we are very happy for them. They'll be getting married. You could be putting it on their wall, congratulating them if you haven't already. We are, this week, in Lesson 2. This week, what we're going to do, if you remember, we're in Book 1 of our School of Systematic Theology.

We're calling it God's Throne Room. We've specifically been looking at the doctrine of God. In doing so, we started with a view of the attributes of God related to His deity. This week, what we're going to do is we're going to look at those attributes of God that are related to His personality.

When we look at these attributes of God, let's take another look as a reminder of what an attribute of God is. Attributes are those qualities that cannot be changed or separated from the idea of what God is.

To discuss any of these things is to discuss all of these attributes as God, but we see that an attribute is something that cannot grow and cannot change. If one of the members of the Godhead has these attributes, He has all of them, and it's not something that will change.

That gets important later on. Attributes are what God has revealed to us, although attributes are not the sum total of God. Number three there is that attributes may be ascribed to any member or any person of the Godhead.

So, any one of the three persons of the Godhead, all of these attributes apply to each person. That's important because today we're going to talk, as I said, about those attributes of personality. Now, if you were following on the Facebook, and you've been seeing what we've been posting out there, we said that there's some issues where this specific doctrine, the personality of God, when we look at these attributes, we start to see how Christianity differs from some other beliefs, alright?

Specifically, I just got done, or almost done, I'm not completely done, reading a book by Deepak Chopra. It is a book that is trying to argue that Jesus Christ was actually trying to teach us Buddhism.

I mean, you obviously knew that, right? He tries to argue that the Catholic Church changed Jesus' teachings to argue for the doctrine we now have, but really what Jesus was trying to do was to teach us on Buddhism.

And the real issue there is that he's trying to say that Jesus Christ gained a God-consciousness, and that in that God-consciousness, that's what he was trying to teach to his followers, that we too could be like God, have a God-consciousness.

And one of the problems is that Deepak Chopra can learn a lot if he would actually go and watch our classes that we did on the school of Biblical Harmoneutics, because his Harmoneutics, his interpretation of the Bible, out of the many passages of the Bible that he tried to use to argue for his position, I think only about three of them actually were in context.

The rest of them were out of context. And those multitude that he took out of context, the majority of them, well, they're taking it to teach the exact opposite of the context. You have a problem if you're teaching something that's exact opposite of the context of the Scripture that you're saying this is what it really was teaching.

But one of the things is he says that we have a spirituality that gets us to a God-consciousness. I guess he never really read Genesis 3, where the reason Adam and Eve sinned was because they wanted to be, oh yeah, that's right, like God, oops.

Or maybe he didn't read through Isaiah 14 when Satan fell because he wanted to be, what was that again? Oh, that's right, like God. Yeah, what's wrong with Buddhism? They're teaching that we can be like God.

But the problem is that God of Buddhism is not a personal God, it is a God-consciousness. It's becoming aware of the God in you. And so this is this idea that we can kind of become God. Now, before doing the show earlier today, I went and talked to a friend of mine who is a Buddhist, just to make sure that I wasn't taking it out of context at all.

And he hadn't read the book that I had read, but said that this is what Buddhism teaches. And this is the problem, because as we study the attributes of God, we're going to see tonight that the God of Christianity is a personal being, a person, not some consciousness that we arrive to.

You know, it also causes a problem for Jehovah Witnesses, because Jehovah Witnesses will say that God, specifically the Holy Spirit really, is a force, like electricity. Well, these attributes apply to the Holy Spirit as well.

We're going to see that in much more detail when we look at the trinity of God, and when we look at... And no, I didn't say it wrong. I know some of you pronounce it Trinity, but we'll get to that lesson in a couple lessons.

But also when we look at the person of the Holy Spirit, we're going to see how that can't be. So what we're going to look at today is the fact that the attributes related to God's personality. Now, these are the qualities, if you have your syllabus, those of you who are students, you have your syllabus under Roman numeral number two, you see the attributes related to God and you have your first fill in the blank.

And that is that those qualities which God possesses, because He is a person, He's not a force and He's not a consciousness. He's a person. It is these qualities that make up the image of God in man. That's what we see in Genesis 1 .26.

In Genesis 1 .26, we see that it says, Then God said, Let us make man in our image according to our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle, over all the earth, and over the creeping things that creep on the earth.

Now notice there, for Dave in the chat room, that didn't say that we have dominion over God. We were actually designed to have dominion over the things that God created. In other words, God still has dominion over us, Dave.

So, but we do see that we have an image of God within us. And these are those attributes that you and I are going to see we possess as well because you and I are a person, at least I hope you're a person.

Maybe, are you sure you exist? But no, seriously though, we end up looking at these attributes that relate to people. And these are things that we have here, and if you look in your syllabus, the first at letter A, you see that the first one is spirituality, spirituality.

And I have a definition for you there in your syllabus. And it is that the essence of God is spirit, alright? This is the invisible source of personality. Let's look at a verse where it describes that.

God is spirit and those who worship the Father must worship Him in spirit and in truth. So what we see there is that God is a spiritual being. We also are spiritual beings. That is why every single culture, no matter where they are, every single human being has a God consciousness.

They all worship a God, even if they set themselves up as God and call it atheism, it's still a religion. Don't worry, the Supreme Court already ruled that. For those of you who want to always go by, you know, the courts, the Supreme Court actually ruled that atheism is a religion.

But what we see is that everywhere people have a knowledge of God. That's why we always end up creating something to worship because God gave us, because we are in His image, we too have a spiritual nature.

But God is a spirit, okay? God is not a physical being as you and I are, though, and we'll get to this when we study the person of Jesus Christ. He is a physical and a spiritual, so He's different. But this gets us into a question.

If you talk to someone who's a Mormon or a Latter-day Saint, what you end up seeing is this. They will say that God was once a man, alright? Why do they do that? They do that because they see passages in the scriptures that talk about God having eyes and ears and hands and feet.

Now what are those things? What is it when we have that? Well, if you look at some of the questions in your syllabus, we've got some questions for you there. It says, if God is spirit, how do we explain those passages that speak of people seeing God?

Okay? So we see people in the scriptures that actually see God, Abraham. He saw God, sat down with Him. These are called theophanies, theophanies. Now if it's specifically of Jesus Christ, it's a Christophany, okay?

Theo being God, so it's a vision of God, Christophany would be a vision of Christ, but for your blank there, it's theophany. That is when God comes in the image of a man, He presents Himself as if He's a man.

There's a second question there for you, if God is spirit, what about those passages that speak about Him having hands and feet and eyes and ears? Now this in the technical term is called an anthropomorphism, an anthropomorphism.

And this is the idea, an anthropomorphism is a way of speaking and giving human attributes to some object. In other words, when you watch Bambi the movie, I'm a hunter so gee, I guess that movie was all against me, that's okay, I don't mind shooting Bambi, she tastes good, or he.

But the thing is that what we end up seeing is this, in seriousness though, when we see Bambi, you see in that movie that it was given an anthropomorphism, it was given the idea of speech, now deers don't speak, okay?

And this is the thing that we see, sometimes God is said to have eyes and ears as if He could see the way you and I see and given human type attributes, okay? But He's not a physical being. Now if you do run into, by the way, if you run into that Latter-day Saint that says, no, no, no, God must have a physical being because, don't you get it?

It says He has hands and feet and ears and eyes. Well gee, in the Psalms it says He covers us with His, oh, wings and He has feathers. Is God a chicken? Just asking. I mean, if you're going to interpret that literally, then you have to be consistent.

Do you see the problem that they have? They can't be consistent in their interpretation of Scripture because they're taking one thing literal and then when they get to something that they don't accept, they take it figurative.

What the problem they're doing is they start with a conclusion and then proof text the Scriptures, and if you were in our class on biblical hermeneutics, you know what proof texting is, but they proof text the Scriptures to look for the things they already have as a conclusion, okay?

It's always a bad thing to do to start with your conclusion and then proof text to make it so because, you know, when you do that, I can prove that your name is Steve Johnson and you were born in Italy in 1921 because any evidence you give me, I'll make excuses for it.

I'll excuse it away because I start with a conclusion. Bad thing to do. You want to look at the evidence of Scripture and let it lead us to where we're going to go. So, let's look at the next one. We have spirituality, alright?

That is the first attribute of God's personality. Next is that we have God is a God of life. God is living in that He possesses within Himself the source of life. Let's take a look at some Scripture here.

Psalm 84, 2. My soul longs, yes, even faints for the courts of the Lord. My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. The living God. That is how God is described. He is a living God. He's the source of life.

That's important because God is the giver of life. This is something that He is as a spiritual being, as a life-giving being, He can give us life. We are alive. We are creatures that live. If you're not sure about that, well, okay, let's not go there.

So, what we see is that God possesses as the source of life and has the ability to give life, both physical and spiritual. God is the only source, though, that can do that. Because remember, God being the Creator, there was no time, space, matter, continuum, so before all of that, there was God.

So, He can only be, He is the only source of life that there can be, alright? There's also another thing, and we looked at this a little bit before, but it is that God is self-conscious, self-conscious.

This is defined if you look in your syllabus. God is aware of His own existence and He, unlike us, knows Himself completely. God knows Himself completely. Remember when we first looked at the attributes of God, we said that God is incomprehensible to us.

We cannot comprehend everything there is to know about God. And though we can't know Him completely, what He has revealed to us we can know, however, when it comes to God, He is self-conscious and He knows Himself completely.

Now we have a self-consciousness. That's why we have things like 401Ks and we are concerned for our well-being and things like that, something animals don't do as much. You don't see, I've never seen an animal, like a whale, holding a save the human sign.

We kind of need some saving sometimes. But we have a consciousness beyond what animals have because we are made in the image of God. But God knows Himself completely. You and I, yeah, we don't know ourselves completely sometimes.

We kind of fool ourselves a lot. We deceive ourselves into believing things that aren't true because, well, we kind of want them to be true. Let's take a look at a passage of Scripture here to see this.

For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of a man which is in him. Even so, no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. So though we can know some things about God, those things that He's revealed to us, we cannot know everything that there is to know about God because God is completely knowledgeable of Himself.

So now this next one, letter D, well, maybe this is just, you know, maybe this is an attribute of God that maybe just got passed on to the ladies. I don't know. No, some of you guys suffer with this too.

Well, is it really suffering? Emotion. Okay, some of you have more of it maybe. But emotion is defined as this, God is capable of expressing emotion. Emotion arises from and is necessary to personality.

It is necessary to personality. If you are a person, you have emotion. So God is an emotional being. Now this becomes an issue and we'll see this later on when you look at Jehovah Witnesses saying that the Holy Spirit is just a force.

Well, if the Holy Spirit is just a force, how would He have emotion? I mean, electricity doesn't have emotion. This is one of the ways that we know something about the existence of God because we have emotion.

We have emotion. That's an immaterial thing, okay? Why is it that we feel certain ways about things? You know, it's very interesting because one of the things, if you study psychology and different things, specifically if you happen to study body language and something called micro-expressions, it's very interesting that no matter where you are, whatever culture you are, every single human being has some basic responses to happiness, to joy, to anger, to fear, that they make these minor, these very small, what's called micro-expressions that they make with their faces.

So if you spot those things, you can see when someone is lying to you, for say, or when someone is angry at someone, in split seconds because every single human being has these emotional responses because God is an emotional being and He gave us emotions like love, like anger, like happiness, like joy, like jealousy.

These are emotions. Now the question becomes, are emotions evil or is it how we respond? Is it the emotion itself that can be sinful or is it our response? In other words, anger, is it always wrong? Could there be a righteous anger or is all anger wrong?

You know, there's times where there could be a righteous anger but sometimes that righteous anger doesn't last very long and we suddenly become angry because of our own selfishness and then it switches from a righteous anger to a sinful anger real fast.

But God is a God of emotion. Let's take a look at some passages here. This one I would think is familiar to most of you. This was the first passage I ever memorized. This is, if you look in your syllabus there, John 3 .16, this emotion is one of love and that's your blank there, love.

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever should believe in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. This is an example of the love of God. We're going to see this a little bit more.

But we end up seeing here is that God is a God of love. He has love. We also see your second letter B there in your syllabus, Psalm 145 .8, compassion, compassion. Psalm 145 .8 says, the Lord is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and great in mercy.

So we see that God is a God that has compassion. Genesis 6 .6, we see that God has grief. We see that God has grief. And the Lord was sorry that He made man on the earth and was grieved in His heart. So God can be grieved.

God is a being that can have grief. Specifically there, God grieved over the fact that man was so sinful that He chose, unfortunately, to rebel against God and want to be God. And so He grieved man and brought a flood because of the sin that was going on.

We see this one. And this one may surprise some people. Because the modern gospel, the modern day gospel that people preach is that God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. And then they come to this passage in Proverbs 6 .16 -19 and they realize that God hates something.

Hate is actually an attribute of God and can be righteous. These six things the Lord hates, yes seven, are an abomination to Him. A proud look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that deceives, devises wicked plans, feet that are swift to running to evil, a false witness who speaks lies, and one who sows discord among the brethren.

These are seven things that the Lord hates. It says the Lord hates these things. And there's some people that may be in the chat room watching that had to use this verse with me tonight because they wanted to send a gift and I said that I'm too prideful to accept gifts.

At least I admitted what it is and they used this verse and said God hates pride. But it's true. There's some things God hates. God hates because of how righteous and holy and just He is. We're going to look at those attributes later in the next lesson.

But we see that God is a God who actually hates some things. Things that are bad. We also see if you look at your next one there, 1 Peter 5, 6, and 7 is that God cares. He's a God of care. Therefore, humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God that He may exalt you in due time, casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.

God cares for you who are His children. Well, aren't we all God's children? Not according to John 1 .12. It is only those who receive Him that have the right to be called a child of God. Not everyone is a child of God according to John 1 .12.

It is only those who receive Him. And He cares about His children. But you know what else? God is also a jealous God. He is a jealous God. Someone already posted this verse in the chat room. Oops, I got ahead of myself.

Before I get to Psalm 55, Deuteronomy 6 .15 is that God is a jealous God. For the Lord your God is a jealous God among you. Least the anger of the Lord your God be aroused against you and destroy you from the face of the earth.

Some of you may say, wait a minute, how could God be a jealous God? How could He be jealous? Isn't jealousy a bad thing? Jealousy for God is not bad because He is deserving of all of our praise and all glory is deserved of Him.

Therefore, He has a righteous jealousy when He is jealous about the fact that we are going after and worshipping ourselves as God or worshipping other things that we are setting up as God. It is a righteous jealousy that He has because He is the primary person, or persons since there are three persons that make up the Godhead, of the universe.

He is the creator of it all. One of the other attributes that I mentioned in Psalm 55 that was mentioned in the chat room is that God is actually an angry God. This goes against everything that we see in the modern gospel.

But let's look at the passage, Psalm 5 verses 4 and 5. For you are not a God who takes pleasure in wickedness, nor shall evil dwell with you. The boastful shall not stand in your sight, you will hate the workers of iniquity.

So what you see here is that a couple of things with this passage. Let's look at that again if we could. Because what we see in that passage is that it says that God will not dwell, you see that? Nor shall evil dwell with you.

Some people use that in the modern gospel to say that hell is a place where God doesn't exist. If you remember those attributes we looked at last week, God is omnipresent and He is everywhere, therefore God is in hell because He is present everywhere.

But this is more the issue that God Himself, each person of the Trinity, does not have evil present in Him. The other thing that we see here is that this talks about God, that He's angry and there's a reason He's angry, if we could put that back up.

He's angry because of the evil, He hates all workers of iniquity. It's not that He's angry with the sinner, it's not that He hates the sin, but loves the sinner. I know that's popular with people. That passage right there says He hates the sinner.

If you need another passage, I don't have it on the slides, but Psalm 711, easy to remember. God is a just judge and He is angry with the wicked every day. So that's not talking about the sin, that's talking about the person.

God's not going to throw our actions into hell, He's going to send people into hell. And that's the reality. And we have to see that God is God. We all want to set ourselves up as God and we want to decide, okay, God would never send people to hell because I can't accept the hell, I don't like hell.

Too bad, I don't like it either. There's a lot of things I wouldn't like, but I'm not God and you're not God. God is God. And God says, there is a hell and He's angry with the wicked every day and they're going to go to an eternity of a lake of fire because He is an angry God.

This flies in the face of the modern gospel. And this is why we have so many false converts nowadays. We have so many false converts in the church, especially the American church, because people teach that God is love and God will give you everything you want.

Just ask for it and He's going to have to give it to you. As if you're God and God has to submit Himself to your demands. God doesn't submit Himself to you and I. God is God and we submit to Him. We've got to learn our place, ladies and gentlemen.

We have to know our position before a just and holy God. He's God, not us. We don't get to make the demands. We don't get to say what's fair and not fair. And this is what we see about God. God is angry.

He's angry. And His anger is a righteous anger. All right, let's look at the next one, the next attribute there in your book. It is intelligence. God is intelligent. If you look at your definition, the ability of God to use intelligence for good means as His intelligence include three different things if you look in your syllabus there.

The first one is knowledge. That's one category of intelligence. This knowledge can be defined as the perception of facts as they are. That's your blank there. The perception of facts as they are. This is knowing, it's basically having an understanding of reality.

We know facts the way they are. This is true. God exists. That's a knowledge claim. That's something we know to be true. But then the next intelligence issue is one of understanding. Understanding and if you look in your syllabus there, it's defined as insight into the significance of facts.

Insight into the significance of facts. And so this is more now where we have, we know the reality of things. We have that knowledge. But now we understand the significance of that reality. So we know things, we perceive things the way they are and now we understand the significance of those things.

Now we get to the third description of intellect and that is wisdom. Wisdom. And this is the ability to place facts in a proper relationship to one another toward a good end. And so what we have here is now we not only know the facts as they are, we understand, have the understanding to see the significance of those facts, but now we know how they interrelate to other things.

That is the ability to have intellect. That's why we have Save the Whale campaigns if you're old enough to remember those things or Save the Spotted Owl. Maybe you aren't familiar with that, but those were American things where we have a concern for animals and animal rights.

And some even have concerns for rivers and plants trying to give them human rights. We're the beings with intellect, not rocks. And if you have the same intellect as a rock, okay, let's not go there. All right, let's go on to the next one.

So God is a God of intelligence. We also see that God is a God of self-determination, of self-determination. And that is that God's activities, God's activity is determined by Him alone and He is a purposeful being.

He is a purposeful being. Let's look at a passage of scripture, Job chapter 23, 13. But He is unique and who can make Him change? And whatever His soul desires, He does. Whatever His soul desires, He does.

What we see here is that this talks about, if you look in your syllabus here, the three aspects of God's personality work together. We see that His desire, He carries them out. We also see, so He has a desire for things and can will them, in a sense, into existence.

We see, and the aspects there are His intellect, His thinking, His emotion, and His will. Those are the three things there. So when we talk of emotions and intellect, this self-determination you can think of as will or volition.

We see this self-determination in His creation. In Genesis 1 and 2, if you have your blanks there for your syllabus, is God's self-determination is seen in His creation. Let's look at Ephesians 1, 3 through 13.

This is a, oops, sorry, that's a wrong passage up there. I don't have, sorry, I don't have that one. That was too long, sorry. But in Ephesians 1, it talks about God's self-determination as part of His salvation plan.

His salvation plan. We see that God had a plan and He determined a plan that wasn't based on anyone else. It's not based on what you and I do. It's based on what God determined, alright? God is the only real free agent that isn't influenced by anything outside of Himself.

But that passage, let's put that passage back up that we did have, Romans 8. This one is that God's self-determination is seen in His plan for the saved. Now, this, remember, this is one of those passages we talked about last time that you see the talk of time.

And now you see this, even though He speaks of things in time, God is outside of time. So these are, this is language that He has that He describes us. Look at what it says in Romans 8. For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.

Moreover, whom He predestined, these He also called, and whom He called, these He also justified, and whom He justified, these He also glorified. Do you see that here? With this, you see that in this passage that we looked at in Romans 8, God determined His plan for the saved.

But He talks in this language that confuses us sometimes. And it confuses people and they get into trouble with it. They get into trouble with it because what they see is they see things like foreknowledge, that He foreknew, that He predestined.

And so when we look at those things, we say those have the concept of time, but God's eternal and He's outside of time. God's omniscient and just knows everything without having to have seen it. He didn't need to foreknow us in the sense of seeing what we would do, to know what He determined He would do with us.

Because if you look in that, put that passage back up there and look at the tense there. At the very end of that passage, He justified, these He also, look at that, glorified, and that's in past tense.

Notice that? That's past tense. In other words, in God's mind, you and I that know Jesus Christ are already glorified. We are already glorified. Why? Because God's outside of time and He already saw all this.

He knows those who in time to us are going to be saved. To those of us who are still alive, to God, we're already glorified. Praise God. Isn't that good to know that we're not going to be stuck in this position where we kind of don't know whether we really, you know, we don't have that knowledge that God has and we say, oh, can I lose my salvation?

Like if I do something really bad, God says He glorified us already. So these are some of the attributes of God that we see when we look at His personality. So God is a personal being. It's not a God consciousness that Buddhism teaches or Hinduism.

It is not some force, some life force, like New Age would teach or, you know, that He's not some physical being that became God as Mormonism would teach. He actually is God, but He has personality and we see these attributes that we can categorize as His personality.

So if you have questions with any of that, I didn't challenge you guys this week, those of you that are students, if you look in your syllabus that you have in your syllabus, those who are students and you can sign up, if you want to sign up and be a student, you can sign up for the syllabus on our website and you can have a syllabus that you get and in the syllabus there, you'll see you have your questions there, your thought questions that you have.

We have a couple of them for you this week, but if you have questions with those, you can feel free to email us at academyatstrivingforeternity .org. If you filled out those questions and you want some extra credit, in other words, there may just be some, shall we say, gifts given.

You know, those of us who know this ministry know that we love to give gifts and those of you who send us email with your answers to the thought questions, we will at different times give some of you guys some rewards for being good students.

If you have any questions though, you can contact us at academyatstrivingforeternity .org. Now, if you happen to be in the South Carolina area this weekend, this weekend I will be in Greenville, South Carolina for the Fall for Greenville Evangelism Outreach.

I will be doing a radio interview Friday morning. I'm sure that we'll get that posted on Facebook. I think there will be a news blast. If you go to our website, you will be able to sign up for our newsletter.

If you are signed up for our newsletter, you'll get our news blast when different events happen like this radio interview for the Fall for Greenville. We'll have that. We also, I think Friday night I speak, Saturday morning I speak, then I lead a team out for an outreach.

Then I will be speaking at a church in Greenville, I think it's Poundton, I'm forgetting the church. I'd have to check the name of it. It's on our website if you go there. Also, the following weekend on October 20th, there's some things that people have been posting on my Facebook wall.