3 Attributes of God, Lesson 2

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4 - Attributes of God, Lesson 3

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Well, welcome to the

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Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Systematic Theology.

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We're very glad to have you with us this week on another exciting episode.

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We are going to be continuing our study on the attributes of God.

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We have lessons one and two already up that we've finished, but we are going to start actually sorry, lesson one that was in two parts, but we do want to welcome a couple of new students.

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We have some new students with us this week, some people who have enrolled. If you have, if you are a student, you've enrolled on our website.

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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.

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Some people that were putting some videos making the claim, but now they had to admit that it does exist.

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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.

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And I hope that each of you that are enrolled students, that you have that syllabus, that you are on lesson two of the syllabus.

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We're going to look at the attributes of God part two or lesson two, and we're going to do that today.

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But so if you have your syllabus, get that out. That is one of the benefits of being an enrolled student to the academy.

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You get that 80 page syllabus, but something came in the mail tonight or this week.

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And I know the person's not watching live. Look what

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I got. That's right. Melissa's getting married. Melissa and John, they're getting married.

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I didn't think he'd actually go through with it, but wow, I guess he's gonna. So I'll be out of that pretty soon.

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It's coming up pretty close. So and if you know, if you're familiar with Striving Fraternity Ministries, you probably know who

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Melissa is. She works for us and we are very happy for them. And so they'll be getting married.

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You could be putting it on their wall, congratulating them if you haven't already. But we are this week in lesson two.

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Now to this week, what we're going to do, if you remember, we're in book one of our

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School of Systematic Theology, we're calling it God's Throne Room. We've specifically been looking at the doctrine of God.

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And in doing so, we started with a view of the attributes of God related to His deity.

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And 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, to His personality.

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And so when we look at these attributes of God, let's take another look as a reminder of what an attribute of God is.

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Attributes are those qualities that cannot be changed or separated from the idea of what God is.

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And 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.

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So if one of the members of the Godhead has these attributes,

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He has all of them and it's not something that will change. That gets important later on.

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Attributes are what God has revealed to us. Although attributes are not the sum total of God.

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Number three there is that attributes may be ascribed to any member or any person of the

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Godhead. So any one of the three persons of the Godhead, these attributes apply, all of these attributes apply to each person.

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That's important because today we're going to talk as I said about those attributes of personality.

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Now if you're 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

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Christianity differs from some other beliefs, alright?

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Specifically, I just got done or almost done, I'm not completely done, reading a book by Deepak Chopra.

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It is a book that is trying to argue that Jesus Christ was actually trying to teach us

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Buddhism. I mean you obviously knew that, right? He tries to argue that the Catholic Church changed

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Jesus' teachings to argue for the doctrine we now have, but really what

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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

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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

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God -consciousness. 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

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Harmoneutics, his interpretation of the Bible, out of the many passages of the

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Bible that he tried to use to argue for his position, I think only about three of them actually were in context.

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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.

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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.

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But one of the things is he says that we have a spirituality that gets us to a

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God -consciousness. I guess he never really read Genesis 3 where the reason

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Adam and Eve sinned was because they wanted to be, oh yeah, that's right, like God.

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Oops. Or maybe he didn't read through Isaiah 14 when Satan fell because he wanted to be, what was that again?

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Oh, that's right, like God. Yeah, what's wrong with Buddhism? They're teaching that we can be like God.

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But the problem is that God of Buddhism is not a personal God, it is a

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God -consciousness. It's becoming aware of the God in you.

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And so this is this idea that we can kind of become God. Now before doing the show earlier today,

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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.

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And he hadn't read the book that I had read, but said that this is what Buddhism teaches.

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And this is the problem because as we study the attributes of God, we're going to see tonight that the

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God of Christianity is a personal being, a person, not some consciousness that we arrive to.

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You know, it also causes a problem for Jehovah Witnesses because Jehovah Witnesses will say that God, specifically the

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Holy Spirit really, is a force, like electricity. Well these attributes apply to the

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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

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I didn't say it wrong, I know some of you pronounce it Trinity, but we'll get to that lesson in a couple of lessons.

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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.

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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.

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And that is that those qualities which

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God possesses because He is a person, He's not a force and He's not a consciousness,

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He's a person. It is these qualities that make up the image of God in man.

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That's what we see in Genesis 1 .26. In Genesis 1 .26,

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we see that it says then God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness.

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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.

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Now notice there, for Dave in the chat room, that didn't say that we have dominion over God.

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We were actually designed to have dominion over the things that God created. In other words, God still has dominion over us,

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Dave. But we do see that we have an image of God within us.

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And these are those attributes that you and I are going to see we possess as well because you and I are a person.

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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.

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And these are things that we have here, and if you look in your syllabus, the first at letter

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A, you see that the first one is spirituality. And I have a definition for you there in your syllabus.

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And it is that the essence of God is spirit. This is the invisible source of personality.

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Let's look at a verse where it describes that. God is spirit, and those who worship the

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Father must worship Him in spirit and in truth.

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So what we see there is that God is a spiritual being. We also are spiritual beings.

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That is why every single culture, no matter where they are, every single human being has a

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God consciousness. They all worship a God, even if they set themselves up as God and call it atheism.

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It's still a religion. Don't worry, the Supreme Court already ruled that. For those of you who want to always go by the courts, the

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Supreme Court actually ruled that atheism is a religion. But what we see is that everywhere people have a knowledge of God.

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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.

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But God is a spirit. 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.

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He is a physical and a spiritual, so He's different. But this gets us into a question. If you talk to someone who is a

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Mormon or a Latter -day Saint, what you end up seeing is this. They will say that God was once a man.

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Why do they do that? They do that because they see passages in the

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Scriptures that talk about God having eyes and ears and hands and feet.

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What are those things? What is it when we have that? If you look at some of the questions in your syllabus, we've got some questions for you there.

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It says, if God is spirit, how do we explain those passages that speak of people seeing

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God? So we see people in the Scriptures that actually see God, Abraham.

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He saw God, sat down with Him. These are called theophanies.

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Now, if it's specifically of Jesus Christ, it's a Christophany, okay,

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Theo being God, so it's a vision of God, a Christophany would be a vision of Christ, but for your blank there, it's theophany.

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That is when God comes in the image of a man. He presents Himself as if He's a man.

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There's a second question there for you. It says, if God is spirit, what about those passages that speak about Him having hands and feet and eyes and ears?

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This in the technical term is called an anthropomorphism, an anthropomorphism.

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This is the idea, an anthropomorphism is a way of speaking and giving human attributes to some object.

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In other words, when you watch Bambi the movie, I'm a hunter, so gee, I guess that movie was all against me.

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That's okay, I don't mind shooting Bambi, she tastes good, or he, but the thing is that we end up seeing is this, in seriousness though, when we see

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Bambi, you see in that movie that it was given an anthropomorphism, it was given the idea of speech.

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Now, deers don't speak, and this is the thing that we see.

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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, but He's not a physical being.

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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?

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It says He has hands and feet and ears and eyes. Well, gee, in the

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Psalms, it says He covers us with His, oh, wings and He has feathers. Is God a chicken?

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Just asking. I mean, if you're going to interpret that literally, then you have to be consistent.

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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 some that they don't accept, they take it figurative.

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The problem they're doing is they start with the conclusion and then proof text the Scriptures. If you were in our class on biblical hermeneutics, you know what proof texting is, but they proof text the

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Scriptures to look for the things they already have as a conclusion. It's always a bad thing to do to start with your conclusion and then proof text to make it so because when you do that,

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I can prove that your name is Steve Johnson and you were born in Italy in 1921 because any evidence you give me,

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I'll make excuses for it, I'll excuse it away because I start with a conclusion. Bad thing to do.

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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.

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We have spirituality, alright? That is the first attribute of God's personality.

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Next is that we have God is a God of life. God is living in that He possesses within Himself the source of life.

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Let's take a look at some Scripture here. Psalm 84 .2.

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My soul longs, yes, even faints for the courts of the

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Lord. My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.

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The living God. That is how God is described. He is a living

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God. He's the source of life. That's important because God is the giver of life.

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This is something that He is as a spiritual being, as a life -giving being,

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He can give us life. We are alive. We are creatures that live.

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If you're not sure about that, well, okay, let's not go there. Alright, so what we see is that God possesses as the source of life and has the ability to give life, alright?

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Both physical and spiritual, alright? God is the only source, though, that can do that.

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Because remember, God being the Creator, there was no time, space, matter, continuum, so before all of that, there was

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God. So He can only be, He is the only source of life that there can be, alright?

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There's also another thing, and we looked at this a little bit before, but it is that God is self -conscious, self -conscious.

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This is defined if you look in your syllabus. God is aware of His own existence and He, unlike us, knows

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Himself completely. God knows Himself completely. Remember when we first looked at the attributes of God, we said that God is incomprehensible to us.

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We cannot comprehend everything there is to know about God. And though we can't know

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Him completely, what He has revealed to us we can know, however when it comes to God, He is self -conscious and He knows

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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.

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You don't see, I've never seen an animal like a whale holding a save the human sign.

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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.

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But God knows Himself completely. You and I, we don't know ourselves completely sometimes.

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We kind of fool ourselves a lot. We deceive ourselves into believing things that aren't true because we kind of want them to be true.

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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.

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Even so, no one knows the things of God except the spirit of God.

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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.

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So now this next one, letter D, well maybe this is just, maybe this is an attribute of God that maybe just got passed on to the ladies.

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I don't know. No, some of you guys suffer with this too. Well, is it really suffering?

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Emotion. Okay, some of you have more of it maybe. But emotion is defined as this,

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God is capable of expressing emotion. Emotion arises from and is necessary to personality.

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It is necessary to personality. If you are a person, you have emotion. So God is an emotional being.

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Now this becomes an issue and we'll see this later on when you look at Jehovah Witnesses saying that the

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Holy Spirit is just a force. Well, if the Holy Spirit is just a force, how would He have emotion?

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Electricity doesn't have emotion. This is one of the ways that we know something about the existence of God because we have emotion.

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We have emotion. That's an immaterial thing, okay? Why is it that we feel certain ways about things?

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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.

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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.

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These are emotions. Now the question becomes, are emotions evil?

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Or is it how we respond? Is it the emotion itself that could be sinful or is it our response?

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In other words, anger, is it always wrong? Could there be a righteous anger? Or is all anger wrong?

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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.

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But God is a God of emotion. Let's take a look at some passages here. This one

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I would think is familiar to most of you. This was the first passage I ever memorized.

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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.

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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.

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This is an example of the love of God. We're going to see this a little bit more.

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But we end up seeing here is that God is a God of love. He has love.

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We also see, your second letter B there in your syllabus, Psalm 145 .8,

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compassion, compassion. Psalm 145 .8 says, the

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Lord is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and great in mercy.

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So we see that God is a God that has compassion. Genesis 6 .6,

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we see that God has grief. We see that God has grief.

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And the Lord was sorry that He made man on the earth and was grieved in His heart.

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So God can be grieved. God is a being that can have grief.

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Specifically there, God grieved over the fact that man was so sinful that He chose, unfortunately, to rebel against God and want to be

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God. And so He grieved man and brought a flood because of the sin that was going on.

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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.

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And then they come to this passage in Proverbs 6 .16 -19 and they realize that God hates something.

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Hate is actually an attribute of God and can be righteous. These six things the

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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.

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These are seven things that the Lord hates. It says the

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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.

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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

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God hates. God hates because of how righteous and holy and just He is.

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We're going to look at those attributes later in the next lesson. But we see that God is a

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God who actually hates some things. Things that are bad. We also see if you look at your next one there, 1

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Peter 5, 6, and 7 is that God cares. He's a

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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.

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God cares for you who are His children. Aren't we all

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God's children? Not according to John 1 .12. It is only those who receive

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Him that have the right to be called a child of God. Not everyone is a child of God according to John 1 .12.

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It is only those who receive Him and He cares about His children. But you know what else?

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God is also a jealous God. He is a jealous God. Someone already posted this verse in the chat room.

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Oops, I got ahead of myself before I get to Psalm 5 .5. Deuteronomy 6 .15

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is that God is a jealous God. For the

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Lord your God is a jealous God among you. Least the anger of the

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Lord your God be aroused against you and destroy you from the face of the earth.

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Some of you may say, wait a minute, how could God be a jealous God? How could

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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.

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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.

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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

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Godhead of the universe. He is the creator of it all. One of the other attributes that I mentioned in Psalm 5 .5

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that was mentioned in the chat room is that God is actually an angry God.

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This goes against everything that we see in the modern gospel. But let's look at the passage, Psalm 5 .4

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and 5. For you are not a

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God who takes pleasure in wickedness, nor shall evil dwell with you.

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The boastful shall not stand in your sight, you will hate the workers of iniquity.

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So what you see here is that a couple of things with this passage. Let's look at that again if we could.

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Because what we see in that passage is that it says that God will not dwell, you see that?

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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.

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If you remember those attributes we looked at last week, God is omnipresent and He is everywhere, therefore

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God is in hell because He is present everywhere. But this is more the issue that God Himself, each person of the

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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

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He's angry if we could put that back up. He's angry because of the evil, He hates all workers of iniquity.

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It's not that He's angry with the sinner. It's not that He hates the sin but loves the sinner.

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I know that's popular with people. That passage right there says He hates the sinner. If you need another passage,

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I don't have it on the slides but Psalm 711, easy to remember.

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God is a just judge and He is angry with the wicked every day.

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So that's not talking about the sin, that's talking about the person. God's not going to throw our actions into hell,

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He's going to send people into hell. And that's the reality. And we have to see that God is

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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.

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I don't like hell, too bad. I don't like it either. There's a lot of things

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I wouldn't like but I'm not God and you're not God. God is

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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

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God. This flies in the face of the modern gospel. And this is why we have so many false converts nowadays.

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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.

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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

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Himself to your demands. God doesn't submit Himself to you and I. God is

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God and we submit to Him. We got to learn our place, ladies and gentlemen. We have to know our position before a just and holy

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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.

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And this is what we see about God. God is angry. He's angry and His anger is a righteous anger.

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Alright, let's look at the next one, the next attribute there in your book. It is intelligence.

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God is intelligent. If you look at your definition, the ability of God to use intelligence for good means is intelligence include three different things if you look in your syllabus there.

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The first one is knowledge. That's one category of intelligence. And this knowledge can be defined as the perception of facts as they are.

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That's your blank there. The perception of facts as they are. This is knowing, it's basically having an understanding of reality, okay?

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We know facts the way they are. This is true. God exists.

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That's a knowledge claim. That's something we know to be true. But then the next intelligence issue is one of understanding.

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Understanding and if you look in your syllabus there, it's defined as insight into the significance of facts.

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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.

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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.

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Now we get to the third description of intellect. And that is wisdom, wisdom.

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And this is the ability to place facts in a proper relationship to one another toward a good end.

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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.

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That is the ability to have intellect. That's why we have

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Save the Whale campaigns, if you're old enough to remember those things. Or Save the Spotted Owl.

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Maybe you aren't familiar with that, but those were American things where we have a concern for animals and animal rights.

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And some even have concerns for rivers and plants, trying to give them human rights.

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We're the beings with intellect, not rocks. And if you have the same intellect as a rock, okay, let's not go there.

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All right, let's go on to the next one. So God is a God of intelligence. We also see that God is a

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God of self -determination, of self -determination. And that is that God's activities,

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God's activity is determined by Him alone, and He is a purposeful being.

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He is a purposeful being. Let's look at a passage of Scripture, Job chapter 23, 13.

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But He is unique, and who can make Him change? And whatever

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His soul desires, He does. Whatever His soul desires,

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He does. What we see here is that this talks about, if you look in your syllabus, here are the three aspects of God's personality work together.

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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.

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We see, and the aspects there are His intellect, His thinking, His emotion, and His will.

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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.

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We see this self -determination in His creation. In Genesis 1 and 2, if you have your blanks there for your syllabus, is

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God's self -determination is seen in His creation. Let's look at Ephesians 1, 3 through 13.

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This is a, oops, sorry, that's a wrong passage up there. I don't have, sorry, I don't have that one.

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That was too long, sorry. But in Ephesians 1, it talks about God's self -determination as part of His salvation plan.

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His salvation plan. We see that God had a plan and He determined a plan that wasn't based on anyone else.

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It's not based on what you and I do. It's based on what God determined, alright.

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God is the only real free agent that isn't influenced by anything outside of Himself.

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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.

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Now, this, remember, this is one of those passages we talked about last time. That you see the talk of time.

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And now you see this, even though He speaks of things in time, God is outside of time.

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So these are, this is language that He has that He describes us. Look at what it says in Romans 8.

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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.

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Moreover, whom He predestined, these He also called, and whom He called, these

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He also justified, and whom He justified, these He also glorified.

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Do you see that here? With this, you see that in this passage that we looked at in Romans 8,

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God determined His plan for the saved. But He talks in this language that confuses us sometimes.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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At the very end of that passage, He justified, these

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He also, look at that glorified, and that's in past tense.

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Notice that? That's past tense. In other words, in God's mind, you and I that know

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Jesus Christ are already glorified. We are already glorified.

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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.

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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.

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And we say, oh, can I lose my salvation? Like, if I do something really bad, God says

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He glorified us already. All right. So these are some of the attributes of God that we see when we look at His personality.

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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 that like New Age would teach or, you know, that He's not some physical being that became

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God as Mormonism would teach. He actually is God, but He has personality.

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And we see these attributes that we can categorize as His personality. So if you have questions with any of that,

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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.

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You can sign up for the syllabus on our website and you can have a syllabus that you get.

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And in the syllabus there, you'll see you have your questions there, your thought questions that you have.

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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 academy at striving for eternity dot org.

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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.

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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.

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If you have any questions though, you can contact us at academy at striving for eternity dot org.

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Now if you happen to be in the South Carolina area this weekend, this weekend

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I will be in Greenville, South Carolina for the Fall for Greenville Evangelism Outreach.

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I will be doing a radio interview Friday morning. I'm sure that we'll get that posted on Facebook.

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I think there will be a news blast. If you go to our website, if you go to our website, you will be able to sign up for our newsletter.

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If you are signed up for our newsletter, you'll get our news blast when different events happen like this radio interview for the

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Fall for Greenville. We'll have that. We also, I think Friday night

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I speak, Saturday morning I speak, then I lead a team out for an outreach and then

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I will be speaking at a church in Greenville, I think it's Poundton. I'm forgetting the church.

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I have to check the name of it, but 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

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Facebook wall. I'm sure we'll have that in the Striving for Eternity group as well. That'll be posted there, but the

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CCN which is Change Collegian Network, it is one of my favorite college ministries and it's probably one of the only ones that I really recommend, but they're having a fundraiser dinner.

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I kind of have to go because I'm going to be up there speaking. They will be honoring

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Striving for Eternity and I will be up there to receive that. For that reason,

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I will be there. I hope to see many of you there. It will be in New Jersey, in Northern New Jersey.

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If you are anywhere in the tri -state area or don't mind taking a ride, their events are usually very action -packed, shall we say.

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They usually have a lot going on. A very good event. I encourage you to come out, not just because of them honoring

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Striving for Eternity and me speaking, but I encourage you to come out to learn more about Change Collegian Network.

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Now, this week we have, as many of you know, we always end the show by having a person we want you to go out and encourage.

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I remind you each week, we don't encourage people enough, do we?

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We want to encourage you to be encouraging others. Because of that, we want to get you to have someone that we want you all to go out and encourage this week.

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He's someone who's usually, you may know of some of his work, but he's kind of more behind the scenes of much of the work that you know.

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But he's someone I've gotten to know over the years and it is a friend of mine, Eddie Roman.

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Now, Eddie Roman, there's his website there and you can see some of his work, but you may know

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Eddie Roman more because of his work with Living Waters or Way of the Master. He's the one that does a lot of the editing of the footage that they have.

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So when you look at all the things that Living Waters does, Eddie edits the footage.

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So now, if you go and check out some of the things he's done, some of the things he's worked on, 180,

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Way of the Master TV show, those things. But there's some things you may not know about Eddie.

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Eddie, when he was younger, was into BMX biking. Eddie is considered the legend because he was very well known for some things that he can do on a

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BMX bike. I don't know if he can still do them. Maybe one day I should go out to California, give him a BMX bike and see if he can still do these tricks.

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But he sent me video of some of the stuff he could do and it's just, it's amazing to see what this guy could do on a bicycle.

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You know, just tricks he could do. But he's a great brother in the

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Lord and he's just really, just one of the more humble guys.

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I call him up at times when we were getting ready to put these classes together and just said,

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Eddie, I got 1 ,001 questions that I want to ask you about video cameras and video editing and these different things.

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And he sits there and spends the time, you know, just willing to spend the time. And it was funny because he said, hey, listen, you know, can

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I go? I got to go because I'm at Walmart and I got to pay for something. It's like, you know, he's sitting there in the aisle waiting to go pay.

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But he's sitting and taking the time to talk to me. And that's the kind of person he is. He's also a very creative person.

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He finds a lot of different ways to give out tracks, which is kind of neat. But he's just the type of person that will take the time to sit and spend with people.

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And even though he's really a very busy individual and he's just a really sweet brother.

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And I encourage you to go out and get to know him better. Go to his website. He's probably by now, he's already tagged.

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If you're in the Striving for Eternity group, you can go in that group. He's already tagged there. So if you're not friends with him, you can tag him from that group and you can give him some encouraging words.

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If you want to join the Striving for Eternity group, go out to that group, ask to join. And the admins there will,

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I'm sure, add you unless you're a troublemaker or your name is Saitembrunkate and then we got to kick you out because you're definitely a troublemaker.

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And so we encourage you to go out and encourage Eddie this week.

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And again, if you happen to be in Greenville area this week, I'd love to see you. If you happen to go and you're there,

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I would love to know that you watch the academy. If you're not one of our enrolled students, let me know you watch it.

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It's a great encouragement to us at Striving for Eternity. Those of us who work here are greatly encouraged when we find out that some of you are actually watching because we kind of think it's just us in the studio that actually watched this.

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Because those of you in the chat, I get to see some of the chats and I know that you guys are not watching.

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You guys just get in there to chat and kind of have the show on maybe in the background. I don't know.

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But anyway, I encourage you to consider enrolling, becoming a student.

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Some of the things you get as a student is as I mentioned earlier, you get the syllabus, the 80 page syllabus with much of my notes, way more than we have.

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You'll also get to join as we do on the top of the hour after the live show, a live

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Q &A with the instructor. So this week being me, the instructor, you get to talk to me.

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Any questions you have from the class that didn't get answered either in the chat room or via emailing us, you get the immediate response of, hey,

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I had a question. You can join in. Or it's just a good time of fellowship. Sometimes that's what it becomes.

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And so if you want, you can join us there if you're a student. And that becomes one of the things that we have for our students.

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And the student membership is a yearly membership. Gets you two syllabuses usually per year.

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And that is something that you pay for. It helps us put on these things.

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And if you actually look at the cost of producing the syllabus and sending it out and everything, and then everything else that costs to do this show, yeah, we're not really making anything off of the membership.

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But we asked for that just to cover some of the costs so that we can put these things on around the world.

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If you are already a student, an enrolled student, you can feel free to donate for someone else.

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We have many people that we give donated memberships to. And people that want just subscriptions, but they can't afford it.

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And if you can afford, you can bless someone else. We have a waiting list of people that would like to get some memberships.

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And we would be happy to do that if you can help us out. So just something for you to think about. Look forward to seeing you next week when we are going to discuss, this will be the third lesson next

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Monday on the Attributes of God. We're going to talk about those attributes that relate to God's morality, to God's morality.

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And we're going to look at that next week. And we look forward to seeing you. Remember to go out and strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.