Systematic Theology (part 3) - Doctrine Of God

I think Andrew has shared with you already, while we're doing this summer

Sunday school class on systematic theology, Andrew and I are mostly teaching out of Louis Burkhoff's Systematic Theology book, that's sort of our primary text, which is available in the bookstore.

We've also given all of the teenagers this as a gift. This is John Nielsen's Knowing God's Truth, which is also a systematic theology text geared more towards upper high school or freshman year of college study.

We've got a workbook here, too, as well. This is just a gift to the teenagers to help them get as much out of this class as they possibly can.

We're not having any expectations about how much they fill out or don't, although I definitely would recommend teenagers that you have, if you brought your workbook today, have it open to the chapter about the doctrine of God, because that's chapter three.

That's what we're going to be doing today, and as I go through the class, you'll probably see some questions here in the workbook that you can answer just listening to me today.

But for those of you who are adults, at this point I think we've given away all the ones to all of our teenagers, but we still have a bunch of extra copies.

So if you are interested in acquiring one of these as well, please let me or Ben Roberts know.

We'll probably move these to the bookstore shortly, and you can have them for a very reasonable cost,

I'm sure. So just give one of us a shout. All right, so Andrew did technically two weeks of introduction.

It felt like four, not because it was bad, but because it got spread out by Steve in the middle.

And so today we're finally getting into it, the real beef, and session one is on the doctrine of God, also known as Theology Proper, okay,

Theology Proper, because everything that we're doing this summer is theology, the study of the science, or the scientific study of God.

But this first session about the doctrine of God in particular is known as Theology Proper because it's particularly focused on God himself, this section of systematic theology.

And it seems like a pretty good place to start, and most systematic theology books either start with Theology Proper or some of them start with the doctrine of Scripture as the idea of the basis that that's the only way that we're going to know stuff about God, but I'm actually going to get into that in a second.

But why is Theology Proper so important? Well, A .W.

Tozer has a pretty famous quote in which he said that, show me a man who has a fuzzy picture of God and I'll show you a man who has a fuzzy picture of his spiritual condition, right, and that we, the clearer our view and picture and understanding of God are, the more solid and solid of a foundation we have for our faith and our

Christian life. So how important is it to know God? Well, John chapter 17 verse 3 says this, and this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true

God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. So how important is it?

Well, it's eternally important, right. I remember a long time ago,

I think I was, might have still been in college, but when I was a young adult anyway,

Jesse Ventura, anybody remember Jesse Ventura? Yes, right, he was a famous pro -wrestler turned governor of Minnesota.

What's that? Actor. Actor, oh right, he was an actor as well, right, and so kind of the Arnold Schwarzenegger career path, except he was a

Democratic governor of Minnesota, whereas Arnold was a Republican governor of California, but anyway, same thing.

But I remember, I remember very famously Jesse Ventura, he got like, I don't know why, things that stick in your brain, right.

But he had this interview, they interviewed him, and he was actually talking about religion, and I remember him saying how religion, he doesn't like religion because they tell you to check your brain at the door when you come in, right.

And that is absolutely not true of Christianity. As Andrew said, and especially of this class, we want you to think, and if you want a really interesting exercise, grab your

Bible app, right, or your Bible on Kindle, and search for the word think, just the word think, and just scroll through all the times, especially in the

New Testament, where you see the word think, think, think, think, think, and you will be amazed at how much

Jesus in particular, but also the apostles, continually encourage us, demand of us, think about this, think, be reasonable about this, look at what's around you, and tell me that you can't, that you can somehow say that you don't need to be saved, or that there is no

God, or that, you know, and so on, and all the different spiritual truths. All right, so when we're talking about the doctrine of God, and we're going to think about God today, we're going to start with the big question, what is

God? Or who is God? Turn to Exodus chapter 34,

I'm going to give God himself the first word here. Who is God? Exodus 34, verses 6 and 7.

I've heard it said that these two verses became particularly dearly beloved to the

Jewish community post -exile from Babylon, when they returned to the promised land, that they loved these two verses, and these came up, and were quoted, and referred to more than maybe anything else in the

Torah. Somebody want to read to me Exodus 34, 6 and 7? So here we have, in God's own words, a very succinct answer to that question.

Who am I? Right? And he lists off all sorts of attributes, and we're going to talk a lot more about attributes later in the class today, but he talks about attributes, and some of these attributes you're certainly going to recognize, probably if you were here for our

None Greater class a couple years ago, right? He's abounding in steadfast love, he's faithful, he's merciful, he's gracious.

The latter part of the verse is about his justice, and his sovereignty, but I think a lot should be made out of the order here, and I've seen a lot of commentators make a lot out of the order in which things are listed.

He starts with how he is, merciful and gracious. He starts with how he abounds in love, he doesn't get to the justice part until later.

The first thing he wants you to know about himself is that he is a merciful and gracious, and slow to anger, gone.

But in fact, don't stop there. The very first thing he wants you to know about him, the part that he repeats, is his name.

Because remember, every time you look in your ESV and you see L -O -R -D in capital letters, what is that really?

What word is that really in Hebrew? Yahweh. He doesn't say, the Lord, the

Lord, he says, Yahweh, Yahweh, a God merciful and gracious. And any time the

Bible repeats itself, it is doing it for emphasis. It really wants you, he really wants, the author really wants you to pay attention to what he's saying here.

Just like Jesus begins so many of his speeches in the Old King James with, verily, verily. In the same way here,

Yahweh, Yahweh. And does anybody remember the translation, so to speak, of Yahweh, the meaning of Yahweh, that he tells

Moses the very first time he reveals the name to him in the burning bush? I am.

The very first thing God wants you to know about himself is, I am.

I am that I am. Right? That he is the self -existent, eternal one.

He is the one on whom depends, he depends on nothing and no one else.

That is who is God. And if we're going to talk about theology as a science, we might be tempted to try to now classify

God, maybe as we do other living things, or the stars, or chemical elements.

But here's the thing, when we get into such sort of like a, Berkhoff calls it a genetic synthetic definition, it's really impossible because God is not one of several species of gods.

He is not some kind of spiritual type even that could be related to other spirits in some sort of genus.

So as Berkhoff says, and this is the answer, question one in your worksheet, the being of God does not admit of any scientific definition.

All right, so there you go, class over. Remember Anselm, our buddy from none greater,

Anselm said that the fullness of being itself, God is the fullness of being itself, the absolute plenitude of reality upon which all else depends.

The absolute plenitude of reality upon all else depends.

Which means, in short and in modern, God is the most perfect being imaginable.

But just what do we mean by the phrase even when we say perfect being? Well, R .C.

Sproul, he had a great lecture on this at a Ligonier conference some years ago, and he said, you know, there's human beings, there's plant beings, there's even a sense of a box of rocks as being.

And God is the greatest, the best, the perfect being, he said, the supreme being. But he thinks when we call

God the supreme being, we do him a great disservice, a great injustice, because the difference is not the adjectives, he said.

The difference is not in humanness and supremacy. The difference really is in this word, being.

The difference is in being. He went on to say the real mistake in these phrases is actually calling humans or animals or trees or rocks beings, because only

God is being. The more accurate thing maybe for us would be to call us human becomeings, because we're still always developing, always changing, always on the move, whereas God is the true being.

Now, ultimately, because God is so other, when we start talking about this, we eventually have to resort to talking about him in terms of what he is like and what he is not like.

What he is like and what he is not like. All right, a little bit of a Latin refresher quiz for you all this morning, via eminente.

Via eminente. Anybody want to take a stab at translating that? Got any

Latin majors in the house? Or former Catholic priests? Yeah, the deep?

The way of what? He emanates? Very close, yeah. The way of emanation.

Or the way of eminence. The way of eminence. All right, and then via negativa would be, kind of the opposite, the way of, not emanate, the way of negation.

Yes, the way of negative, the way of negation. The way of eminence and the way of negation.

Why they won't just say via positiva and via negativa, I don't know. Not fancy enough,

I guess. So, via eminente is the positive sense, what

God is like. Another fancy word for it is cataphatic, cataphic theology, cataphic theology.

And what he is not like, via negativa or apophatic, apophatic theology.

So, in the way of eminence, right, we might turn to Isaiah chapter 6 and we might look at how the angels cry out in three -fold repetition, and again, as I said, whenever the

Bible repeats itself, pay attention, holy, holy, holy is the

Lord God Almighty. So on the way of eminence, we would say that God is holy.

But then what he is not like, right, the Bible gets into via negativa all the time when it calls him the living

God. Why? Because it's pointing out that he is different from the idols who are not living.

Every time he calls himself the living God in the Old Testament, he's doing it as a contrast to the dead, unspeaking, unseeing, unhearing, wooden and stone and precious metal idols.

That the heathen around them had worshipped. But then last, sort of my,

I think a last sort of definition for the being of God, we'll give it to the Westminster Catechism, which also

Nielsen quotes in his book, which is God is a spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.

Big old list of attributes. All right. So that is the answer to who is

God or what is God. But now I'm going to ask you maybe an even bigger question.

How do we know that God even exists? How do we know that God even exists?

Anybody want to give me something? Taylor. Prime mover theory.

Excellent. We're going to talk about that in a few minutes. Creation. Yep. We're going to talk about that too.

Excellent. Conscience. Checking to see if anybody's going to name something that I don't have prepared already. Levi.

Conscience. Yes. Another good one. And yes, that one's on the list too. This. Excellent.

And revelation. All right. Great. You guys hit the overview already. Fantastic. That was the teaser to this whole section.

All right. So approaches to knowledge. There's really three approaches to knowledge, as it says there on your handout.

Three approaches to knowledge. I'll talk about the first two, and then

I'll reveal the third one. The first two are reason alone or emotional experience.

Okay? Reason and emotional experience. So when we talk about reason, we're talking about science and logic and ideals.

And this being a class on theology in which we keep emphasizing it as the idea of the scientific study of God, you might think reason is where we'd lean here.

A little bit. But the problem with pure reason, with reason alone, is that reality becomes a thing.

It just becomes an equation, right? James Boyce said, it can tell us what it is, but it cannot tell us what ought to be.

Right? That's the problem with reason alone. It can tell us what it is, but it cannot tell us what it ought to be.

Sure, E equals MC squared, great, but is that what it's supposed to be? Whereas emotional experience, usually, especially when you're talking about trying to use emotional experience to get a handle, a grip on knowledge, on reality, is that it usually ends up being a very intense participation in something.

Okay? And when you bring this to the religious realm, it becomes an intense participation in some kind of rite or ceremony.

In ancient times, of course, it was idol worship. But in modern times, we've got our own variations on this, don't we?

What kinds of things do we have now? Pentecostalism, yeah, right, where it's heavy emphasis on just sort of the experience and the emotion and getting wrapped up in the feelings, yeah.

Yeah, right. Even the way that we organize our order of worship, there is a sense of both a rational reason and all with the sermon, and then there's an emotional aspect to it in the idea that when we sing and when we pray and these other things that we're supposed to also be engaging emotionally.

So I guess I'll just skip to the end there, to the third one, which is Boyce calls Christianity itself the third way.

Or to say it a little more carefully, there is a God who has created all things and who himself gives his creation meaning.

So a way to knowledge is this, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and the knowledge of the

Holy One is insight, Proverbs 9 .10. Or Proverbs 1 .7,

the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. So we might say that a third approach is to fear and know the

Lord, which, as Andrew and I want to do with the bowling analogies, sort of represents that in between the two gutters, right?

Reason alone, you're in the left gutter. Emotional experience alone, you're in the right gutter.

True Christianity, somewhere right down the middle. And that's how we can approach our knowledge of God.

Now, our recognition of God and his existence comes at two levels, and I don't mean this when

I say our now, I'm talking about all of humanity, not just Christians. All of humanity, we have some recognition of God's existence and it comes at two different levels.

All right, number one, first level, is awareness, all right? Awareness of God.

As the preacher of Ecclesiastes rightly observes, he said, God has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what

God has done from the beginning to end, right? He has put eternity into man's heart.

Eternity! How big is eternity? Go ahead. How big?

It's eternity, right? It's infinitely big. Okay, if you have an infinitely big hole in your heart, what's the only thing that can fill it?

Go ahead. Say it out loud. An eternal pile of dirt. An eternal pile of dirt? No, come on. What's the only thing that could fill an infinite -sized hole?

An infinite being, right? An infinite being.

And who is that infinite being? The Lord of the Lord. Right. Here you are again.

Yes. I guess hypothetically it could be a pile of dirt, but no.

There is no infinite pile of dirt. The only infinite is God, right? The only infinite is

God. God has put eternity into man's heart. So God has put, to say it another way, how

I like to say it, he put a God -sized hole in your heart so that only he can fill it.

And the thing is, is that awareness, that sort of, we all know whether we like to admit it or not, we all know that we've got that hole there.

Psalm 19, the heavens declare the glory of God, right? Like we see just from as we look around us at creation and we look up at the stars and we realize our total insignificance and we realize, you know, universally we are overwhelmed or awestruck, okay?

The fool is the one who says in his heart that there is no God. And then, of course,

Romans 1, right, like the entirety of Romans 1, which just goes on and on about how people know, they're without excuse, it's so obvious, and they're working hard to reject it, to ignore it, to push it away, to pretend like it's not there.

I love what Boyce says about Romans 1, he says, Paul isn't saying, you know, he's saying that the sign is plain, he said, it is a billboard, it's not some obscure kind of thing like hiding behind a veil, alright?

The fact of God's existence is there for you in your heart, it is a billboard, he says. No one, no matter how weak -minded or insignificant, could be excused for missing it.

There is enough evidence of God in a flower to lead a child, as well as a scientist to worship him.

There is sufficient evidence in a tree, a pebble, a grain of sand, a fingerprint, to make us glorify

God and thank him. This is the way to knowledge. Yes, right, why would we, right, why do we hold out hope for an afterlife, right?

Why do we even have that sense of, we have some, this kind of weird, unexplainable, at least to them, right, innate sense that there's more to us than just this meat sack.

Now, awareness could potentially also be established or maybe even proven by some of the things that you all mentioned a few moments ago, right?

And they call them the rational proofs for the existence of God, okay? The rational proofs for the existence of God, and this is question four on here.

Now, Burkhoff, oddly, or maybe, I don't know, I was surprised by it in his chapter, he doesn't speak too highly of them, honestly.

He doesn't particularly love them. He, he, and maybe, you know, to do, to give him credit, it's because he puts particular special heavy emphasis on, on, on revelation, right, and on special revelation as, as the way that we really ought to be able to know

God or prove God's existence, and so he doesn't particularly think too highly of these rational proofs for the existence of God, and we have covered them at length in past summers with None Greater and Whole Christ, so I've listed them here briefly for you.

Ontological argument, the cosmological argument, the teleological argument, the moral argument, and the ethnological argument, and I've given you the various definitions on the right, but they're not in order.

So, we're going to go down the list, and I want some brave volunteers to raise their hand and see if they can't figure this out, okay?

Ontological. Who wants to guess? Which of the five on the right is ontological?

Josh. What's that? None Greater. None Greater. Correct. None Greater.

This is where Barrett got the title, None Greater, in his book. Anselm argued the existence of God, he's the one who first posed the ontological argument, the existence of God from the concept of a being than which no greater can be conceived.

Anselm reasoned that if such a being fails to exist, then a greater being, namely a being which no greater can be conceived and which exists can be conceived.

So you would just end up in this infinite loop. So eventually you have to get to the idea of there is a being for which there is

None Greater. It's kind of the reverse of the uncaused first cause. You're going upwards and saying, like, well, there's somebody greater than that, and there's somebody greater than that, and eventually

I've got to stop. I have to say that there is a being in which there is None Greater. And if that's true, there really is some

None Greater being. Well, that None Greater being has to be God. And thus, God -proven, according to Anselm, right?

Alright. Second, Cosmological. Alright, go ahead. God is the

Great Architect. Nope, close. Taylor? The Uncaused First Cause one.

Yep, the Uncaused First. Cosmological is the... God is the Uncaused First Cause.

So go ahead. Teleological, now you're right, is

God is the Great Architect. Yeah, so teleological is an extension of the cosmological.

Alright? If God is the Uncaused First Cause, teleological sort of focuses particularly on information.

Alright? About the idea that information cannot be spontaneously created naturally.

Okay? It is a non -material fundamental entity, to use their terms. Information, in other words, can only originate from an intelligent sender.

And so any order that we observe in the universe, particularly, especially in mathematics and genetics, that order and that information implies the existence of an intelligent and purposeful being.

Okay? So naturally, the teleological argument is the foundation for the intelligent design movement.

Right? Which is not necessarily religious, to be clear. Okay? We have allies with them when it comes to creationism, but they're not, they're very careful to remain secular.

Or at least agnostically non -denominational. Okay. But yes, so in that, they would say that God is the

Great Architect, the Great Designer. The deists also were big on teleological arguments, so you're, you know, not yet quite to Christianity yet.

Alright. Moral. We're down to a 50 -50 shot here, because we've already hit three. The problem of good.

Correct. Why on earth does everyone have a conscience? Why do we have a sense of what is good, right?

The atheists love to throw out the quote -unquote problem of evil, and say, like, if there is such a thing as a good

God, then why, why does evil exist? But you can flip that around on them and say, how do you explain good?

Right? Man universally recognizes that there is some kind of highest good and moral idea, even if we disagree about what that is.

Right? We might have different cultural standards for what is the best good, but we all sort of recognize the ideal state notion of that there is some kind of thing out there that is the best.

The good. And no less than Kant, Immanuel Kant, the philosopher, thought that this was the strongest of all the arguments.

Okay? We've got this sort of internal guiding North Star that speaks to our conscience as, this is the best.

Okay? And then the last one is the ethnological argument, which means all, which is obviously the last choice, all cultures worship something.

Okay? We've all historically tended towards worshiping something, which sort of indicates some kind of instinctual desire to reach out to a higher being, like Jonathan was saying, we kind of just know that we've got a soul, something's going on,

I need to do something to protect this soul, or there's got to be some higher power that I need to appease or something here.

All right? Now, here's the thing that's complicated about the ethnological argument.

The materialists and the atheists, they've explained this away, at least from their standpoint, pretty easily.

Okay? They have just said that this is just some kind of error in our evolutionary programming. Right? That one of our earliest ancestors had some misunderstanding, it was just our, it was actually really our first approach as humans at science, and that we were just trying to explain what we saw around us, and we just came up with this religious sort of mumbo -jumbo to explain it.

Okay? And they argue, and I think they have something of a point, right?

That as cultures become more civilized, quote -unquote, religious worship tends to decline.

If you narrowly define religious worship as I go to a temple and I bow down to a statue. So, funny enough, ethnological is probably the weakest argument when judging it by rational logical standards, but I want to point out to you that it is probably the one that scripture uses the most.

Again, in the ones that I've already mentioned to you. Ecclesiastes, right?

Psalm 19, again, the heavens declare the glory of God, and everyone looks up at the heavens and goes, I need to, there's something

I need to worship out there. Or Romans 1. Romans 1 is essentially

Paul's giant ethnological argument for the existence of God, and the idea that we have no excuse, that there's none who have any excuse to deny that God exists and that they're responsible to him.

So the idea is, like, if you were going to just, if you were trying to be fair, say, to all and say,

I'm going to choose a religion, why would you not choose, you would certainly want to choose one that went all the way back to the beginning, that provides a proof, an explanation for who

God is and why we're here. Because everything that we just have been talking about, I'm going to classify it into natural revelation.

All of those rational proofs, so -called, anyway, of God are natural revelation.

We're looking at what we can observe and see around us, or that we can philosophize and think and rationalize about, and we're saying that that's our revelation of God, our understanding of God's existence.

The problem is, while those might prove God exists, they sure don't give us any help for how to reconcile ourselves to this

God. That requires special revelation.

Category 2. As Brian said, the Word of God. Right, Taylor? It doesn't even tell us that we need it, necessarily.

Right, exactly. Other than, maybe, it sort of gives the hint that that great architect is amazing and perfect, and if he is, then he probably sets all the rules, and maybe

I've fallen short of those rules. Right? But, yeah. Special revelation, by the way, is also always self -revelation.

It's always self -revelation. God condescends, if you remember that from Nunn -Grader,

God condescends to communicate with us. Calvin called it divine...

Do you remember? Divine condescension? He called it divine... Baby talk! That's right.

Divine baby talk. Because, relative to God and us, right, we are the babies.

And he just has to sort of babble at us for us to be able to understand. Nunn -Grader's first pillar was,

God is only revealed to us through the lens or method that he provides. And so,

Birkhoff, he emphasizes that even though we talk about theology as a science, and a studying and knowing of God, human reason does not discover

God. Rather, God discloses himself to the eye of faith.

God discloses himself to the eye of faith. So, question five on your worksheet is, rational proofs are a form of natural revelation.

All right. So, like all good Adult Sunday School sessions, we are not going to finish today.

But we're going to do one more section of my notes, which is the names of God. All right?

The names of God. And we'll save the attributes for next week. So, if all that before was natural revelation, now

I'm going to get into talking about special revelation. And what special revelation really reveals to us about theology proper.

All right. Now, earlier, in Exodus 34, 6 and 7, we read that God uses his proper name when he's introducing himself, so to speak.

Right? Yahweh, Yahweh. And I emphasize so much about what that name means, and why it's important.

And it's maybe the first thing that God wants us to know about it. But here's the thing I'll now say, is that since God names himself,

God did not have a father or a mother to give him that name. He named himself. All of his names that he uses for himself are some form of self -revelation.

Okay? They are expressive, as Burkoff puts it, expressive of his many -sided being.

All right? So, I've got this table here on the worksheet. And we're going to try to fill this in, about what other names tell us, some of his other names that he uses for himself in the

Bible, what they tell us about him. Now, first I want to note that other than his proper name,

Yahweh, and that first row, the generic one, all the other names are anthropomorphic and an act of condescension.

Okay? Because, as we've said, God is incomprehensible. Right? We cannot fully comprehend him, and so everything, he's got to talk to us in this sort of analogical, anthropomorphic way.

Okay? All right. Can anyone guess any of these blanks before I reveal them in the table?

Does anybody know what the generic word for God is in the Old Testament? Anitra? L. L.

Correct. L. E -L. Or, the plural form? Elohim.

Elohim. Right? And Elohim famously used throughout Genesis 1, which is why every time in Genesis 1 when it's got a pronoun in there, it uses a plural pronoun.

Let us create man in our own image. Okay? Because Elohim is plural.

Okay. And the plural forms in the Old Testament, most likely used for intensity, kind of like in the royal we sort of way, but there are definitely commentators who want, who, and I think they have a point, that it might be a hint at or a point, you know, of the

Trinity. God's Trinitarian nature as well. Okay? So, L. Elohim.

How about in the New Testament? What's the generic word for God or a god in Greek? We've been saying it all morning.

Nope. Greek. It's the name of the class. Theo. Theo.

Theo -ology, right? Theo. So, Theo -logy. So, Theo, Theos, is just the generic word for God.

Alright? So, in the New Testament, there's plenty of times where it just says God, capital G, God, and that's the word

Theos. Okay? Alright. That doesn't tell us a lot other than that he's divine.

But how about the next one, Lord? That he's a Lord. Adonai. That's right.

In Hebrew, it's Adonai. And in Greek, didn't know you were going to get into all this

Hebrew and Greek lesson today, did you? Come on, where's my Christian college students at?

Sleeping? Greek, it's Kurios.

With a K. K -U -R -I -O -S. Kurios. And both mean

Lord, ruler, possessor. Okay?

So, from this, when God uses Adonai for himself, or Kurios for himself, we are, of course, seeing in self -revelation the idea that he is sovereign.

Most sovereign. Right? He is the Adonai of Adonais. The greatest of all lords.

And there is nothing that occurs in the universe that is not completely and totally under his sovereign control.

Past, present, future. We're going to talk about decrees next week.

You'll hear more about that, too. Alright? And then, just in the

Old Testament, there's one that means the mountain, or almighty, or he who overpowers.

There's a lot of songs that use this one. Hymns. El Shaddai.

That's right. Or just Shaddai, since we already said El. So, El Shaddai would mean God Almighty, right?

So, Almighty alone is just Shaddai. Okay? S -H -A -D -D -A -I.

This is the name he was known by to the patriarchs. I love this.

Look at Exodus 6, 2, and 3. I'm just going to read it. I'm going to read it with all the names instead of the way that we, in the

English, just substitute in Lord and God and everything else. Just listen to all the different names that just flow out in just this first part.

Elohim also said to Moses, I am Yahweh. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai, but by my name

Yahweh I did not make myself fully known to them. That's in Exodus 6, 2, verses 2 and 3.

Okay? Alright. And then the other New Testament name that's more exclusively in the

New Testament, Father, which in Greek is, anybody know? Just say it.

Pater, like paternal, right? Pater. And, of course,

Jesus not only properly calls him Father, but also teaches us to call him Father, us

Christians to call him Father as he has adopted us. Now, I want to point out that, although I blanked out the

Hebrew side, it's first used as his name in the New Testament, but there are plenty of places in the

Old Testament where he is a fatherly, he is described as having fatherly relation to Israel.

Okay? Where it talks about him as the father of Israel, or that Israel is his son. Deuteronomy 32,

Psalm 103, Isaiah 63, Exodus 4, Hosea 1, and more and more and more. Okay?

So, it's not like Jesus, quote -unquote, invented this in the

Gospels, where suddenly the Jews were supposed to start thinking about God as Father. He simply pointed out what

God had been referring, you know, had been trying to, the point he'd been trying to get across and say, you know, if you are saved, if you're one of his own, then he is your father.

Right? Truly. With special emphasis. And then lastly, salvation. What's the

New Testament Greek word for salvation? Go ahead.

Nope. That's God with us. Close. It's Jesus.

It's Jesus, everybody. Jesus. Yep.

Okay? Salvation. And in the Old Testament, what's the equivalent of Jesus in Hebrew?

Joshua. Or Yeshua. Right? If we want to get really Hebrew. Say it with a

Y, everybody. Yeshua. Okay? Yes.

I love this, that the diminutive form of Yeshua is Yeshi. And I just love that word.

And I've read, like, sort of fictional stories just written, like, you know, historical fiction kind of things with Mary and, like, the young Jesus in which she's calling him

Yeshi. And I just sort of love the idea of that as a nickname.

Yeshi. But Yeshua and Jesus. Salvation. God is salvation.

So to summarize, God uses many names for himself to teach us important truths about himself.

Okay? And remember, given that a name in ancient culture had so much power and significance.

Right? Think of all the times in the Bible in which the Bible stops, pauses to explain to you the meaning of the name of the person.

Because it's so important. Right? What Abraham means. Why Abraham goes from just being

Abram to Abraham. Why Jacob goes from being Jacob, deceiver, to Israel.

Right? Lover of God. Right? Like, just, it just, it keeps, right, there's all sorts of places where the name has so much importance.

And so, of course, God's names have so much significance attached. That these, his names, might be the most important things that God wants us to know about himself.

All right. So we're going to stop there. Next week we will talk about attributes of God, decrees of God, and the works of God.

If time permits. In one week. So buckle up. All right.

Thanks. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you so much for all those who have come before us who have taken the time to do this study and gather this information and provide these resources.

And I'm just, I'm continually struck as I am able to study, Lord, and prepare lessons like this.

How much is available to me and how easily. In this day and age, compared to how hard it had to have been even just a hundred years ago.

And certainly, hundreds and thousands of years ago with reformers and church fathers who worked so diligently to carefully organize our understanding of you into these systematic theologies.

I pray, Lord, that as we study this that we would come to know you better.

Because ultimately that's what ought to be the most important thing. That we know that we need to know you in order to have eternal life.

And if we do have it and we are Christians then we ought to want and love to know you better as the foundation not only to better understand and know the object of our faith but to then live as we ought in response to it.