Sunday Night, July 1, 2018 PM

start with this. God is spirit.

The Catechism says God is spirit and does not have a body like man. And yet throughout the scriptures we read about things such as the right hand of God or that God sits on a throne.

And these kinds of language, these kinds of language is man -shaped words about God, that God's eyes see everything that happens.

But Jesus is God is spirit. God does not have a body like we do.

He is not mortal. He is not changing. We know from the scriptures that He is all -powerful, everywhere present, all -knowing.

He is not confined and limited as we are because He is spirit. So when we say this,

God is spirit, we have all this man -shaped language about eyes and hands and sitting on a throne.

But we know not to then make God into an idol or create an idol in our heads, that He does have a body in that way.

Additionally, part of that language, that man -shaped language, the human -shaped language is

God's gender. Gender is specific to physicality, but God doesn't have a body.

So we know it doesn't refer to that. So we're just kind of eliminating that out of the way. Okay, first of all.

Now we have the question, why does God reveal himself in man -shaped words? The $10 term is anthropomorphic, but I'm just going to say man -shaped.

Okay? Man -shaped terms. Why would God speak to us in that way? Talk about a right hand or talk about a throne upon which

He sits. Why would He use terms like that? You're trying to be confusing.

Yeah. So Jerry has identified the fact that if God spoke to us in a way that perhaps

God would speak with God in the eternal fellowship and counsel of the

Triune God, we wouldn't understand what he's saying because we are not as intelligent, we're not as intelligent or wise, nor can we fathom the full wisdom of who

God is. So it's important that He speak to us in a way that we can understand. Calvin put it this way, it's kind of a baby language.

When you talk to a three -year -old about something important, you don't use terms like anthropomorphic, right?

You're not going to help that little kid, you're going to use words that a three -year -old can understand, right?

And especially if it's very important, you might get down on one knee, look at them eye to eyeball, right?

Try to hold his attention and talk to this child in a way that he's going to understand you.

And what you say is true it's true, and you say it in a way he can understand it.

Now someone else may sit back and analyze and say, hmm, and take the analogy too far.

So what we're saying is when God speaks to us, He's going to speak in a way that we understand, in a way that will be helpful for us to understand who

He is. So He chooses to talk about a throne because He wants us to know He's in charge and He's a king, He has all the power.

He speaks to us about a right hand to let us know that He is strong and always ready to come to the defense of His people and always ready to judge wrong.

He speaks to us about His eyes so that we would know that He sees everything. Not the way that we see, and we have photoreceptive nerves in our head, but that He truly knows everything that's going on and sees everything that's going on.

And so He uses His language to tell us who He is. Now why the male gender?

God made us in His image. He made the male and female in His own image.

He made them. He brought them together in a family from the very beginning and then has a lot to say in the scriptures about how husbands and wives are to love one another and how parents are to love their children and so on.

And when fathers are addressed throughout the scriptures, fathers are called to be what?

A head, leaders, authority, we're going to get into the adoration, protector, and then pastor, which is just something much the same.

So when God talks about who a father is, when

God talks about who a son ought to be, talking to us about who we are in our humanity,

He will then also use analogous language drawn from those ideas to talk about Himself, not to say that He is a physical father, but that He does have this role as a father in our lives, that He provides for us.

God causes His brain to follow the just and the unjust. As a creator, He provides.

As God is creator, He owns everything and He's in charge of everything. He has all authority, all power.

Like a father is to exercise authority. And when we think about being a protector,

God wants His children whom He loves, whom He has saved, to know that He protects them, that He shields them.

So the language of father is very helpful. Now, you can't be a father unless you're a male.

Some would debate that today. I have no idea why. But you can't be a father unless you're male, hence the male gender language.

Also, a son, a faithful son, is important.

So He is male. The Holy Spirit has the male gender because we have one

God and three persons, the same essence, yet in three persons. So we're going to carry that male gender identification language all the way through.

Perhaps most importantly, God refers to Himself in the male gender because of the narrative of salvation.

God made Adam and Eve in His own image. Eve was deceived by the serpent and ate the fruit and gave some to her husband who was with her.

Adam had been called to tend the garden and to keep it. He failed in his duties.

He did not interrupt the snake, rip its head off, and end the conversation. But he was responsible.

We know he was responsible, as we read in the Scriptures, that there is

Adam who was a type of him who was to come. And there's this new humanity that is promised in Christ as the second

Adam. And again, you can't have a second Adam unless he's male. Some would debate that today, and I have no idea why.

Now, you have Jesus Christ, God the Son, taking on human flesh, and He came as a male.

God was going to do that from the very beginning, before He ever created. He had determined this in eternal counsel, and before He created everything, and before the

Incarnation, this was going to be the case, before any of the Scripture was written for our benefit.

So the male gender has to be there in order for there to be clarity in the gospel story.

So if we get rid of the male gender because of protests about its oppressive discourse, and whatever else folks would like to say, then we're going to lose the storyline of the gospel.

We lose the understanding of God as Father. We lose the understanding of the special relationship between the

Father and the Son, the headship of Christ versus the headship of Adam, and we start losing all sorts of things.

So I think that's why it's important that the gender language is ultimately man -shaped terms to help us better understand the gospel.

And I've probably left some things out, so is there any other questions that popped up additionally? That's a great question,

James. Okay, anything else for discussion?

Yes. Yes. We've talked about the

Trinity, the person of the Son. It's important to...we

have the following understanding from the Scriptures. The Father is not the

Son, and the Son is not the Father. I was trying to select a hymn, and there was a good oldie in here, but it says that the

Father went away to prepare a place for us. The Son is not the

Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Son.

And also the Spirit is not the

Father, and the Father is not the Spirit. Three distinct persons. Now, the

Father is God, the Spirit is God, the Son is God. Okay? So when we think about the

Trinity, we have to think, the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God, God is one, but the

Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father. That's a mystery, but it's not a contradiction.

Yet, this is revealed to us, the truth about who God is revealed to us in the Scriptures, even though we have no hope of fully fathoming the depths of that.

Now, let's think about Christ. It was the Son who became incarnate, not the

Father and not the Spirit. It was the Son. And the

Son took upon human flesh. He did not cease to be a member of the

Trinity. He did not end eternal fellowship with the

Father and the Spirit when He took upon human flesh. He is fully

God and a fully man, two natures in one person.

Okay? So, fully God, fully man, two natures in one person, this is the hypostatic union, another mystery that we cannot help but think of when we think of the

Trinity, we also must deal with the Incarnation. Now, in Revelation, we have language of Jesus Christ on the throne, the

Lamb of God who is on the throne, but also doubled up with that language is the language of not just the

Lamb, but the idea of God the Father on the throne as well. We never see

God the Father. For all the imagery in Revelation, we never see the

Father. For He dwells in inapproachable light.

God is Spirit, God is light. We can't see Him. And He expressly condemns any effort to make any kind of image representing

Him, the second commandment. And so, this holds in special place the only one who has ever revealed

God by way of an image, and that is

Jesus Christ. No one has seen God at any time, but the only forgotten God who was with the Father, He has explained

Him. And if we want to know who God is, we look at Jesus Christ. And we only see

His humanity. When John wrote 1

John, he said that we have seen Him, we have touched Him, we were there with Him.

And even in the Transfiguration, he is only seeing something that is still translated in a way that John can somehow grab hold of some kind of comprehension of who

God is. And so, ultimately, because God is

Spirit, God is sitting on the throne, and yet this is speaking of God the

Father who doesn't have a body, and yet the Son is also sitting on the throne as there is this unity together as the authority is being expressed from heaven.

So, when we read in the Scriptures of God on His throne, or God with eyes, or God with a right arm, it's helpful to remember that this language, this human -shaped language, expresses better for us, helping us to understand who

God is, but ultimately the fulfillment of all the man -shaped language in all the

Scriptures, all the anthropomorphic language in the Scriptures, is fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ.

For He did take on human flesh, and He came down to our level as the full, perfect Word of God to convey who

God is to us. And so, in the Incarnation, we have the fulfillment of all that anthropomorphic language.

Yes, 1 Samuel 2 25, 1

Samuel chapter 2, and verse 25. As we look at this portion of history in Israel, we're dealing with a time in which there is before the kings of Israel.

It's a time when things are pretty bad because of the degradation of Israel throughout the history of the judges.

Just how bad have things gotten? Well, the priesthood is in big trouble.

The high priest Eli is fat. This is a big problem.

Priests didn't get fat because the fat was to be burned off and given to the Lord. Priests ate fairly lean.

But Eli's sons are following their father's example, and they're not doing the sacrifices right.

He has no moral authority to tell them to stop because even though they are more corrupt than he is, he's still corrupt.

So Eli and his sons are the corrupt priesthood, and it seems that there is no valuable leadership left in all of Israel.

Yes, because in chapter 2, we find that Eli needs to rebuke his sons.

In fact, his sons are guilty of stoning. They should be stoned to death because of their crimes.

Eli was very old. Verse 22, he heard all that his sons were doing to all Israel, how they lay with the women who served at the doorway of the tent of meeting.

And he said to them, Why do you do such things, the evil things that I hear from all these people? No, my sons, the report is not good, which

I hear the Lord's people circulating. If one man sins against another, God will mediate for him. But if a man sins against the

Lord, who can intercede for him? But they would not listen to the voice of their father, for the

Lord desired to put them to death. Which is a light way of saying the same thing that the

Bible says about God's approach to Pharaoh. Now in chapter 3,

Samuel, the little boy, receives a word from God.

He thinks it's Eli at first, we know the story, but finally God speaks to him. And what is sometimes left out of the

Sunday school story is what exactly God said to Samuel. The Sunday school story concludes with Samuel realizing that God was speaking to him, and how wonderful it is that you can hear

God speaking to you if you just read your Bible. Which is true, but what did God say to Samuel?

And this is what Samuel told Eli. Well, verse 11.

That's what it says. Yeah, and it's pretty harsh.

So we want something else, don't we, when we see it? We instinctively, oh, surely there's a...

But then we hear, you know, Jesus himself said there is a kind of sin from which there is no coming back.

And we have something like that here, don't we? The destruction of Eli's house, of course, happened when

Eli, when Hophni and Phinehas took the Ark of the Covenant out into battle like a superstitious good luck charm and then lost it to the

Philistines. And then Eli heard the news and he fell over and broke his neck and died.

And then Hophni or Phinehas' wife, who gave birth to his son and died, in naming him

Ichabod, the glory of God is departed. There were still remnants of Eli's house that continued for some time, but soon they were all killed.

All priests of God were killed by Doeg the

Edomite in Saul's day. He traced the line of Eli all the way to there where they were destroyed.

So that's... I forgot your question.

I apologize. What does it look like?

I mean, that's what it says. And so we want something different.

But it says, even back in chapter 2, verse 25, they would not listen to the voice of their father for the

Lord desired to put them to death. If the Lord desired that they repent, he would have given them the grace to repent.

Oh, with Judas. Right. Yeah. So it seems pretty clear that if God wanted it otherwise, it would have been otherwise.

Like Saul of Tarsus, right? Saul of Tarsus could not be more opposed to Jesus Christ in the way of Christianity.

There was no one more zealously against Jesus than Saul of Tarsus. And God interrupted his path ending.

No, no, no. You're going to stop doing that. And instead, you're going to be an apostle for me. So it doesn't look like there's any redemption for Eli in this case.

And it didn't look like that way either for the Pharisees, to whom Jesus was speaking. And they blasphemed the Holy Spirit.

And it's a very, very sad passage when you find that. But you find that again and again.

Good podge tavern. How about that? We were up in the hills of Arkansas.

Becca and I were traveling, and we came around one of those hairpin curves. And we found astounding grace,

Baptist Church. Yes, Ms.

Wylene. Let's turn over to Hebrews 6.

This is another passage that talks about an irredeemable kind of person.

And again, these are more frequent in the Bible than we would care to see.

And yet God knows what we need. And the fact that these are here are severe mercies that we would read about them and be thoroughly warned.

So in Hebrews 6, and let's take a look at verse 4.

It says, For the ground that drinks the rain, which often falls on it, and brings forth vegetation useful to those for whose sake it is also tilled, receives a blessing from God.

But if it yields thorns and thistles, it is worthless and close to being cursed, and it ends up being burned.

But, beloved, we are convinced of better things concerning you and things that accompany salvation, though we are speaking in this way.

So when you look at the litany of terms in verse 4, and we talk about these terms of enlightened, and tasted, and partakers, and again, tasted.

These are terms, again, used throughout Hebrews and throughout the New Testament in a way that is not exclusively of Christians.

It can also be used of non -Christians who are somehow blessed by the ministry of the church.

But you can, this is the warning, you can be enlightened.

You can have the light of the gospel shined on you. You can be brought to an understanding of the gospel.

The central information of who Christ is and what He did. In fact, He's the only mediator between God and man.

You can taste of the heavenly gift of the Holy Spirit.

You can even be partakers of the Holy Spirit. Not participants in His life, but partakers of the blessing of the

Holy Spirit in the life of the church. In other words, you're in the splash zone of the

Holy Spirit, and you're getting some effects because of the goodness of the Holy Spirit.

But you yourself are not born again. This is all possible. You can taste the good word of God.

You can have the word of God preached to you again, and again, and again. And that the powers of the age to come.

You can taste of the powers of the age to come. Being blessed by all these people who are new Christians in Christ.

Old things have passed away. The old new things have come. And you're a beneficiary of that because you're around them.

And all these things being so, and then abandon all of it.

And have fallen away. Yeah, that would include people who would say that because they have an understanding of who

He is. And perhaps they have that facility with this spiritual language. But it says if they've fallen away, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance.

This is going to fall in line with what Christ said about the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. And what we find in terms of under the heading of apostasy.

Jesus assures us that of all that the Father gives him, he will not lose one. And that no one can snatch this out of his hand.

And 1 John says that in reference to this age in which we live and the spirit of Antichrist growing.

That those that many left, they went out from us, but they were not really of us.

For if they had been of us, they would have remained with us. But they all went out so it would be shown that they were not of us.

And so again and again the scripture is clear. There is no idea of being born again, being saved, truly being a

Christian. And then not being a Christian anymore. There's nothing in the

Bible that says that. But there is a lot in the Bible that challenges us to consider whether or not, test yourselves, examine yourselves, to see whether or not you're in the faith.

We're told that. Because it is dangerous. It can be very dangerous for people to be associated with Christians participating in the life of the church.

And considering that to be good enough. Remember how many times did

Jesus say something to these people who have been following him so passionately from place to place.

Risking themselves and even going hungry sometimes just so they could be around Jesus. I mean what devoted followers.

And all of a sudden he says something. And they go away. John 6, 66.

And many of them, many of his disciples departed and followed him no more.

Because the parable of the seeds is actually the parable of the soils. But we call it the seeds, right?

We do. The parable of the seeds. We instinctively call it that. That's kind of what we kind of think about.

But it's actually the parable of the soils. And the difference is seen.

The difference in the heart that is prepared by God versus the hearts that are of the flesh is very clear.

In chapter 10, verse 26. So in chapter 10 of Hebrews, in verse 26, it says,

For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins.

Is that what you're talking about? So the idea is the knowledge of the truth, obviously speaking about what the author of Hebrews has just talked about, the confession of our hope, talking about the blood of Jesus, this new and living way, which he inaugurated for us through the veil that is his flesh.

We have this great high priest over the house of God. We have a mediator. He is our savior. And if this way, this knowledge of the truth is given to someone and they say,

I'm going to keep on doing what I'm doing because I want to do that instead of trust in Christ, can this person, as they keep on sinning willfully and going their own way, are they going to find some way to be saved down that path?

Is there any salvation down that path of willful sin? No. Jesus Christ is still savior.

But if they go on sinning willfully and never repent, are they ever going to find some sort of salvation?

No. That's kind of like those that have been enlightened, but they chose not to be enlightened.

Right. Ultimately, they rejected the message. It's just funny. Blaspheming of the

Holy Spirit has to do with what the Pharisees were doing was they were seeing the work of Christ, who had been given the spirit without measure, and he was casting out demons.

He was healing people and so on and so forth. And the Pharisees said, this is the work of Satan himself. Okay. And so Jesus says that this, that there's no hope for them if that's the way that if that's what they're going to hold.

That's what they confess. There's no hope for them. Their heart is so far gone. Right. Romans 1 talks about God turning folks over at a certain point, turning them over to reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting.

And even though they know the judgment of God is upon those who do these things, they do them and celebrate others who do them as well.

Once you're so far gone and you've rejected everything there is about, that's true.

That's right. Right.

Without repentance and faith, there is no salvation from sin. Unless someone turns away from themselves and turns to Christ, there is no salvation from sin.

So you can turn to our church. You can turn to a new identity. You can turn over a new leaf and you do all of that.

But there is no salvation down a road of sin. And that sin can be self -righteousness and that sin can be licentiousness.

But if you go down the path of sin instead of turning to Christ, there's no salvation down that path. And I think that that's a message that very often is difficult for us because, after all, here in the

South, we believe in justification by death. Right.

Exactly. If my neighbor's name is Gary and he's an avid golfer and I go over and call him

Fred and talk about fishing. Am I talking to? He's my neighbor,

Fred. Hey, Fred. My name's Gary. How was fishing? I'm a golfer. And people do that with Jesus all the time.

Right. Jesus is my ultimate permission to do whatever I want. Jesus is, you know,

Jesus is my get out of hell free card. Or Jesus loves me and nothing ever bad will ever happen to me.

And they're not really dealing with who he is. Who is Jesus Christ? Right.