None Greater (part 1)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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Let me start by reading this, you, my

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God, are supreme, utmost in goodness, mightiest and all -powerful, most merciful and most just.

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You are the most hidden from us and yet the most present among us, perfection of beauty and strength, ever enduring and yet we cannot comprehend you.

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You are unchangeable and yet you change all things. You are never new, never old, and yet all things have new life from you.

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You are the unseen power that brings decline upon the proud. You are the ever active, yet always at rest.

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You gather all things to yourself, though you suffer no need. You support, you fill, and you protect all things.

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You create them, nourish them, and bring them to perfection. You seek to make them your own, though you lack for nothing.

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You love your creatures, but with a gentle love. You treasure them, but without apprehension.

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You grieve for wrong, but suffer no pain. You can be angry and yet serene.

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Your works are varied, but your purpose is one and the same. You welcome all who come to you, though you never lost them.

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You are never in need, yet are glad to gain. Never covetous, yet you exact a return for your gifts.

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We give abundantly to you, so that we may deserve a reward, yet which of us has anything that does not come from you?

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You repay us what we deserve, and yet you owe nothing to any. You release us from our debts, but you lose nothing thereby.

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You are my God, my life, my holy delight, but is this enough to say of you?

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Can any man say enough when he speaks of you? Yet woe to those who are silent about you, because though loquacious with verbosity, they have nothing to say.

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Thus writes Augustine of Hippo about our God. And when

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I read this, and even reading it out loud to you now this morning, I get the sense that he started out to just write, you are my

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God, you my God are supreme, and then he felt like he should say a little bit more about what he meant by supreme, and then four paragraphs later, he still wasn't quite done.

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This lengthy quote comes from a book that today we know as, we call Augustine's Confessions, which technically is an autobiography of Augustine, but it spends so much time talking about God that you'd be forgiven if you didn't realize that it was supposed to be about Augustine.

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And this lengthy quote, this very sort of dissertation really, right, on who

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God is, it packs in an entire book's worth of points about the attributes of God, and so wouldn't you know it, a book, it basically forms the outline, the table of contents of this book that we'll be studying this summer.

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The book's called None Greater by Matthew Barrett. None Greater.

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Who is Matthew Barrett? Maybe you're not familiar with him. I wasn't until recently.

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So Barrett is a, he's an associate professor of theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and he's the founder of Credo Magazine and Credo Podcast, maybe some of you might have read that or heard that or seen articles posted about that kind of thing.

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He was, well, I shouldn't say he was, he is, but he's kind of an academic kind of guy, and he, and you know, if you look through his list of books that he's published from like 2012 till 2019, it's all big academic textbook type stuff, right, theology textbooks and things like that.

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But then in 2019, he came out with this, None Greater, and so this was really his first book aimed at a wide audience.

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And then this year, or maybe it was late last year, came out one about the Trinity, which we also have out there on the book table called

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Simply Trinity. So the covers, by the way, look very similar. The same publisher did both

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None Greater and Simply Trinity, so they've got the same sort of pattern thing. So if you're interested in buying this book, we do have some copies on the table.

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Make sure you get the right one. I mean, you can get Simply Trinity too, it's a good book, but make sure you get this one if you're interested in reading along with us.

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Of course, also, you know, wherever great e -books are sold, you can pick it up there too. And if we run out, we are prepared to buy many more copies, so please feel free to pick one up.

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Now, what is None Greater? What is this book that we're going to read? So, you know, with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek,

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I've often said that one of the most popular genres of, say, about the past five years in Reformed Christian circles is something that I call

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Puritan tourism books. Okay, Puritan tourism books. And what I mean by that is that there's been this tendency of authors to take those, you know, of modern authors, to take those 400 -some -odd -page tomes, right, written by the

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Puritans in the 1600s and 1700s, and sort of tour us through the books, right, giving almost like a commentary on the

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Puritan books, maybe taking certain parts, themes from multiple authors, putting them together into one, and sort of giving us that modern commentary on it to make it understandable for our modern brains.

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Now, whether in fact they're actually dumbing it down for us, I'll leave that to you to decide. So that's

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Puritan tourism. None Greater is slightly different in that instead of being

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Puritan tourism, we've got church doctor tourism. We're going to go back a little bit further in time than the 1600s and 1700s.

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We're going to go all the way back to the 300s, actually, with Augustine, and also a couple of guys around the end of the first millennium, 1000 and around 1200, with Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas.

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So while he picks in things elsewhere, Calvin comes in quite a bit also in this book.

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Really the three guys that he focuses a lot on as he goes through this book are, the writings of three guys that he focuses on are

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Augustine, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas. So in the book, he calls them the

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A -Team. And the reason we're going to go through, he's exploring through these writings of these three men, is what he's exploring in particular is the attributes of God.

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And if you look at the title, None Greater, the subtitle of the book is The Undomesticated Attributes of God.

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And so then you might ask, well, why did he write this? I mean, do we really need another book on the attributes of God?

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I mean, Tozer, Pink, Charnock, weren't they all good enough? Why do we need another one?

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Well, I'll let Barrett defend himself. I'll quote him directly. I'll tell you why. Here's why he says he wrote the book in the introduction.

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He says, this is a book about the attributes of God. But it is probably unlike any book you've read before on the attributes of God.

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Most books on the subject address one attribute and then another and then another. But it is unclear how these attributes relate to one another and whether they all stem from a foundational belief about God.

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This book is different. Not only do I believe each and every attribute is key to each and every other attribute in God, but I'm convinced that we can only understand

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God's attributes in all their glory if such attributes originate from one core conviction.

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And here it is. This is the thesis statement. We're going to repeat this probably roughly 400 times over the summer.

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God is someone than whom none greater can be conceived.

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Say it with me now. God is someone than whom none greater can be conceived.

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Now, it's stated in a really simple way and in a few bit of words, but be careful because there's almost like a double negative snuck in there.

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That he is someone than whom none greater can be conceived.

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So another way to say this is, if you were trying as a thought experiment to imagine the greatest possible person, the greatest possible being, you could not possibly imagine anyone greater than God.

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Okay? Anyone greater than God. So there is none greater, and thus the title.

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Okay? None greater. Now, this is, when it comes to the attributes of God, this is a top -down approach.

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Okay? This is a top -down approach. Folks like Tozer and Pink, and by the way, excellent books.

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This is not meant to cast dispersion on any of those other books about the attributes of God, and they're all extremely valuable, and I highly recommend them.

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Well, not all of them. One well -written one. But anyway, Tozer and Pink, I'll just go ahead and say,

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I recommend those two. But like he says, they have sort of a bottom -up approach when it comes to the attributes, right?

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And in particular, what they're doing is, they start with kind of like, and helpfully,

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I think, to help us understand how to understand who God is and what he is like, they compare him to us a lot.

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Right? It's like, how is God like us? How is he not like us? All right?

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And it's a way to sort of help your finite minds to get a handle on this and grasp it and figure out just what it means to talk about God and what he is like.

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This top -down approach starts with a premise that God is perfect.

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Okay? We just start with that one singular philosophical premise. God is perfect.

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Okay? Now, if we postulate that God is perfect, then we can ask the question, if he is in fact perfect, what must be true about him?

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If he is perfect, what must be true about him? And you'll be surprised, I think, as we go through this class, how many things you can list as the answer to that question.

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Right? If he is perfect, what must be true about him? Now, we're not even at this point necessarily talking about what scriptures say about him.

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Right? Although we are going to find, as we answer this question, each one, that the scriptures tell us, reinforce for us, reveal to us all of the things that we are going to find for the answers to this question.

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Right? That there is none greater. And it is logic that's going to make this possible.

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Okay? We're going to sort of use logic. We're going to use reason to think this through, to explore the scriptures, to engage our minds, to renew our minds, as Sproul would say.

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Right? About God's attributes. About what he is like. But I don't want to move past this too quickly without acknowledging the, there's sort of some intellectual tension at play here.

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All right? Because that we can do this. That we can even try to answer the question, if God is perfect, what must be true about him.

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That to do that is going to require us to use, like, sound, logical reasoning. But God himself is the source of such logic.

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God himself is the source of such logic. That things in this universe are even logical at all is, in fact, a reflection of his attributes.

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Namely, that he is orderly and immutable. I mean, have you ever stopped to consider that?

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Have you ever stopped to consider the fact that we have laws of science?

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Have you ever stopped to consider the fact that we have laws, rules of logic? That we can make arguments?

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Right? That we can talk about things that are true and false? All these things stem from who

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God is like. Let's instead imagine, let's do a little thought experiment this morning.

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I hope you're awake. Where we imagine a universe ruled by a God who is capable of change.

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Who is capable of growth. If we imagine such a universe, it would be chaotic.

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It wouldn't have scientific laws, because its scientific laws would be temporary.

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They'd be progressive. As this God grew, as this God changed, then what would be true about light moving at a certain speed one day, another day it would get faster.

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As this God would change, so would his ideas of what was best, or what was necessary, or what was logical, or what was true.

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There would be no absolute truth, because it would be possible for something to change truthfulness.

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So, we're going to be able to reason about the true God, because God is reasonable.

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That's the only reason we can do this. And he is reasonable, because he is perfect.

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Why don't we go. And yet, the very first attribute that we're going to talk about next week, that Andrew is going to teach on next week, is in fact, that God is in fact, incomprehensible.

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Sorry. Yeah, sorry to you.

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So, we round we go, right? Now, some of you might be old enough to remember

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Glenn Beck. Do you guys remember Glenn Beck? Do you remember that name? He used to be one of the more popular conservative talk radio personalities.

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And I just remember that he had this saying, whenever he was going to talk about something that was going to get him upset, or just wild, or crazy, or whatever, that he'd warn his listeners to wrap duct tape around their heads, right?

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So that when their head exploded, you wouldn't lose any of the pieces, okay? You could put it all back together.

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I'm going to exhort you similarly, okay? Andrew and I are going to either explode your brain, maybe hopefully in a positive, whoa, kind of sense, or melt your brain, maybe both in one sitting.

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And so please come each week fully caffeinated, okay? And prepared for this, alright?

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Because God is, and not to get too far into this, but when we say

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God is incomprehensible, the definition of that is simply this, that since God is perfect and infinite, and we are not, it is impossible for us to completely comprehend him, to completely understand him.

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We cannot get our arms around him because he's too big, right?

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To put it very simply, he's too big. And so while we're going to try to reason, and we're going to try to comprehend him, we can't fully plumb the depths of him, right?

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And this, by the way, is going to be true into eternity. Have you ever thought about what it's going to be like in heaven?

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What are some of the things that we're going to do in heaven for eternity, right?

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One thing we're going to do in heaven for eternity is continue to plumb the depths of how great

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God is, because we will remain, even in eternity, even in heaven, finite creatures, right?

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And so we will forever be able to enjoy learning more and more and more about him, to greater and greater depths, because he is inexhaustible.

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There is none greater. Psalm 36. Actually, you know what?

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Let's get a little interactive this morning. I need three reader volunteers. I was about to just read it out loud.

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Who would like to read some scripture for us this morning? Mark, you can read Psalm 36, 9. Josh, you can read 1

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Peter 1, 1 Thessalonians 5, 21. Psalm 36, 9, 1

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Peter 1, 2, 1 Thessalonians 5, 21. All right. For with you is the fountain of life.

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In your light do we see light. This is

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David. David wrote this. This is Davidic Psalm. This is David taking the top -down approach to trying to comprehend

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God, okay? That he's saying the only reason we see light is in your light, right?

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Because he is the very fountain of life. And we can get really wide and expansive in that thought about what fountain of life means.

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He's the fountain of thought, the fountain of knowledge, the fountain of wisdom, right?

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The fountain of our, like I just said earlier, the fountain of reason, of logic, of understanding, of blessing.

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And it takes God's light, it takes his illumination of our minds for us to be able to see really anything.

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And I've said this before, I think even in an adult Sunday school class, but it really sticks with me.

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That there are across, particularly in America, across this country, there are colleges out there that have, that nowadays we consider to be very secular colleges, some of them are even public colleges, that have professors, chairs of biblical studies, entire departments, right?

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For studying the New Testament or the Old Testament or things like that. And if you read these folks, or listen to any of these, most of these folks, it becomes very apparent very quickly that these are not

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Christian people. And yet they study the Bible for a living, right?

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And it just strikes, it is such a fantastic reminder of the fact that for us to really understand this, to see this, requires

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God's light on our minds, requires the Holy Spirit to illuminate for us, right?

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That we can in fact spend an entire lifetime studying the

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Bible, but if we're not saved, if God's not working in us, if the

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Holy Spirit isn't revealing to us the truths within it, it's just a book and we can get real academic with it, right?

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And we can know, we might even be able to know all the right answers as we read it, but not truly, not have it mean anything to our lives, not have it mean anything to our hearts, right?

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And not really truly come to understanding. So David tells us in Psalm 36 9, in your light do we see light, right?

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We need God's light in our minds, on our hearts, in order for us to understand him.

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So everything, everything over the next couple of months as we look at the attributes of God, everything that we're going to be able to say we know about him, we only know about him because of how he's revealed it to us, right?

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The light that he has given us. 1 Peter 1 2. So this is

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Peter's opening greeting to this church, right? Or to this multiple churches that he's sending the letter to.

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And he starts with, you know, as a basically saying, according to the foreknowledge of God, of the

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Father, according to, right? This is a list so we can keep applying according to each other. According to, you know, being in the sanctification of the

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Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for the sprinkling of his blood, may grace and peace be multiplied to you, right?

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May grace and peace be multiplied to you. May grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ, our

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Lord, Peter says elsewhere, right? That grace and peace being multiplied to us comes from the knowledge, our knowledge of God again and God's knowledge of us and God giving to us and working through us, working in us,

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I should say. And his great mercy caused us to be born again to the living hope, right?

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So for us to be able to see, to understand, to have the light, we have to be born again.

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All right, 1 Thessalonians 5 21. Test everything, hold fast to what is good.

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Test everything, hold fast to what is good. This is, I bring this out as a reminder to us, that even though we're going to talk about reasoning through things and we're going to talk about, we're going to try to think through this, that we must remember that we are people and as people we are, what's that?

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Fallible, okay? And so we must test, right?

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We must examine all things, test all things as we think, as we are going through this exercise of renewing our minds and then hold fast to that which is good.

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What are we going to test it against? Scripture, right? We're going to test it against scripture and then hold fast to what is good.

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Any questions, comments on that? Are we brain melting already?

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Just wait until we actually start talking about theatres.

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This is just the introduction. Well, since none greater is going to look at the 18,

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Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas so much, I'm going to wrap up this week's introductory lesson.

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I'm going to use the time we have left, the next 15, 20 minutes, to give you a brief presentation about each of them.

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Okay, and in case for those of you who are not familiar or who think you know but you don't really know, first off, let me start with this.

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How many of you have heard these names before? Okay, good. Steve, you don't count.

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If Steve hadn't heard that, I'd be nervous. Okay, all right.

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Who thought Augustine was pronounced Augustine? It's okay.

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It's no problem. Don't feel bad. I did for a long time, too.

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Sproul set me straight on that one. Okay, it's Augustine. Augustine of Hippo, not the animal.

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Hippo was a town in a city on the Mediterranean in modern -day

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Algeria, okay, so North Africa on the coast. And he lived in the 300s, 350 to 420 -ish, okay?

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So not too long into the history of the church, one of really the early, early great thinkers, great theologians of the church.

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And most consider him to be, after Paul, the foundational theologian of the

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Western world, okay? He was, for example, one of the first to really develop and document, define for us the doctrine of original sin, right?

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And he went through, he battled with the Pelagians and the

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Doassists and a few other various heretical groups. So the Pelagians in particular, like his whole treatise on original sin was written as a rebuke of the

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Pelagians, right? Who believed that, Pelagians believed that everyone has some tiny speck at least of light still within you that allows you to be able to choose to be saved, right?

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Whereas, and Augustine refuted that pretty thoroughly.

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Now, interestingly about Augustine is that Luther and Calvin really liked him, his writings, right?

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They didn't know him personally, but they really liked his writings. And in fact, when

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Luther and Calvin in the Reformation, 1 ,200, 1 ,300 years later, when they were being accused of inventing new doctrine, right?

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Or inventing new understanding, they loved to point to Augustine's writings to show that they had a lot in common with him, right?

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So in Augustine, while he doesn't use the terms, we do see quite a bit of things that we would today say, oh, this sounds like sola scriptura.

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Oh, this sounds like sola gratia, right? Like that there's elements within there, maybe not quite so fully developed as Luther and Calvin would come along later and do, but that he has in them some of those elements, right?

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Of Reformation thought. Now, the thing about Augustine that is on the negative side is that he was also heavily influenced by Aristotle and Plato, okay?

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He got a really big, before he was saved, he got a really thorough classical Greek education.

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And so he was really into those guys, and as such, he also really helped, again, because he was a philosopher -theologian.

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He really helped to solidify those two, Aristotle and Plato, as sort of the founts, the sources of Western philosophy, okay?

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Up till that point, they'd almost been, maybe started to be forgotten a little bit, kind of fallen by the wayside, those two.

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But now, of course, we all know, we've all heard those names. They're all very famous Greek philosophers. And a lot of the reason for that is that Augustine kept them going, right?

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Brought them into the Church, the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church's thinking, and so thus sort of perpetuated them all the way till this day.

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And both Anselm and Aquinas later, they're also Neoplatonic, which is a fancy word for New Plato, right?

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Just continuing on with the philosophy when it comes to the philosophical stuff, maybe not the theological stuff, but the philosophical stuff about them.

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We won't, this morning, get into the implications of that, but, well,

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I'll get a little bit into the implications of that. What that does, in fact, do is it does give the

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Roman Catholic Church a basis for church tradition being something that can be foundational.

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That gives them a way to be able to say that, you know, that church tradition should be as important as Scripture, right?

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By synthesizing a bit of the Platonic philosophy into things.

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And it's Melanthon and contemporaries of Luther who come along later and have to write some of the background players of the

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Reformation. They have to write the new philosophical treaties to bring us back to sola scriptura alone.

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All right. All right, so that's Augustine, okay?

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Anselm. Anselm might be of the three, the one that you may not have heard the most about or that you might be the least familiar with.

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He's Italian. He's born in 1033, so just after the start of the second millennium.

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But even though he was Italian, he actually got sent to England to serve as the

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Archbishop of Canterbury, and that's where he became really the most famous, is while he was serving in England.

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And at that time, the Archbishop of Canterbury, there was, not to get too much into church history, but even back then, that archbishop was essentially like the head of the

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Catholic Church of England, okay? That position meant that you saw over most of the diocese in England, and so that kind of made him the head of the

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Catholic Church there, okay? Now, he even more so than Augustine attempted to argue for the reasonability, to use that word, the reasonableness of the tenets of the

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Christian faith. Anselm said this, this is one of his famous quotes, and I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but believe that I might understand.

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For this too I believe, since unless I first believe, I shall not understand.

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So there you go, okay? Pow! Right. But what he's essentially saying is faith -seeking understanding.

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Okay, that's the short way we could summarize that, faith -seeking understanding, which again is what

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I was just saying a few minutes ago, that we're not going to have true understanding without true biblical faith.

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Okay? That we need God's light in order to illumine our minds, for us to see light, okay?

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To see the light. So we have to have faith and then seeking understanding, and a lot of people, even contemporaries of Anselm, come along and they try to accuse him of flipping it around the opposite, of being understanding, like trying to reason into faith, but instead he always goes back to saying, no, no, don't misunderstand me.

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You need to have faith first in order to have, to be able to use reason and have proper understanding.

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So in this way he was something of a philosopher -apologist. Okay? Now Barrett, mostly in this book,

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None Greater, he's going to look at Anselm's book, Proslogion.

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Proslogion? I'm going to go Proslogion. Proslogion I'm going to go with. Anybody want to give me a ruling on that?

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Does that sound good? Steve? Better. Proslogion?

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I think it's that. Logion? Maybe it's Logion? Okay, all right. Anyway, it is the first well -developed treatise on the ontological argument for God.

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Has anybody ever heard of the ontological argument for God? Yes, good, all right, awesome.

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Anyone want to try to tell us what the ontological argument for God is? No. No, no.

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Corey, that's your job. All right. All right, so here we go. Anselm, he is trying to prove the existence of God from the concept of, you ready for this?

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A being that which no greater can be conceived. Oh. All right.

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So Anselm reasoned that if such a being fails to exist, if there was no such being, then we could posit and imagine one being none greater.

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Then a greater being, namely a being then which no greater can be conceived and which exists can be conceived.

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But this would be absurd because nothing can be greater than the being which we already said no greater could be conceived and so thus a being which, so thus a being which, then which no can, can,

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I didn't have enough caffeine this morning. Let me start over. So then a being then which no greater can be conceived, i .e.

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God, does exist. Okay, did you follow that?

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No, you did not. That's okay. I don't blame you. All right. We'll try it one more time.

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So if such a, so first we start with the notion of is there a being then which no greater can be conceived?

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Okay. If not, we'll take the negative side of this first. If not, if there was no, if that being failed to exist, then that means that you are arguing that I can conceive of a greater being than that.

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Except if you do that, eventually you'll get to the point where you'll have to say but eventually, there's got to be something where I get to a point where there is a being none greater.

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I've run out of beings. Right? I finally got to the being of which there is none greater.

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And so thus, by even trying to argue against it, you've proven it true that there is eventually some being of which there is none greater than which you can conceive.

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Thus, he must exist. Okay? God exists.

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So that's Anselm's ontological argument. And we have some modern philosophers in our day and age, especially folks who are in the intelligent design or creationist movements who are trying to use the ontological argument and trying to, you know, form it in much clearer terms than that to try to help us all understand what it means.

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But, you know, basically these arguments for the existence of God. All right.

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So that's Anselm. Last is Thomas Aquinas. Not Aquinas.

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Yeah. I know. Every time Barrett talks about the A -team, I mean, of course, first, I'm thinking

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Mr. T. But, because I'm old enough for that. But then second, I'm also thinking like Voltron.

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I'm like imagining like these theologians like assembling and yeah. All right. That joke. Some of, a few of you got that.

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Thank you. I love this church. Okay. Aquinas, he lived in the 1200s.

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Okay. So a couple hundred years after Anselm. And he was a Dominican friar. Okay. So all the, if you see the paintings of him.

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Yeah. All the Dominican friar stereotypes that you can remember, that's exactly what he looks like.

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Okay. And so he's a Dominican friar. And he spent most of his life serving in Italy and in France.

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Okay. Now, ironically for us, one of Aquinas' major contributions to thought was rejecting

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Anselm's ontological argument. But, only because he held

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God in such high esteem. Aquinas' quibble with the ontological argument was incomprehensibility.

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It was that, and again, stay tuned for Andrew's lesson next week. But if we can't fully understand

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God, then we can't truly conceive of this greatest being that Anselm was challenging us to try to conceive.

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Okay. So it's not that he disagreed with Anselm that God exists. But rather disagreed with using this ontological argument as a way to prove it.

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Okay. But how Aquinas put it was, only

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God himself could possibly fully understand his own nature. And that is true.

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Right. Only God himself can possibly fully understand his own nature.

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All right. Now, Aquinas treated theology as a true science.

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A true science. All right. For those of you who have not considered this before, the word theology sounds a lot like the ology part at the end.

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What other examples of ology words can you think of? Biology.

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Geology. Psychology. Yeah. Sociology.

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Meteorology. Right. Got a lot of these. Okay. All these things I just named, what are they all? They're all science.

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Right. They're all sciences. Okay. Theology, as a word, is supposed to mean the science, the study of God.

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Right. Just like all those other things mean the study of rocks, the study of weather, the study of so and so. Theology is the study of God.

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And Aquinas is really one of the ones who really gets going on theology as a true science.

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Right. And he precedes the Renaissance. He sort of foreshadows the Renaissance by applying something of a scientific method to the study of God.

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Okay. And his evidence for when he's doing that study is the scriptures.

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Yeah. And church tradition. Okay. Now, mostly

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Barrett is going to look at Aquinas' book, Summa Theologiae. And particularly in that book, there are sections in that book about the divine attributes.

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Now, Aquinas has a really sharp, special focus on the so -called classical attributes of God.

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All right. And honestly, we probably call them classical because they were Aquinas' focus. I mean, that's what made them classical.

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And these are simplicity, immutability, eternality, and the three omnis.

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Can you name the three omnis for me? Omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent.

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Yes, very good. Okay. Simplicity, immutability, eternality, and the three omnis.

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And we're going to get into all those as we go. So that's

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Aquinas. All right. Now, one final point that I want to make, it's one of my one quibbles with Barrett in this book, and you've heard me kind of already sprinkle it through as I've been talking about these three gentlemen, is that if you read

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None Greater, he's going to heap much praise on the works of these three men.

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And I don't disagree in praising what he's quoting, the parts of their works that he's quoting, because in those senses, these men, their writings are immensely valuable to us.

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But you might come away thinking that these three men are really great on everything.

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And you should not. Okay. You should not come away with that. Because they are all, without apology, very

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Roman Catholic. Okay. This is pre -Reformation. They are all very

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Roman Catholic. To varying degrees, because we're talking about a sweep of a thousand years, right, between Augustine all the way to Aquinas.

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But to varying degrees, they all hold to the papacy. They all hold to the veneration of Mary, Roman rites, mass sacrifice.

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Again, it's different levels of development. And certainly nothing to the level of how

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Roman Catholicism today has advanced to even more unbiblical territory. These guys are nowhere near that.

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But still, just remember that they are, in the time in which they live, members of the

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Roman church. And that they have this, and they have no problem, and also,

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I mean, as an example, the Roman church itself today has no problem holding up these three as valuable to read and learn and study and use.

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I mean, the Roman Catholic church names all three of these folks as church doctors, which to them means like PhD kind of doctor.

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True great theologians for Roman Catholics to study. So, by all means, yes.

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I'm also not trying to disparage them either completely. So by all means, yes, read Augustine's Confessions.

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Read Anselm's Proslogion, if you'd like. And just my exhortation is you is please remember to be

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Bereans, as you do. And always compare what they say with Scripture, whether these things actually be so.

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So that's this morning. That's the introduction. Starting next week, like I said, we'll be looking at the chapter one, if you do want to read along with us.

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And chapter one, the first attribute is about incomprehensibility. But we're going to start with remember that every time the question is, if God is perfect, what must be true about him?

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Right. And the first answer to that question is that he if he is perfect, then he is incomprehensible.

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All right. And Andrew will guide us through that. OK, let's pray. Heavenly Father, Lord, I thank you so much for being able to just come together again for Sunday school hour.

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It's been so long and it's just so wonderful to be here this morning and to study together in and to learn and to try to grow as Christians.

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Lord, we we recognize as we enter into this summer, this series of looking at your attributes that as finite creatures, we will fail to truly be able to grasp you.

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And yet, as our great father, you encourage us to learn more about you.

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You you multiply grace in our lives through our knowledge of you. You want us to know you better,

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Lord, and I pray then that you would bless us as we endeavor to do that very thing through these classes, through this study,