Systematic Theology (part 4)

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Systematic Theology (part 5)

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So Pradeep is in here, he asked me to cover in one session, to the degree possible, sort of chapter 3 of the
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Fundamentals of the Faith book. And I know he's been going through Doctrines of God and things like this, and chapter 3 is about the
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Attributes of God. So, to the extent that we can cover the entire Attributes of God in 45 minutes, it will be a feat to behold.
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So, the question that I guess I have is, why... oh, there he is!
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Brian, you were the topic of my story! You were in my dream last night, you and Dr.
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Mola, the whole thing. You'll have to catch up on it later. Why do we study the
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Attributes of God? Why is that a worthwhile topic of our time and energy as Christian believers?
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By the way, I like to be very interactive when I do classes, so... You've got to speak up or there's going to be a lot of silence.
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Why study the Attributes of God? Good, we want to know God better. Other answers?
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Excellent, right? We know what we're like, but we need to learn what He's like. Though there is a sense in which our
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Attributes somewhat reflect Him, in a sense, as well, too. Well, in Job 22 -21, it says,
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Agree with God and be at peace, thereby good will will come to you.
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So, there's profit to us to learning about God. And in Proverbs 9 -10, it says,
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The fear of the Lord at the beginning of wisdom and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight. We have great gain that comes to us as a result of knowing
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God. So, in the Bible, in Psalm 89, verse 7,
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God is described to be feared, awesome and mighty. We hear in Isaiah 43 that,
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Before me there was no God and there will be none after me. So, we are studying someone that is unique and unlike us, and there's profit to us, and we desire to know
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Him, and it is worthy of our effort. In the Scriptures, God initiates the introduction to Himself, not by a self -defense or a theological treaty.
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He simply has claims of self -existence in the Scriptures. So, when we learn about God through Scriptures, we're learning who
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He is by what He claims to be. And it starts by, first, His self -existence, and then He goes on through the
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Scriptures to describe Himself through the authors of Scripture. So, we're going to go through a few verses here.
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I'm just going to have you guys read them, and we'll go through some basic concepts. First, on basically the self -existence of God.
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So, I'm just going to go around and ask you guys to read some Scriptures if we could. If you could grab Genesis 1 .1,
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Exodus 3 .14, and Alyssa, you know the drill, right? You know how this goes.
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Isaiah 43 .13. So, Genesis 1 .1, there's a basic assumptions of God's existence right out of the gate.
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And Exodus 3 .14, perfect. So, we have His title of I Am claiming self -existence in Isaiah 43 .13.
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So, God has existed from all eternity. Our job here as Christians isn't to defend
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God. We're not here teaching a class on how to prove the existence of God.
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We're going to start with the baseline that God has identified who He is. He self -exists.
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He claims His self -existence. And it's not up to us to defend Him, per se. It is up to us to understand who
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He is. So, why do you guys think men question the existence of God?
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What is it about man that questions God's existence? Excellent.
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I love that answer. Any other thoughts on it? So, we can't see
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Him. So, then that follows into the next question, which is, in what ways has
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God revealed Himself to us? So, how is God revealed to man? When we say we want to study
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God, the attributes of God, what do we have as a means? The perfect and thorough answer.
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Thank you, Brian. Can you think of a verse in Scripture that you would go to on the general revelation answer?
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Awesome. Can you read Romans 18 -20? Because that's 18 -22, if you could.
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Good. So, God made Himself evident to men, and God made Him seen through His creation.
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And if you just jump ahead to Romans 2, 14 -16, it talks about how
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He's also revealed to men in their conscience. If you could just read that real quickly, that would be great. Excellent.
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So, God also reveals to them through their conscience. So, we have general revelation, just like in Psalm 19 -1.
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The heavens declare the glory of God, echoed in Romans 1, 18 -22. So then, okay, we're going to accept the fact there is this one great
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God. He's revealed in Scripture, He's revealed in creation, and it's important for us to know Him for the aforementioned reasons.
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So then the question follows, can we know Him? Is this God a knowable God? Can we know about God?
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Because He's much greater than us in every aspect. Has He made us able to know
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Him? How would you guys want to answer that? Yeah, exactly.
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That's Philippians 2 and others. So, we're going to get to that about how we get to know God through looking at Jesus Christ Himself.
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So, yes, we can know God, and there's a means by which we can know Him. I love that answer.
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And because one of the things that I was thinking along those same lines as well, that if we have a
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God that can't be known, if we have an unknown God, how can an unknown
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God be worshipped and trusted by us? Isn't our trust and our worship best directed at a
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God that we can know? Otherwise, it's sort of blind, completely blind faith and trust.
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So, yes, I believe God wants us to know Him, and not only does He want us to know Him, I think the overarching point of Scripture is that it's the greatest quest of a man's life to know
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God. There's no higher thing that we can do in our life than to know
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God. Everything else subordinates to that. John, let's grab a few more scriptures, if we can.
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So, can you grab John 17, 3?
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And Rachel, do you want to grab Jeremiah 9, 24? So, it's so important that we know
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God that we even have the knowledge of God equated to our eternal life.
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Salvation is inherently linked to the knowledge of God. John 17, 3.
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Excellent. I love that verse. You want to be saved? Know God. Can we know
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God? Can we be saved? It's the same question. When we know God, we are embracing, really, the salvation that God has granted to us.
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So, someone who is saved can say boldly, I know God. And then, what do we have for Jeremiah 9, 24?
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Good. So, there's a testimony out of Jeremiah that we can know God and we can boast in knowing God.
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So, though we know that God is things like incomprehensible, He has no boundaries,
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He's beyond us, even though He is that great and grand, we still have the ability to know
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Him. So, what is then the difference between knowing
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God and knowing about God? Something I talk to my children about because when us as Christian parents raise our children, we often teach our kids about God, right?
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And we hope that they branch over to knowing God. Yes, Frank. Good. And in Proverbs 2, 3 through 5, it said,
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For if you cry for discernment, lift your voice for understanding. If you seek her as silver and search for her as hidden treasures, then you will discern the fear of the
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Lord and discover the knowledge of God. So, it breaches from intellectual to personal, and that personal really is a salvific knowledge of God.
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So, let us see. The importance of... Yes. No, no.
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That's an excellent point. That's an excellent point. So, practically speaking, right?
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We can know God by, one, setting our minds and our desires to know Him, and by filling our mind with His Word, and by listening...
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Sorry, learning to fear God because it's the beginning of wisdom, right? So, if we set our minds to know
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God, we desire to fill our minds with His Word, and we have a healthy fear of God, that will move us from the knowing about God into knowing
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God category. So, how does fearing
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God keep knowing God from becoming sort of casual?
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How do we have the fear of God be keeping us on our toes, as it were, and not just letting the knowledge of God be...
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How does it sort of elevate the importance of it? Am I asking that question right?
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Brian, you look like you want to answer. What's the importance of us fearing God in our quest for knowing
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God? Let me ask it that way. Yeah, and we take it seriously, right? This is an upgrade from sort of kindergarten
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Sunday school class. This is a serious endeavor of our entire existence, our entire life, and we have it before us, and yet we so rarely take advantage of what we have been given and entrusted.
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Yeah, and so both Brad and Brian are pointing to the next fundamental thing before we actually try to look at some of the attributes of God, which is how we actually then know
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God, and you guys both pointed out that it's through Christ that we can know God. And so let's just look at a few verses that clarify that.
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So I want to make sure... We want to keep going to... You didn't have a chance to do a verse, right? So John 14, 9 through 10.
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Vincent, can I get you to Colossians 2, 9? And Rachel, Hebrews 1, 3?
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So John 14, 9 to 10, if you have that. Excellent. So based on what you just read, what would you say...
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What does Jesus say about the meaning for knowing God based on that? Yeah, exactly.
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Colossians 2, 9? Great. We want to know what God's like? Let's look at Christ. If the whole fullness of God dwells in Christ, we look to Christ.
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How about Hebrews 1, 3? The exact representation of his nature. So we know that God...
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The importance of knowing God. It's profitable for us. We know that God can be known.
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We know that he desires us to know him. We know that knowing him is synonymous with salvation.
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We know that he's made knowledge of him available to us by general and special revelation.
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And we know that he's given us Jesus Christ, the author of our salvation, as the very embodiment of the character of God.
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So all the tools are laid before us to know God, and we ought to then move forward with fear and reverence to seek to understand who this
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God is. And if we fail to do so, then we are effectively worshiping an unknown
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God, and that would be a tragedy. So Andrew, my son, right there, raise your hand.
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He handed out a blank piece of paper to everybody, or should have. I don't know. If you don't have a piece of paper that you can scribble on, put your hand up and he'll get you one in the next 10 seconds.
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Cough, cough. And if you need a pen, too, he's got some extra pens. So a lot of you here have been
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Christians for a long time. Some of you have grown up in households that you've been taught since you were wearing diapers about Christ and about God.
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And some of you are more new Christians, but yet kind of have an understanding of who God is, or maybe you're just learning for the first time.
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But I think if you actually try to put down on paper what you already know of God, you'll be fairly impressed.
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And since God's character has an infinite number of attributes that we can only see the finite number given to us in Scripture, we need to at least sort of quantify where we already stand.
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So what I'd like you to do, and this sort of harkens back to my junior high
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Sunday school class, I'm going to give you guys three to five minutes, and I want you, just from what you know, make a list on this piece of paper of as many of the attributes of God.
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So just a single word that would be an attribute. An attribute would be a characteristic of God.
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And see how long your list can get in the next three to five minutes. I'll give you a 30 -second warning when we'll close it off.
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So go ahead and spend a few minutes and make your list of your known attributes of God. Cheating off Mom and Dad, come on!
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She used to be in my Sunday school class. I'll bet if you keep thinking, you won't be able to stop writing.
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It's like that alphabet game that you teach your kids when they can't fall asleep, right? The ABCs of the attributes of God.
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We'll go 30 more seconds on your list. All right, let's call it there.
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Hopefully some of you felt like, I needed more time to write. It's kind of like when you play Boggle, and you're looking for all those words, and there's more to find, but the timers run out, right?
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So how many people here had less than 20 on their list? Add up your total list so you have your number.
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Who had less than 20? Less than 20, okay. Who had between 20 and 30?
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That's pretty good. 30 to 40? More than 40?
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So we dropped out somewhere under 30 was the highest, right? No one got over 30?
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Alyssa, did you get over 30? You can brag in front of the adults, it's okay. All right, so let's hear what some of you guys came up with.
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So we'll run through the room and see what everyone has. If yours has already come up, you can cross them off, and we'll see how many unique ones we came up with just in the short time that you guys did this exercise.
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So let's just start here with Bob, and we'll just go zing, zing, zing, zing, zing, and list a unique one off of your list.
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Simple, okay. Everywhere. Infinite. Creative.
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Mediator, okay, good. Zooks. Zealous. Just. Triune, excellent.
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Jealous. Triple holy, excellent. Luke, you got one? You can cheat off mom, it's okay.
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Loving, excellent. Keep going. Omnipresent.
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Powerful, good. Keep going. Excellent. Miraculous. Sarah, you got one?
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No? Alex? Creator, good. How about you guys over here? Slow to anger, good.
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All seeing, excellent. Double dipping on zealous.
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I think we got that. Come on. Cindy? All the good ones are getting used up, right?
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Any left? Okay. All wise. Protector, excellent.
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That was a pretty good unique list, and there's got to be, what, 60 people in here or something? Did anyone else have any other unique ones that weren't named?
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Sustainer. Self -sustaining, good. Eternal, what was it? Blameless.
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Other unique ones? Savior, excellent.
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Shepherd. Ruler. Destroyer of evil, excellent.
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Compassionate, I heard. King of kings. Substitute, good.
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Orderly, I like it. What was it? Light, good.
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Excellent. Never sleeping, excellent. Did we exhaust them all?
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At least within this finite room, did we exhaust our own finite minds? So that was pretty good, right?
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So within less than 10 minutes, we named, what, 75 attributes of God. Are there more that exist?
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How many more? Is there an infinite number of God's attributes, right?
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Right? We have to think so. And we have a great example of the ones that God wants us to have available to us through his special and general revelation.
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So you guys already know a lot about the character of God and the nature of his attributes, but let's highlight a few of them.
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We have about 15 minutes that we can do that in. So some of the more common ones that are mentioned is things like,
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I think, holiness, righteous, and just, sovereign, eternal, immutable, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, love, truth, and mercy.
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I would say, if you were to take a cross -section of Christian culture and identify the most commonly named attributes of God, these would probably make most lists.
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The thing I love about the attributes of God is that each one of these attributes that you all named and the ones that went unnamed and the ones that I just stated, they all have to work in perfect harmony with one another.
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You can't have one attribute of God sort of superimpose its ability to trump another attribute of God.
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They all work perfectly together. So when we say we have a righteous and sovereign
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God, aren't we – yeah, go ahead. I like that. That's a quotable
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Abendroth quote, right? That's good. So, right, and that's why, you know, when
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I teach in my Sunday school class and we talk about these things, you know, Alyssa and others, you guys know these things, right?
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We talk about this and say, when other kids try to argue with you and say, can
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God make a rock that's so big that he can't lift it? Right? It's sort of a contradictory question, right?
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And Ms. Zook, how would you answer that question? You forget? Come on, come on. Alyssa, do you know?
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Right. So God can only do what's within his nature, right? So he can do everything insofar as it's consistent with his nature and character, right?
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So if someone tries to give you these false questions that makes God conflict with himself in any category, you know, it's just setting up a straw man argument.
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What's that again? Yeah, no, exactly.
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So when we talk about his sovereign nature or his eternal nature or his immutable nature, it has to work with his loving nature as well, right?
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So we have to have a sovereign God who is eternal and immutable, but does it all in love.
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So we can't say, oh, he's sovereign and eternal, but today he's love and tomorrow he isn't love, right?
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Because he's also immutable. So his character, existence, characterizations of love can't change over time, for example.
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And so all these attributes all have to work synonymously and in harmony. So the holiness of God.
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Let's hear a random definition of the holiness of God, a one -liner definition.
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God is holy. We say it all the time. God is holy. But give us your one -liner theological definition of the holiness of God.
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Sinless without blemish. Okay, that's good. That's good. I like that. It's like the absolute purity of God, right?
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So how about any verses come to mind that mention the holiness of God? That's a tricky question to put you on the spot for, but you're up for it.
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Anyone can help her? A verse in Scripture that mentions the holiness of God or alludes to it?
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Patty, didn't you mention the triune holiness? Do you know where that's found in Scripture? Isaiah?
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Yep. Isaiah 6, right? So, yeah, it's God's absolute purity,
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His absolute perfection, and it's probably the most often mentioned theme in Scripture on His attribute of God, His holiness.
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So how about righteousness? What would be a good definition of righteousness?
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And make sure in your definition it's distinguished and not blurred with justice. So if we say God is righteous, how would we describe the righteousness of God?
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Excellent, right? He only does what's right. He's righteous. He doesn't do anything that's wrong, right?
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And so then sort of the pairing attribute of that is His justice.
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And would you be willing to take a stab at a distinguishing feature between righteousness and justice?
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Right, so it's sort of His legislation of the righteousness, right?
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Exactly. Let's see if we can find a few verses on the righteousness of God.
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So how about Psalm 119, 137? Andrew, can you grab that?
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Psalm 119, 137. And how about Psalm 89, 14?
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John, you mind grabbing that? Psalm 89, 14. Do you have it, Andrew? So when he reads
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Psalm 119, 137, see if we can identify something in there that speaks to either
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God's righteousness or His judgment. Not tricky, is it? Is there anything in there that speaks of His righteousness,
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Andrew? All right. So it's displayed in His rules or in His judgments, right?
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So He is righteous, and then He enacts them through His righteous justice.
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And you had the other one, which was Psalm 89, 14, right? So broader question then. How does our standards of righteousness compare to God's standard, and what do we do if those standards are in conflict?
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So we tend to have our own very righteous standards of things that we seem to think are righteous, right?
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How do they compare with God's standards? Excellent. And we have those standards laid out for us in Scripture.
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Okay, how about the sovereignty of God? It's a popular phrase around here, the sovereignty of God.
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Define for me in one sentence the sovereignty of God. Yes, Andrew.
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Nothing is out of His control. Good. I like that. He does whatever
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He pleases. It's all in His control, right? He's subject to no one. God is subject to no one.
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He does as He pleases. And who has Romans 8 .28 right at the tip of their brains that they can spout out for me?
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Romans 8 .28, it's a favorite verse. All things work together according to His purpose, right?
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They work out for our good, but it's according to His purposes. So He does all that He pleases.
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So we have a holy God who does everything right, and He has the ability to execute
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His justice because He is sovereign, right? So these attributes all start working together in harmony.
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So knowing that nothing is out of His control, again, as we seek to know God, what should be our response to that?
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So we hear God is sovereign. We see it affirmed in Scripture. We know it's our desire to know God and to follow
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Him. It's linked inherently to our salvation. How then do we respond as Christians to knowing that God does all that He pleases and His purposes are accomplished?
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How should we respond to that personally, kind of like an application of this? Right, exactly.
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So we can look back 2020 and say, this happened, this happened, this happened.
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Praise be to God because His purposes were accomplished, and we don't have to fear and fret and worry about all those things that took place because He used them for His purposes and for our good.
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Okay, how about the eternality of God? How about a definition of God is eternal? Exactly, that's the perfect answer.
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He has no beginning and no end. I think we could probably come up with a verse that supports that, unless you have one in mind,
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Vincent. How about, can you look up Isaiah 43, 13?
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And while you're up at that area, Isaiah 44, 6 would be a good one too. Was it
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Isaiah 43, 13? Is that the right one? And how about Isaiah 44, 6? I'm the first and the last.
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It's similar to Revelation, Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. God is eternal.
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So then we say God is immutable, right? What's the definition of God's immutability? Unchanging, right?
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God cannot change. We have to love the doctrine of immutability. So Malachi 3, 6,
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I'll read it to you guys. For I, the Lord, do not change. When we study all these things, we say, okay,
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God is sovereign, God is holy. But imagine if God was all these things and He was mutable, right?
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He could change. I'm these things today, but I'm not these things tomorrow. I mean, what would that do to us as Christians if God was mutable, right?
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It would be awful. So praise God that He's sovereign and that He's in control of everything, but that He does it righteously and He does it with justice.
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Praise God that He's holy and apart from us and has the ability to do these things. Praise God that He could do it from the beginning to the end.
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And praise God it doesn't change anywhere along the way, right?
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So these things have to work all in harmony. So how about omniscient?
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We have a definition of omniscient? All -knowing, right?
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God knows all things, present, future, past. Nothing takes Him by surprise, right?
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Psalm 139, 1 to 6, So, knowing that God is all -knowing, how do we as a
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Christian respond to that? Or what were you going to say? I think that's great.
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I remember once it being described to me as if God can see here's the beginning and here's the end and He can see it all together, whereas we only see the moment that we exist within.
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I thought that was helpful for me to kind of picture that a little bit. Absolutely. So what should be our response to God knowing everything?
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Do you want to add to that? Absolutely. And I agree 100 % with what you said,
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Corey. We could keep going on this, right? We could do this for all day and go through everyone that everybody mentioned and then keep going with the greater list and show how they all work in complete harmony and how each one of them elicits a certain response from us as Christians, or at least it ought to, so that we just don't find ourselves knowing about God and not knowing
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God. See, the knowing about God is being able to give me a definition of sovereignty. Knowing God means that that has transformed your life and how you make a decision today about something.
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So the other ones that I mentioned, by the way, we have to sort of encapsulate all this with a loving and merciful
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God at the end. We can't quite get there, but we need to sort of end there because if we have a
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God who is this powerful, He's holy, He's sovereign, He's righteous, He has justice,
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He never changes, beginning from the end, all that. But if that all happened on the umbrella outside of love and mercy, that would be a pretty scary place to live, right?
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But yet we know that God is rich in His love and His mercy toward us and it's the
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Romans 8 .28 thing where it's all done for His glory and for our good. That should end this with, instead of sort of a reign of terror, a smile on our face as Christians.
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So any final concluding thoughts from you guys as to really the personal response to this?
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There's been some sense about comfort, but what about things about praise or prayer or service or our view of our own sin?
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Any other applications that you guys can think of that would be good to share with others about how we should respond to knowing
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God? Excellent. Any other closing thoughts? Yeah, this whole journey begins with the fear of God, Proverbs 9 .10,
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but it then concludes with a greater fear of God, hopefully, right? Excellent. Yeah. Excellent.
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I'll close with one just sort of parental thought on how these things apply in my life on a day -to -day basis, and Andrew can probably testify to this.
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When things happen in life and there's conflict or strife or there's always some sin involved in it, we tend to, at least my flesh wants to, deal with the issue.
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We had this fight at our house. It wasn't you and I, but it was a fight at our house, quote -unquote, about who had the strawberries first and whatever, this kind of thing, right?
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And so an argument like this can get into a half an hour debate over strawberries or whatever, right?
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But if conflict or sin is always taught and shared in the light of God's character and God's attributes, it makes it much easier to see how things that are sinful, wrong in our life can be fixed.
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Rather than just say, you've got to fix this, it's kind of like the stop hitting your brother kind of thing.
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It tends to be what we want to say, but if you talk about who God is and what he's done for us and how
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God's attributes are exemplified in Scripture and in our lives, it makes it easier to then obey in other areas as well.
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That's just kind of a side note as an ad. All right, I'm going to close in prayer, unless there's any other final thoughts.
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Heavenly Father, thank you so much for our time. Thank you for who you are and for what you've done for us. We thank you that you've revealed yourself to us in the
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Scriptures, that we can know you and not just know about you. I pray that you would transform our lives so that we reflect
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Christ well in all that we do and all that we are. In Jesus' name, amen.