Beauty of God — Glenn Meldrum

Let's look to the Lord in prayer. Father, we come before you now in the precious and wonderful name of Jesus. We just thank you for who you are. Lord, as we look at your word this morning, we pray that you would give us a spirit of wisdom and revelation so that we may know you better.

God, we need a clear view of you. We need the dismantling of our view of you that we've had for so long that's built just upon opinions and self and distortions. We need a fresh vision of you. And we ask that you would give us understanding in the precious and wonderful name of Jesus.

Beholding the Beauty of God

What I want to do is I want to look at the beauty of God. And I'm going to lay out some thought here that's all preliminary for me to get to where I really want to go, and it's going to take me a little bit to get there.

But I'm going to begin in Psalms 27, verse 4. Psalms 27, verse 4. And after this, then, we will end up in Song of Solomon. In Psalms 27, verse 4. Well, actually, Psalms 27 is a psalm where David is crying out because of the oppression of his enemies.

And there's nothing within the psalm that tells us where and when in his life it was written, just that we know it was written by David. And so here you have this psalm that's all about the oppression of his enemies, and then you have verse 4, which is just absolutely astounding when you look at the setting.

And I don't know whether at this time he was king, whether he was king just of Judah, or whether he was king of Israel, which would have happened seven years later. We don't know exactly when this happened.

But yet, whether he was just fleeing from Saul, or whether he had become king of Israel, or just king of Judah, whatever it was, it's an astounding statement of what he makes there. One thing I have desired of the Lord, that I will seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.

I mean, can you say one thing you desire? I mean, do you know how astounding that would be? Here's a man talking about the oppression of his enemies upon him, and he's not saying one thing I desire is victory over my enemies.

He's not saying I want greater wealth, I want the throne of Israel, or I want a nice easy life, or whatever. One thing I desire, and what is the one thing? It's broke down into three thoughts that are there, but ultimately to behold the beauty of God, to behold his beauty, to look at this God and to see him, and to look through all the veil of the flesh and all this world, and to begin to see a little more clearly of who he is.

One thing I desire. David at times, especially with his sin with Bathsheba, and then killing her husband, having her husband killed. He was in a backslidden state there, but when it says in Scripture that he was a man after God's own heart, that defines the majority of his life, where he really was.

Yes, he had the times where he got lifted up in pride, and judgment came on the nation as a result of his pride, but for the most part that man's life was in hot pursuit of God. He was a man that desired one thing, and here is this yearning that's inside of him.

He says, I want to go to the house of God. I want to dwell in his house. I want to behold the beauty of God in that place. I want to see him. Is that what defines your life? Are you wanting Jesus just to be an addition to it?

To clean the house out, make it nice and make it pretty and everything else, and then you can go on and live your own life? Or is it that you've come to a place like this that says, there's one thing I desire.

I don't care about the money. I don't care about the situation. I don't care about the job. I don't care about anything. There's one thing I've got to have you. I've got to see you. I want to behold your beauty.

I want to behold your splendor. And so what I want to do is I want to take a little bit of time and look at the beauty of God. And what we're going to do here is we're going to do a little bit of theology, and theology is not a Christian cuss word.

Okay, it's two Latin words put together, theos, which is God, and ology, which is study. Every time you pick up your Bible, you're doing theology. Every time you're going through the workbooks and so on, you're doing theology.

And so it's just the study of God. And so we're going to do a little bit of the study of God. I'm going to deal with a little bit of systematic theology, though, here, and be a little bit more formal, but I am going to do my best not to bore you.

God's Freedom and Human Dependence

I want to begin by looking at the freedom of God. I'd venture to say that most of you have never thought of the freedom of God. It's not been something that you went and even was curious about or wanted to know, especially while you were in your sin and in your dead religion.

You're not going to want to know the freedom of God and how that really affects our life and what that means. To help us understand, let's begin from a human standpoint, though. We are not free people.

We live in a country that we say is free, but what that means is that we are not oppressive as other nations. We are not free. Imagine if somewhere on this planet there was a switch, just like a light switch, and you flicked the switch off and gravity turns off.

You flicked the switch on and it kicks back on. You'd find out if all of a sudden the guy attending that switch, that was his whole life, to attend that switch and make sure it never got turned off, he stumbles and he accidentally whoops, and all of a sudden people start, whoa, off the world.

I mean, how long are you going to live? And then when he turns it back on, whoo, that fall is going to really hurt. We are bound to this planet. We are stuck here. And you don't think about it, do you?

How often have you ever woke up and the first thing on your mind is, thank you God for gravity. You know, we take it for life. We are bound to this planet. And it's the goodness of God that allows us to be bound because otherwise we'd be dead.

After service today, you will probably get something to eat. We are bound to the dinner table, sometimes way too long. Right? We are bound. I mean, we like it. Glad God has given us taste buds that we can enjoy the bounty that he has given us in this world.

But how long can you go without food? Forty days, they say, maybe with some supplements you might be able to go. Eighty days, but you are going to eventually die. There was a young man I know, he fasted forty days.

It was not a God-ordained fast, it was a religious fast. He ended up in the hospital because he was killing himself. He was on the verge of death. He lost every hair on his body and it never grew back again.

You see, he was killing himself. Religion, all that it was, it wasn't anything about relationship. Just religion. But how about water? You can go three days, maybe, without water. I've preached, you know, many times in Bullhead City, which is the hottest city in the nation.

It gets up occasionally to 130 degrees there. I asked them once, how long can you live in the desert without water? And they basically said, maybe a day. You need it. It's not just a maybe, it's the reality.

And you want to look at it even more. How about air? Let somebody hold you underwater for 30 seconds, you might think he's playing. Take it a minute and you're going to be panicking. You're going to be freaking right out.

You are bound. You are bound. You are in need of all these things outside of you. I remember years ago when I was pastoring in Detroit. The story is never, I've never forgotten this story. It was of a little girl that the mother had locked up in a closet and that girl lived in that closet, that dark closet, for seven years.

It was her bathroom, her bedroom, her living room, her dining room. Anything she got from the mother, she got through the door to that closet. One day her mother was so drunk, she forgot to lock it and the little girl got out and it got known.

We were created to love and be loved. And when the fall came into the world through Adam, it twisted us and demented us so that our love is this selfish taking thing. But can you imagine what that had to do to that girl?

To be in such a cold, heartless situation, locked away in this closet, no love, longing to love and longing to be loved and never knowing it. You see, we need that. It's not something we just want. We need that and when we don't have it, it twists us in the brain in just horrendous ways because God created us, wired us to love and be loved.

But what about God? He doesn't need gravity. He lives outside of creation. He's not controlled by it. He's not controlled by the elements. He's not controlled by the sun and the stars and the galaxies and none of that.

He's outside of it. And so He controls it all. He is within it all but separate from it all. Here's this God that needs nothing. He doesn't need gravity. He doesn't need air. He doesn't need water. He doesn't need our love.

You understand? He does not need our love. He doesn't need our worship. God is self-sufficient. He is free. Nothing outside of Him. He doesn't need anything outside of Himself to be who He is and to do what He does.

He was fully God before men and angels were created and He'll be fully God if all of creation ceases to be in a moment. He is who He is and nothing can add to Him and nothing can take away from Him. He needs nothing outside of Himself to exist.

He is self-existent. When He told that to Moses, that I am that I am, that I'm a self-existent one, all I can imagine if a video camera could have been there at the burning bush to see it, all that Moses could have done was have his mouth gaping open in astonishment.

I don't understand. Self-existent? How do we comprehend such a thing of God when everything in existence that we know and see and understand has beginning and end? And then God says, that's not me. I'm separate.

I'm different. I'm self-existent. I'm uncreated. This is the God that broke into our world, took upon flesh and blood. Not a different God, not a lesser God. The same identical God. So He needs nothing outside of Himself to be who He is.

He was wise, just, holy, loving, kind, beautiful, almighty before creation. And nothing can add to it because He is infinite in all those. And the very idea means nothing can give Him any more. He can't become more wise, more holy, more powerful.

Because He is full, complete and infinite in it all. He is not served by men as though He needed us. And you know, I do not understand. I don't understand this. Why did God create mankind? We are not told other than it was His good pleasure.

That's it. It was His good pleasure. He didn't create because He was lonely. Everything He needed was within the Godhead, was within the Triune God. The perfect love in everything was right there. He wasn't a lonely God aching for somebody.

He was a God fully fulfilled. But He created out of the super abundance of who He is that we might know this God and share in the glory of who He is. The infinitude of God. I'm speaking things here that I do not understand.

I'm just being honest. How does a finite being understand an infinite being? And the crazy thing is some people, man, they got their theology down. They think they know so much and they can quote this verse and that verse.

And they've got a down pad and they don't even know nothing. And the best thing they could ever do is come to the place and say, I don't know. I thought I knew. I thought I had it all figured out. I thought I had all those doctrines down.

And then to come to a place of realizing, I haven't even begun to understand. If you could take all the atoms in all of creation and add them all together with number, that would be what we know of God isn't even the equivalent of one atom.

We know so little of this God. So little of the vastness and greatness and majesty and beauty and splendor. So little of Him. And yet we think we know so much. In our pride and arrogance, we fail to understand what it really means as much as is humanly possible for God to be infinite in every dimension of His being.

God's Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnipresence

He is omnipotent, which means He is all powerful, which means that He super abounds with the power to do anything He wants to do anytime He wants to do it. When God created, He spoke a word. When was the last time you spoke a word and even cracked a sweat?

One word. Do you understand? It wasn't hard. Wham! There it is. Just a word. Wham! He'll speak another word. Wham! It's gone. And then He'll speak another one and a new heaven and a new earth will come into existence.

And the whole time, it's like, it's not like He's making it a little bit bigger. It's nothing for Him. And when He was done creating, when you look at each day of creation in Genesis, what do you see there each day?

He used this word as tov, t-o-v, which means it is good. I have done what I wanted. If He wanted it a billion times bigger, it would just be another word. It wasn't hard. It wasn't difficult for Him.

And this God that is omnipotent, that can speak a word, and galaxies and universes come into existence, this same God is able to speak a word to us and give life, where there's been nothing but death.

This God that is all-powerful is able to make victorious those who have been absolutely defeated. But the problem isn't with an omnipotent God. The problem is with finite people that say no to Him. God is omniscient, which means He knows everything that there is to know, yet there is no end to all He knows.

Don't ask me to explain that. I went to grad school. I got a master's in theology, and church history, and philosophy, and I forgot so much that I learned there I can't even remember it. It's like you're done with the class, and it's gone out of your head.

Where did that go? But yet there's God everything, everything. He knows everything. There's no end to it. And that should be haunting to us, because He knows everything, because He knows us. There is no mystery, not the motives of our heart, nothing He knows at all.

And the aspect that He would love us, that should blow our minds, that He would still love us. He is omnipresent, which means He's everywhere at once. And He's not everything at once, as Eastern mysticism would say, that you are basically sitting on God right now, because it's the material world as well.

God is separate and distinct from His creation, yet He fills it all. There again, don't ask me to explain it. But there's no place you can go where He is not. You can't even go to hell and have Him not be there, but yet all the residents of hell will never know the tangible reality of God.

It will be the abject absence of any reality of God in their understanding, yet God will still be there, and He will be the only one throughout all eternity that will know their agony. Omnipresent everywhere.

There's not been a sin that you have enacted, that He wasn't right there. He's seen everything. He's known everything. God is infinite as far as time, which means that He's eternal, that He is timeless.

And you know, we have a terrible, terrible time with this one. I mean, this is why you have evolution and all these things out there. One of the reasons for it, because where is it that God came from?

Everything in existence has a beginning and end, and then God says, I'm the self-existent one. Here I am. I've always been. It hurts our brains. I don't comprehend. How can you have something that always exists?

And yet, in the paganism, and you go back into ancient religions, and you see it rebirthed in modern science, in evolution, which is the idea that the material world, that matter is eternal, and recreates itself again and again.

But God says, that's not the way it is. I'm the only one that's eternal. And all that creation is came out of my infinite genius. That in my mind, it's not just that I saw what creation would be, but I designed all the laws that would govern all of creation.

Laws that we haven't even understood, or even know exist yet that he has created, that keeps it all going, and everything by the power of his will. The wonder and the majesty of this God. He's eternal.

Yet all creatures, all creation, is bound in time. We have a beginning, but we will not have an end. We are going to live forever now. Our eternity is different than God's eternity. Because we will forever be with him, yes, but never be like him in that sense.

Idolatry and the Manageable Deity

A .W. Tozer made a very powerful little point. He said, left to ourselves, we tend immediately to reduce God to manageable terms. So what do we do? We take this God that is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, that is eternal, that is this God that is so beyond anything we can imagine, and then we take him and we drag him down.

But here's the thing. We don't even drag him down to the human level. Because for mind, for human mind to understand this God, we must drag him down below our level. We make a manageable deity. That's what people do when they are in the practice of sin and call themselves Christian.

They make a manageable deity. They make a God that they can understand, that they can figure out, that they can just say, this is how it all works, and they're comfortable with that God because they won't make him the holy, infinite God that he is.

They'll make him something else. So it becomes idolatry. The church in one sense is full of idolatry today because of all the false beliefs that are in there that define them, that allow them to continue in the practice of sin.

Idolaters, which is no different than what Israel was during the days of Jesus, right? They weren't bowing down to Molech anymore, were they? They had a new idol, and that was the idol religion, and that they could practice their religion and still have all the garbage inside of them like whitewashed sepulchres.

This elderly man is in a park. He's bent over. Looks like he's playing in the dirt, and this little boy sees him and kind of walks up very sheepishly. He's walking up to him, and the old man looks at him and says, come here, boy.

Let me show you what I'm doing. The boy comes up a little. No, no, come on. You're not going to see from there. Come up here. I'm not going to hurt you. So the boy comes and stands just a little ways from him, and the old man stoops down and says, look at right there.

You see that little ant? Well, there's his home over there, and I have went and moved some rocks and sticks out of his way to make his way home a little bit easier. The little boy looks at him and says, Mister, did you just break out of the insane asylum?

I mean, who in the world wants to help an ant? I mean, you know, what do we do? We buy those little round canisters, and I don't know what goes on inside of those things. Ants go in and never come out.

I don't know if they walk around, get dizzy, fall over. What? You know? I mean, but we don't want them in our houses. Right? And here's a man out there making the life of an ant a little bit easier. And you know what the man tells the boy?

He says, that ant doesn't even know I exist. I just made his way home easy, and he doesn't even understand what I've done for him. And we don't comprehend who this God is that has broken into our world.

Song of Solomon 5 and Christ Knocking at the Door

Turn with me to the book of Song of Solomon, to the fifth chapter. What I'm going to share here is a difficult, it's a very difficult book. Song of Solomon is challenging. This portion is, I think, a lot more clear.

And there's two approaches that can be taken with the book of Song of Solomon. One would be that the beloved, which would represent the church, is engaged to the lover, which represents Jesus. The other way is that they were married, and I happen to believe it, that they were engaged, that they were not married.

And so you have to think of this not in a modern day, 21st century, perverted kind of romance that we have today, that guy sees girl, and they end up in bed in the next hour. You know, I mean, it's just, this isn't it.

And so what you have here is you have a play that's taking place. I guess that's probably the best way we could look at Song of Solomon, it's a play. You have three main actors. You have the lover, that is Jesus.

You have the beloved, that is the bride, going to be the church. And you have the friends, that's the world. And so there's this dialogue that goes on between this, this story that is playing out. And we're going to look at a portion of this, beginning in chapter 5, verse 2.

And just in case your Bibles have little notations of who's speaking there, none of those, not one in your Bible, those little notations over the headings, none of those are original to the Hebrew and Greek.

Those are really late, late, late added, and so they're not original. And so what's going to go on here is the people are changing, and I will tell you who is speaking, because sometimes they're incorrect in the headings that they put there.

And so the beloved is speaking here. She says, I slept, but my heart was awake. Listen, my lover is knocking. Now the lover speaks. Open to me, my sister, my darling, my dove, my flawless one. My head is drenched with dew, my hair with the dampness of the night.

Now the beloved speaks. I have taken off my robe. Must I put it on again? I have washed my feet. Must I soil them again? My lover thrust his hand through the latch opening. My heart began to pound for him.

I arose to open for my lover, and my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with flowing myrrhs on the handle of the lock. I opened for my lover, but my lover had left. He was gone. My heart sank at his departure.

I looked for him, but did not find him. I called him, but he did not answer. The watchmen found me as they made their rounds in the city. They beat me. They bruised me. They took away my cloak. Those watchmen on the walls.

Oh, daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you. If you find my lover, what will you tell him? Tell him I am faint with love. Now the friends speak. How is your beloved better than others, most beautiful of women?

How is your beloved better than others that you charge us so? And afterwards the beloved begins to describe the beauty of her lover. I just want to jump right into the allegorical teaching that's in this.

What you have is you have a picture of Jesus knocking at the door, and in this case we're going to look at it first from a believer's standpoint, which is really where this is at, and I will touch on it from a non-believer's standpoint, which is not directly implied in this portion of Scripture, but I want to look at it nonetheless because I think there's some good points we can glean.

The picture is of this man that has engaged this woman and loves this woman. He had been laboring all day, whether it was in the fields or the marketplace. It doesn't tell us where he was working, but he's laboring all day, and he's going to her house to spend a little bit of time with her.

He wants to hold her hand. He wants to look in her eyes. He wants to talk with her, and the idea that he is drenched with dew speaks of this great desire that the sun is setting, the dew's starting to fall, he is getting wet.

It speaks of desire. I want to spend some time with this woman. Eventually I'm going to be married to, that I will spend the entirety of my life with. I want to spend time with her. And so he comes to the door, and he knocks on the door.

Open to me, my darling, my dove, my flawless one. Open to me. Let's sit down. Let's talk. Let's look in each other's eyes. Let's hold hands for a moment before I have to go home so I can get some sleep and get up in the morning.

But I'd rather be up until 2 or 3 in the morning with you, spend a little time, and talk with you than have a whole night's sleep. Knocks at the door. But the lover, she was inside. She heard the knock.

But she didn't want to get out of bed. She'd gone to bed. She washed her feet. She washed her clothes. And she had her jammies on. And everything was there. And, you know, she had everything just right.

And Jesus comes knocking on the door and messing up her comfy little time. Well, let me try and relate this to us as men. You've had a bad day. I mean, it was rough at work. Okay, 100 degrees. No air conditioning.

So in the shop it's, what, 120? I mean, you drank and you drank and you drank and you're just drenched from all the sweat. And then the boss is just grumpy and grouchy because he's hot and you're hot and grouchy and everybody's grouchy.

And it's just a terrible day, man. It's just the pits. You just can't wait to get home. And you get home. And you go in and you take your clothes off that are just soaked with sweat. And you throw them aside.

And you take a shower. And you put on your jammies. And you make yourself a little quick meal. And then you pop some popcorn. And you're going to sit down and watch some Christian movie or whatever. And you sit there and you just want to veg out, man.

You just want to veg out. You are stressed out. And you just want to put your brain in neutral. You don't want to deal with problems until you've got to deal with it in the morning. And all of a sudden that knocks there.

There's that knock. And Jesus is saying, Come along, son. Let's sit down and let's talk for a little bit. And you're just there, Jesus, why are you coming now? Why are you messing up my comfy little time of just vegging out?

I am stressed.

I want to be left alone. Don't bother me. You see, he keeps knocking. Open up, son. Open up.

Let me in. You see, in this analogy here, why didn't the woman open up for Jesus when she came? Because she was utterly selfish. Consumed with self. Consumed with her own desires. Consumed with her own wants.

Consumed with her own self-pity. Her own struggle. What a terrible job I got. I have to sweat all day long. And then I got to go home and I don't have air conditioning. And it's the pits, right? Poor pity party.

Oh, it's just so hard. Life's so hard. Well, you don't know what hard is until you get to hell. Then you'll know what hard is. You see, it's not hard. I'm not going to say it's comfortable, but it's not hard.

And how many guys have left because it got too hot and they complained and it was just whiny, whiny, whiny little guy that just so self-absorbed he can't see anything but himself and his own pain, his own struggles, and they're not touching my feely good buttons or anything else, right?

Hudson Taylor wrote a little book on Song of Solomon. Good little book. And he made this point. He said, It is sad that Jesus should be outside a closed door. That he should need to knock. But it is still even more sad that he should knock and knock in vain at the door of any heart that has become his own.

It was her condition of self-satisfaction and love of ease that closed the door. Jesus, you're just kind of in my way right now. You're just kind of in my way. I don't really want to go that far. Okay, I want you as Savior.

I don't want to go to hell. I want this problem out of my life, but I don't want you to consume my life. I don't want you to consume everything. I don't want to give up this particular stuff. And this is the scary thing because behind that closed door are some very scary things.

Revelation 3:20 and the Lukewarm Church

And let's look at another door. There's another door that Jesus was knocking on. And this is one that I want us to take a couple minutes at and look. It's in Revelation 3, verse 20. He says, Here I am.

I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him and he with me. Who is Jesus talking to here? The church of Laodicea. The church out of the seven churches, the one church that Jesus had absolutely nothing good to say to.

A backslidden church. A church that was immersed in the world. That thought it had everything together. I'm good. I don't have all the issues of other people. I'm alright. Yet Jesus says, You're wretched, poor, blind, miserable, and naked.

You don't even understand. I'm at the door of your life knocking because if you don't open the door, you're going to be eternally in trouble. What were the people hiding behind that door? Why didn't they want to open that door?

What were they hiding? What idol of their heart that they would say, Jesus, you can't come in here because I've got things in this room. I've got things in my house that I don't want you touching. I don't want you to get out of my life.

I want to keep these things. I want to protect them. They've been who I've been all these years. Clean me up. Make me enough good so I can go to heaven but leave me basically alone. Let me live my life.

I've got these idols. I refuse to relinquish. You see, some of you have closed the door to Jesus and he's knocking. He's knocking. Some of you, the door's closed and you're a follower of Jesus. You come to Christ while you've been here but now you're scared he's demanding too much.

Can God demand too much? Because whatever he commands, whatever he demands, he offers us all the grace necessary to do it. So he can never ask too much. He will ask what is beyond human ability, the natural man, but he will never ask and demand of us what his grace will not be able to supply.

But what happens is we say, I don't want you. You're getting too close, Jesus. You're starting to touch these idols that bind me, these things inside of me. I don't want them to deal with. I don't want to deal with them.

I don't want those things out. I don't want to overcome. They've been so much a part of me. You rip those things out and I'm going to be undone. What's going to be left of me? But he knocks in a desire for you to finally open your eyes and say, these filthy things I've kept in my little house, in my little house, in my heart, in my mind, these worthless, good for nothing things are actually leeches that have attached themselves to me and they're sucking the very life out of me.

They're destroying me. They're zapping anything good. You're trying to give me life and these things are taking the life right out of me. You're knocking at the door wanting to come in, wanting to deliver me from the very things that I've allowed to attach itself to my life.

That's destroying me. The lover is there knocking at the door. Why have you shut the door? Why have you shut the door? And you shut the door because you're trying to hide something. There's some idol, something that you're wanting to keep from him, but he's omniscient.

He's omnipresent. He knows what's in your house. He knows. He's just waiting for you to finally have the courage to deal with it and throw yourself at his feet and throw open the door. And I'll tell you, when that door opens, sometimes it'll just be this sweet, sweet Jesus right there, arms outstretched wanting to wrap us in his arms.

Other times it'll be this blazing light that'll just blind us and knock us to the ground like it was with Saul. But he will give us exactly what we need. Give us what we need when we need it.

You know, I'm just astounded again and again as I think of it. Why would Jesus want me? Why would he? Why would he break through all the junk and stand at that door of my own heart so many years ago knocking, saying, Son, open to me.

Let me in.

Why? I know a billion years from now I still will not have that answer other than it was the goodness, kindness, and love of God. And so Jesus is at the lover's house or the beloved's house knocking, knocking on the door.

Finally, she gets out of bed. And the picture here is that it wasn't just like what a guy would do, okay? So, you know, you got the knock, you get out of bed, you go there and you're a mess, you could care less, you know?