Attributes Of God

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I'm going to just give you a, we'll take maybe 10 minutes to walk through the chapters here and I'm going to just give you a little bit of a one -liner on that.
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Maybe I might ask a question or two and then with that we'll dive into a few of the attributes that are maybe a little more challenging.
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One of the things that we did do this summer was ask those questions that are puzzling and I think for adults here, you know, when you became a
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Christian the first time, there was a lot of questions and excitement as you open your Bible and you're like, what does this mean?
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And it was fun for me to relive that with the high schoolers. They asked a lot of tough questions and some of them had some great answers.
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I'm like, hey, did you get a cheat sheet into my notes? And that was a fun part of the
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Sunday school and I'm hoping that today we can do some of that again. So I'm going to just do a little bit of,
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I'm going to use some scriptures, some quotes from some famous theologians and then with that we'll look at these attributes and then look at the questions that you might have to explore them a little bit more.
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So two verses to start us off with, Psalm 104 verse 1, you don't have to turn because I'm going to use a lot of verses.
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The psalmist says, you, God, are clothed with splendor and majesty.
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You, God, are clothed. You are clothed with splendor and majesty. Many a time my analytical mind just goes to, okay, what is this, how does this break down?
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You, God, are in the present tense, clothed, that's just a psalmist's way of poetry and then
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I quickly check that off and then I say, splendor and majesty. What does splendor mean? What does majesty mean? Let me just think through splendor, glory, the synonyms, cognates and things like that and majesty, like kingliness, sitting on a throne.
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All these things go so fast through my brain. I've got to walk through that verse without just basking in the greatness of who my
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God is. Clothed. The psalmist uses the word clothed just to kind of let you kind of sit back and say, what does that mean?
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What does clothed in glory, in splendor and majesty look like?
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Why do the scriptures reveal God to us as one who is clothed in splendor and majesty?
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And the goal of these, a book like this and the things that talk about God in the scriptures is to evoke that awe at the otherness of God.
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We are but creatures, we are fallen creatures, we are finite creatures, but we are in the presence of an infinite, transcendent, holy and altogether other
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God. And so when we come here, when we reflect on God, we want to just pause and let this weight of God just sink upon us.
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And so this is author Marsha Witten.
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She says, the transcendent, majestic, awesome God of Luther and Calvin has undergone a softening of demeanor.
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And many a time when I think of this, I think, oh, it's the liberals who have done that. Not so. It's me.
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I walk through my life thinking, what do I need? What does Pradeep need from God today? What can God do that would help me through my sanctification, through my work -life balance, through my parenting,
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A, B, C, what do I get out of it? And I've just forgotten that life is not about me.
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It's all about God. So the question of the first attribute that this author gives is, he calls it incomprehensibility.
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Incomprehensibility. I'm just going to read a verse and a comment and then get some thoughts and we'll move on.
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The first verse is from 1 Timothy 6, 15 through 16. Can we know the essence of God is what the author is trying to get to.
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He who is the blessed and only sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality.
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And up until this point, you've learned a lot of things about God. The rest of the verse goes, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see, to him be honor and eternal dominion forever.
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As you let that verse sink in your mind, I'm going to read a comment by Anselm in his prologue on, and here's what he says.
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He says, and he says this in the form of a prayer. And that's one of the wonderful things about Anselm's writing and Augustine as well.
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Truly, Lord, this is the inaccessible light in which you dwell.
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For truly, there is nothing else which can penetrate through it. So that it might discover you there.
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Truly, I do not see this light since it is too much for me. Yet, whatever
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I see, whatever I see, I see through it. Just as an eye that is weak sees what it sees by the light of the sun, which it cannot look at in the sun itself.
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Oh, supreme and inaccessible light. So incomprehensibility of God.
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Thoughts, what do you think? Is God comprehensible, incomprehensible? What do we mean by this
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God who dwells in inapproachable light? High schoolers. I know we didn't cover this.
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This is one of those things we snuck in afterward in little bits and pieces. Anyone have any thoughts you want to share?
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And this gives the adults a little time to think through so they can respond. All right, anyone else?
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What do we mean by incomprehensible? Excellent.
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We cannot fully understand him, fully comprehend him. We can't put our arms around him in such a way that we say, oh,
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I got everything about God. And that's the key, because the two dangers we want to avoid is, you know,
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I can go know nothing about God, like an agnostic person says, you know, God is just far beyond.
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There is nothing I can know about him or say that propositional truth about God is meaningless because you just had to somehow experience him in his presence in some mystical way.
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The Bible does reveal things about God. There are things that we can know about him. But we need to be very humble as we come before this infinite
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God, because we are finite creatures. We finite cannot capture the infinite. And also, we are fallen creatures who don't have the right way of looking at things.
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Even the little finite things we hold are soiled. And we need to be careful as we come before the immensity, the infinite nature of God himself.
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Excellent answer. Any other thoughts on this? I'm going to move through, but we'll come back. Yes, Dave, and then Charlie. You hit on something just a moment before I come to Charlie.
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High schoolers, what is that attribute called that Mr. Smith just talked about?
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Simplicity. And in fact, and I was like, yeah, this was the one attribute that we just said, you know, when we went through the chapter, everybody was like, don't just say yes, because Pradeep was teaching this, because it's hard for me to kind of explain.
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You put all this together. But when we finished everything last week, we said, you kind of get to see this now. And we just took three attributes, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnisapiens, and took a few examples.
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And we said, OK, now simplicity is kind of, we can kind of get a glimpse of that. And that's the beauty of God.
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Excellent point, because we can't quite get how they all work together. Charlie, can someone just record you when you speak?
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You mentioned so many good things. I'm just going to say a few of those just to anchor them in our minds.
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The one thing that you started off with, I think, is so crucial. How do we even start thinking about these attributes of God, the communicable attributes, or the attributes that are revealed to us?
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You know, some of the philosophers, you know, sit on the mountains and think, you know, they can just kind of get God.
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The way we understand things like love, for example, God is love. And the next chapter talks about how do we speak of God?
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And, you know, there is univocal language, which means the way I love, the way
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I use the term love, and love is the same, exact same as the way God is love and does love.
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And there is univocal, equivocal, which is completely different.
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What I do as love has nothing to do with what God has in terms of love. And then you have analogical, where there is aspects of the way in which
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I love that are similar to the way in which God is love. And we being made in God's image and being able to reflect those attributes shows that there is some truth to this analogical language usage as we even talk about the things of God.
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And so when we talk about love, for me to just say, agape, I'm just going into this transcendent world, means nothing until I understand what love means in the context in which
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I'm familiar with. And then I look at the love of God on the cross as he sends his son, and that shows me a scale in which
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I don't quite understand. And then you move up to say, you know, this nature of God that loves me in eternity past before I even was, you know, before anything was there.
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And then I start to go into ratified space. And I'm like, okay, what does that even look like? You know, I don't quite know, but that is embedded in the nature of God.
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And that's the splendor of God that I kind of get a glimpse of, which when I spend my time in eternity,
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I will get to bask forever. And then there are things like timeless eternity. And I'm hoping
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I'll get to that today, where we just don't have categories to think of those things. Nothing in my experience has anything that can even speak of timelessness in the way
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God is outside of time. But what we do know about God, the glimpses that you get from the scriptures, how
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God is his decrease from eternity past, all come to pass, and things like that.
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We'll maybe spend a little more time on those more ratified subjects. I use this triangle with the students.
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The scriptures are the one thing that are infallible. So you never question the scriptures. If the
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Bible says something and I don't understand it, the problem is not with the Bible, it's with me. And that's my foundation.
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On top of that, we build up theology, where we pick the different verses that speak to a certain subject and try to put them together.
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So I don't take one scripture and kind of run off on my own. I want to make sure I have the whole counsel of God. And that's where theology comes.
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And theology involves necessarily the interpretation of the scriptures and the way in which I put them together.
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And there is a possibility that my theology is off on this or that or completely wrong.
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And I have to reject it like I had to do. When I first came to BBC and, you know, there are things that we think we know and we really don't.
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And so theology, we hold it with some tentativeness and we always keep reforming it on the basis of the scriptures as we understand the scriptures more accurately.
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And then I put the next level of philosophical questions like eternity, the timeless, eternal nature of God, the simplicity of God.
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Those are all things that we have those questions because we are made in God's image. We are meant to look at God and say,
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I want to know you more like Moses did, you know, as he was standing here, Lord, show me your glory. And when it comes to those things, it is right for us to ask those questions.
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But we need to have the humility to recognize that some of these things we may not quite get it.
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But the fact that we can spend time in the presence of God, talk like Anselm, pray like Anselm to him and say,
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Lord, I know who you are. Show yourself to me even more. I'm going to skip the next one, which is how do we think
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God's thoughts after him? We talked about those three types of thinking. We'll maybe come back to that. The next chapter that he has is the perfection of God.
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I'm not going to talk about that either. But how many of you are familiar with that? So let me start from a different angle and hopefully it will answer what you're saying.
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So everything that God has revealed in the scriptures are meant for us to know.
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And so when you look at the scriptures, there are certain things that talk about let's just use timeless eternity because that's a simple example of what may be hard for us to grasp or comprehend.
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And so maybe, you know what, let me just hold that till we get to timeless eternity and then we'll use that as an example to walk through what would be a right way for us to think and revel in God and what would be things to not just speculate and wander off into the domain of, oh,
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I know a lot about God when really I should just be silent and say, God has not revealed that to me and I need to be humble.
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And Calvin's, I love, you know, when what you said about Calvin is so true. When we talk about these things, in fact,
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I think the first few classes I did with Sunday school was like, here are some quotes on humility. You know, we are asking all these questions about God, but let's just be very clear who we are.
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And we need to be very humble as we look at these things that even what the scriptures have revealed as we reflect on them and meditate on them, it's how we approach it rather that we not approach it at all.
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Right. And it may not be always clear. You get those glimpses of those and then we want to be careful how we handle them.
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You know, the thing between Augustine and Calvin, end of Augustine's life, he writes his big book.
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I think, Bob, you probably know all of the corrections that he had to write in all of his books that he's written. His books are, you know, fill several walls and more.
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And he was humble enough to recognize that he was not perfect and he had to make all these changes. Calvin, not so much.
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And I wonder why? Because he was, you know, stick to the word.
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Don't don't go a little too far. He's less of a philosopher, more of a biblical theologian.
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Excellent point. And actually, I'm sure some high schoolers have something to add to this. What do you think Calvin said about?
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Are you quoting Calvin? OK, what is what? How do we think of the revelation of God in this manner?
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Whoever has it, just blurt it out. No, I'm waiting for the high schooler.
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Brian, it's yours next. Go ahead. That's the theological term is the language of accommodation.
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God accommodates our littleness. And Calvin says it's like a nurse listening to the little baby.
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It's all true, but it's not nothing that encompasses all the complete majesty of God.
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And when we get to heaven, even everything that we know now we get to see is just like the tip of the iceberg. There's so much more that we get to enjoy when we are in heaven.
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Thank you. Did you want to add something, Brian? Thanks. All right. So the next attribute is aseity.
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High schoolers, can you define what aseity means? Self -sustaining.
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So he's the one who is ase of himself. He needs nothing from anybody else in order to exist.
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You and I are all not ase. We need breath. We need food. We need gravity.
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We need life. A lot of things we depend on God and the world that he's made for us, but God needs nothing.
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He is self -sustaining, self -existing and of himself and from him flow all things.
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A scripture is Job 41, 11, who has first given to me that I should repay him.
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Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine. And here, when we think of the world that we live in and existence,
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God owes us nothing. And then you go back pre -Genesis 1, 1 and you think, existence of God.
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He is eternal as well. Westminster Conspection of Faith says, God has all life, glory, goodness, blessedness in and of himself and is alone in and unto himself all sufficient, not standing in need of any creatures which he has made, nor deriving any glory in, by, unto and upon them.
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Now, one of the challenges with this verse is, how do you now relate to the scriptures that talk about God's relationship with us?
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God does not need me. It's a very basic truth of scripture, but it's hard for us to quite understand as we put those things together.
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So maybe we'll come back to it if we have time to read a little bit more into this ascetic,
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I think is a crucial topic in terms of how we worship God. This, maybe I'll just finish that thought.
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If God does not need me, what is
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Rick Warren's thing, purpose? Does my life have a purpose? How do you see your own quote -unquote self -worth?
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Okay, you're all BBC folks. I know what, you know what I mean by what I'm saying. What value do you have?
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Is there anything, any point in your life if God doesn't need you? Okay, not just high schoolers, anybody can answer.
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Yes, John. Amen. You know, if you look at from God's perspective, you know, he brings glory to himself.
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But what should be shock and awe is the one who needs nothing, chooses to place his affection on me.
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He chooses to send his son for me and he chooses to redeem me and make me sit in the heavenly places with him.
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That should blow my mind. It's not because he needs me, he does this. It's because he is, he is who he is.
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And that's like, okay, this turns this a completely different level than what I thought
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God was in terms of love. And that's the nature of our God that we worship. Okay, let's move to the next one, simplicity.
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I'm going to just quickly comment on this and then we'll, we'll come back to this because I hope we can wrap a few things around this topic.
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In fact, on scripture, it's very hard because you don't have one verse talking about the simplicity of God. The verse that this author used was hero,
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Israel, the Lord, our God, the Lord is one. And normally when I read that word, I'm not thinking simplicity. You know, here is the
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Lord. Your God, the Lord is one is one God. We have, uh, you know, the theological implications of that, but I'm going to read a few quotes so you can keep this in your mind.
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And we'll come back to this. The nature of God is simple, immutable, undisturbed.
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Nor, okay, this is the hard part. This is Augustine on the Trinity, nor is he himself one thing.
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And what he is and has another thing, what he is, he himself is one thing and what he is and has another thing.
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And the way you want to be thinking. So one of the aspects of this, which comes out is God's attributes.
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Are not some things he possesses scandalous.
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God is his attributes. So a better way, one way to say of God's power might be
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God has all power. And a better way to say it would be God is all powerful.
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And when we think through the implications of what we mean by possessions and what his being and his essence is, um, and I think
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Charlie, you use this right at the beginning, you know, all of these various attributes, how do they all work together?
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How does wrath and love work together without conflict, without, without having priority, you know, in this situation, this goes up and this comes down.
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But no, God's always, always a God of all of his attributes at the maximum level.
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Nothing just goes up and down like, you know, as my music scales go up and down. How do they work?
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Because he's simple. He's not made up of parts. He's not made of composite elements that come together and make him
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God. He is one from eternity past. And then this applies to everything, including his decrees.
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Nothing, what he decreed in eternity past is always the same. His actions don't just react to the circumstances of the life around him.
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He is always one and simple and same. And yet we get to see him in a multitude of ways.
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In fact, one of the analogies that the author uses is that of, um, um, like a prism and refraction.
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You know, the light is white, but we get to see the violet and the blues and the grays as God's work in us demonstrates his love, his, his, his mercy, his, his power and so forth.
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And how does that all cohere as one in God? That's the beauty of God.
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And we, I believe we can get to that, but it is not as easy path to say God is simple and say we, we kind of comprehend all of it.
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But I think it is actually a biblical truth. And we'll try to use an example to get to that toward the end.
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Um, any, any additional thoughts on sat before we move to the next one? Nope.
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Sorry. Simplicity. Yeah, that's right.
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Yeah. And, um, uh, we'll use, for example, the omnipotence of God to talk about how that looks like.
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Excellent. Actually, what you said leads to the next point, which is immutability of God, because you and I may have to grow in love.
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We have a potential to be more loving and we can get better at it or worse at it. Whereas when it comes to God, he is maximally love because that's his essence and his essence does not change.
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And he's immutable, unchanging in the way in which he is loved because that's his essence. Actually, when you said this,
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I was going to say this at the introduction. I forgot. Pastor Mike, um, you remember when he asked Sinclair Ferguson, what is
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God doing right now? And the answer was simultaneously at this very moment.
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And that's who he is. All of his attributes are always active, um, in its full capacity.
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Um, and that's part of the simplicity definition of God. All right. So immutability, uh,
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James 1 17 with God, there is no variation or shadow due to change. And, uh, uh, actually
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I'll just use this, you know, immortal, invisible, God only wise we blossom and flourish as leaves on the tree wither and perish, but not changes.
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The God is unchanging. And, uh, there's, this is actually a very crucial truth to what we, how we understand
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God's perfection. Um, maybe I'll pause for a moment here.
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This is an important attribute that is not always easy for us to understand. So I talked about the potential for us to grow.
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Okay. Let me ask this in a different form.
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What might be problematic, at least perceived to be problematic. When I say
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God is immutable and unchanging, what might be some wrong ways of thinking that God is immutable?
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Do any such thoughts come to your mind? Anchored, doomed, right?
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Okay. Any other, yes. Why pray? God has, his decree is never changing.
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What's the point of praying? So the way this author does it, and I think he does a pretty good job at it.
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I mean, this book is a good book, but it's got lots of nuggets, not always tied together very well. So you can pick a lot of it.
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Some of them are easy. Some of them are not. But here's what he tries to do to answer that question.
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He says, sometimes we think by immutability, God is inert, static, immobile, and dead.
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The only thing that I know that doesn't do any change is something that's inactive, incapable of doing anything.
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But that's really not the kind of God that we, the scriptures speak of, right?
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We have a God who is not just transcendent and out there, but he is imminent and completely active in every event that happens here on earth, every moment that I have my breath and my life.
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So here's one of the theologians quote. He says,
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God is unchangeable, not because he's inert or static like a rock, but just for the opposite reason.
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What might that opposite reason be? He is so dynamic, so active that no change can make him more active than he already is.
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He is pure act and simple. So he's using technical terms here, pure act and simple.
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In fact, the next topic is going to be on his emotions, immutability and then impassibility.
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Is God capable of changing emotions? And the answer is no. And that's another harder topic for us to grapple with than immutability.
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But the definition that he uses here is he is pure act and simple.
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Now, this is where the simplicity of God actually helps us tie together some of those questions that we can't quite answer otherwise.
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The way I relate to prayer and response to prayer is chronological, right?
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So I pray at time X, 935 for my relative who is in the hospital and God hears my prayer and responds in such a way at 935 .5
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or whatever time. This is how I think, you know, God now acts in that way that now he not only hears my prayer, responds to my prayer, acts in the basis of my prayer, and he does certain things in that circumstance, whatever it is, he does it for his goodness and for his glory.
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So this is the way that I, as humanly, can think of the way in which my prayer and God's response would look like.
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Now, for the sake of time, I'm going to skip back and pull a few of those attributes together. Let's bring in timeless eternity.
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Do we agree God is timelessly eternal? Not all theologians do. Not all good theologians do. Some of them don't quite agree with the
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A theory of time that we have where God is always outside of time. But I believe that's the best explanation for all of the scriptures because what they would do sometimes is take words like everlasting and contrast it with the eternal sense that we normally think of being outside, everlasting just being stretched out in time.
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And that's really not the Biblical, I don't think that's the right, does justice to God's action. He's not just pre -time in Genesis, pre -Genesis 1 -1, nor is he just extended in time post the second coming and beyond.
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But he is also outside of time and capable of interacting with time in any point in space.
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And this is hard for us to understand because omnipresence would be an easier thing for us to do. And I know the high schoolers, we work through this thing, you have a reference point for omnipresence.
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There is two points in space where someone else is there or you were there in two points in space at different points in time.
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You just can't exist at the two points at the same point in time, two points in space at the same point in time.
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Easy for me to say this. But at least I have a category to think about omnipresence, right? So God is both here and there.
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I can see these things. But time, what was the example we use to think of visualized time?
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Yeah, if you want to think of, we are on a train and it's moving and we are outside, God is outside of the train. All of life for us moves with the train.
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There is no reference point like we stand on the train and say, ha, there's the tree that's moving by. You don't have that when you think of time.
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Augustine writing about time talks about that knife edge. You don't really have a present even. You can look at the past, you can look at the future, but before you know it, the present is gone.
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You know, we can't define time. He says, you know, that time is one of those things I can think about very naturally. But he asked me to explain it.
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I have no idea how to explain what time is. We are all carried through time. We don't really have categories for outside of time, but we have sufficient evidence in the scriptures to understand how
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God is not just the creator of time. So as he says in the beginning, God created heavens and the earth. That's your origin of time.
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But he's also the God who is outside of time. And now when we pull that attribute of God's eternality, and then we say
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God is immutable in the sense that his decree from eternity past always stands.
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And that decree includes my prayer and his response to prayer as part of it.
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I'm just simplifying it into a very simple way. So here's one way I can start to think about God is immutable, but it is not like he is immutable in an inert rock.
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He is maximally active, pure act. And I'm going to just switch to the next topic, which is impassibility.
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And we will come back and talk about this a little bit more, but I'll tie these things and then we'll maybe we'll have some questions.
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Does God have emotions? Does he suffer? Does he feel pain and sorrow?
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Is that a good thing for God to feel pain and sorrow? Does God have the ability to feel pain and sorrow, but chooses not to in order to be impassible?
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Actually, let me ask you this. How many of you think actually raise your hands if you feel bold enough that God impassibility that God does not experience emotions and feelings is actually a biblical concept or truth?
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And actually, this is exactly what the high school has asked me. It's like, can you define what you mean by emotions?
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And because some actually wasn't Rachel, I think it was Mrs. Rathbun, who's not with us here now.
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She's in Cedarville. She's like, you know, I can think of certain attributes that would look very suspiciously like emotions.
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And I'm like, oh, you are very smart. But I'm going to use a very,
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I don't know if she'll give the answer or not. Think of it in terms of Zeus, you know, the pagan gods and their reaction to the world that they live in, the things they really care for and want, and they get really disappointed and frustrated when they don't get what they do.
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You know, that's passion. And that's the negative side of passion, if you will.
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And you can maybe just tone it down to a more softer version of, you know, you're in so much pain, and my heart kind of bleeds, and I'm just weeping for you.
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You know, that's another kind of emotion that you have. How many of you think that that's a god who is passionate, not impassable, is a biblical god?
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Okay. Anybody else bold enough? And just as we did with the last topic of immutability, there are scriptures that talk about God's relationship with us in his, not the transcendent part of it, but the imminent part of it.
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And when we try to think of how God relates to us in the scriptures that talk very clearly of, like a mother hen,
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I want to bring you into my, I should memorize my scripture before I try to quote it, but you all know the scriptures
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I'm talking about. You know, the love that God has for his people, like a mother hen for her chicks, and how like a husband for his bride, you know, he cares for the well -being and for the parent for the child.
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There are so many analogies of how God expresses himself in the scripture as a god who cares deeply, who has his affection placed upon us.
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And when we think of impassability, it seems like maybe this is at odds with some of those things that's describing who
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God is. And so for us, we need to look at, when we think of immutability, God himself doesn't change, and if we've anchored that in some way, shape, or form, then we come back and scratch our heads and say, in what way is
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God changing when it comes to his emotions? And we say, okay, seems odd for me to try to grasp.
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Does it not? So let me give you a couple of, no, actually, let me just give you one thing.
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How many of you know Eli Wiesel? And he's famous for, yeah, and he wrote another book called
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Night, and that talks about this suffering of humanity and the presence of God. Where was
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God when this young Jewish boy was hung on the gallows and took a half hour to die just suffering through that extended period of time?
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And the only emotionally satisfying answer seemed to be for Eli, that God was there in the gallows with him, suffering alongside that boy.
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And one of the theologians, Moltmann, took that and then took it, ran with it, saying, you know,
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God, a suffering God is a kind of God that we can relate to. Anything else is not a God that we can worship.
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And so this author kind of pulls that apart and said, okay, you know, it feels emotionally satisfying, but let's kind of think through the
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God who is rather than the God we'd like to be. And he uses an example of a house on fire and your child inside the house.
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You have a fireman coming alongside and douses himself with fire and says, you know,
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I feel the pain that you have and your son is experiencing. I experience what you're going through.
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Or the one who says, you know, I'm here to rescue. I'm going to go and get your son out of the house. And he uses that somewhat trivial analogy to talk about the relationship of God to a how
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God addresses the problem of evil without being entrapped by it.
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And so Moltmann would go as far as to say, you know, when you have Jesus on the cross, it's
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God's suffering there with you. And, you know, there are some things we quite don't grasp.
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For example, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Jesus speaking to the father who can penetrate the depth of what goes on in the inner relationship that happens there.
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But if I replace the human Jesus with the God's death on the cross, if you will, can
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God die? Answer is no. The answer is no. OK, and now we have to deal with what does that mean?
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So we want to understand that better. Yes. You know, in the hypostatic union, you have God the son in both his fully human nature and in his fully divine nature.
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There are things that God is with.
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And yet when you have the suffering of Jesus, what does that mean when it comes to the Trinitarian suffering?
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And when you think of the immutability and the impassibility of God, how do I connect them with these scriptures?
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And I think, Pastor Bob, what you used is one of those things that we want to really keep in the back of our minds when we look to the
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God in his essence and the God who relates to us and the God who communicates to us as these babies, that everything that he says is true.
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I want us to be clear that when God accommodates and explains himself to us, his love is everything there you take to the bank.
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Yet you need to be careful that it is not the whole sum of who God is. And for us, we pick the rest of the scriptures and then we understand this, the transcendent
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God who in his essence never changes. Nope, nope. You touched on many good things.
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I made just a comment and then maybe, John, you can state what you were thinking. So, anthropomorphism, you know,
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God has, you know, the eyes of God, the hands of God. You know that God doesn't have eyes and hands, but it's talking about his knowledge.
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It's talking about his work in our lives. Anthropopathism, when it comes to passions, it uses similar language accommodating the way we relate to one another in order to communicate something that's deeply true of God in a way that we can understand in human terms.
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John, did you? Okay. Sorry. Okay. I realize we're out of time.
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Yep. Amen. That's an excellent way of thinking that. I'm going to just say a couple of things and we'll wrap it up.
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So, here is Augustine's prayer. You, Lord God, lover of souls, show a compassion far purer and freer of mixed motives than ours for no suffering injures you.
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And I think that's one of the things with this book. He has some great gems of quotes like that that just help us think through this very difficult topic.
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The last thing I want to say is maybe picking up on what Charlie said about God and his relationship to evil, for example, his decree.
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And when we think of omnipotence of God, God can do anything. He doesn't create a
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God that... God. He doesn't create a God. He also doesn't create a rock that he cannot lift because it's a contradiction.
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It's got a logical flaw in its own statement. And God doesn't do evil because that would not be a sign of his potency, but of his impotency to do good.
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And we need to be careful when we think of what God can and cannot do. And yet in God's decree, when we think about everything that is ordained that comes to part, all that is good, all that is evil,
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God is sovereign over all of them from eternity past. And when we think of creation, even does
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God know you and me because he created us? No. And when we go back again, just stand on the edge of Genesis 1 .1,
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God knows us. And Augustine tries to help us understand that his knowledge and power are intertwined in that very aspect.
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His thoughts are creative, if you will, causal. And so in eternity past, whatever God, who
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God is, his decree is not chronological, his power and action and his knowledge is not incremental, but all of them are one in God, the simple being who always says he's always maximally active, he's always maximally joyous, and he never changes in any of these things.
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And so his power and his knowledge are one, and they should hopefully give us a little glimpse.
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And when you throw in timeless eternity on top of that, that he is outside of time, that should help us understand how
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God might be simple in a way that we can maybe get a little bit of a glimpse as we try to connect diverse scriptures that talk about his multitudinous attributes.
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And in his relationship to us, he is not just this abstract God who is simple and far off, but a
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God who relates to us closer than any friend that we ever would have had. And let me stop there.
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I apologize, we couldn't kind of tie all of them together, but hopefully you got some thoughts that would help you exalt
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Christ in your worship this morning. Let me pray and we'll wrap. Lord, we thank you for revealing yourself as almighty, all -knowing, and a
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God of love. And I pray, Father, that as we continue to worship this morning, that you would reveal yourself to us in the proclamation of the word as we sing your praises.
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I pray that you would deepen our hearts and our minds with affection for you, and that, oh
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Father, that it would not just be a love embedded in our hearts and in our minds, but it would be an active love like yours in being poured out upon among those with whom we live.