None Greater (part 7)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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All right, chapter 6 of None Greater. About 2 ,600 years ago, give or take, the prophet

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Jeremiah, he witnessed the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of the army of Babylon.

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And while he was there watching that scene, he was overcome with emotion and overcome with grief.

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And he penned the book of Lamentations about that incident. And within that book, there are these words.

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But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope. The steadfast love of the

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Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning.

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Great is your faithfulness. Many years later, the hymn writer, he echoed

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Jeremiah with these same beautiful words. He said, great is thy faithfulness,

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O God, my father. There is no shadow of turning with thee. Thou changest not.

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Thy compassions, they fail not. Great is thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.

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So for the next two weeks, hopefully two, as we continue looking at the attributes of God together in Sunday school, we're going to be talking these next two weeks about God's immutability.

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Immutability. And of all his attributes, all of which are majestic and glorious and worthy of praise,

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I would like to assert that this one, immutability, that this one attribute should cause our hearts to sing the loudest, to sing the happiest.

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Immutability is defined via negativa. Does anybody remember what that Latin phrase meant?

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Yes, by negation, way of negation is literally in the Latin, by negation.

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So it's defined via negativa by the simple statement, God does not change.

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Immutability. God does not change. And it's that unchangingness that is the ground on which we anchor our souls, really.

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Because if God is merciful but he can change, then we must always fear that he might be less merciful later.

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If God is love but can change, then I could do something to make him love me less.

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Or even worse, maybe, I could do something to make him love me more. And I ought to be thinking about what it is

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I should be doing. To do that. We could wake up tomorrow and find that the sun no longer rises in the east, or that gravity is suddenly twice as strong, or that we need to breathe water instead of air.

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All these things do not change because God does not change.

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And worst of all, probably far worst of all, is that if God could change, then what he wrote in his

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Bible yesterday might no longer be true today or tomorrow. So that is why

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I say that of all of the attributes, I think immutability is the one that ought to elicit the greatest praise in our hearts.

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And it might not be one that we often think about, but it is one that runs as an undercurrent.

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Many of the ones that we've been doing here at the beginning, acuity, simplicity, perfection, and now immutability, they run as sort of undercurrents amongst all the other attributes.

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And immutability is no different. So in short, that God is immutable is the only reason that really we can make sense of life at all.

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It's the only reason we can make any sense of life at all. I think back to many of us, of course, are very familiar with the

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Greek myths or the Norse myths. And they're the ones, at least, that the

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Western world is most familiar with. But there's other pantheistic religions that had lots of different gods and goddesses.

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And generally speaking, with all of those religions, with those multiple gods and goddesses, what would you say is sort of the defining characteristic of their gods?

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They're fickle. They're too human, yes. They're too much like us.

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And to what Josh said, I think the thing that makes them most human is that they're very fickle.

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All those religions, all the people who follow those religions lived in abject fear of their gods because they were afraid they were going to wake up on the wrong side of the bed that morning.

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And they went back and back and back for those sacrifices, for those gifts, for whatever ceremonies or practices that they thought they needed to do.

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They did all those things because they wanted to make sure that they kept those gods in a good mood.

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If the volcano erupted, if the plague came, if the harvest didn't come in, it was because they were grumpy.

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And we didn't do enough to appease them. And so now we've got to appease them maybe double, even more.

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So of course, for them, life barely made sense. They couldn't make heads or tails of it.

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Why is this happening? Why is that happening? They lived in constant fear of the question, what if?

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What if? Because they just didn't know. But God, the true

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God, he is immutable. And in fact, we, I'm going to talk about later, we all, including the unbelievers, trust in that attribute of God far more than we realize on a daily basis.

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You are all, in fact, trusting in it right now. So here's the plan.

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Today, I said this is going to be two weeks. Today, we're going to unpack the meaning of immutability and its implications on our life.

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And then next week, we're going to dig deep into some apologetics around this attribute and handle some of the really hard objections to it.

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I know, especially you, some people are really chomping at the bit around here this morning.

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They want to ask me about things like the moment of creation or about the incarnation or about anthropomorphisms in the

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Bible that seem to make it sound like that God can change his mind. We're going to deal with all those next week.

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Okay, next week. I'm giving an entire class just to those because there's so many that need to be dealt with and it's just going to take a little bit of extra work.

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But I promise we'll get to all those next week. This week, we really need to start by saturating ourselves in the joy of immutability.

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All right, and then we'll marinate on that. We'll let our souls marinate in that for seven days and then we'll come back and we'll deal with all those next week.

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So, for those of you who are joining us today for the first time, welcome. We've been exploring together the attributes of God.

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Use that, obviously, as you can tell, using this book, None Greater by Matthew Barrett.

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And I really appreciate the order that Barrett has handled them because the, gone through each one of them because the knowledge and the wisdom that we're gaining each week or each session,

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I think, just keeps building one upon the next and upon the next. And he even laid that out at the very beginning. If you remember when

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Andrew and I did the intro chapters, we mentioned that that was really one of Barrett's, he stated up front, that's one of his goals is to make it much more obvious that every one of these attributes are interconnected and they're not just separate little lessons, right?

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But rather, each builds upon the other. And the two most recent attributes that we've dealt with, right, are what?

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Remembers last week or two weeks ago? Or three weeks ago, actually. Or I know,

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I don't even know. However many weeks ago. The last two lessons. Yes? Simplicity was last chapter.

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Yep. So, Brian, since you remembered, can you give me the two or three sentence summary of what

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Andrew took more than 100 minutes to explain? Yeah.

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Yeah, God is not a composite. He's not made up of parts. He is singular perfection.

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Augustine told us that there's no difference between what God is and what

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God has, right? We don't say that God has love.

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We say God is love. We don't say God has justice or follows justice.

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He is justice. All right, and what was the one before simplicity?

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It was the weird Latin word. Aseity, yes, aseity. I'm dying on that hill, it's aseity.

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All right, anyway. There's been a controversy over how to pronounce that word, but anyway.

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Josh, can you define aseity for us? He's complete within himself, yep.

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He is self, asterisk, right? Like insert all the things after there, right?

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There's a million of them. Name off some of them. Can anybody name off some of them? Self -sustaining, self -sufficient, self, which one's the one he's the uncaused first cause?

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Remember that one? Self, what's that? Self -existing, yes, very good, yep, yep.

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He's self -empowering. He doesn't need to get power from anywhere else.

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He doesn't need to eat food or get sleep, right? He's self -attesting.

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No one else needs to vouch for his existence. He is from himself.

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That's what the word literally means, aseity, from himself. Now, these both, okay, and then even if we go back one further than that, and that was perfection, they lead into immutability like this.

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For if God is entirely from himself, if he has no parts which can be added or subtracted, but is entirely singularly one, then why or how could he change?

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And that's question one there on the worksheet, because God is entirely from himself and is entirely one, entirely singularly one, perfect being, he must also be immutable.

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As Barrett says, and I quote, this, that is what makes

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God so astoundingly, unbelievably unique. He does not contain the ground of his own being in,

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I'm sorry, he does contain the ground of his own being in and of himself. We are one thing today and another thing tomorrow, wavering between existence and non -existence, but there is no wavering with God.

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As the one who is life in and of himself, he remains eternally indivisible, simplicity, and therefore constantly reliable.

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The one with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change, James 117.

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So that God is simple means he is indivisible. And remember that Andrew told us that that also makes him incorruptible, right?

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Because anything that could be divided or that is composed could also decompose, right?

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Both in the way you're all picturing it, being eaten up by worms and turning to dust, but also just the simple idea of, this music stand is made up of parts and if I wanted to,

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I could disassemble it, right? I could decompose it back to its constituent parts. And if I really wanted to,

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I can melt down the materials from which it is made and even separate those out, right?

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Into the various different alloys of metal that are put together into the stand, okay?

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But God is not like that. God is incorruptible, he cannot be decomposed.

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Anything that is a composite of the parts might also be capable of some kind of decomposition.

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So let's expand our definition though of immutability further, because it's a really simple statement and if that was it, why am

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I taking two weeks, okay? God does not change. But what does that really mean? On number two there, we're gonna talk about these different aspects and I took these from Knowing God by J .I.

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Packer. Barrett also has a list in his chapter six, but I like Packer's list better. I just think he does a great job with summarizing it in this way.

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Now these are a little bit out of order to help keep you awake and on your toes, so you're gonna have to find the match as we're going, all right?

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All right, number one. God's life does not change.

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God's life does not change. Psalm 102 says that heaven and earth will perish, but you remain.

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They will all wear out like a garment. Like clothing, you will change them and they will be discarded, but you remain the same and your years will never end.

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So which one of that is on the worksheet? C, yep.

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He does not gain or lose. He does not grow or learn. He does not age.

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God's life does not change. All right, here's another one. God's character does not change.

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God's character does not change. Can people's character change? Yes. What's a good example?

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What's a good example of people's character changing? Regeneration, yes, absolutely.

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Regeneration and sanctification. I hope our character is changing, right?

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We're trying to be, we're striving to become more Christ -like every day. What's a negative example of people's character changing?

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Yeah, bad company corrupting good character. That's a very good one.

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Also, certainly there's plenty of examples, both in fiction and nonfiction, of traumatic events, right?

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Greatly affecting someone's character where they turn into someone who's very vengeful or very bitter, very angry, right?

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And they would live the rest of their lives broken by whatever traumatic event had occurred in their life, right?

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And people who knew them before and then after say they're like a totally different person, right?

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And in the good way, people who knew us before we were saved and after would say they're like a totally different person, right?

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So people's character can change, but God's does not. God's does not.

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Do you ever think about this, that the link, the one link between Bible times and now is

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God himself? Because the God who delivered Moses, the

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God who fought for David, the God who gave wisdom to Solomon, the God who comforted

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Elijah, who fed the 5 ,000, who raised Lazarus from the dead, he is the same

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God today that you and I pray to and worship. The same God.

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So which letter is that on the worksheet? God's character does not change. E, that's right, his attitude, his heart, his temperament, they're all the same today as they were in Bible times.

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All right, next. God's truth does not change.

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God's truth does not change, and amen to that. As I already mentioned in the introduction, because if God's truth could change, that would mean that the very plan of salvation might change, which means we'd have absolutely no assurance of anything.

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Packer wrote that God still stands behind all the promises and demands and statements of purpose and words of warning that are addressed to New Testament believers.

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These are not relics of a bygone age, but an eternally valid revelation of the mind of God toward his people in all generations.

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So which one's that on the worksheet? B. B, I gave it away,

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I pretty much read the quote right there. All right, next.

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God's ways do not change. God's ways do not change.

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Maybe you should ask first, which one do you think it is? A. Yes, you're right,

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A. He continues to act in accordance with his will in the same way that he always has towards the just and the unjust.

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The same way. He still disciplines those he loves to make them more Christ -like.

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He doesn't try something new. He deals with his creatures the way he always has.

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And then last, we can guess the letter by process of elimination. What's left?

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D. What do you think D means? Anybody wanna guess the word this time instead?

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God's what does not change? His will? Yeah, that's a good synonym for the word

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I had. Starts with a P is the one I had picked. Purpose, yeah,

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God's purposes do not change. Actually, I didn't pick it, Packer picked it. But yes, you could say

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God's will in the same way. Yeah, God's purposes do not change. What he planned from the beginning, that is what he has done, what he is doing and will do.

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We'll come back to this a lot next week, okay? But what he planned from the beginning is what he has done, is doing, and will do.

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His purposes do not change, okay?

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And you can put those two things together a lot when you're thinking about it. And there's a lot of questions that might pop into your head about immutability and you can say, well, his ways are not changing and his purposes are not changing.

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Because whatever it is that we might perceive as change is in fact what was planned from the outset, from eternity past.

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Numbers 23 .19 says, God is not a man that he should lie, nor a son of man that he should change his mind.

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Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill? And Psalm 33 says, the plans of the

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Lord stand firm forever. All right, any questions about any of those or thoughts this early in the morning?

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On a holiday weekend, are your thoughts waiting till Monday to come out?

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Yes. Right, yes, so thank you.

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Good callback, I forgot about that one. So a few lessons ago, I talked about the, it was the

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Greek philosopher who made the statement, Heraclitus, about that you cannot stand in the same river twice because the river is constantly changing, right?

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But God is never changing. So the same God from Moses' time, from David's time, from all creation, right, is the same

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God that we deal with today. He has not changed. Now, speaking of analogies, thank you, that was a good segue.

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Because very early on in this class, we established that because God is so unlike us and so unlike anything in his creation, we have to mostly try to talk about him with analogical language, right?

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It's the best we can really do because of his incomprehensibility. But analogies are what?

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Flawed, yes. They're not the best always, right? There's always some limit to them. So we gotta tread carefully, and if there's maybe any attribute where there's a lot of bad analogies littered about, besides the

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Trinity, it is immutability, okay? However, we're gonna try, all right?

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Can you think of one particular analogy, I'm gonna lean on the Bible to try to pick the best one.

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Can you think of one analogy that the Bible uses for God's immutability more than any other?

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You hear it all the time, especially in the Psalms. Rock. Rock. That God is, that's number three, that God is a rock, the rock, my rock.

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I know, I know, I can't. Thank you, Dwayne Johnson, right? I can't, yes.

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All right, we're gonna do a lot of reading because there's so many of these. So here we go, I'm gonna need a lot of volunteers, or I might just volun -told you.

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Here we go, Deuteronomy 32 .4. Be nice if I could just start over here and go this way.

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Scott, can you do Deuteronomy 32 .4? Chuck, 2

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Samuel 22, two and three. Kathy, Psalm 18 .31.

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Brian, Psalm 19 .14. Psalm 28 .1.

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Let's see, Charlie, Psalm 62, six and seven.

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Cindy, if you look at me, if you make eye contact, you're in trouble. Isaiah 26 .4.

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Look away. Janet, Habakkuk 1 .12. I'm gonna make you find

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Habakkuk. Let's see, who else?

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Josh, Matthew 7 .24 .25. Yes, sir,

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Matthew 16 .18. And then last but not least, you want this one?

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1 Corinthians 10 .4. There's a lot, there's a lot.

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Pretty awesome. Scott, let's go, Deuteronomy 32 .4. What strikes me the most about that one right off the bat is, does it even use the word

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God or Yahweh in there? It just says the rock right off the bat, right? It's his proper name in this verse.

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He is the rock. All right, Chuck, 2 Samuel 22 .2 and three. Psalm 18 .31.

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Yes? Yes, it's an allusion to, yes, it's allusion to Moses being put in the cleft of the rock.

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It's also an allusion to, this is David, so it's also kind of allusion to the fact that he keeps hanging out in caves, right?

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To avoid Saul, so he just sort of has that physical example in his own life of hiding in these literal rock fortresses.

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Psalm 18 .31. Who is a rock except our

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God? There's several other examples that I didn't quote here in which the

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Bible uses the word rock to compare it against false gods and saying how the rock's still here, but the false gods aren't, right?

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They're even worse than a rock. Rock. Psalm 19 .14.

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My rock and my redeemer. Psalm 28 .1. Psalm 62, six and seven.

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So here we're hearing a bit about the rock as a foundation stone, right? A place to anchor, and of course, our hymn writers have picked this up a lot, right?

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And we have lots and lots of hymns talking about anchoring ourselves to a rock, holding firm to a rock, yeah, yes, yep, yep.

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Isaiah 26 .4, right? Is that the one I'm on? Yep, there you go, an everlasting rock.

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Habakkuk 1 .12, again there, right?

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Using it as his proper name, the name to which to refer to him. You, O rock, everlasting.

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Matthew 7 .24 and 25. And again, here

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I'm playing on the fact that the word of God is synonymous with God himself, right?

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In this context that to, you know, Jesus is saying, found yourself on these words of mine, this

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Sermon on the Mount, but ultimately, if you're doing that, you're really founding yourself on him, right?

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Him himself, because he spoke with authority. All right,

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Matthew 16 .18, right?

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Does everybody remember the context of that one, Pastor Mike, and we've probably heard many sermons in this church about this verse, right?

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What's the play on words in that verse? Right, Peter's name, right? Because what does Peter's name mean literally in Greek?

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Right, well, it means stone. It's like small rock, right, little rock. And then, and so it's

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Jesus doing a play on words, right? You are a little rock, but upon this rock, right?

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Now, whether the rock means necessarily his confession or perhaps just Jesus himself, right?

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The point is still the same, that it is the rock of Christ as Messiah, Christ as the

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Son of God, right? That's the rock. All right, and the last one, 1 Corinthians 10 .4.

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Who had that one? No, did I not give it?

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Sorry, I ran out of list. Anybody have it real quick, they can read it? Josh, are you close? Okay, 10 .4.

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So they, and what Paul's talking about here is the Israelites. They all drank the same spiritual drink from the rock, and the rock was

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Christ, literally, right? And of course, that's an allusion to what? Right, getting water in the desert when

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Moses the first time was commanded to strike the rock at Meribah, and the water gushed out, and the second time he was told not to strike it, but he struck it anyway, and the water came out, right?

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But in both cases. And then Jesus himself in John 4, right, talks about, calls himself the living water, right?

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The true spiritual drink. All right, so in what ways of all that we just read, right?

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What are the ways in which the rock, calling him a rock, is a good analogy? What are those aspects about rock that we're supposed to be thinking about?

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Yes, Charlie, yes. The rocks are the most permanent, everlasting thing around.

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We have the natural rock formations, like Charlie's saying, the mountains, right?

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Or just upthrusts and various rock formations that they might see. And also, of course, there's plenty of times where they set up rocks, right?

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They used rocks to mark the borders between farmlands. They used rocks as signposts, go this way to Jerusalem, right, type of stuff, right?

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So the, but the rocks were the thing. And just the sheer fact that they were multigenerational, thank you,

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I really like that way of putting it, right? They outlasted the people, right? So they're a great example of the everlastingness, the unchangingness of God.

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What else? Strength, yeah, strength is a big one, right?

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A strength that doesn't change, right? They're just there and strong.

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They don't wear out, so to speak, at least in terms that ancient man was noticing and on timescales that we were noticing, but I'll get to that in a second.

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You could put your anchor on the rock and it's not gonna go anywhere, right? You could leave it there for days and days and weeks and whatever, and it's still gonna be there to hold you.

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And then there was one more that came up, right?

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Anybody else? Remember one other aspect of this with rocks? I said it already, but what were rocks to David?

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They were a hiding place, a shelter, a fortress, right? So they also represent a constancy of a place in which you could go and within him, it was impenetrable, right?

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Again, not changing. Man -made fortresses were weak.

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The natural ones were beefy strong and not going anywhere. Now, to finish question number three, in what ways does it fall short of an analogy?

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Well, I can hammer and shape stones, right? I mean, there's an entire profession called mining that's about this.

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That last verse that we read that was alluding to when Moses struck the rock. When he struck the rock, he split the rock.

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So the rock broke open to make water gush out.

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I can put gems into tumblers with the sand and whatnot and hours later they come out like these nice smooth stones.

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Or we can go down even to someplace like say, purgatory chasm down South of here.

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And we can see these tremendous boulders, huge things. But with modern technology, even though erosion is slow, we can go down there and we can measure year after year how those giant, what seemed like massive, immovable, unchangeable boulders are in fact slightly shrinking, right?

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It's slightly changing shape. We'll be one year after another after another, slowly getting smoothed out by erosion and water and wind erosion.

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Or plant some trees and watch those trees break it right up. Yep, exactly. Even the old man in the mountain in New Hampshire, he eventually fell, right?

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We learned that lesson, yeah. Man will fall, yeah. But not so our God, okay?

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Not so our God. So this is again, this is where the bad analogy becomes a bad analogy, but God is the rock of rocks.

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You know, we've heard Lord of Lords and King of Kings. Let me add rock of rocks. Samuel's mother,

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Hannah, she might've put it the best when she prayed in 1 Samuel 2. She said, there is none holy like the

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Lord, for there is none beside you. There is no rock like our God. He's a rock, but there's, he is a rock, but there's no rock that I can see that's really like him.

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He's the best of them all. The strongest, the most immovable, the most unchanging.

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That's our God. So the analogy Barrett answers, he says, wars come and go, countries rise and fall.

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All the world changes from one century to the next, but not the rock. It is not thwarted, it does not vacillate.

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In but a small way, that rock is like God. He does not change. Come what may, God remains the same.

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He is firm and secure, always there, never fluctuating, incapable of defeat, and forever steadfast as a fortress to those in trouble.

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So there you go. I think we hit every one of those this morning about what makes for a good analogy.

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All right, now, and as I was getting to at the beginning of this lesson, it is God's immutability that is the very foundation for the trust that we have in God.

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And even unbelievers, whether they know it or not, trust in God's immutability.

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Why? Anyone wanna take a crack at that? How are unbelievers trusting in God's immutability?

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Charlie? That's right.

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Yep, that's exactly right. What we describe as the quote -unquote so -called laws of science, right?

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They're only laws because God does not change. It's not like there was laws of science and then

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God bound himself to those, right? And says like, all right, well, it's gravity, so I gotta make sure that, you know, gravity says that things will accelerate towards the earth at 9 .8

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meters per second squared, so I gotta make sure that every time someone drops a rock that it's gonna fall that fast, right?

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And no, God wrote those laws, right?

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That's why a miracle is not hard for God. It's not like he has to overcome something in order to accomplish the miracle.

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A miracle is just, you know, when something happens that does not follow those natural laws, right?

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But it's not hard for him to do that. He doesn't have anything that he needs to overpower in order to make the miracle happen.

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He just simply has to not do it that way, right?

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And yes, there's one of those ones that we're gonna talk about next week. But yes,

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Charlie. Oh, good, good, yeah. Yep.

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Yep. Yep. Yes, exactly right, yep. Dr. Jason Lyle, who's a creation apologist, he put it this way.

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He said, God's logic is built into the universe. So the universe is not haphazard or arbitrary.

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It obeys laws of chemistry that are logically derived from laws of physics, many of which can be logically derived from other laws of physics or laws of mathematics.

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But the most fundamental laws of nature exist only because God wills them to. They are logical orderly because God himself is logical and orderly.

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And the way that the Lord upholds and sustains the universe he has created is in character with him.

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The atheist is unable to account for the logical orderly state of the universe. Why should the universe obey laws if there is no law giver?

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But laws of nature are perfectly consistent with a biblical creation. God is Lord over all creation and sustains the universe in a consistent, logical way.

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Here's the real connection to immutability. God does not change, and so he upholds the universe in a consistent, uniform way throughout time.

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Can someone read Colossians 1, 15 to 17 for us this morning?

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I know we had a lot of readers already. Anybody new wanna volunteer for that one? Mr. McDonald, do you wanna do that one?

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Colossians 1, 15 to 17. The he through all of this, we didn't read back far enough, is who?

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Jesus, yeah. Very specifically, it's Christ. And he is before all things, a very definitive statement of Christ's deity, right?

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And in him, all things hold together. In that last part in the

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Greek, we get this sense of Christ literally applying force to the components of creation.

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At the atomic or subatomic level, even. Christ is the one who, he's keeping those protons and neutrons and bosons and quarks and all that stuff from flying apart.

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When the end of the world comes, this is question number four, when the end of the world comes, God's not gonna have to blow it up to destroy it.

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He's simply going to have to let go. Right, why don't you just sort of pass through?

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Yes, yep, yep. Yeah, to digress ever so slightly, when I look at the scientific things,

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I appreciate that God seems to have made an infiniteness, an infinitude, he sort of built it into creation in both directions, right?

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That the universe is mind -bogglingly big, and I think that's because he wants us to, no matter how much we look up, we can't find the end of it, just to prove just how big he is, right?

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He's still bigger than that. And on the small direction, right, is no matter how much we microscopically inspect and break apart atoms, it's like we find another sub -particle underneath that sub -particle.

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We can't seem to get down to the bottom of it, right? And like Charlie said, right now, the current limit of science at that sub -atomic level is they have no idea how or why the weak sub -atomic force, nuclear force works, but it does,

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Christ upholding the universe. All right, well, before we go today,

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I wanted to return to my very initial thought when I was reading Lamentations. But this I call to mind, and therefore

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I have hope. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end.

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They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. Note the connection at the very beginning.

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But this I call to mind, therefore I have hope, right? This is Jeremiah preaching to himself.

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I will think about this. I will dwell on this. I will fill my thoughts with this. And because I'm thinking about this, that's how

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I have hope, right? This is where he's centering, anchoring his hope. That the hesed love, the steadfast love of the

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Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning.

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Great is your faithfulness. Our God is a faithful God, faithful God.

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And that he is faithful, it should be obvious by now, is rooted in his immutability. We find him faithful because he does not change.

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There are new mercies every morning because God is there every morning ready to dole them out again.

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He doesn't hit the snooze button. He doesn't, like we talked about those

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Greek gods, he doesn't wake up on the wrong side of the bed and said, you know what? No mercies today.

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Can we just take a break? It's Labor Day, right? He is, of course, infinite.

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So he can't run out of mercies to give, which is a good thing because we need a lot of them.

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So question five there. Do you struggle with assurance of your salvation? You don't need to.

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Behold, your God is faithful. Do you fear that you have done something that would make him love you less?

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You don't have to. Behold, your God is faithful. Are you worried that his promises somehow don't apply to you?

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You don't have to. Behold, your God is faithful.

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Barrett sums it up for us like this. You can trust God to remain good and you can trust that this

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God always has your good in mind and will always act in a way that reflects his perfect goodness even in the midst of the trials he has ordained for you.

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Thank you very much. Next week, as I said, we will continue to look here at immutability, about the apologetics.

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We'll talk about the incarnation. We'll talk about creation. We'll talk about those times in the

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Bible where it says that God repents of this or does something, you know, changes direction or seems to, anyway, change direction and deal with that in terms of what it means for God to be immutable, okay?

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All right, let's pray. Heavenly Father, I thank you so much for this morning, for gathering us together here today.

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I am thankful that even this morning when I woke up, even though I could have failed to think of it, your mercies were there and ready for me, for all of us, that you are faithful,

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Lord, to be with us, to provide for us, to grow us day by day more

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Christ -like. You are faithful to see us to the end, to fulfill your promise that we might, by placing our faith and trust in your son,

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Jesus Christ, that we have, Lord, will, that you,

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Lord, have secured a place for us and that we will live forever in heaven with you.