2023 BBC Bible Conference - The Fount Of All Joy Session One "Divine Blessedness" with Pastor Steve Meister

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Well, thank you so much for your hospitality. It is a pleasure to be here and to be able to share with you and encourage you.

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This is my first time to New England, and I'm so thankful we came the right week as we're looking at pictures, and Mike was harassing me about all the snow last week.

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I've lived in California and Hawaii my whole life. I have blood like fruit punch, so I don't know how you all survive out here, but God bless you for doing so.

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And I'm thankful to be here with the confidence that you love the

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Gospel, and more importantly, or because of that, you know how to rightly distinguish it from the law and understand the goodness of God in our

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Lord Jesus. And I want us to start there and ask this question, what is good about the

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Gospel? Or maybe even a more fundamental question, what is the good?

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The answer to both of those questions, I hope you know, is the same. It's God. What we want to do in the time that we have this evening and tomorrow,

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God willing, is consider nothing less than why we exist. The very fundamental basis of reality and how all of happiness is found in God alone.

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That's our great aim, and this is our purpose. I want to put it out in front and center, and it's very simple, and it's our only main aim here this weekend, is that we want to be assured, and if you leave tomorrow and this is true, then we will have accomplished our purpose, that you are assured that God loves you and that He created you and has redeemed you if you are in Christ to be happy in Him now and forever.

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That's our simple aim, to know that God loves you and to be assured of why that's the case and how

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He wants you to be happy in Him forever. God has communicated Himself to us so that we would have joy in His joy.

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That is the why beneath creation, redemption, and the coming consummation, that we all would have joy in the joy of God.

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And that's what we're aiming at this weekend. How can we be assured of this? Or, speaking at it logically, how do we account for that?

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How do I account for that in my mind and understand, especially in the difficulties and vicissitudes of life, how do

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I know that God loves me and wants me to be happy in Him? To do that, we need to consider

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God and to deepen our knowledge of Him. So that's what we aim to do. I believe you've got a handout, and that's mostly just a conglomeration of some of the quotes

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I will want to use, so you have those with you and you don't have to worry about trying to write somebody down as we're talking.

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But it will be a point of reference to you and we'll consider much in God's Word. But that is our aim, to understand how we can have joy in the joy that God has in Himself.

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And to do that, we need to know about Him. And this is basic, really, to loving

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God. We cannot grow in assurance or devotion or love for God without knowledge.

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The modern assumption that we may have encountered, that doctrine hinders love and joy, is simply wrong.

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And we don't really believe it. Because we don't operate that way in any other of our relationships.

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Augustine in the 4th century, and there will be a lot of Augustine in our time together, he said that no one can love a thing that is quite unknown.

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To love, we must know something about someone, even in relationships.

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J. Gresham Mason said that every human relationship is bristling with dogma. That is the reason you love those you love, is because of what you know about them.

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You know truths about them. You know who they are, and your love deepens and grows, and relationship to your knowledge and doctrine of them growing.

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And older theologians understood that this was the point of theology.

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Theology has become something a bit different on the other side of the Enlightenment. But if we go before that, older theologians knew that the whole point of all that we say about God, according to His Word, is that we would grow in love and joy for Him.

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Just a couple of samples. William Perkins said that theology is the science of living blessedly forever.

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Do you want to know how to be happy forever? Theology addresses that. Jehonas Macovia said that theology is a discipline partly theoretical, partly practical, teaching a way of living well and blessedly into eternity.

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So theology, what we think and say about God, and how we think of Him, is about how we live and sojourn to eternal joy.

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It's about how we have contentment and blessedness in God. And the reason we have far less joy in our generation is because we've forgotten the knowledge of God, the source of all joy.

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We've lost our grip on what is, on reality, because we've lost the

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God who is. And when you do that, you lose understanding why everything exists.

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And if we forget God, we will forget ourselves. And that's fundamental. The knowledge of God and the true knowledge of ourselves are intertwined and inescapable.

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So, for example, Augustine, in probably one of the greatest sentences ever written outside the Bible, in the beginning of the

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Confessions, he wrote this, You move us to delight in praising you, for you made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in you.

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So, in that sentence, Augustine says, in the middle, the most fundamental fact of existence,

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God made us for Himself. We exist for God. And it explains the subjective experience he then takes from that.

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That's why we rejoice to praise Him, and we are restless without Him. The reason joy is found in communion with God, and restlessness and anxiety exist without Him, is because we were made for God.

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He created us for Himself. Over a thousand years later, John Calvin started his Institutes with the same observation.

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He said, all our wisdom is intertwined in two parts, the knowledge of God and of ourselves, and then he wrote, man never attains to a true self -knowledge until he has previously contemplated the face of God, and come down after such contemplation to look into himself.

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Here's the thing. Knowing yourself, who you are, and why you are, and having contentment and joy is impossible until we consciously know the

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God who made us. Because He made us for Him. This is why what we're doing this weekend is astoundingly relevant for whatever else has been bothering you up before this evening.

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About our culture, about society, about ourselves and our life. Theology is really the only proper starting point to begin addressing any of the things that we're concerned about.

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The reason our culture has lost its mind on truth, beauty, and goodness is because it has forsaken the only ultimate basis for any of it.

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G .K. Chesterton said, when the first effect of not believing in God is you lose your common sense.

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And he's exactly right. And the reason we see so much nonsensical things today is because we've quit believing in the one who is.

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And that's not only true for thinking about ourselves in terms of common grace and in society, but it's also true for what we think about the

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Gospel and Christianity. Knowing God is the fundamental fact of our faith.

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And it's connected to every other idea. If your idea of God is wrong, then your idea of the

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God -man, the Lord Jesus Christ, will be wrong. And then our understanding of His work in the cross and resurrection will be wrong, and so on.

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Everything begins with who God is. E .L. Maskell said, logically and essentially, the doctrine of God is the fundamental doctrine of the

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Christian religion, for according to its teaching, everything other than God depends on Him and exists for His glory.

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In other words, we get God wrong, we'll get Christ wrong, we'll get the Gospel wrong, we'll get the

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Bible wrong, we will get everything else downstream wrong, because everything else is downstream from God.

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And so this is fundamental. If we're going to understand and worship and walk before God, the reason that the

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Gospel has so often been turned into a therapeutic message, without any of the biblical contours of righteousness and sin and justice and redemption by the work of Christ, is because God has been lost, and God has been forgotten, as we think about the

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Gospel. And that reminds us that the direction of the

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Gospel is always Godward. The good of the Gospel is

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God. Think of the familiar words of our Lord Jesus in Matthew chapter 11, verses 28 and 29.

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I'm sure many of us maybe have them memorized, or at least know a large part of them. Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

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Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

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What rest is the Lord Jesus offering to all who would come to Him? Now, often when people read those verses disconnected from Matthew 11, they fill in their own concepts of rest.

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And it goes in varied directions, in a self -directed or even a therapeutic way, but we forget what

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Jesus said right before these words in verse 27 of Matthew 11. All things have been handed over to me by my

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Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the

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Son chooses to reveal Him. Why did the Son come?

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To reveal the knowledge of God the Father, so that in Him we might have rest.

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You see where Augustine got his great line? Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you. Christ came that we might have rest in God.

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Our joy would be fulfilled in Him. We are brought to rest in God. That is the great good of the

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Gospel. By Jesus' work and by faith alone in Him, we have rest in our

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God and we call Him Father. And then we have joy and we can tell others. That is what

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Peter says in 1 Peter 2 verse 9. He says, you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.

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The word that Peter uses there in 1 Peter 2 verse 9 for excellencies is about as close as we get in the

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New Testament to the word attributes. It refers to intrinsic characteristics.

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The intrinsic worth, or what we might say, perfections. And that is what we are going to do this weekend is consider the perfections of God.

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And we will consider more tomorrow, but we will have to remember that God technically does not have attributes.

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We ascribe these things to Him as He has revealed them to us in His acts of creation and especially in His word.

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We, Psalm 29, we ascribe to the Lord. We attribute perfections to Him.

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And if there is a categorization of attributes that we prefer, the one that is probably most common is communicable and incommunicable.

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But one that might help us tend a little better to understand things is absolute and relative. We think of God as He is absolutely in Himself, apart from and prior to creation.

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And God as He relates to what is not God, to His creatures, to creation.

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And we will consider a lot about what is true of God absolutely this weekend. Because that governs and it dictates everything else that we say about God as we think about His love and His holiness and His goodness.

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And they are typically forgotten today and often misunderstood today. As we have not thought well in recent generations about God and the church.

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And we need to recover some of these things that were taken for granted centuries before us. So that is what we are going to do this weekend,

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Lord willing. And what I want to do is cover God's divine blessedness this evening.

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And then tomorrow morning we will look at God's incomprehensibility and infinity. And then we will also look at His aseity and simplicity.

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And then we will end considering His immutability and impassibility. And if all those sounded like 10 cent words you have no reference for, don't worry, we will get there.

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We will plow the field and it will all make sense by the end. But we will walk through these absolute attributes of God.

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And consider again how our hope and joy is found in our eternal God and the

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God who made us. And He wants us to have that rest in Him. Matthew Henry said, referred to this as the pleasantness of a religious life.

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He said it is not only one of the privileges of our religion that we may rejoice but has made one of the duties of it. We are defective in our religion if we don't live a life of complacency of God in His being,

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His attributes and His relations to us. It should be a constant pleasure to us to think that there is a

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God. That He is such a one as the scriptures revealed Him to be. A being infinitely wise and powerful.

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Holy, just and good. That this God governs the world and gives laws to all the creatures. That He is our owner and ruler.

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That in His hand our breath is, in His hand our times, our hearts and all our ways are. Thus certainly it is and thus it must be.

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And happy are those that can please themselves with these thoughts. As those must needs be a constant terror to themselves who couldn't wish it were otherwise.

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They who thus delight in God have always something. And have something very commanding too to delight in.

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A fountain of joy that can never be either exhausted or stopped up.

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To which they may always have. Those who delight in God always have something.

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In fact they always have everything. And they have an infinite fountain of joy. To which we always have access through our

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Lord Jesus Christ. And that's where I want us to begin our time this evening. And if you have your Bible with you and Pastor Mike has already kicked us off well in 1

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Timothy. I want you to turn to 1 Timothy please. And let's spend some of our time meditating there and then moving through the rest of Scripture.

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We want to think of 1 Timothy about God as our fountain of joy.

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But I want us to begin in chapter 1. In 1

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Timothy chapter 1. The Apostle Paul gives one of the great absolute statements of the

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Gospel in verse 15. You're probably familiar with it. 1 Timothy 1 verses 15.

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The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.

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Of whom I am the foremost. Christ came to save sinners.

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It's wonderful. And true. And succinct. And what Paul's doing in this chapter. He's essentially evangelizing the false teachers he's already described.

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And he'll return to again in chapter 6. He's basically saying that just as I have been redeemed. As I was such a great opponent to the church.

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You can too. Because Christ Jesus came to save sinners. And now as we see this absolute statement of the

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Gospel. Work back to verse 11. And consider how Paul introduces it.

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He refers to the Gospel of the glory of the blessed

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God. With which I have been entrusted. The good news.

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The Gospel. Of the God who has brought us to himself. And he is blessed.

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That is a remarkable statement. Though it may not have jumped out to you the first few times you've read it. It's a statement about who

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God is absolutely in himself. And God is absolutely blessed.

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Our blessedness is always dependent. It's always contingent on circumstances being met.

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On the right conditions. You see that in scripture. Psalm 1 begins with blessed is the man who.

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Jesus begins the sermon on the mount with the beatitudes. Blessed are those who. And that's how it always is for us.

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We are blessed when conditions are met. But God we're told.

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Is just blessed. Apart from. Prior to. And without anything else that exists in creation.

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God is blessed. God is happy. To be blessed is to be in a state of happiness.

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Or joy. And God's blessedness. Now that you've hopefully had it pointed out to you.

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You'll notice how often it shows up in scripture. It's a common description. And praise to God. David, for example, in.

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First Chronicles 29 verse 10 prayed this. Blessed are you. Oh Lord. The God of Israel.

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Our father. Forever. And ever. Our adoration. And our seeking

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God. Is rooted. In the incomprehensible wonder. That God.

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Is forever. Blessed. Why. Well Paul explains.

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God's blessedness. In the. Doxologies that envelop this epistle. In 1st Timothy. He explains the household in which we live.

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As God's household. And that we are to. Show in the world. As he says in chapter 3. But. In chapter 1 verse 17.

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We have the 1st doxology. As Paul writes. In 1st Timothy 1 17. To the king of the ages.

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Immortal. Invisible. The only God. Be honor and glory. Forever and ever.

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Amen. And then. We just had it read. Let's read it again. In 1st Timothy. Chapter 6.

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Verses 15 and 16. Paul again writes. Of he. Who is the blessed.

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And only sovereign. The king of kings. And lord of lords. Who alone. Has immortality.

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Who dwells. In unapproachable light. Who no one. Has ever seen. Or can see. To him.

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Be honor. And eternal dominion. Amen. Now here.

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Paul. In these. Doxologies. Give some. Of the attributes. Of God. That account.

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For his. Blessedness. In. Chapter 1. And chapter 6. I want you to first.

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To notice. That they're mostly. Negations. They're mostly. Negations. That is describing.

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God. By taking away. And denying. What he is not. That is taking away.

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Creaturely. Aspects to God. And denying. Those. We must. Negate. And when we do that.

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When we. Describe God. By negation. What we're doing. Is acknowledging. Who God is.

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Is beyond. All that we can fathom. And that we cannot give. A comprehensive definition. Of infinite. Perfection.

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John Norton. For example. Said. It's manifestly known. That God is. Much more difficult to know. What God is.

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And so. You have negations. Like in verse 17. Of chapter 1. He's invisible. He's without visibility.

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That is. God's not composed. Matter. God's not corporal. You can't see him.

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Now. This doesn't make. God. An amorphous. Force. Like in some. Sci -fi. Movie. But it.

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Acknowledges. His infinite. Fullness. So. In chapter 6. Verse 16.

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Paul says. That he dwells. In unapproachable. Light. Psalm.

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104. Verse 2. Says that God. Covers himself. With light. Like a garment. Remember.

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Moses. Asked to see. God's glory. In Exodus. 33. And how does God. Reply. You cannot see.

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My face. For man. Shall not see. Me. And live. He can't be. Comprehended. What you see.

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You comprehend. How do you. See. Infinity. No one.

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Can see. God. In himself. Human. Perception. And comprehension. Cannot take in.

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Infinite. Eternal. Boundless. Light. So. We can't see. God. Further.

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Paul. Gives. Both. In chapter. 1. In chapter. 6. Here. Refers to. God's. Immortality.

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So. In chapter. 1. Verse. 17. He says. He's. Immortal. He cannot. Perish. But notice.

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What Paul. Does in chapter. 6. Verse. 16. He. Increases. It. And says.

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He. Alone. Has. Immortality. And notice. What Paul. Is doing. There. He's. Being. Very. Careful.

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Theologically. Because. Who else. Is. Immortal. Well. In a sense.

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We are. We're. Mortal. People. With. Immortal. Souls. But.

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Is. Our. Immortality. Like. God's. Immortality. Well. No. Ours. Is. Granted. It's.

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Given. To. Us. We. Were. Created. We. Came. Into. Being. God. Sustains. Our. Being. God. Alone.

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Has. Immortality. That. Is. Him. Mortality. His. Immortality. Is. On. A. Whole. Other. Order. Of. Existence.

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Not. Granted. By. Anyone. Sufficient. In. Himself. Caused. By. No. One. And. See.

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Another. Way. Here. That. We. Describe. God. Not. Just. By. A. Way. Of. Negation. But. By. The. Way. Of. Perfection.

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That. Is. Even. The. Things. That. We. Share. With. God. Have. To. Remember. There. Is. An. Infinite. Different. Distance.

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Between. Us. And. God. And. A. Distinction. Of. His. Infinite. Perfection. So. We.

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Say. We. I'm. Immortal. Yes. God. Is. Immortal. Yes. But. Really. What. We. Mean. Is. God. Alone.

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Has. Immortality. He. Is. The. Giver. Of. Life. He. He.

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He. He. He. He.

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He. He. He.

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He. He. He.

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He. He. He.

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He. He. He.

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He. He. He.

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He. He. He.

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He. He. He. He.

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He. He. He. He. He.

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He. He.

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He. He. He.

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He. He. He. He. He. He. measure.

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So notice what our friend Bailey said. He said that blessedness is the comprehensive conclusion of all of God's perfections.

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That is when you've said all you can say about God, what you say is He is blessed. And secondly, that's the cause of every creature's joy.

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The root of every joy is that God has joy in Himself.

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So the reason that goodness and joy exist is because God is blessed.

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You can share that with your unbelieving friends. Everyone in the world wants to be happy.

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Why? Why is that the universal disposition of every man, woman, and child on the face of the planet?

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Because God is happy and created us to be happy in Him.

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And our universal longing for joy is a reflection and echo of the garden when

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God breathed life into dirt to find joy in their Creator. Happiness exists because God is happy.

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Benedict Pictet said that who would not call God happy who is in need of nothing, finds all comfort in himself, possesses all things, is free from all evil, and filled with all good.

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And if you want a short definition of blessedness, that's pretty good right there. Why is God blessed? He is free from every evil.

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He is full of every good. So He's blessed. No evil, full of every good.

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And by evil, we don't just mean free of what's morally wrong. We mean even the limitations of creation.

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God is blessed because He's boundless. There's no limits to Him. There's no limits to His ability.

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And all that we say in negating what is creaturely in God and ascribing perfection to Him is describing

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God as blessed. And what we're doing here and beginning to get a glimpse of is the absolute and sheer otherness and radical difference between God and us.

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And this has to control everything else that we think and say about God.

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And we must always remember that He is absolutely blessed. And all the other perfections and attributes we'll talk about account for and support and explain why

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God is the Blessed One. So, as Scripture gives us literal and absolute descriptions of God, that He is love, for example, of course the

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Blessed God is love Himself. The Psalms say that you are good and do good.

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The reason God does good is because He is goodness. That's who He is. It's proper to God.

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And we'll get later, at the end of our time tomorrow, this is also why we ascribe things like immutability and impassibility to God.

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In fact, you could lay alongside blessedness in 1 Timothy the word impassibility and we're getting at the same thing.

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It's impossible for God to undergo changes of state that in any way disturb

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His blessedness. He's joyful eternally in Himself. And God's joy is not a passion or an emotion.

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It's not something He's moved into by another. It's not something He has to be created in Him.

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He is blessed. It's the pure perfection of His being. So, Thomas Adams said this,

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God's glory is never left off. There's no interruption of His blessedness. There's not a moment where He is less happy.

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Now, that means that when we read in our Bibles that God has been angered or sorrowed or grieved, it must be that we are confronting some kind of figure of speech or what theologians say is an improper ascription to God.

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And by improper, they don't mean wrong or somehow that the Bible is saying something false. What they're saying is God, as we'll talk about this, is accommodating

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Himself to us. That we might understand His infinite acts and that we might have something of a grasp of who

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He is in His relationship to us. And we have to think carefully about what the Scripture is revealing proper to the

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God who is blessed. Now, let me ask you this. Why is it good news to know the gospel of our blessed

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God? Why is it good to know that the God who saves us to Himself in the

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Lord Jesus Christ is blessed, especially if we're not?

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Is it good news to know you were redeemed by a blessed God if you're miserable and depressed?

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I want you to think about that. You're not quite ready to answer it, but you will tomorrow.

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So, I got to get you to come back tomorrow morning. For now, the half answer

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I want to leave you with this evening is that the knee -jerk reaction of modernity is incredibly short -sighted and it's ultimately hopeless.

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So, sometimes you may hear in very philosophical terms or just in common conversation, if we're not happy, how could

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God ever be happy? I'm miserable. What good does it do for me to know that God is happy?

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But here's the truth. If God isn't happy, then no one can or ever will be happy.

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Even further, if God isn't happy, happiness doesn't exist.

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It's a delusion. It's an illusion in your mind. It's not real.

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It's not coming, and it never will. And what we have right now, that's as good as it gets, period.

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Theologian Fred Sanders said this, if God's not happy, nobody's happy. If God's not the fountain of blessedness, listen, then

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God doesn't have blessedness to give us or to bring about. That's the key.

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If the source of all good isn't blessed, then blessedness isn't real.

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And our desire for joy and blessedness and happiness is a material delusion. It's a physical phenomenon, and that is not, friends, good news.

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But God is blessed, absolutely. And his gift of joy to us in Christ to bring us to himself, it reminds us it comes from the sheer gratuity of his goodness, the fullness of life and joy in himself.

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What Owen said is the ineffable mutual in -being of the Father and the Son in their eternal love in the

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Spirit, and out of the overflow of that joy, God has moved to create and to redeem.

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I want us to end our meditation on blessedness thinking about that. I want to think about it in three ways, in creation, revelation, and redemption, and think of the significance of God's blessedness.

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Let's think first about creation. If God is blessed in himself, then what must we say, then, about the act of creation?

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It wasn't out of need. God doesn't need anyone or anything to be happy.

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That means creation is utterly gratuitous and free and ultimately mysterious.

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One writer said this, the real miracle is not that God exists but that the world does.

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God cannot but be, but that he in whom nothing is lacking should confer existence on us, that ought to stagger our minds.

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It ought to stagger our minds that the blessed God brought us into being, that we're even here, that Massachusetts and the

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United States and the world and the cosmos exist is a wonder because he needs nothing.

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God loves not out of need. Augustine said that God loves out of the abundance of his generosity, out of sheer gratuity.

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God created to spread his joy and goodness. That's what the Puritan Richard Sibbes, who was known as the sweet dropper, that's what he said.

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He said this, God's goodness is a communicative and spreading goodness.

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If God had not a communicative spreading goodness, he would never have created the world.

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The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were happy in themselves and enjoyed one another before the world was.

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God delights to communicate and spread his goodness. Why does everything exist that is not

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God? Because the Father, Son, and Spirit were happy in himself and God delighted to spread that goodness to others.

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Sheer gratuity, utter grace. And this has been the answer that Christians have given.

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William Bates, for example, said, as there was no matter that is nothing else beside God, there was no motive to induce

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God to make the world but what arose from his goodness. For he is an all -sufficient being perfectly blessed in himself.

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His majesty is not increased by the adoration of angels, nor his greatness by the obedience of nature.

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Neither was he less happy or content in that eternal duration before the existence of any creatures than he is since.

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Only free and unexcited goodness moved him to create all things that he might impart being and happiness to the creature, not enrich his own.

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God created to impart being and happiness to us.

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We are here out of the wonder of God's goodness and blessedness and joy.

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And he made us to find our joy in him. Jonathan Edwards said, there's an infinite fullness of all possible good in God.

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And he goes on to say, it seems a thing amiable and valuable in itself, that this infinite fountain of good should send forth abundant streams as there is an infinite fullness of joy and happiness.

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These should have an emanation to become a fountain flowing out in abundant streams as beams from the sun.

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Creation is the utterly gratuitous, completely free, unconstrained act of God to spread his goodness.

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That should dispel any of those blasphemous caricatures that somehow

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God is cold, inert, aloof. We exist because God has joy in himself and delighted to spread his goodness to his creatures.

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And this explains everything that's wrong with the human race in Adam. We want happiness without the

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God who made us to have happiness in him. And that dog won't hunt.

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It doesn't work. God made us for himself. That is why we delight to praise him.

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And this means something else very important for us. For us as people, what we are and who we are has intrinsic goodness.

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And that is an important message for Christians in the church today to our world that has lost sight of this fact.

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The first message of our world that rejects what is according to nature is that what is according to the creation and God's design is inherently good.

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And has inherent joy attached to it. There's a benevolence in God's design.

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There is goodness to being and what is, and it's derived from our good

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God. That means when we're talking with our friend or neighbor, whatever they feel inside, whatever dysphoria they have, whatever they think they should be or not be, we have to start with the fact that what we are is good by definition, because the

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God who created us is good. And he created all things to spread his goodness.

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So design, creation, nature, they matter. And they're attached to our happiness.

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And they come from the goodness of God. That's creation. Let's think about revelation and scripture and God's blessedness and how this helps us think about the

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Bible, perhaps from a different angle. What if the reason scripture exists is because it's an invitation for us to have joy in God?

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Do you think of the Bible that way? An invitation to joy that God has given us

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In Psalm 119, verse 9, we have a familiar text. How can a young man keep his way pure?

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By guarding it according to your word. Of course, it's absolutely true. We walk a path of purity and gratitude to God by guarding

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God's word. But too often, that principle gets abstracted from scripture and reduced to, well, if you want to be holy, you just memorize and study the

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Bible. You just pound it in. It's like a collection of moral principles that you just, you get them down. And it becomes really not much different from any other moral discipline or other philosophy.

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But the logic of that stanza in Psalm 119 comes three verses later in verse 12.

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And you know what the psalmist says in Psalm 119, verse 12? Blessed are you,

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O Lord, teach me your statutes. Why do we long to hide

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God's word in our heart? Because it comes to us from the God who is infinitely blessed in himself and we want to be happy in him.

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Lord, you are blessed. Teach me your Bible. Give me joy in you.

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I want to know you and I want to know how to be happy in you. Later in verse 68 of the same

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Psalm, Psalm 119, we see the same thing. You are good and do good. Teach me your statutes.

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I want to know goodness. I want to be close to you. I want to know what goodness means. And the more you grasp of God's greatness and goodness and his ineffable wonder, the more you treasure what a gift his word is to us.

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God spoke to us that we would have delight in him. And we should never take for granted the fact that God has revealed himself to us.

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The God who is infinite, beyond, uncontained, and boundless. It's not just a matter of course that he decided to speak to us.

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It comes too from the sheer gratuity of his goodness that God would spread that goodness and joy to us and accommodate the infinite mind of God to little creatures and speak to us in words that we would understand, that we might know something of him.

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It's a testimony of grace. Sometimes I get told that reflecting on the doctrine of God is just going to get us too far away from the

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Bible. And we shouldn't do that. It's the exact opposite. It helps us understand what the

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Bible even is. It is a remarkable gift of our only good and blessed

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God who has spoken to us that we might know him and know him, especially in his son, the word made flesh, as he comes to us from its pages.

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So reflecting on the doctrine of God shouldn't remove the Bible from you. It should return it to you in fresh and powerful ways with a renewed appreciation that we have the self -disclosure of the boundless and blessed

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God who's communicating to us. And that brings us then thirdly to think about God's blessedness related to our redemption, our redemption in Christ.

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What scripture says about us in sin in Romans 1 verse 25 is this, we exchange the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.

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We gave off eternal joy for death and destruction because the devil is a liar and murderer from the beginning.

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But God, the son, he assumed human nature and came incarnate as the

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Christ. And he was called in Mark 14, the son of the blessed.

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And he took on the finitude of human nature that the boundless blessed

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God would become a man of sorrows that we might through him be returned to the source of joy in God.

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The son who is blessed forever assumed humanity in the person of Christ and he wept.

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He lived our sorrows. He became a curse for us because cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.

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And he did so that our sorrow wouldn't be eternal, but that it would turn to joy and to rescue us in him.

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In salvation through the person and work of the Lord Jesus, God has given us the greatest joy possible himself,

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God. And by faith and union with Christ, we return to commune with the source of all true happiness,

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God. So what David says in Psalm 16, in your presence, there is fullness of joy at your right hand.

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There are pleasures forever more. Martin Luther said, when I possess Christ, I possess all for he is pure righteousness, life, and eternal blessedness.

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Christ came to bring us to eternal joy in God.

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And that the sorrow we know in this world by our sin and the due justice of the curse would not be eternal, but would be temporal.

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And that the final word on our lives and our souls would be pleasures forever more in our blessed

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God. And that's what happens now is his word comes to us by faith. And we behold the glory of the

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Lord who is joy. And we are sustained in our joys increased until one day our faith will give way to sight and we will have what is called the beatific vision, the blessed vision of the glory of God in Jesus Christ.

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And it's called beatific because it gives blessedness to all who have it eternally.

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And we will finally have the end of our existence met. We will have joy in God forever because he is joy.

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And if we're in Christ, he's brought us to himself. 300 years ago, not far from here, the man

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Jonathan Edwards was bothered by the doctrines of the sovereignty of God. He said it appeared like a horrible doctrine to him.

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But in 1721, he was reading 1 Timothy and he came across these doxologies that we just looked at.

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And he said this, as I read these words, there came into my soul a sense of the glory of the divine being, a new sense, quite different from anything

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I'd ever experienced before. I thought with myself how excellent a being that was and how happy I should be if I might enjoy that God and be wrapped up to him in heaven and be, as it were, swallowed up in him forever.

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That's what we get in the gospel. We get God, God in his glory, his incomprehensible beauty, moving in sovereign grace to bring sinners powerfully to himself and have eternal joy forever.

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And it's all revealed in the gospel of the glory of our blessed God. Amen.

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Let me pray and thank God for our time. Father, we thank you for these meditations upon your blessedness and joy.

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We pray that they would be a motivation for our communion with you in prayer and worship for our fellowship with one another, and even to share the good news of your son with others.

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That they, like us, might be beggars who seek you by grace and that we might rest in contentment upon your goodness as you have sent your son to bring us back to you.

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Help our contemplations and our meditations be upon your goodness and your glory. We pray you would sustain us as we continue to consider your ineffable perfections this weekend, that our assurance and our courage and our joy would only increase in you.