2 Attributes of God, Lesson 1, Part 2

Why Study Theology and the Attributes of God

Well, welcome back to the Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Systematic Theology. We're glad to have you with us. We are, if you were with us last week, we started looking into the attributes of God.

And we're going to spend three lessons on this, but we didn't quite finish lesson one last week. So we're going to continue with part two of lesson one. Now, if you are a student of the Striving for Eternity Academy, you'll have your syllabus with you.

If you open up your syllabus and with the syllabus, it's one of the things you get as a student of the Academy to become a student. You can go to the website that you see right about there and strivingforeternity .org and go to the Striving for Eternity Academy page and you can enroll there.

These trainings are free to all of those who have access to the internet and you can watch them and for free and get all the training, basically get a seminary or Bible college education on theology. We're going to go through a lot of stuff and you can get it for free.

However, if you want to help support the ministry, that would be a great blessing to us. One of the things you get if you are a paid student that's enrolled is the syllabus. You also get a one hour conference call after the show.

So why don't we begin? We were looking last week, we looked at the attributes of God and we were, as we went through, we said we would start with book one of systematic theology where we would go through the doctrines of God, the doctrine of Christ, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, the doctrine of angels.

Now this week we're going to be looking at the doctrine of God and specifically we'll look at the attributes related to God's deity, to God's deity. And we started last week by looking at God's incomprehensibility.

That means that God is incomprehensible. We cannot fully understand everything there is to know about God, but what has been revealed we can know with certainty. That's where we go to our Bible and a great passage to bring out is Deuteronomy 29 .29.

It's one that you're going to hear me quote regularly as we go through this because this is a passage that helps us understand something about our inability to comprehend God. It says this, the secret things belong unto the Lord, but the things that were revealed belong to us and our children forever that we may do all the words of the law.

So that which God has revealed to us we are commanded to do, but we are not going to understand everything there is to know about God. So moving on from His incomprehensibility, we looked at His immutability and if you remember that was that God cannot change.

God can't be one thing today and something else tomorrow. This tells us that His attributes, these attributes that are only for God cannot be one way today something else tomorrow. We also looked at His infinity, that He's infinite and that's where we left off and that is the idea that He has no boundaries outside of His own nature.

Now when we had looked at this we saw that His, the infiniteness, if that's a word, is that a word? Hmm, guess not. The infinite God, it can be seen He's infinite in several ways, in existence, in time, in space, in knowledge, in power, and in presence and we're going to see each one of those tonight.

God's Self-Existence and Eternality

So let's start. God is self-existent. If you have your syllabus with you, letter D, God is self-existent. That is defined as God is infinite in existence. God's existence does not depend on anything outside of His nature.

So God doesn't rely on things outside of Himself. He is self-existent. So when people try to argue, well who made God? Well no one made God. He's self-existent. Let's look at some scripture for that.

In Exodus 3 .14, Moses asked the question of God saying, who should I say when Israel asks, who should I say sent me? God said to Moses, I am who I am, or I am that I am. He said, say to the people of Israel, I am sent me to you.

Deuteronomy 32 .20 says, for I lift up my hand to heaven and swear, for I live forever. I am, that is the name of God. It means that He's self-existent. He had no beginning. He had no end. He just exists.

We can't comprehend that. Now I find it amazing when atheists, professing atheists, will argue that, you know, the universe just always kind of existed, but God can't. Come on. Well the universe had to have a beginning because it's matter.

God is not material, right? God created the time, matter, space, continuum. So I mean, you can't have that. But the idea of I am, I am is that name Yahweh or Jehovah. And what you have there is the Hebrew writing would have consonants.

They didn't have vowels in the original writing. The vowels were known by the speaking. But in Exodus 20, it says not to use the Lord's name in vain. So Jewish people, even today, will not use God's name.

I mean, they will sometimes put G-D because they don't want to use His name in vain. Forgive the cough, please. And so one of the things that happens is they would not say the name I am. When they'd read that, okay, they would replace it with the word Adonai, which is another name for God.

And so what you have is you have these consonants and we lost the vowels. And so what people have done is they've taken the consonants and they substituted the vowels for Adonai into that and we get Jehovah.

And that's one of the things that we don't really know what it originally was, what the vowels were. But if you hear people say Yahweh or Jehovah, it's the same thing. It's this name I am. It has the idea of self-existent one.

We're going to see that when we get into the lessons on the names of God. But it is the fact that God is a self-existent being. He had no beginning. He had nothing created Him for the Mormons out there.

He didn't live on a planet called Kolob. He didn't have a father and a mother. He's self-existent. This is how you know we have a totally different God. The God of Mormonism is not the God of Christianity.

They're different. Let's move on because I really want to get through this lesson today. God is eternal. I want to spend a little bit of time here. God is eternal. Defined there, if you look in your syllabus, it is defined that God is infinite in time.

He is infinite in relationship to time. He has and will continually exist endlessly. So those are your blanks there. God is infinite in relation to time and He will continue to exist endlessly. Let's look at some passages, or at least one passage, and you have more passages in your syllabus.

I encourage you to go to your syllabus and check them out and study them here so that you have these to look at the other passages. Read them within their context. If you remember what we did in the School of Biblical Harmonetics, check the context.

Read the whole chapter, maybe, so you really understand the context of it. Let's look at Revelation 1 .8. I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

So what we have here is that we see that God is an omnipotent, sorry, an eternal being. As an eternal being, He always existed. He won't ever die. He is outside of time. Time does not bind Him. He is not limited by it.

So time does not apply to God. He is not restricted by it. Time is in relation to events. However, the first event was the one that God created when God created the time, space, matter continuum. He was before that.

He was before time and space and matter. And so there was a time when there was no time. I can't comprehend that, but to God, that's the way it is. And we're going to see how this interplays with some of the other attributes in a couple of moments.

But it is due to God's eternality that Jesus Christ, who is God, can pay an eternal fine for you and I. Jesus Christ's one-time death as a man but also being as God can pay the eternal fine for eternity that you and I owe for breaking God's law.

This is what makes Jesus Christ unique. This is what makes Christianity different than every other world religion. Because what we have here is we have someone who is God that pays the eternal fine, making the payment.

There's only two sources for a payment of sin. The individual sinner pays it for all of eternity or an eternal being pays it once in time but for all of eternity. So further, since Jesus is eternal and outside of time, although his death occurred within time, he is not a being within time.

Hence, his death was to God is eternal. Thus, Jesus Christ's death on the cross is the only payment of sin that can be made other than the sinner paying for all of eternity. All right. We're going to see how this plays in a couple of minutes with one of the other attributes and answers problems that people have when they start.

I want you to see we're starting with the attributes of God and understanding of who God is. That is important. Okay. The reason that's so important is because a lot of people, you'll see it on Facebook and places, people jump in and start debating theology and they usually start with soteriology, the study of salvation.

And the reason that's such a problem and the reason you shouldn't start in the middle is because if you want to really understand these things, you first have to understand they're rooted in the nature and character of God.

And if you understand the attributes of God, you will better understand these things later. And we're going to touch on some of them tonight to answer some of the confusion. But let's look, letter F in your syllabus, and really this is a mistake I should have corrected in the syllabus because these should have been indented to, they're really sub points to his, you know, to the infiniteness of God.

God's Immensity and Omniscience

But next is his immensity. Immensity, if you look in your syllabus, is defined, God is infinite in relationship to space, in relationship to space. God is infinite in relationship to space. God is not limited to space.

Let's take a look at a, this is a rather long passage. I'll just read the beginning part. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man.

We can really stop there, and I'm going to stop there just for the sake of time. But it goes on to say, the point is that God does not live within a space of a temple. My wife was just doing her devotions out of the story with the Philistines where they get the Ark of the Covenant thinking, this is the Jewish God.

He's contained within this space. And they put the Ark of the Covenant into their temple with Dagon. Next morning, Dagon has fell over, bowing before the Ark. So, they put Dagon, they put their God back on the wall.

And next day, Dagon has fallen over, but this time his hands and his head are broken off. So, what do they do? Well, of course, the Philistines worship the true God, right? No, they don't. Because that's the problem with people.

They don't want to worship the true God. They hate God. So, what do the Philistines do? They say, let's get rid of this God of Israel. Thinking like if they just get rid of this box, the God of Israel is no longer there.

God is not bound by space, all right? Immensity proclaims that God is outside of space, okay? We're going to see how this ends up interrelating with His omnipresence in a moment. Okay, but it means that He's outside, again, of that time-space-matter continuum, all right?

Now, we want to tie the eternality, His being that He's eternal, to the next one, which is that He is omniscient. Now, look at that and you'll see, this is a compound word. Omni, meaning total or complete.

Science, meaning knowledge. All knowledge or all science. In other words, a total knowledge. God is all-knowing. We define this as that God knows all things, what we would call past, present, and future, but He also knows the real and the possible.

So, we're going to look at those things. Now, let me define that a little bit. God is outside of time and has a knowledge where He just knows everything. You and I learn through observation. How do we know gravity exists?

Because we observe it time after time. And if you're anything like me, sometimes we learn the hard way, and so we kind of learn by doing the same stupid thing over and over and over and over again, right?

But we observe things. That's how we learn. And I don't mean this in a flippant way, but God never had a bright idea in his life. He never learned anything. God just knows it. And that's the difference between God and us.

We learn through observation. God just knows. So, when people say, well, God looked down the tunnels of time to see who would be saved, and those people He saved because He saw who was going to be saved.

That puts God inside of time, and He would have to have learned something. That can't be because God's outside of time, and He knows everything. Some will say, well, God elected before the foundation of time.

So, before God created the universe, He already chose who He was going to save in eternity past. And the problem is there is no eternity past to God. You see, that's a problem. That's language used because God is speaking baby talk to us.

You know, we have little kids. We speak to them as children. You know, don't touch that. No, later they get older, we say, that's a plug. It causes danger. When they get even older, we say, it has currency of electricity.

It'll electrify you, and it'll be an electrifying experience. Very shocking, and you'll be dead, right? As they get older, we can explain more. Well, the difference between us and God is so vast that He still has to speak baby talk to us.

Some of our pride, we can't handle that. We think we know everything. We don't know everything. We know what God reveals to us to know. All right, let's look at some scripture with that though, all right?

First, when you have someone who they've sinned and their heart is condemning them. So what does 1 John say? For whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and He knows everything.

Boy, isn't that reassuring? Isn't it assuring to know that God knows everything so that when we have sinned and we feel beat up about it, God knows. God's forgiven us. He understands. But you know what?

There's sometimes where we try to sin, we try to hide it from God. Well, take a look at what it says here. There's Hebrews 4, verse 13. No creature is hidden from His sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of Him whom we must give an account.

So you see in that passage, we can't hide from God. But now look at this next one. Woe to you, Corzine, and woe to you, Bethsaida, for if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.

You see, God knows that had He done the miracles in Tyre and Sidon that were done in these two towns, Tyre and Sidon would have repented. He knows with absolute certainty the decisions of what could have happened.

All right, now this can hurt our brains. This is where Deuteronomy 29, 29 comes in. We try to understand this. But God is omniscient and in that He doesn't learn things. He just knows them. He's outside of time.

Everything's the same eternal second to God. Okay, so you want to get into Calvin's Mormonism? Here's the resolution of it. Okay, God is outside of time. He did not need to observe our decisions to make His decisions.

And His decisions weren't based on what we did and we didn't do things based on it. It's just He knows it. He just knows it. And it's not that it happened in eternity past because there was no eternity past to God.

That's a way of saying before there was time. Because there was a time when there was God before there was time. Bring your rack of your head with this. But think about this. Six billion people in the world and God knows if you go down the road and you make a right turn instead of a left turn, God knows with absolute certainty exactly what would have happened had you made the left turn.

But He knows you wouldn't have made the left turn. So you made the right turn. And in a sense that's the only turn you could have made because God knew that that was the one you were going to make but you made it of your own will.

So did God force that? No, He didn't force that. You made that. God knew you would make that because He has complete knowledge. It's not a knowledge based on observation. He didn't have to see us make the right turn to know we'd make the right turn.

And He didn't force us to make the right turn because He knew that. And they just are. And so God knows what would have happened for all six billion people in the world. He knows all of the choices that they could have made with the tens of thousands of decisions that we all make every day.

He knows the outcomes of all of them for every single human being. And He knows the best plan. Right? So God's intelligence is beyond our human comprehension. That gets back to that first attribute we looked at, incomprehensibility.

God never learned anything. His is a total and complete knowledge eternally. God knows all things. And we have to remember that He knows everything. And it's because of this that when He says something prophetically, it is with certainty because He already knows it.

That is why He is the only source of information that is 100 accurate and 100 correct. It's the only source that's true. So when people say, toss your Bible out and then let's start talking about things, well now we're talking error because you can't have the truth when you're rejecting the one thing that is the source of truth.

We make mistakes. I know you don't. It's just me. I understand. But we have to understand that when the Scriptures speak of someone being saved prior to the creation of the world, Ephesians 1 .4, it is in a sense to explain to finite creatures the infinite and what can't be understood and comprehended by finite beings.

So God chose individuals whom He'd be saved, hence in time God chose us before we are born kind of outside of time because His knowledge is outside of time. So you see, when people jump in the center of the debate by starting with soteriology, they start with a problem because all of a sudden they're starting with the middle and they're trying to explain something as if God is outside of time or had to learn something.

God didn't have to learn anything. He's outside of time. So let's move on to the next one and we're going to see how these interrelate now. Omnipotence. God is omnipotent. Omni, again, meaning all or total.

Potence, meaning power, means God is all powerful. He can do anything that is consistent with His nature. That's your blank there. God can do anything that is consistent with His nature. He does all that He wills to do but He does not do all that He is capable of doing.

Let's look at some passage scriptures before we get into this. Mark 14, and He said, Abba Father, all things are possible for You. Remove this cup from Me, yet not what I will but what You will. Jesus is recognizing that God the Father is capable of doing anything inside of His nature.

Is it possible for God to lie? No. God cannot lie, Titus 1 -2, because it's outside of His nature, His ability. He does not have an ability to lie. Okay, so when you get these people that ask these silly arguments, Can God make a rock so big that He can't lift it?

No, because that's outside of His nature. You know, my friend Greg Koukl just did a great video on this on his, on his, on the Strand to Reason YouTube channel, one of his podcasts. And he also does a thing when he's in groups, he takes a paperclip and he gets some big guy, Can you, can you bend this into a square?

The guy works at it, bends it into a square. He goes, Can you bend it into a circle? The guy bends it, you know, into a circle. He goes, Can you bend it now into a square circle? No, because the definition of squareness and the definition of circleness are different.

And so, they're two differences. They have a different nature. God's nature is such that He is good and He can't, and He's all-powerful, but He can't do anything outside of His nature. Now, saying that, I have to deal with the one issue that comes up a lot, okay?

People often bring this up, is if God, atheists, professing, professing atheists bring this up. If God is all-good and He's all-powerful, how could there be evil in the world? Okay, start with the fact that you can't have evil without God, okay?

Evil's the absence of good. Good is defined by God. You can't have evil without God. So, the fact that you say there is evil in the world, you first must have God. But, that aside, who says that if God is good and all-powerful, there can't be evil?

See, the professing atheists would then just argue if God didn't allow evil, they'd cry, God's not fair. He's making me a puppet. I have no choice. I have no will because God is forcing everything. The reality, you're just never going to please them, all right?

And, that's just a simple reality. They're talking about two different aspects of nature. They're opposite. It's like a square circle-ness. You can't have that, okay? God's nature is such that He's all-good.

We're going to see that in a later lesson. But, it's also that He's all-powerful. But, He'll do everything that's consistent with His nature. And, part of His nature is that He allows evil. He doesn't cause it.

He doesn't force it. But, He does allow it, all right? And so, we have to remember that God is all-powerful and can do anything within that is consistent with His nature, okay? And so, people sit there and they get into these debates.

And, their terminology is not right, all right? God is all-powerful, yes. But, it doesn't mean that because you think goodness means you can't accept evil in the world that God had to put a stop to it.

That's your definition. But, who says you get to define that, okay? That's the problem. They want to be God and they're not, okay? So, God is not, He uses agents though in the world to carry out some of His dealings.

But, He's not forced to, all right? Let's look at one more. Omni, presence. Omni being all or total again. And, this is now presence meaning location. This is dealing with the fact that God in His totality is in all places at all times.

So, your blank there in your syllabus is that God in His totality is in all places at all times. Let's look at a passage of scripture. The eyes of the Lord are in every place keeping a watch on the evil and the good, Proverbs 15, 3.

What we have here is that omnipresence means that God is everywhere presence. Now, I'm going to ruin something for some of you. Some of you, well, when you share the gospel, you talk to a lost person, you share the gospel incorrectly.

You define hell incorrectly. I know, I did it myself for years. And, we mean well, but let's think about it. If God is omnipresent and we define hell as a place where God is not, God is absent. Is that true?

Not if He's omnipresent. If He has an omniscience, so He's everywhere in His totality, then God is present in hell. It just means that He's not present in a way where He's in a relational way to those people suffering in hell.

He is in hell, but the presence is not a relational one. But, He is there because He created it and He's everywhere. Alright, so these are the six areas that we see that God is infinite. He is infinite in His existence.

He's self-existent. He's infinite in relation to time. He's eternal. He's infinite in relation to space, that He's immense. He's infinite in His knowledge, omniscience. He's infinite in His power, omnipotence.

He's infinite in presence, omnipresence. So, we see that those are six ways that God is infinite. Now, there's one more attribute of God that we want to deal with that is related specifically to His deity, and that is His sovereignty.

God's Sovereignty and Human Responsibility

His sovereignty, let's look at this. It is defined in your syllabus there, letter J, definition there, in reference to His supreme power and His position as the chief being of the universe. So, this is in reference to His supreme power and His position as the chief being in the universe.

Alright, let's look at a passage of scripture for that. Actually, we'll look at a couple. Ephesians 2 .10, for we are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should do them.

So, God prepared the works. We are His workmanship. We're His tool that He uses. Psalm 15 .3, our God is in the heavens. He does all that He pleases. He can do whatever He wants because He's sovereign.

Whatever the Lord pleases, He does in heaven and on earth, in the seas and in all the deep. Psalm 135, verse 6. God is sovereign. God does whatever He desires to do. And what we see here is that God is in control of everything.

It doesn't mean He causes everything, but He's in control of everything. There is not a single atom of the universe that is outside of God's control, alright? And so, this is where we sometimes have a problem.

You know, last night I was on Facebook with an individual who is not a believer in Christ. He used to say he was an atheist and he said atheist in quotes until he got into debating. He loved to debate and he debated with a friend of mine, Sai, who basically convinced him that he knows God exists.

And trying to argue that God does not exist is like trying to argue that words don't exist. You rely on words to argue that words don't exist. You rely on reasoning to reason God does not exist. But I asked him, he said he's still, he's not a believer in Christ.

He just, he can't accept that. He can't because he doesn't believe in hell. And we reasoned through that and I said, what does it matter? Does your belief in hell or my belief in hell make it reality?

No, it matters what's real. And we worked through these things. But eventually I asked him, I said, is the issue that there's some sin that you love so much that you don't want to give up? Or is it that you are so prideful you don't want anyone telling you you're wrong?

Or is it that you're so prideful that you want to be in control of your own life? You don't even want the God of the universe, the God that gave you life and created you to tell you what to do. And he was like, yeah, it's kind of that.

And that's our problem. We want to be the sovereign. We want to think we're in complete control of our life. And we're not. God is the one in control. No, that doesn't mean as one person who I had, I asked him, he believed in a determinism that God forces everything.

And I said, if I just, I reach back and cold cock you, I punch you. Did I do that or did God do that? He said, God made you do that. God would make you do that. I said, that removes all responsibility.

That's not what the Bible teaches. We have a responsibility. Okay, that's something we see in the scriptures. So God's case is that he is the absolute authority. He doesn't answer to anyone. There's no one God needs to answer to.

He is the final authority. So we can't sit there and appeal to some higher court of appeals than God. God is the highest court. He is the highest judge. There is no one we can appeal to higher than God.

And this is why his plan, when we look at these attributes of God now, we see that his plan is the best plan. Because he being outside of time, he can see everything. He's absolutely certain of everything that will happen within time.

Because he's omniscient, he knows everything. He didn't have to observe it. He knows it with absolute certainty. Because he's all powerful, he can bring about the plan that he institutes. Because he's sovereign, he's in control of bringing it about.

And he's everywhere. We can't hide from him. We can't fool him. He sees it all. This is how we know that the plan God has is always going to be the best plan that there is. Though we may not understand it.

We may not see all the benefits of it. We may not see how it's good. God does. And that is why we can trust that his plan, his sovereign plan, is better than anything we would come up with. And when we question God, we're being foolish.

Because we are finite beings who do not even begin to understand the infinite nature of God. Now, I will warn you, there may be times, this is school, so you will have pop quizzes throughout. You will maybe have some quizzes.

But if you are a student of the academy, then turn your page to the last page of this lesson. And you will see there are some thought questions for you. This is your homework assignment. Your homework assignment is to go through these questions.

And we will look at some of these questions next week. But these are where you start to apply the lessons, apply the things we learn, and start applying them to real world scenarios. So if you don't have a syllabus, well, I would encourage you to go to the website Striving for Eternity and look at the Striving for Eternity Academy and enroll as a student so you can help support this ministry to do these lessons for free online so they go around the world.

We do have some new students that we're welcoming. We have our first student from London, UK. So we welcome you, a new student this week. We have another student seeking, waiting for a check to be cleared from Lima, Peru.

So we welcome some of those students among some others that have signed on. And so the number of enrolled students continues to grow. We do this academy free online for you to get the training. But it does cost us quite a bit of money to do.

And so for those students who are paid students, you get a syllabus. And about at the top of the hour after the live show, you get a free question and answer where you get to talk to the instructor and be able to ask any questions from the lessons.

And so I want you to do your homework for next week. And next week, we're going to look into again to the attributes of God, specifically those attributes related to his personality. OK, so that's what we're going to look at next week.

Now, I want to let you know, if you have any questions, we will seek to answer all questions. We try to answer them if they come on in the show, during the show that come up in the chat room. But if you have a question, you can email us at academy at striving for eternity dot org academy at striving for eternity dot org.

And we will get you answers just to let you know some news and events. I know a lot's going on in October, but if you can make it out October 12th to the 14th, I'm sure this is posted now on the in the chat room and also on the striving for eternity group on Facebook.

If you go there, you get a lot of the news, what's going on with the ministry. But there is a link right now to the fall for Greenville evangelism outreach. Now, I know some of you know about this other conference going on.

There's you know, but you know what? That's just a conference with a bunch of talking heads. Go get the DVD, order the DVD and come to this outreach, because not only do you get the teaching that won't be put on DVD, so you have to be there to get the training.

I know I'm one of the keynotes, I am the keynote speaker, but there's a lot of other far better speakers probably to come and listen to. But then we go out on the streets and we're going to actually evangelize.

We're going to have some experienced people. If you've never done evangelism, sign up. There's going to be a lot of opportunities to get trained up. Now, as we do every week, we really want to encourage you to encourage others.

It's one of the things we do every week. We want to give you a person to encourage. And we do that because of the fact that, you know, most people say encouraging things about people after they pass away.

We have someone we want to ask you to encourage because someone close to her passed away. So our sister of encouragement this week is Jacqueline Debris. If you go to the Striving for Eternity Facebook group page, you'll see that she's tagged right now as the CIS, the Striving for Eternity Academy Sister of the Week.

She lost her husband, Paul, who was a truck driver and got in an accident. I did not have the opportunity to get to meet them. Well, I met them, but didn't get the opportunity to really get to know them when I was at the Deeper Conference.

I didn't really get to know Paul, but friends of mine have. They spoke very highly of him. A very sweet brother. He's home with the Lord now. But Jacqueline is going through a difficult time without, as she had put on Facebook, without her teacher.

He would teach her so much of the scriptures. And it is with that that we want to encourage you to go out and encourage her this week. I do know that there are some people trying to raise money for a college fund for her young children.