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Cory talked about this book last week. He went to the introduction. He really talked about the three men who heavily influenced a lot of Barrett's writing.
Again, these men, Roman Catholics, they're certainly not perfect. No man is, myself included.
But he really started to explain this book in this ontological look at the attributes of God, this kind of top down look at the attributes of God.
And you may remember the Glenn Beck reference, right, with duct tape wrapped around your head so your head doesn't explode.
All I'm going to say is I thought about starting this week with a glossary, so I opted not to do that. But it's actually one of the reasons that inspired putting the worksheets together so we can write down some terms that hopefully will be helpful.
All right, hopefully this will help us open our minds and considerations of who
God is, how completely different he is from us, and consequently how incomprehensible he is.
So for those of you who've read, you know this. For those of you who haven't, you can catch up.
Barrett opens this chapter talking about Moses. We know the story.
It's Exodus 32, Exodus 33. Moses is desperately asking
God to see his glory. Show me your glory, right? But there's this kind of,
I think, tendency, at least for me when I read especially Old Testament narratives, they feel kind of dry sometimes.
I mean, when you think about what is happening at this moment, Moses is hidden in the cleft of the rock by God.
God in his presence is passing by. And we just kind of read it and we're like, wow, that's kind of cool.
But there's no narrative that's really provoking emotion unless you are already really well educated in what's going on.
And so when Barrett paints this scene, there's more copy of the book. If you need a copy of the book, raise your hand.
When Barrett paints this scene, it's so much more vivid, at least to me, because it describes
Moses, who is terrified, who is shaking, whose palms are sweating.
He is nervous. This is something he has asked for because he is so desperate to see God. But he is terrified.
This is the response that we see when people are faced with the reality of the character of God.
When Jesus in the New Testament performs miracles, what's the response of the people? What happens?
This is not a rhetorical question. They're afraid. Yeah. Mark four, right?
They're in the boat. Now, this is Jesus with his disciples. You would think that Jesus knows these people, right? 437.
And a great windstorm arose and the waves were breaking into the boat. So the boat was already filling. But he,
Jesus, was in the stern, asleep on the cushion. And they woke him and said to him, Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?
And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased and there was a great calm.
He said to them, Why are you so afraid? And this afraid is talking about the fear of the wind, right?
The fear of sinking and maybe dying. Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith? And they, the disciples, these people who presumably know
Jesus pretty well, know who he is, were filled with great fear. And then they talk amongst themselves, who is this man that even the winds and the seas obey him?
They knew Christ. They followed Christ. They knew or thought they knew who he was. And yet when faced with his character, when faced with his power, their response, much like Moses, was terror, was fear, right?
And that's what we see with what Barrett is painting for us at the beginning of this book. Moses had a special relationship with God, right?
I think we kind of know that. I hope we know that, right? He is functioning as Israel's intercessor, right?
He was the representative for God's chosen people. When you think about what Moses did, what
Moses asked for, the audacity of Moses to request that he could see the glory of God, right?
You would almost think that God should just strike him down for even asking for that thing. But he doesn't.
He relents, right? And then we see in the following chapters, in chapter 34, that just like the moon glows, and it's a pale reminder of the sun and the light that we have every day,
Moses goes down the mountain after communing with God face to face, it says. And Moses' face shines so much with the glory of God that the people of Israel are afraid of Moses.
And he actually has to cover his own face because otherwise he wouldn't be able to interact and serve the
Israelites. God gives Moses the faintest hint of who he is.
He covers Moses, he's walking away, and Moses is able to peek out after the fact and see the back of God.
And so even within the context of chapters 33 and 34, which is this whole part that we're talking about, we see something over and over again.
And I want you to remember this. This is for your worksheet if you have one. If you don't, there's worksheets up there. Keep this in the back of your mind because we're going to revisit this.
God is only revealed to us through the lens or method that he provides.
He also is the one doing the revealing, but I couldn't figure out how to make that sound clever. So this is what I came up with.
Again, we will come back to this. This is something that we're going to talk about a lot. There's two pillars that we're really going to use as the foundation for this week's study.
This is the first one. So Exodus 33, Moses pleads with God.
His unique position and his intimacy with God are the only reasons that God, that Yahweh, even entertains his request.
But he also knows, God does, that Moses cannot see his glory.
He cannot take in his glory, right? So this is the plainest example of this.
When we think about our pillar, God has only revealed to us through the lens or through the method that he provides. This is literally that same thing.
This is not quite as lighthearted as walking up behind someone and putting your hands over their eyes and saying, oh, you can't see.
Or only letting those people see what they want to see or whatever it is. But the idea is not too dissimilar from that.
God is literally covering Moses with his hand. You can't see me, you can't perceive me, except in the way that I let you.
If God had, figuratively speaking, turned the corner and been gone before he removed his hand,
Moses wouldn't have seen him at all, right? This is only through what God has allowed Moses to see.
In Moses' humanity, even as the closest human being to God on the planet, God's glory was completely incomprehensible.
Moses knew it and God knew it. Exodus 33, 20. But, he said, God said, you cannot see my face for man shall not see me and live.
And the Lord said, behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock and while my glory passes by,
I will put you in the cleft of the rock and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then, here's that permission, here's that filter, here's that method,
I will take away my hand and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen. Okay, this perception is only through what
God has allowed. And we see the same kind of idea in, for example,
Isaiah 6, right? The seraphim are serving God and these aren't even, you know, sinful people, these are the seraphim, the angels, but what are they doing?
They're covering their faces, right? Why? Because finite beings cannot take in the full sight of the glory of God, right?
They're also, you know, flying and covering their feet because feet are ritually unclean and all these other things, but here, they're covering their face, even as sinless angels, because finite beings cannot take in the full sight of the glory of God.
God's essence is completely incomprehensible in its glory, in its perfection, and in its brilliance.
So, one more time, God has only revealed to us through the lens or through the method that he provides.
So, question, a little bit of a turn here. Why is it so hard for us to get our arms around this idea at all?
What makes it so difficult for us to wrestle with the otherness of God?
Anybody have any thoughts? Why is this like, why is it so hard, right? That's perfect.
We try to fit him into our perceptions, right? The only way that we can relate to God is through understanding his attributes and describing him in ways that, although we acknowledge at the time that they are insufficient, they're the kinds of things we use to describe ourselves or others.
And this isn't in my notes, so I'll probably say something dumb, but when I look at the
Greek myths and the Roman myths and all this stuff, you look at those gods and they are the paragons of human virtue and also human vice, right?
They are the extremes of humanity in both the positive and the negative, and that's because these are gods fashioned out of their own image.
These are gods that men have created to worship and to praise and to glory and to honor and all these things.
And when we think about our God, our God is fashioned, he's not fashioned, right?
Our God is external. His truth is external to us.
And so one commentator says this, he says, most philosophers and theologians agree that all formulated knowledge about God is analogical.
That is, declarative statements about God, such as thou hatest all evildoers or the
Lord is compassionate and merciful, are understandable only because people know something about hate and mercy in their own experience.
When we speak of these qualities, even in another human being, we are to some degree automatically projecting into that person what we know to be hate and mercy in ourselves.
In other words, all knowledge of other persons is analogical, analogous to something we have experienced, because there is no possibility of direct sensation of personality in others.
To hear someone laugh gives us no direct sensation of that person's joy, but knowing how we feel when we want to laugh joyfully, we assume analogically that the same sort of feeling produces the other's laughter.
That make sense? Yeah. Okay. And this is exactly the reason why it is so hard for us to comprehend
God, because we don't really have this truly accurate analogical ability to kind of assess who
God is and what God is doing, right? But when we see some anthropomorphic explanations in scripture, and we'll dive into this in a minute, it helps us understand what's happening in context.
However, there is a negative side effect to this. And that is that when we do this, when we look at this anthropomorphism, we have a tendency to unconsciously relate ourselves to God more closely.
When we need finite terms to understand an infinite God, our minds, our lazy minds, starts to shrink the gap between the two.
Because we have this analogical perspective. This is how we think as human beings. And so, as we start to filter
God's attributes through these classical assessments, we start to think, oh, well,
I understand love. So God's love, okay,
I get that. So God's kind of like me, wrong, right? And so we start to start to bring those two things too closely together, ourselves and God, right?
And so we remember our first pillar, God is only revealed to us through the lens or the method that he provides.
Of course, the primary method by which God reveals his truth is what? Scripture, right?
I mean, pretty much everything comes off of that. Preaching, God reveals his truth through preaching. Preaching should be focused, you know, on the word of God.
We could talk forever about how God reveals truth, his truth in general, but I do want to stay focused because I only have 30 minutes.
So, all right. Who would like to read some scripture, by the way? Here we go.
Volunteers? Becky, can you get to Genesis 2 -7? Ben, 1
Chronicles 21, 14, and 15. I need one more person. Gary, will you please read Genesis 6, 7, and 8 when
I call on you? Okay. Anthropomorphism.
Who would like to define anthropomorphism for us? I think we know what this word means.
It's a big word, but it's a word we've heard enough. Cindy? Attributing man -like qualities to God.
Using language that would be fit of a person to describe something that is not a person, right?
I mean, Raya and the Last Dragon had an anthropomorphic dragon because the dragon could talk to you and disappear and do all this other stuff.
That part's not anthropomorphic, but it's the last Disney movie I watched, so I figured I'd bring it in. It was okay.
Baker's Encyclopedia says that in the broadest sense, all affirmations about God are anthropomorphic.
All of them. Every single one, in the broadest sense. Then, it goes on to describe anthropomorphism in scripture as having three different types.
So, there's subtypes underneath anthropomorphism. You probably knew this was coming if you have your worksheet because it says
God's anthropomorphism can be described in three ways. Here we go. The first one is called anthropoesis.
Anthropoesis comes from the Greek combining human, anthro, and poesis, making or doing.
So, this describes the actions of God in a way that he is doing things or would do things.
Genesis 2 .7. Becky, was that you? Okay. So, God has formed man up from the dust of the ground.
Number one. We have other images, and we'll talk about this later, of God being the potter and us being the clay.
When we think about this, when we kind of imagine what this, who knows what this actually would look like, we kind of almost have the spectral hands come down, and they model it, and they're going to poke the nostrils and do all this stuff.
And that's how God forms man, right? But it says here that he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.
Well, we talked about this kind of metaphysical differentiation between us and God. If God is spirit, if he's not physical, he's not physically like, he's not physically breathing into the nostrils of man.
So, what is he doing here? Well, this is anthropoesis. This is a way to ascribe a man -like quality, an idea that we can understand, that we can hang our hooks of reality on to kind of get what's going on.
Another one here. Genesis 1 .3. Did God physically say the words, let there be light?
In every way that we could understand that God made some kind of utterance, sure.
But first of all, none of scripture is actually in English, so he definitely didn't say let there be light, right?
But he's not physical. He doesn't have vocal cords, so he's not speaking.
But for us and our understanding, this helps us get an idea of what scripture is talking about, right?
And there's many examples of this in scripture. I'm only using one for each of these. But this is what anthropoesis is.
For spelling, it is A -N -T -H -R -O -P -O -I -E -S -I -S.
Anthropoesis. Anthropopathy. This one, maybe a little bit more familiar? Maybe?
Anybody know what anthropopathy means? He can do everything, ladies and gentlemen. Exactly.
So the root word here, pathy, might sound like pathetic, for example.
It really specifically talks about the idea of suffering. But Charlie's right.
Anthropopathy describes emotion. Anytime we see God in an anthropomorphic context that deals with emotion, that's this.
Anthropopathy. This one is actually pretty phonetic. P -O -P -A -T -H -Y. First Chronicles 21, then.
And this is obviously something where there are many, many examples in scripture of God exhibiting emotion.
And this is, I don't want to say it causes a problem for believers, but frequently the challenges that get thrown up are like, oh, well, if God is perfect and God never changes, then how can he relent?
Or how can he be sad? Or all of these things. Well, because this is an anthropomorphic image of a thrice holy
God. That's the answer to the question. Or one might say an anthropopathic image of a thrice holy
God. But one commentator said something that I thought was interesting. I don't know if I agree with it, but I understand the idea that he's going for.
He said, God has emotion, but he doesn't have passion. That's an interesting statement, but the idea there is
God is not pulled to and fro by the winds of his emotion.
He doesn't change his mind because he just gets so mad. Or God loved the world so much.
These kinds of ideas. That's not what God's love is. That's not what God's wrath is.
God's wrath and his love and all of his other emotions are deliberate and planned and executed according to his plan.
That pop filter sounds great. All right. So we have anthropoesis.
We have anthropopathy. And then finally, we have what we kind of classically think of when we think of anthropomorphism.
I mentioned this with the hands, with forming Adam out of dust. Who is
Genesis 6? Gary? Genesis 6, verses 7 and 8. Okay. So I picked this one because we have some anthropopathy here, right?
God is sorry that he made them. But also, Noah found favor in what? In the eyes of the
Lord. Once again, he's still a spiritual being. Still doesn't have eyes, right?
But we understand this idea, right? When we look back at Exodus 33, we talked about that when we opened.
It talks about how Moses spoke to God, how? Face to face. God doesn't have a face.
Sorry. I mean, these are kind of weird thoughts that we have when we kind of think about them in the abstract, but we know instinctually that they're true, right?
And so this is anthropomorphism. And there's so many examples of this throughout scripture.
I just kind of picked one. So despite that warning
I had before, there is nothing wrong with anthropomorphism. In fact, most books about the attributes of God make heavy use of anthropomorphism because we're trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, right?
And even though we see these images in scripture, helping us to understand, helping us to see
God through this filter. Remember, God has only revealed to us through the lens or method he provides. As we understand these things, because the writers of scripture have written them, we still see
Isaiah 46, which says, to whom will you liken me and make me equal and compare me that we may be alike?
Well, you said hands and eyes and face. What? Right.
And this is why this is such a hard topic. This is what we talked about before, because our minds are bent on understanding things analogically, right?
In comparison with our own experience. But where God is concerned, despite the anthropomorphism we see in scripture, he is completely different.
And this is another reminder. So God is revealed to us only through the lens or method he provides. And now we come to our second pillar, number three on your worksheet.
God's incomprehensibility comes in two ways. Two. In essence and in magnitude.
In essence and in magnitude. I'm going to talk about essence first. Magnitude, I think we kind of get, we'll get there.
But this essence thing, this is wild. Okay. In 2010, and I was a little,
I had this idea, this kind of germ, I wanted to do some research on this. And then I looked it up and found out it was 11 years ago, and I felt old.
It's how the world works, right? In 2010, NASA, or a scientist that was funded by NASA technically, made what was at the time considered to be a staggering discovery.
Headlines across the world confirmed the existence of life unlike any we had ever seen it before. It was very exciting.
Scientists were exhilarated and stunned to announce that they had found life whose
DNA was not based on phosphorus, like everything else in the world, but based on arsenic instead.
I'm not going to get into it. They don't really think it was quite as dramatic as they felt like it was. But, you know, quote, according to lead scientist
Felisa Wolf Simon, they knew that some microbes can breathe arsenic, which is also weird. But what we found is a microbe doing something new, building parts of itself out of arsenic.
The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding organisms in other planets that don't have to be like planet
Earth. That's why everybody thought it was a big deal, by the way. Like NASA's Ed Weiler says, the definition of life has just expanded.
NASA geobiologist Pamela Conrad thinks that this discovery is a huge and phenomenal one, comparing it to the
Star Trek episode in which Enterprise crew finds Horta, a silicon -based alien life form that can't be detected with tricorders because it wasn't carbon -based.
Who remembers this episode? I love that hands just went up. It's like saying that we may be looking for new life in the wrong places with the wrong methods.
Indeed, NASA tweeted that this discovery will change how we search for life elsewhere in the universe. Why am
I talking about this? I promise it wasn't to make a Star Trek reference, but obviously some of us appreciated that.
This discovery led to a complete change in the understandings of the foundation of life.
Before this, scientists had not seriously entertained there could even be living beings that were so fundamentally different at the core building block level.
It was just assumed that everything was this way, like carbon -based life forms. Everybody knows, oh, carbon -based life forms.
That's the thing we hear in every sci -fi show. We as people have a tendency to make a lot of assumptions about the way things are.
This is that analogical thing, right? Oh, it's like me. I mean, I'm just going to assume that this other thing that's like me is probably like me.
But this contributes to why God is so incomprehensible to us. Remember, his incomprehensibility comes in essence and in magnitude.
God's essence, the foundation of what makes him who he is, is fundamentally different from our own.
Barrett describes this as saying that God is different in kind. That's the word that he uses. God is different in kind.
He's a different type of being altogether. He calls this the creator -creature distinction. That's how he describes this thing.
We see this idea, I mentioned this before, in scripture, Isaiah 64, Jeremiah 18, he is the potter, we are the clay.
This is an image that we get, creator -creature distinction. Mike talks about the whole army men idea, right?
Where we're just basically like the army men in the sandbox, and God is controlling them, and of course
Mike's the hero of every story. We are fundamentally different from God.
Aquinas helps us with a quote that I pulled off, page 23, where he says, the infinite cannot be contained in the finite.
God exists infinitely, and nothing finite can grasp him infinitely. Makes sense, that tracks.
It is impossible for a created mind to understand God infinitely. It is impossible, therefore, to comprehend him.
Now, we're using the words finite and infinite here, so it kind of sounds like we're talking about magnitude, but we're not. Aquinas is really talking about this fundamental essence of who
God is. God's essence is no limit. God's essence is infinite.
His unlimitedness is part of who he is, and so any understanding, any attempt that we make to understand him with our finite minds leads us to anthropomorphism, because that's the only way that we can understand him, right?
Our understanding is analogical. So last week,
Corey mentioned the ontological argument made by Anselm. Who remembers what ontological means?
I know. Well, that's why I put it on a sheet. Okay, well, that is the argument, but that's not what ontological itself means.
It's good, though. It's better than God, right? It's good. It's okay. It's all right. Ontological, specifically dealing with the essence or the nature of being, okay?
And here's the quote. I was going to kind of rewrite this, but then I gave up, and I'm literally quoting Corey's notes. Anselm reasoned that, quote, if such a being, a being of which none greater can be conceived, fails to exist, then a greater being, namely a being than which no greater can be conceived and which exists, can be conceived.
But this would be absurd. Nothing can be greater than a being than which no greater can be conceived.
I guess that makes sense. So a being which no greater can be conceived must exist.
You can see me after. And then we get into this other thing, which might be my favorite word in this entire chapter.
Barrett dives into the essence of God by writing about his quiddity. I love this word.
It's a great word. It doesn't deal with Hogwarts. No brooms. But quiddity. I thought it was a hand.
Sorry. In the past, Barrett writes, God's essence has been referred to as his quiddity.
Quiddity constitutes the essential nature of something. God's quiddity is unlike our quiddity.
Infinite as he is, his quiddity is ineffable. Another good word. Ineffable means something is incapable of being expressed in words.
I like that. To say that God's quiddity is ineffable is to say that God's essence is indescribable.
Checkmate. It is so infinite, so supreme, so glorious that its majesty, its beauty, and its perfection transcend our feeble human words.
Got it. I'm on board with that. That makes sense to me. A little bit more sense than Anselm. Sorry. This is heavy stuff.
This is mind bending stuff, right? Everything that we understand, we understand in an analogical context. I'm repeating myself a lot because I think it's really important, and we got to hold on to terra firma when we look at this stuff, right?
That's why that arsenic -based organism thing blew scientists' minds, because it was completely different from what they expected.
They found it in California. That probably explains it. But here, it's a fundamental part of why we simply cannot understand
God. Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. This kind of thing, but way more extreme than that.
That's dealing with this idea that men and women are really different. Well, guess what? Men and God, even more different.
So, God is completely different from us. Thank you. But, thought experiment time, because we haven't gotten there yet.
Even if God were somehow like us, even if we sort of put this essence thing, this difference of essence, put that aside for a second,
God would still be incomprehensible in magnitude. We kind of saw this in the
Anselm quote when he talks about finite and infinite, but I want to look at it a little bit closer.
Before we dive into this, are there any questions so far? I want to make sure that I answer questions while I can still remember what
I'm talking about. Yes? That's a good question.
So, Jesus obviously was a human. He was incarnate. So, where did that image come from?
If Jesus existed before the foundation of the world, then Jesus' image, this is almost like a chicken and egg thing, right?
If Jesus existed before the foundation of the world, it's not like God said, well, I guess this is what people look like. Sorry, man, but you're going to have to look like that.
Right? So, there had to be some, I don't know that I have the perfect answer for you, but there had to be some concept, some idea of what humanity would look like when
God fashioned us in his image. I would make the argument probably that this is probably more spiritual, right?
Especially when talking about the difference between God creating animals and God creating human beings who have souls, who have spirit, who have the ability to worship even, right?
And, oh, Steve is saving me. Mr. Cooley, please, Pastor Steve. It kind of makes me wonder if Jesus, I mean, obviously
Jesus is fully God, and so he had perfect patience, infinite patience even, but as he looked down, again, anthropomorphism, right?
And saw us just descending further and further. He's like, all right, can we get this over with?
Can I go down there, please? Because they're getting real bad. You know, I don't know. I mean, that's, that is obviously a biblical.
That's not, please don't quote me. And then I scrolled because I was being punished. So now I got to figure out where I was.
Okay. All right. Thank you, Pastor Steve. So here's our thought experiment.
Let's set aside our difference in essence. Let's look at our difference in magnitude. We look at something that we've kind of touched on before, something that is more comfortable to us.
Prior to this study, this is likely the, I'm going to say only, maybe primary way in which we would characterize our understanding of the incomprehensibility of God, right?
I think this is kind of the default that we go to. In fact, I'm used on this.
What's this book called? None greater, right? Isn't that a description of magnitude?
Isn't it? There is none greater than, when
I read that, my mind says there's none greater than God. He's the most holy. He's the most loving. He's the most gracious.
He's the most patient. He's the most merciful and on and on and on. And I'm back into my anthropomorphic cycle of describing
God through finite terms, right? But he's the most of those things. He's like the bestest, right?
And it's all true. When we look at the magnitude of God, this is absolutely true. But hopefully, as we kind of look through this today, we've seen that the magnitude of God's fulfilling of his attributes, which he's not really fulfilling his attributes.
It's simply who he is. And we're using the attributes to describe him, but that's a whole different conversation. As we would know them analogically is just one aspect of God's transcendency.
One might say that this is ineffable, right? In our analysis of God, I'm making the case that our first thoughts would and probably should be drawn to God's holiness.
It's perhaps through God's holiness that our insufficiency is most on full display.
Because if there is anything that God is that we're not, it's holy. God's holiness is revealed to us throughout scripture.
It's the only attribute of God that is referred to in triplicate. Holy, holy, holy.
And yet we are so aware of our lack of holiness. Brief diversion.
When we pause to consider what holiness means, it means two things. I ask this to my home group all the time because I love talking about holiness.
What are the two kind of aspects of holiness? What does holiness mean, Brian? Okay. Otherness, right?
Otherness. That's the harder one. Most people don't get that one. Purity. Perfection, right?
So, to be holy means to be perfect and it means to be set apart.
We think about vessels for honorable and dishonorable use, right? Those vessels are separated. Kind of the idea behind kosher.
Separate things, right? Holiness is perfection but also otherness, right?
And, oh, this idea of being set apart in the context of God is essentially an exploration of the fundamental different essence of God.
God is other than us. He is alien to us, right? These are some words that maybe we've heard, you know,
Pastor Mike use before. This essence thing, this is not new. This is not a new doctrine and I just wanted to kind of bring it back to say, look, this is something that has been around forever as we understand holiness as being perfect, which also is two things.
It's without blemish and complete. Those are the two kind of prongs of perfection. This otherness is exactly what we're talking about when we talk about God's difference in essence.
So, 941, depending on which clock you look at. What do we do with this information?
How do we grapple? How do we deal with this? Great. God is incomprehensible. I can't talk about it. That's not the best response.
It's part of a response, I guess. So we look back at our first pillar.
Does anybody remember what our first pillar is or did somebody write it down so they didn't have to remember? Anyone? Is there a hand over there?
No? Okay. All right. Well, you talked about last week. I'm just talking about 20 minutes ago. God is only revealed to us through the lens or method that he provides, right?
God reveals himself to us through his methods. So when we look at God's incomprehensibility, we kind of have three choices or at least as I sat down and thought about this,
I was struck with three choices. The first one is that we take off the duct tape and we just kind of let our minds be blown and we fall into agnosticism.
It's like, I don't know. I have no idea. At the heart of agnosticism, writes
Barrett, is an irremovable distrust, a piercing skepticism of the divine.
It is one step removed from atheism and some would argue that atheism is its logical conclusion.
But listen, scripture never accepts such uncertainty. In the eyes of the world, the skeptic is considered the sage.
In God's eyes, the skeptic is called the fool. The fool said in his heart, there is no
God. So that's our first option. I don't love it. It's not really the way I would go.
To fool oneself is deliberate, into deliberate. Ignorance is not bliss, right?
Ignorance is bliss? No, it's not. It's folly. But Barrett here reminds us of a key truth, which is extremely important for us.
God may be incomprehensible, but he is not unknowable. He is incomprehensible, but he is not unknowable.
So now we have two options. The first one of what's left is what the nation of Israel did when
Moses was on the mountain. Anybody remember what the nation of Israel did when Moses was on the mountain?
Idolatry, right? The golden calf, right? They melted down all their jewelry and stuff and all the husbands said, but I gave you that.
It was a 25th anniversary gift and now it's a golden calf. We watched Fiddler on the
Roof last week, so I've got a little bit of this kind of, you know. Anyway, the golden calf,
Exodus 32. Where's Moses? Moses isn't here. He went up the mountain. He's communing with God. Maybe he's dead.
We need a new God to worship. Can you tell I have Jewish roots? I go right into it. We need a new
God to worship. Let us fashion one. But Israel was foolish. That was a long time ago. We're more refined than that.
We're smarter than Israel. Come on. We're enlightened now, right?
Wrong. As time passed, Barrett again, it became evident that the Enlightenment experiment had failed.
Autonomous reason was not so autonomous as it turned out. It was, in fact, idolatrous, attempting to remove
God from his throne and replace the creator's authority with the creature's intellect instead.
The follies of the Enlightenment should forever remind us that attempting to scale the ladder of heaven to pull
God down is the height of human hubris. We talked about before this unfortunate tendency that we have because of our analogical minds.
When we think about ways to understand God, we unconsciously shrink that gap. That's pretty much what
Barrett is talking about here. This pulling God down is the height of human hubris.
I mentioned the Tower of Babel. Similar idea. We look at the Tower of Babel, and we're like, you can't build a tower that high.
That's not going to happen. But the idea there is the same. It's no different. Maybe it's money, or it's power, or influence, or TikTok views.
I don't know. We joined TikTok for our website. It's weird. TikTok is very weird. Whatever it is that we worship, this option, option two, is not much better than agnosticism.
But at least, at least, it recognizes that human beings were created to worship.
Barrett says it so well. He says that every one of these little g -gods is ultimately replacing the awesome incomprehensible
God with our own fallible minds. That's what it's doing. No. What we must do is approach the incomprehensible with humility.
We must understand, again, that God reveals to us everything we need to know through the lens or the method that he provides.
And he doesn't do that, by the way, for his own benefit. He does that for our benefit so that we can comprehend him.
There's another book that I've been reading lately. You may have heard of it. It's called
Things Unseen by this guy, J. Gresham Machen. I don't know if you've heard of him. But much like None Greater, Machen marches through truths about God in a logical fashion, right?
Things Unseen is a collection of basically radio addresses, I guess you would call them, where he's just kind of, hey, everybody, how you doing?
This is what we talked about last week. Let's talk about some more stuff. And he kind of has these monologues, right? We've him monologuing, where he just muses about God.
And in it, in the second chapter, the title of the second chapter is How May God Be Known?
Well, that is germane to our topic. Let's study. In it, he says, a divine being that could be discovered by my efforts apart from his gracious will to reveal himself to me and to others would either be a mere name for a certain aspect of man's own nature, a
God that we could find within us, or at best, a mere passive thing that would be subject to investigation, like the substances that are analyzed in a laboratory.
I think we ought to be rather sure that we cannot know God unless God has been pleased to reveal himself to us.
Machen is high theology for the common man. If you don't have Things Unseen, after you buy your copy of None Greater, go get a copy of Things Unseen.
It might be a little easier to read. What Machen is exploring here, and this is important, is rational assent to the unknown.
Barrett writes that incomprehensibility guards the Christian from thinking that a mere mortal can know
God's very essence. It keeps us finite individuals from the theistic rationalism of the
Enlightenment. It protects us. The belief that we mortals can, by our own unaided human reason, attain comprehensive knowledge of the divine.
It entails an acknowledgement that we are the recipients and beneficiaries, not the originators and creators of divine revelation.
Even as we look at incomprehensibility and we say, well, this is kind of frustrating. I want to know more about God. I want to understand
God better. And we will, in glory, right? Barrett reminds us this is here for a reason.
First of all, God is fundamentally different from us, but also as we rightly understand God's incomprehensibility, yes, as an attribute of God, it protects us from thinking that we can master the divine.
The disconnect between our finite nature and God's infinite nature creates in the intellectual a great quandary.
If we cannot see and cannot observe and cannot reason something with facts that we know, we struggle deeply with the idea that that thing exists, right?
The release valve of this struggle is agnosticism. I don't know.
The salve for this disconnection is willful ignorance. Because God is so different from us, and our entire,
I say this all the time, my life is by definition anecdotal. I can only experience what I've experienced.
I can't, I can't, you know, you did a different thing. I can't speak to your experience. I don't want to get into some, like, some lame, some weird kind of, you know, thing.
But I can't speak to what you've gone through. I can only relate to it by what I've gone through. And if there's something that's fundamentally unrelatable, i .e.
the quiddity of God, then it's just like, segfault, can't figure it out, right? I don't know what to do.
So for the intellectual, the idea that we simply cannot know the unknowable is painful.
It's like, oh, come on, why can't I figure this out? This is me programming all the time. But as Barrett reminds us, and scripture before him,
God is not unknowable. So, okay, how do we reconcile these things? We have incomprehensibility, we have unknowability, or we have knowability, rather.
How do we reconcile these things? We reconcile them with trust. We trust him.
This is not the faith of a child, right? Mark 10, right? The blind faith of a child, but the willful submission of those who know him.
God is incomprehensible in his essence and his magnitude, but we can know him through what he tells us. Now, this is for free.
I read this in Men's Health Magazine, so bear with me. Not this first sentence.
What we receive as we rightly recognize our place as the creature in beholding an incomprehensible
God is awe. God is awesome.
Science is now suggesting there are physiological benefits to the emotion of awe.
Physiological benefits. Lowering stress, inspiring creativity, fighting depression.
It should not surprise us to learn a right focus. This is not Men's Health anymore. A right focus on Christ and who he is.
I just don't want to misrepresent it as a Christian magazine, okay? It should not surprise us to learn a right focus on Christ and who he is helps us in all aspects of our life.
Physical, emotional, and spiritual. I'm going to close with a quote from Calvin who says, we know the most perfect way of seeking
God for us to contemplate him in his works whereby he renders himself near and familiar to us and in some manner communicates himself because disheartened by his greatness we cannot grasp him.
We ought to gaze upon his works that we may be restored by his goodness. Let's pray.
Father, thank you for this time that we've had together. I just praise you for even bringing this book, this
Matthew Barrett book, to us that we might read it and contemplate you and think about you and be driven to study you more, to know you better, even as we understand that we cannot know you fully.
I just pray for service today, for Pastor Steve, bring the word to us. I just pray that many hearts would be pricked and those who do not know you would come to a saving faith in you.