None Greater

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Rather than continue with simply Trinity. We're gonna take a brief Detour is not the right word a brief flashback to the other
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Michael Barrett book None greater, which I know this is hard for you this early in the morning on Sunday but it was two summers ago now that Andrew and I taught through the book none greater and It should be no surprise to you since they're written by the same author that there's a lot of those two books have in common a
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Lot of connections, and there's been a lot of things that Steve's been bringing up in the past few weeks
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That I kept saying like oh, that's from none greater. Oh, that's from none greater, so I'm gonna take the opportunity today to review with you a little bit of Some key points from the none greater book that hopefully you'll understand how closely they connect to Simply Trinity and what we're doing right now in simply
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Trinity, so We'll start with a little quiz which is really unfair because I just said it was two summers ago, but here we go
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Let's see who has the most excellent recall that can remember From two summers ago all right.
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I'm gonna start with a you know what I'll do this. We'll do it as a group, okay? That'll put the pressure off a little bit all right, so I'll ask a question out loud of the group
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And you can all just answer yes, or no all right, okay? Here we go So these are questions about the attributes of God because none greater the book none greater is about all of the different attributes of The Lord so can we know the essence of God can we know the essence of God?
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Yes, or no no raise your hand if you think no we have a nominee for no
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All right, how about yes? All right, how about yo?
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Few yo's all right The answer is no we cannot know the essence of God, and that's the the key word in that question
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We cannot know the essence of God and that attribute The fancy word for that attribute is in comprehensibility
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That we cannot fully Comprehend God so we cannot know him at his essence and the joke
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With that we talked about that in the very first week of none greater and the joke the running gag for the rest of the Class was well, so we can't know so we're done here right.
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Why are we bothering with teaching all set have a nice day? But in fact we can know something about God can't we and everything that we know about God comes from his
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Condescension to us Calvin no less than Calvin called it the divine baby talk
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Where he where the Lord? Reveals himself to us in language and in terms and in analogies that we can understand
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That are at our level so that we have at least some glimpse of God we cannot fully comprehend him.
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He is incomprehensible, but we can know him and not only can we know him? But the Bible gives us all we need
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In order to know him as much as or as in the way that God wants to be known
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All right next question does God depend on you No, that was an easy one right
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God does not depend on you does anybody remember what the name of that attribute is It's the fun latin one so close
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Yeah, it starts with an a acidity acidity acidity acidity tomato tomato
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Acidity all right. It's his acidity Got you know probably the more popular way of talking about acidity is to say that God is
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Self -sufficient right he's self -sufficient But I went for a whole hour about a seedy one time during the summer because it's way more even than just self -sufficient
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He is He is able to be like he is he's self everything right self -energized self -existent self -dependent
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Self -sufficient Self everything and in fact here's our first connection to simply
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Trinity his trinitarian nature is one of the things that makes a seedy
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Possible for lack of a better word All right, and here's why?
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Because God is always and this is the next one is God made up of parts
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No, and that one is Simplicity and it's right there in the title simply
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Trinity, right? Because God is simple and we of course do not mean that as an insult
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Even though the word kind of in modern vernacular takes on that connotation if I say that someone is simple
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But we don't mean that right when we say that God is simple We mean that he isn't he's not made up of any parts that all of the attributes of which we know
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God He is all of those all the time To the fullest to the maximal
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Right. So when we say that we do not it is not simply that God is loving it is that God is love
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All right. It's not just that God is just or you know, he is justice
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Right. He is the very definition of those things if you ever stop to consider that and think about that What we know of as love
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It is God and how he acts and how he is that defines true love to us
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Right that we have that even the unbelievers have a sense of what justice and fairness are
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The only reason we know or have any idea what something is that is just is because that is how
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God acts That is how God designed things to be Right and God is all of those things all the time.
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All right, so here's one so if he is this is where the Trinity comes in and All the linkages together because he can if he is self -sufficient and he is love well, the reason he can be self -sufficient and loving it is
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Because of his Trinitarian nature in this But and and not dependent on us before he created anything he was already maximally loving within the three persons
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All the time from eternity past. He did not need to create anything to complete himself to fulfill some need to Even to bring him glory.
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Are we commanded to glorify him does all creation glorify him? Yes, it does did he need that though?
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No, he did not He did not and that brings me to the last one, which is does
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God? change No, and that is a mutability
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Immutability and hopefully we're gonna see how all these things wrap up together so we can step away from our human negative
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Implications of what we perceive simple to be it still sounds, you know, like a pretty simple concept
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Right God is simple he can't be Divided and yet we keep talking all this time through all these simply
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Trinity classes about three persons All right, Dave.
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Yep. Yeah, I got you
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Yes, he does but I understand what you mean, so Or I understand why that gets hard to do and to that we also have to turn to God's Eternality Right the fact that God is eternal
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The best way that it yeah, Andrew's laughing at me because I'm the one who has to stand up here and do this
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This makes sense to me, I hope I can try to make make it make sense to you.
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All right, and It's it's the idea of state of being okay, because one of the big things about a seedy is that we took when we talked about a seedy is
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Was a quote from R. C. Sproul in which he told us that He was sort of he was describing about human nature and everything and he said, you know
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One of the terms we use for humans is we call ourselves human beings Right, but that in fact is probably the most inaccurate description of us possible because we are constantly changing
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We're constantly growing we're constantly We are what we were not before Not to get too sidetracked on this but one of my favorite
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I think really interesting scientific faxes is that every part of you
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What you consider to be you? refreshes about every 10 years
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So right now your body if assuming all of you in here are older than 10 years old There isn't a molecule in you.
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That was in you 10 years ago and Yet somehow you're still you right?
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So I'm sorry to blow your minds with that one But you know just in terms of the normal ideas of cellular growth and decay, you know
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Your your cells are constantly dying and being replenished. You're constantly eating that's bringing in new
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Molecules and matter into your body and you're constantly expelling them It's all that stuff right your whole body is like turning over in that way
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God on the other hand, so so so Sproul said that you know We are the baby the best word for us as we should call ourselves human becomings
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Right because we're constantly like going towards something becoming something that we are not now
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God is the only true being He's the only one who has been in a state of like present current
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Always He is the being All right. So now we have to take ourselves out of time when we talk about this a eternal
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Generation and eternal spiration. All right, you got to take yourself out of time and recognize that at Genesis 0 right before 1 1
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There was God all three persons God and At that moment, even though I can't really say the word moment because that's a time word but at that state
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Right God already is He is present. He is he is
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Right then in there and he is in the state of because he's eternal. He's always been this way
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He is already in the state of God. The Sun is already in the state of being begotten
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He is being begotten in the present of God So his current state which is the same state.
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He has always been in is one of begottenness and for the spirit his current state, which is the state he's always been in is a state of Sentinous sorry spire spiritedness spiritedness.
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I don't even know what huh spire We'll just say spiration the state of spiration. That's probably the right way to say
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Does that help at all? No, it does not that's fine Maybe it helps somebody else but Yes, Andrew.
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Oh, no, it did it help you or you just oh, you're gonna try to help me. All right, go ahead Yeah, it's it's again.
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It's it's You know when we say that he is begotten that very word begotten is an accommodation word to us, right?
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It's like well look It's kind of like When you guys have a son
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The Godhead right which again brings us back to incomprehensibility see how much fun we're having today. All right
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Circles and circles and circles. Yep This is what made God so astoundingly
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Unbelievably unique Barrett said he does not contain the ground. I'm sorry. He does who messed that up He does contain the ground of his own being in and of himself
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We are one thing today and another thing tomorrow wavering between existence and non -existence, but there is no wavering with God as The one who is life in and of himself.
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He remains eternally indivisible and therefore constantly reliable The one with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change as James 1 17 tells us
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All right, so that God is Has a seedy that he is eternal that he is simple makes him indivisible
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Makes him incorruptible makes him immutable God does not change and where I want to get to by the end of this is
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You know what we were talking about this that that Steve has been wrestling with and grappling with and I thought well
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It'd be a good spot for us to hang for a little while is about the incarnation And the idea of the human nature and the divine
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Nature and the human will and the divine will and all that stuff. And well doesn't that imply some kind of change?
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All right. So but before we get there Let's just talk a little bit more about what it means when we say that God does not change that all these terms
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His simplicity and as a CD and everything else how that all wraps into the notion of him not changing
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All right First off God's life does not change
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Psalm 102 says that heaven and earth will perish but you remain They will all wear out like a garment
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Like clothing you change them and they will be discarded But you remain the same and your years will never end
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God Does not gain or lose He does not grow or learn
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He doesn't age We can't even fathom that because it's happening every moment.
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You just learned something. You didn't learn before Did it ever occur to you that nothing has ever occurred to God?
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He never gains new information that he did not have before To that also
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God's character does not change Can people's character change?
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Sure, in what ways can our character change? That's an excellent example when we get saved we become a new creation and hopefully there is a new character that comes along with that How else?
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Maybe less dramatically We repent of our maybe a particular sin right where there's some
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Sinful habit that we have it kind of is affecting our character We repent of that thing and we grow as a person and we are we're a little bit better character than we were before All right, what else
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What other ways this character change for us? It's based on circumstance and on trials as well.
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Absolutely Right our very sort of like who we are even our personality can be shaped by Some kind of trial or or maybe even a positive we talk about trial certainly negative circumstances
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But even positive ones do as well Right affect kind of our disposition a little bit of our personality those kinds of things
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Let me tell you kind of a funny story about this when I was in High school.
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I went away to this It was called boys life camp or something like that And it was it was this
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Scholarship thing where I had done well in history class and my history teacher picked me to do this and we went and we kind Of did like it was like mock state government for a week
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Okay, so I know it's Spencer Kennard is like it's like heaven for Spencer. Okay Where where where you go and like we all pretended to be a state representative and we you know
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Passed bills and all this kind of stuff, but we didn't was for a whole week and we stayed in a dorm Out east somewhere in some community college closer to Boston.
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Okay. Now I was from Western, Massachusetts All right, so I I had a certain way of speaking from out there in Western, Massachusetts But most of the people who were there at this camp thing were from Boston okay, and By the end of the week
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I had a Boston accent Just from hanging around with them for so long All right, and I went home and my mom was like what happened to you and it took me like two days to shed it again
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Right. So just being around those people Right. Also, by the way, just to make you laugh about that like this is how
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I normally speak when Karen and I lived in Pittsburgh constantly people would tell us how we sounded like we had a
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Boston accent So I'd probably because we just use the word wicked a lot but All right, so our character changes but God's character does not the link the link between Bible times and modern times is
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God himself, which is a great thought for us the same
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God who delivered Moses Who fought for David? Who gave wisdom to Solomon who comforted
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Elijah who fed the 5 ,000 who raised Lazarus from the dead? He is the same
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God that you and I pray and worship this morning. His character does not change and to that also his truth does not change and We should all be extremely thankful for that because if his truth could not change that would mean if it could change
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That would mean that the very plan of salvation Could change which means that we'd have no assurance at all
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God still stands behind all the promises and demands and statements of purpose
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Words of warning that are addressed to New Testament believers That's J .i.
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Packer, he says they are not relics of a bygone age, but an eternally valid revelation of the mind of God toward his people in all
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Generations and then number four
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God's ways do not change his ways do not change
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He continues to act in accordance with his will in the same way He always has towards this towards the just and the unjust
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He disciplines those he loves to make them more Christ -like he doesn't try something new
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Those of you who have children Know that some ways you one way you could define parenthood is that you are constantly trying something new
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With the kids because the last thing you tried didn't work So we'll try something else
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Right you are always trying something new God does not need to do that. God does not try something new with us
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He's not like well. I Guess that discipline way didn't work.
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Let's try this way instead right that is not how God acts or thinks he deals with his creatures with us as he always has and lastly
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What that boils down to is that God's purposes? Do not change what he planned from the beginning that is what he has done is doing and will do and That right there is where we're gonna be able to see how many of the things where we feel like we perceive a
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Change in God is not a change at all, but simply us in time watching this plan unfold numbers 2319
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God is not a man that he should lie nor a son of man that he should change his mind
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Does he speak and then not act? does he promise and not fulfill and Then Psalm 33 where it says the plans of the
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Lord stand firm Forever does anybody remember?
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What is the or or you just maybe you don't remember, but you can think of it? What particular analogy would you say when we're talking about God's unchangingness what analogy does
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God use for himself when it comes to his immutability More than any other analogy or any other word picture
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Rock that's right. He calls himself a rock He calls himself a rock in and I'm pretty sure this is not an exhaustive list
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Deuteronomy 32 for 2nd Samuel 22 2 & 3 Psalm 18 31 Psalm 19 14
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Psalm 28 1 Psalm 62 6 & 7 Isaiah 26 4 Habakkuk 1 12
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Matthew 7 24 & 25 Matthew 16 18 and 1st Corinthians 10 for right the rock and Of course the rocks that we have with us.
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We sort of know of their Mutability though right so there's some level where this analogy kind of breaks down, and I was just reading this week a
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Sort of oral history argument not argument oral history article about the old man in the mountain in New Hampshire Right that great rock formation that was up in in the notch and Franconia notch where the the profile on the side of the mountain looked like a man's face
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And it's it's the logo that you see on everybody's, New Hampshire license plate and whatnot And it you know of course it had been there for hundreds of years
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Since at least since the colonists were here we have people writing and talking about it So they it's looked like that for all that time, but about ten years ago now in the middle of the night it fell
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Right collapsed and and is not there anymore, and so well so much for the immutability of rocks
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Right and I can hammer and shape a stone and everything else But But not so our
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God in that he is the rock of rocks Hannah when she was praying to the
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Lord She said there is none holy like the Lord for as none besides you there is no rock like our
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God So yeah, he's a rock, but just to be clear. There's no rock like him
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He is the rock of rocks Wars Come and go
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Barrett says countries rise and fall and all the world changes from one century to the next but not the rock
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It is not thwarted. It does not vacillate in a small way that rock is like God.
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He does not change Come what may God remains the same He is firm and secure always there never fluctuating and capable of defeat
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Forever steadfast as a fortress to those in trouble All right, so God never changes
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Everybody agree with me on that Okay, great. So then does God change his mind?
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Then why does Genesis 6 6 say that God repents or 1st
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Samuel 5 11? Why does he regret? Putting Saul on the throne that is correct.
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Yes, very good that From us Again, we're in the accommodation language section of things that for us as we as non -eternal temporal creatures
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Get to watch these plans unfold and see these things happen in time to God.
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There has been no change There is no change in time This has always been the plan.
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Do you know in the Old Testament every time that we have this
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Word where we've translated it English as repent or regret or something like that for God It's a translation of the
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Hebrew word Nahum But there is actually a second so this is what
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Taylor was saying a minute ago even just English Being not very good for this compared to other languages let alone compared to what
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God would want to communicate That in Hebrew there's a different word for repent to Shiva or just shoot
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All right, and though that word is more literally the return or turnaround
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Word that we think of when we say repent, right? We often if we're trying to define for kids what it means to repent we say well that means to you know
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Instead of going towards that sin you turn around and you go back the other way right
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So to turn from sin So whereas Nahum has a sense of Breathing strongly
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That what's that? Yeah, you know that you know that feeling right? Right to be sorry or to pity
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That breathe, you know the the anthropomorphic sigh and So, you know the the language describing
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God is changing a repenting You know it for example Barrett said actually no
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Charnock says this for example God's repentance cannot have anything in common with our own repentance, which stems from a want of foresight or Ignorance of what could succeed or a defect in some examination of the occurrences which might fall within consideration
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Repentance for God this Nakum sigh is only a change of the outward conduct according to his infallible foresight in immutable will
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Right because you know, let's make it very clear here that in the same chapter in which
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God talks about regretting or repenting of making Saul King Samuel tells
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Saul a few verses later and the glory of Israel will not lie or have regret for he is not a man that she he should have regret
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Okay So in a way God regrets with foreknowledge that we cannot
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Because we didn't have that foreknowledge to begin with I might regret taking the highway tomorrow morning because I didn't know there'd be so much traffic or Regret having the scallops because I didn't know that I would get food poisoning
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But that for God that is not what it is for God to say I feel sorrow that I made
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Saul King is not the same as saying I would not make him King if I had to do it over Right for us.
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That's the regret right? I would not go on the highway if I had to do it over right, right? That's not the case.
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No, right and by the way, this is one of the reasons why
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As you know in terms of being sticking really carefully to the doctrines of grace and the ideas of election and Predestination within salvation that you really really get in trouble if you start to try to explain that as some folks do as God Look down the corridors of time and saw who would repent and chose those people
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And those are the elect Right because if you do that Who's now suddenly in control?
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Who made the call? Right us we did
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Right, not God God like did some kind of look literally what just happened in that Very terrible description is
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God gained new information that he did not have Before right he was like, oh,
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I want to see who's gonna repent. So here let me open up my little portal screen Right and I'll do the little swirly thing and and and right and and voila now
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I can see into the future and there is Brian Bartlett and There he is on his knees repenting.
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Okay good. He's elect check Yes, Brian, right?
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Yeah, the the the heretical doctrinal name of that Yeah, the the unorthodox doctrine name for that is open theism
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Open theism being the idea that he he sure he's God, but he can't see into the future
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So he's constantly reacting to what everything is. What's what's all happening at the time?
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Yes, then right exactly Right, and as I've been saying all along through this whole class if anyone ever said that to you you would say you don't want that I Know you think you want that but you don't want that because you do not want a
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God who could learn You do not want a God who can change I've said this before in this class a bunch, but you know when we talk about these so -called laws of science
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What goes up must come? the
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Sun rises in the and sets in the Heat transfers from the hot thing to the
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Cold the less hot thing right to be to be extremely technical
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You like this guy? We're getting we just nailed some thermodynamics class in here, right? Okay, all those things
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They are just God being consistent. They're just God being consistent
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When God makes a miracle happen in creation, it's not like he has to do some heavy lifting to violate one of the laws of nature to beat it and Make an axe head float right or to like exert some extra power on the storm and make the storm stop
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All right, because all of the things of nature happening are just God not changing we have known this at a fundamental level within ourselves even if We've tried to deny that truth and weak
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I can prove that to you by saying you go back and you look at the ancients and you ask the ancients
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What's their explanation for all the natural disasters in the world and they always said it was what we made the gods
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Angry, the gods are woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning
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Right, let us do another sacrifice or some other chant or some other ritual or blah blah blah
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To try to put them in a better mood Right because we you know, and and so we saw all those things and we said we we recognized right like this notion of Where was
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I going with this We we recognize this notion that like that that the kids, you know when we saw as regular as consistent was you know
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God being in like again. Sorry, I'm going off the rails here, but We recognized it as God is they
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What am I trying to say? Let me pause for a second and think I'll just back up and say that God is always in control of all things and is always being consistent.
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And when we saw something that looked Inconsistent we tried to explain it as a changing
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God. Okay, that's what they're Dave Yes in the
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Old Testament, yes, it's that it's the knock 'em. Yes. Yep. Yep All right.
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So with the few minutes we have left let's talk about the second person of the
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Trinity and John 1 14 and the word became flesh and dwelt among us
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Okay I heard it whispered over here He became change
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Doesn't that indicate change he once was not flesh and now is flesh Okay, and in fact will forevermore be the
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God -man well, as I said one way to tackle this is to talk about God's relationship with time and Remembering that since he created time and dwells outside of it we can
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Call upon the notion of God's eternal generation and eternal spiration are an immutable Eternal generation and an immutable
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Eternal spiration just as God's eternal willing and eternal knowing and eternal loving are an immutable
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Willing and immutable knowing and immutable loving James Anderson, who's a professor at the
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Reformed Theological Seminary? He he talks about with the implications of incarnation.
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He says God's actions take effect in time and space But God acts from a timeless
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Eternity and If you remember what we've been talking about recently with simply Trinity This is where we had to keep making the distinctions between Two different kinds of Trinity and not kinds of Trinity, but two different adjectives with Trinity.
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We talked about the economic Trinity, which was And we remember
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God's actions and what's the other one louder?
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No, not social Trinity, that's a bad one Yes, it's the who he is one.
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What's that one? imminent Trinity Right the imminent Trinity and the economic
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Trinity the eminent Trinity is who he is His essence and the economic Trinity is what he does how he acts
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Okay, so God acts from timeless eternity, but he is actions take effect in time and space
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So at one time Abraham is Not in covenant with God while at a subsequent time
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God Abraham is in covenant with God Did God intrinsically change?
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Not from his eternal standpoint It's timelessly true that God is Not related by covenant with respect to Abraham at time one but related by covenant with respect to Abraham at time, too
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Abraham is one is Abraham understand is the one conditioned by time
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From Abraham standpoint. It makes perfect sense to say God entered into a covenant with me
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And so how obviously then does this apply to the incarnation?
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Well Jesus? Becoming human is really a loose way of speaking one conditioned by our temporal perspective
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Orthodox Christ Christology Anderson says doesn't require us to say that the incarnation involved an intrinsic change in intrinsic change in God the
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Son all we need to say is that the incarnation was a Contingent event
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God could have freely chosen not to take on a human nature Because he's free to choose anything and to it's timelessly true that God the
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Son Was not related by incarnation with respect to creation before for BC and With respect to creation after for BC.
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It's the creation that is conditioned by time not God the divine nature
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Retained its attribute of immutability and the human nature united to the divine nature was mutable
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What does Luke say about Jesus about the twelve -year -old Jesus He learned obedience and he grew in Stature and wisdom and right he started as a baby and then became
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An adult a man right yes, Andrew Yes, that is true
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In like I said it is that he acts Right that his his will his purposes come to be in Time over time like he acts upon time and space
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But the the purpose itself has been the same right from the get -go the plan of salvation has been the whole plan
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Before any the first bit of that water flowed over the rock right
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It didn't happen until 4 BC right Yes, yes
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Council of Chalcedon Affirmed it this way it said Christ Son Lord only begotten
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Acknowledged in two natures which undergo no confusion no change no division
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No separation at no point was the difference between the natures taken away through the Union But rather the property of both natures is preserved and comes together into a single person and a single subsistent being
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All right or two if you remember that Pretty cool picture that diagram that Steve put on the one handout right we've got the triangle
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Representing the Trinity the divine nature of Trinity, and then you got this Brick right of rectangle that was the human nature that Christ took on Not being added to the triangle
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Because then we could add something to God and God does not change Right, but taken upon the
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Sun The Sun taking it upon himself So that they don't mix it's not like God Jesus is not a blend of the human and the divine
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And nor is he nor nor if you could I don't know Pry him open or something like that Would you be able to actually see as much as he's not a blend you also can't see like here's here's divine
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Jesus part and here's human Jesus part All right,
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I can give you no analogy for this because none exists It's really what it boils down to just like the
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Trinity every single analogy is Going to fall apart at some level and we can make really funny
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Videos about that And we can do the same thing about the
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Incarnation, there's just no good analogy that we can really give that's gonna be perfect Because there's nothing else like the
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Incarnation and all that God has made or revealed to us That's part of the exclusive wonderfulness of Jesus The Bible states both of these truths without apology
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Hebrews 13 8 Jesus Christ the same yesterday and today and forever
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And 1st John 1 that which was from the beginning that life was made manifest, so Probably to just put a bow on this.
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I would say what's best to remember is that when we talk of God's immutability We must always be careful to specify what about him is not changing
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What about him is not changing is his character his purposes his way his truth his disposition towards us
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It does not mean that he is rigidly immobile In fact, he is the exact opposite of rigidly immobile and it was
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Aquinas Who coined the term purus actus? That God is pure act.
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He is the unmoved mover the uncaused first cause
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If God were rigidly immobile if he was that kind of immutable then nothing would have ever happened
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Right, but rather God is much like we were trying to get into about you know God's current state of eternally gender being eternally generated and eternally spirated that that God is also eternally moving eternally acting eternally empowering
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It's one of my favorite Picture word pictures in the whole New Testament is right there at the beginning in Genesis 1
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Where it talks about the Spirit of God that he's created the heavens in the earth But they're without form in void and there's waters that are covering over the whole world and those waters are not literal water
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But rather sort of this primordial for lack of a other term for you and it and it speaks of the
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Spirit of God Hovering over the face of the waters and that word hovering that we translate hovering actually means
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Vibrating the Spirit of God was shaking a little bit like this is the word picture over the face of the waters and If you take your finger in a bathtub or a full sink and you start shaking your finger in it, what happens?
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Waves start coming out and what do we describe energy as? waves
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Here is God the unmoved mover Energizing his creation.
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All right, let's pray Heavenly Father We thank you so much for all that you have done to accommodate us in what you have taught us
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We wrestle with these things and I think it's great that we wrestle with them. I think it's great that we
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Try to come to grips with understanding you better, even though you have shown us that you are
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Incomprehensible, but yet you've told us everything we need to know about you At some level
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Lord, I pray that you would make sure that we prevent us from taking on so much pride in of ourselves
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That we become discontent over not being able to comprehend you But that we can rest in knowing that you have in your word given us all that we need to know you
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Pray that whenever we struggle with these things Whenever our picture of you is a little bit too fuzzy and unclear that we would run to the
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Bible To learn more about you. Thank you so much that you are unchanging
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Despite our perception of it. Thank you so much that you love us the same
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Today as you did in eternity past and will for eternity future that you placed your love upon your sheep and made the way of salvation and Executed the plan completely all on your own
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That we might be able to Enjoy heaven with you forever in the blessings of eternal life in Jesus name.