Bonus: The Attributes of God

Andrew Rappaport's Rapp Report

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Welcome to The Rapid Pull, daily edition, where we provide a quick biblical interpretations and applications.

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This is a ministry of striving for eternity. One of the most fruitful studies for any

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Christian is to dive into the study of the nature and attributes of God, or sometimes referred to as the perfections of God.

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Why is this? Well, for one thing, if you have the attributes of God in mind and correct, it will help in your theology.

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Most of the time I find that most people, when they have theological issues, you can usually find the problems in their theology just by looking at where they have something wrong with the nature or attributes of God.

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As we examine that, we end up seeing that a study of the attributes of God helps us to be solid in our theology.

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But there's much more than that. The fact is, the more you study on the nature of who

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God is, the better you know the God you love. Do you love

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God? Well, if you love God, you want to study Him. When people are dating or getting engaged, they want to know everything about that person.

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The same is true with God, but in a far greater way, because God did something for us we can never repay.

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So when we think about who God is, when we examine God, we should be looking to know

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Him better. There is nothing that is going to strengthen your walk with Christ than studying the perfections of God.

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The better you know Him, the better you're going to understand His Word, the better you're going to understand theology, the better you're going to know what it is

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He would have for you to do when choices come. So this is a study that we have, 31 different attributes of God, for you to study and check out.

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I hope that as we go through each one of these, it enriches your study of who

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God is and of His Word. I hope you enjoy this study.

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The attributes of God is a very important study when we look at theology, because all of our understanding of theology will be rooted in the attributes and nature of God.

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One of the things that many people make a mistake about is to think that they can study theology and not spend the time to understand who

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God is. Most of your theology will be rock solid if you get one thing right, the attributes and nature of God.

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God cannot work against His nature. Always remember that. So when we look at the nature, the attributes of God, it will help us in our theology.

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We want to start a study looking at the different attributes of God, so that when you study the scriptures, when you study theology, you will know that you have your theology right when it doesn't mess up with any of the attributes of God.

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It's one of the things you will often find, especially with cults and false religions, they ultimately will mess up, in one way or another, the attributes and nature of God.

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They're going to say He's something that He doesn't say about Himself. And so when we want to know if our theology is in error, we are going to know it when it messes up with the nature of who

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God is. A very simple way, and that's what we're going to start a study on in the next couple of podcasts.

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I hope that you enjoy this. Now as we've said, we want to study the attributes and the nature of God because it is important for us in understanding the right view of our theology.

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There is something about studying the attributes of God that we have to understand. And a good example of this is if we look at Isaiah chapter 6.

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When you look at Isaiah chapter 6, you're going to see that when Isaiah had a proper view of the

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Lord, he sees the Lord high and lifted up, and the first thing he does is say,

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Woe is me, for I am undone, because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.

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For my eyes have seen the Lord, the King, the Lord of hosts. And so as he sits in this and sees this imagery, what we see is that when

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Isaiah has a proper view of God, it changed his view of himself, it changed his view of sin, and it also changed his view of service.

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Because when God says, Who will go for us? Whom will we send? Who will go for us? Isaiah says, Here I am, send me.

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Now he wants to go for service. So if you have a right view of the attributes of God, you're going to see it's going to affect the way you view yourself and others.

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He saw himself in light of all of the others among him, his people. He saw a different view of sin, and it changed the way he wanted to serve

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God. This is one of the things that we can see when we study this, will help us in our understanding of self, sin, and service.

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Studying the nature and attributes of God will help us in refuting false teaching. We see this in 1

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Peter 3 .15. It also will help us have a greater reverence for God.

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You can see this in Job 28 .12 and 23 -28. That for the believer, when they think and meditate upon God, they have a greater reverence for him.

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In fact, what we're going to go through in this series will be a list of attributes that I actually developed as a prayer list when

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I was struggling with prayer. My pastor mentioned to pray God's word back to him, and I started to do that.

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And thinking about God, I developed my prayer list, which was nothing more initially as these 31 attributes of God, and I still have them there today, to meditate and to think upon who

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God is. That causes me not only to have reverence for God, but praise for God.

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I end up having a great amount of praise because what I end up seeing is that God is so much greater than I.

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It causes me, as the psalmist has in Psalm 111, to have a praise for who

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God is. The more we meditate upon him, the more we think about him, the more we're going to be able to recognize the things that he has done, who he is, and the easier it's going to be for us to refute false teachers that come and try to walk among us, because we'll have the truth in the nature and attributes of God.

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As we begin to look at the attributes of God, we first have to ask the question, what in the world is an attribute, really?

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Attributes are some distinguishing characteristic or quality that describes the nature or being or essence, in this case, of God.

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When it's in relation to God, these attributes are those distinguishing characteristics or qualities of the divine nature, which are inseparable from the idea of who

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God is. This is why it affects the way we view theology, because we cannot separate these attributes from who

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God is, therefore, this is a description of God. Therefore, when we study theology, the study of God, all of it is going to come from an understanding of his attributes.

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His attributes will work in proper thinking with proper theology.

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These attributes were not caused nor affected by the works of God, such as creation, in any way.

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So what we see about these attributes is that an attribute does not grow, it does not change, it is part of the nature of God himself.

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It is how God reveals himself to us. It's not the sum total of all that God is, but those which he has revealed to us, those that we can understand, tell us much about God and what we can learn from him.

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So the more we study the attributes of God, the more we have a better understanding of who

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God is and what it is he wants us to know. When we look at the attributes of God, I want to talk first about categorizing them, because we see several different ways people attempt to categorize the attributes of God.

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Most often what you see is those that are communicable and those that are incommunicable. What does that mean?

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Communicable means that these are the attributes that God has passed on to us, some to angels as well, but those attributes that are communicated or passed on to other of his creation.

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However, when we look at the incommunicable attributes, these are attributes that are true only of God, they're not passed on to any other of his creation, and those are ones that are true only of God.

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So when we look at those attributes, those are attributes of deity only. Now, this is how we typically see it, and I have broken these attributes out a little bit differently, and I want you to understand how and why we're going to go through it the way we are.

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The first list that we're going to have is attributes of deity. The attributes of deity are those attributes that are true only for God.

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So God alone possesses these, and he possesses all of them. Any being that possesses these are referred to as God.

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This would be the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Now, there's attributes of personality, those are ones that are going to be passed on to even the angels and to men, that defines personhood.

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And the last is attributes of morality, which we will see in human beings. And so this is the way

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I'm going to break down and categorize the attributes of God. When we start to look at the attributes of deity, remembering that these are attributes that God alone possesses, the first attribute we always want to look at is the attribute of incomprehensibility.

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Incomprehensibility means that God's nature is impossible to fully comprehend.

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Though man can know about God, we cannot know him fully. We can only know what he reveals to us.

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Man needs not to know everything there is to know about God in a complete sense, but what he reveals to us we can know with certainty.

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We have several passages of scripture that we can look to to see this. One of the ones I use the most often is

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Deuteronomy 29 .29. The secret things belong unto the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and our children forever that we may do the words of the law.

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We also can see in Isaiah 55, for my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.

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We end up seeing over and over again that God is above us, that we cannot comprehend the things of God.

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That should not cause us to be in fear, that should cause us to be in reverence that he is greater than us, knows more than us, is better than us in every way.

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Though we don't know him perfectly and completely, there are things that will be a mystery to us, but that which he has revealed to us, that we can study, that we can know, that we have the thoughts that God wants us to know about him.

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Another attribute of God's of deity, those meaning that he alone possesses, is the attribute of immutability.

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This is the idea that God's nature is incapable of change, he cannot change.

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We see this in James 1 .17, every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the

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Father of lights, without whom there is no variation or shadow of change.

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Hebrews 13 .8 says, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

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That's what it's speaking about there, folks, that Jesus Christ is immutable, that he cannot change in his nature.

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It doesn't, by the way, mean that the gifts he gives wouldn't change. It means that his nature doesn't change.

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Now how does this affect us? Well, it's encouraging for us to know that God is not going to promise something today in his nature, and somehow be a different nature tomorrow.

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So today he might be faithful, but tomorrow he may not be. We see this in Malachi 3 .6, when he says,

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For I the Lord do not change, therefore you,

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O children of Israel, are not consumed. In other words, the children of Israel can rest upon the promises of God, because he doesn't change in his nature.

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The promises that he makes to his children, he will complete them, because his nature doesn't become something different over time.

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This is important to see that God is completely and totally incapable of change.

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This doesn't affect his actions, it means about his nature. The next attribute that we want to look at of God's attributes of deity is the attribute of infinite.

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God is infinite. This means that God has no limits or boundaries outside of his nature.

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God is infinite in existence, in time, space, knowledge, power, and presence.

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We're going to look at those in detail. But what we end up seeing is that God's infiniteness is a positive assertion that he is boundless.

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God's infinite nature is incomprehensible to us. God is not subject or limited by anything external to himself.

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God is without bounds. He has no restrictions outside of his own nature.

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Nothing limits him. He is free. We end up seeing this throughout the scriptures.

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We see that his ways are unsearchable, that we cannot come to an end of them in Romans 11 .33

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or in 1 Kings 8 .27 where his ways, his heavens cannot be contained.

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We end up seeing that he created man in Acts 17 .24 -28, that he created man with boundaries because he doesn't have them.

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And so what we see is God doesn't have limits. He is truly a free being, not influenced by anything outside himself.

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Self -existence is an attribute only of deity of God. It is the idea that God is infinite in his existence.

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God's existence is not dependent upon anything outside of himself.

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God's existence relates to his capability to sustain life. It is expressed in the name he calls himself in Exodus 3 .14.

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God said to Moses, I am who I am. This is the idea of the name

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I am that we often hear as Jehovah or Yahweh. It is the self -existent nature of God.

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God is described as always existing or being without beginning and without end.

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We see this throughout scripture. Psalm 41 .13, Psalm 90 .2, Psalm 103 .17,

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Psalm 106 .48, Isaiah 44 .6, Revelation 1 .11

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.17, we also see it in Revelation 22 .13. The idea that he has no beginning, has no end.

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God's existence occurred before anything that was created. We see that in Romans 11 .36,

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Colossians 1 .16. So God existed before there was anything. And so every living thing is dependent upon something or someone except for God.

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He is completely and utterly independent of all other things. This means he is a self -existing one dependent only upon himself.

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The attribute of eternality. This describes the fact that God is infinite in relationship to time.

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He has and will continue to exist forever, endlessly. He is from everlasting to everlasting as Psalm 90 .2

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says. Time does not apply to God the way it does to us and the way we think.

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God is not restricted by time. Time is something that God actually created when he created the time -space -matter continuum.

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There was a time, we say, where there was no time. In other words, this is a way we try to understand

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God's infiniteness when it comes to time. That he is eternal. That he is outside of time.

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We cannot fully comprehend this, but what we see is that God reveals that he chooses to work within time and respects time, but he is not dependent upon time.

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With God, there is no chronological succession of thoughts as there is with us.

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God is completely and totally conscious and aware of time as we know it, yet, to him, the past, the present, and the future is all the same eternal now.

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This is the idea of 2 Peter 3 .8 where he says, to God, what day is a thousand years and a thousand years is a day.

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It is the idea that God is outside of time, that it's all one eternal now to him.

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This is important when we look at Jesus Christ's death on the cross because he had to be eternal to pay an eternal fine.

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God is immensible. That means that God is infinite in relation to space.

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He is not limited in any way by space. In fact, God is the creator of what we would call the time -space -matter continuum.

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If he created it, he cannot be bound by it or limited by it. Immensity proclaims that God is outside and apart from space.

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This plays into when we look at an attribute later on of his omnipresence where God is throughout space.

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God is a spirit and as a spirit, he is a non -spatial being. Space does not apply to God and he is not restricted by it, though he understands it and works within space for our sake, he, however, is not dependent upon it.

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God is immaterial and not part of the material universe, which, by the way, makes it problematic for those who say, show me from science that God exists.

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Science is the study of the material world and cannot be used to study the immaterial. God is everywhere present because he is not bound by mass.

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God will work within what we might refer to as space, but he is not bound by this.

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We end up seeing this in 1 Kings 8 .27 where he says that, behold, the heavens, the highest of heavens cannot contain you,

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O God. So you see that God is beyond anything that can be contained in what we call space or matter.

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Omniscience, this is the attribute of God that God is all -knowing.

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It's a compound word, omniscience meaning all or total and science meaning knowledge.

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This is the idea that God is all -knowing. He knows everything, all details, past, present, future, and even the real.

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He can even say, as he walked on earth, that if Sodom and Gomorrah had seen the works done in their presence, they would have repented in ashes.

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He knows completely what could happen. Because he's outside of time, because he is eternal, his knowledge is one that's not bound by time.

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This is why only God can have 100 % true knowledge.

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He can speak his prophecy to us because it's not a time -based thing for him.

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He knows these things will happen, so he says it to us in time, and it's still future to us, but he could say it with 100 % accuracy because it's not a prediction, it's not a guess for him.

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He knows it with an absolute knowledge. This is what makes it different for God than for you and I.

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We don't know things absolutely. We don't know things with 100 % accuracy. He does.

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And so as we look at God, we must recognize the fact that he knows everything, and this is part of his attributes of omniscience.

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He has complete and total knowledge of all details. The attribute of God known as omnipotence.

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This is a compound word, as we saw before, with omni meaning all or total, and potence meaning power.

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This is the idea that God is all -powerful. Able to do anything consistent with his nature.

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God does all that he wills to do, not all that he's capable of doing.

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The idea of omnipotence is that it is working with the rest of his attributes.

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Remember the things we learned about attributes is that they're all true of God, so we cannot separate these from who

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God is. So he is all -powerful, but he is also all -good and faithful and the other attributes that we will be seeing.

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So just as he is omnipotent, all -powerful, it's consistent with his very nature.

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This is something that we see a lot of people try to argue, that somehow God is not all -powerful if he allows evil in the world, and they try to pit one attribute against the other.

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But these attributes do not work independent. They all work together, and there's more than just those.

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And the argument is, is the only way of doing good to not allow evil? That may cause some other problems that we may not be aware of because as we looked at last time, he's omniscient.

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He knows what we do not know. So when we look at the fact that he is all -powerful, there's nothing that he could do that's not within his nature.

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In other words, he can't create a square circle because that is illogical and logic is part of his nature.

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So he can do that which is within his nature, but it doesn't mean he does everything that he could do. Another attribute of God is that he's omnipresent.

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Again, the compound word omni meaning total or all, present, having the idea of the meaning of present or the space immediately around a being.

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This is the idea that God is everywhere present, infinitely present, everywhere where there is.

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So when people say that God is not in hell, that's actually not true. He's everywhere. He is without presence in the sense that there's nowhere where he's not.

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He doesn't have a single place that he is, and this goes along with the fact that he's outside of space.

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So God is completely outside of space because he kind of created it, but this is an encouragement to us as well because the fact that God is everywhere present means that we are never alone.

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Jesus could say that he is with the Christian, a single Christian. I am with you always.

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We are never alone. There's nowhere we can go where God is not.

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There's nowhere we can hide from God. This means if we're in hell, as Psalm 139 would say,

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God is there. We cannot hide from God. Now that could be an encouraging thing when people are speaking bad about us, saying things about us, and we feel like no one has seen this.

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No one knows. God always knows. He is always with us. We're never at a time without him present.

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However, that also means that when we sin, he's also there. There's never a time we sin, and we can say no one will see this because whenever we sin,

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God is also there. Sovereignty. This is an attribute of God specifically referring to his supreme power and position as the chief being in the universe.

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The sovereignty of God refers to that aspect of his power and position.

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It is referring to his attribute of omnipotence, that he's all powerful. The position that God has as the chief being in existence, and it brings into a certain amount of authority with it.

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In God's case, the authority is total and absolute. Charles Ryrie says in his book,

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Basic Theology, So God is sovereign.

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There is no one greater than him in all the universe because he created all that is created.

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God is in control of every atom in the universe. God is the ultimate authority in all the universe.

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There is no one higher than him. He is the final court of appeals in all matters because he is the sovereign, the ultimate sovereign.

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The last attribute that we want to look at that is in the category of God's attributes of deity, in other words, attributes that are only of God, that anyone that possesses these attributes are of God, and this is the last one that does tie into some of the others and that is the unity of God.

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This is the idea that God is one, unlike anyone else. There is only one of him, there is no one else, and in that he is completely unified.

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That there is no working outside of himself, in other words, the fact that there are three persons in the

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Trinity, they are one God. We see this in Deuteronomy 6 .4, Hero Israel, the

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Lord our God is one. First Timothy 2 .5 that says, for there is one

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God and there is one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, there is one

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God. 1 Corinthians 8 .4 -6 says the same thing, that there is one

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God, one Lord, there are many gods and lords that are man made, but for us there is one

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God and Father. So we see that God is one, there is no division within God, and the fact that we know this helps us to understand that he gives us an example that the

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Trinity, that within the Godhead, that God is one and unified, that is how we should be acting within the church.

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We should be one, we can't be one in the same way, but we should strive to have the same unity in the body of Christ and in our marriage, that God has a complete, undivided unity.

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We now move on to the category that I put into the category of God's attributes of personality.

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These are attributes that he communicates to other persons. This would include mankind, and I would say this could also include angels.

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These are attributes that he has passed on, but it's more specifically this and the attributes of morality are those that we say when we say that we were made in the image of God.

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Made in the image of God means we have these attributes, and the first of them is the attribute of spirituality.

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The essence of God is a spirit, and there isn't a part of him that is this invisible source of personality.

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We also have a spirit, but we're not just a spirit. God is just a spirit.

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So questions that come up is, if God is a spirit, how do we explain all those passages in the

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Bible that speak of people seeing God? These are called theophanies, or Christophanies, if it's seeing

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Christ. And so these are when people see God who presents himself in a material sense when he's really not material.

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Now if God is spirit, what about all those passages that speak about him having feet and hands and eyes and ears?

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These are called anthropomorphisms. These are where God uses language we would understand that is something we understand what it means to have eyes and see, but he doesn't have eyes.

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He doesn't see that same way. But this is God speaking down to us in a language or in a way that we can comprehend.

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An attribute of God is life. God is living in that he possesses within himself the source of all being and activity.

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So we get into the definition of what is life theologically in this way. Life is the mental or spiritual energy or activity of intelligence, emotion, and will or self -determination.

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So God is living in that he possesses within himself the source of all being and activity.

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Now when we look at science, they're going to argue that life means to be able to reproduce. That's not the case with God.

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That's not the case when we use it theologically. It is the idea that God has within himself and possesses activity that he can do things.

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So only God can give both physical and spiritual life.

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Now we see throughout the Bible that God is referred to as a living God. Jeremiah 10 .10.

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You can look at Matthew 16 .16 and others where he is called the living

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God and he is the source of life that he could give both physical life as he did with Adam and Eve or brings people back from the dead or spiritual life.

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We live because he gave us life and we have life.

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We have and possess being and activity but he is the ultimate source of that.

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God is self -conscious. Now when we look at the first of the attributes in the realm of personality, the first three that we described deal with God's personality as a whole where the following three describe his makeup of his personality.

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Now God is self -conscious. In other words, God is aware of his own existence. He knows himself completely because of the other attributes we've already seen.

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Therefore God can't deceive himself. Something we can do. But self -consciousness is the capability of awareness of self.

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It manifests in the ability of abstraction and reflection in forming concepts.

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God is aware of his own existence. He knows himself perfectly and completely in totality.

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The self -consciousness of man is what separates man from animals.

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However, unlike God, man can be self -deceived and does not know himself perfectly or completely.

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So when God describes himself to man, he does so without deception.

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He does it knowingly. We may not be able to fully comprehend everything he reveals about himself but what he reveals is without deception.

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When we are conscious, we can deceive ourselves but we are not like animals.

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Animals cannot reflect on their own existence where man can.

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God is emotional. God is capable of expressing emotion.

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Emotion arises from and is necessary to personality. Emotion is defined as the affective aspect of consciousness.

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God is expressed in areas of knowing, feeling, caring, preferring, and choosing.

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Although God is an emotional being, his self -determination is not out of balance with the rest of his attributes.

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So God cannot make a purely emotional decision. We have emotions because God has communicated them to us.

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Because God has emotions, we have emotions. This is part of our personality because we are made in the image of God.

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Emotions can sometimes be seen as a bad thing but not with God. With God, they are always a good thing.

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Now we see that God expresses these emotions as love, John 3 .16, compassion,

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Psalm 145 .8, grief, Genesis 6 .6, hate, Proverbs 6 .16

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-19, care, 1 Peter 5 .6 -7, jealousy in Deuteronomy 6 .15,

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even anger in Psalm 5 .4 -5. We see here that God has attributes of emotion and people often think that some of these

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God can't have but God has all of these emotions. God is intelligent.

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Intelligence is the capability for knowledge and power of knowing.

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Intelligence is the use of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom.

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Knowledge can be defined as the perception of facts as they are where understanding is the insight into the significance of those facts and wisdom is the ability to place those facts in proper relationship to one another, in God's case to use for a good end.

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Others can use wisdom for a bad end but this is an attribute that's communicated both to angels and to humans.

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Humans have intelligence. Now we can use that intelligence for bad things but we can have knowledge of facts, understand how the significance of those facts play into things, and then understand how the wisdom to know the proper relationship of those facts toward other things.

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The intelligence of God dictates the use of his intelligence for good means.

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Intelligence directs whereas emotion desires and the will determines.

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God's intellect is best seen in relationship to his omniscience. God knows all the facts of the universe.

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God understands all the knowledge as it relates to itself and God has the wisdom to relate all of the understanding of the universe with everything else.

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God goes way beyond smart. The last attribute that we see in the category that we call the attributes of personality is

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God's attribute of self -determination. Now this determination relates to his will or purpose and this works together with the others that we have seen.

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We saw his intelligence and the intelligence is the thinking which leads to the emotion which we saw last and now this is the fullness of it with the determination or the purpose, the volition.

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So you have the thinking, the emotion, and the volition. Now self -determination is God's activity which is determined by him alone.

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He is a purposeful being. Self -determination refers to God's will, purpose, or choice.

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It is the ability to act freely. You and I do not act freely. We have an influence of sin.

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Ever since the fall, man was cursed by sin. God does not have that. God has a true freedom in his determination.

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He determines alone. God is independently sovereign, fully and totally self -determining.

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God is independent of his creation or its creatures. His determination can be seen in his plan for salvation in Ephesians 1 and his plan for the saved in Romans chapter 8.

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Although God's self -determination is that all men be saved, he does not cause such to happen.

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He allows for the decisions of men. We enter now to the category of attributes of God that I refer to as morality.

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These are attributes that are communicated to man but maybe not to angels. This is something that we can experience and this is something that we get because they come from the nature of God.

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The first of the attributes that God has in relation to morality is the attribute of holiness.

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Now holiness is described both positively and negatively. Negatively, holiness refers to the fact that God is separate from all forms of uncleanness.

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Positively is that God is pure. Now we see this throughout the scriptures. You could look at the book of Leviticus to see that negatively

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God is separate from sin, from that which is unclean or evil. That's throughout

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Leviticus where he'll say to be holy, to be sanctified, to be separate as he is separate because he is

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God. Be holy because he is holy. Now can we be holy exactly like he is holy?

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No. But that is the standard. But we can be separate from sin at some point for good.

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But it is also positively that God is pure. That there is, as it says in 1

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John 1 .15, no darkness at all in him. Now the thing that we end up seeing is that God is completely unlike us.

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He is completely separate from sin. He is nothing like us. So there's so many people who want to make it like God is like a man.

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No. God is holy. He's totally unlike us. The last attribute that we looked at is

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God's holiness. And God's holiness is expressed in four different ways. Righteousness, justice, goodness, and wrath.

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We'll look at each one. We'll look at righteousness now. Righteousness is defined that God demands that all moral beings conform to his moral perfection.

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God is righteous by nature because of the fact that he is holy. He commands for us that he communicates this attribute to us and therefore we too must be holy.

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And one way is to be righteous. We have to understand that this comes from the nature of God. This attribute for us is the idea that because God is righteous, we too should be righteous.

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God is righteous in all of his dealings because his nature is righteous.

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So when we see this that God alone is right in all that he does, we cannot say there's anything

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God does that's wrong because in his moral character he is righteous.

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He does right because it's his nature to do that. The definition of righteousness, what defines right from wrong, is from the nature of God.

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So righteousness is the holiness of God applied to the relationship to his created beings.

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And because God's holiness is the source and standard of right and wrong, it does not change.

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God expectations and punishments are necessary and unchangeable.

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He is right all the time. As we look at the attribute of holiness, we said that it's expressed in four different ways.

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Righteousness, justice, goodness, and wrath. Today we'll look at the one of justice.

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Now justice is the maintenance or administration of what is just, especially by the impartial adjustments of conflicting claims or an assignment of merited rewards and punishments.

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Now God judges, and as a judge he judges perfectly, justly, impartially, correctly.

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And non -conforming to his moral perfections is what the standard is.

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We know what justice is because we know God. God is the source of justice, is where we get a sense of right and wrong of justice from.

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When we think about this, the Psalms say in Psalm 711 that God is a just judge and angry with the wicked all the time.

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People don't want to think about that anger. We're going to look at that in a few attributes. But the point is that God is a just judge.

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In other words, when he executes judgment, it is always fair, it is always impartial, and it's always right.

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So when he legislates or acts in a position of passing judgment on something, we know that his judgment will always be correct.

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God's righteousness and justice is revealed in the necessity for our salvation.

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Because we break his law, there must be justice. Another attribute that we see related to an expression of God's holiness is his goodness.

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We saw righteousness, justice, goodness, and wrath. Now when we look at goodness, it is the fact that God is totally and completely good in all that he thinks, says, and does.

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It should be a great encouragement to the Christian that God cannot do anything that's not good.

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Everything he does will be good. He's not like the false gods that men create where they can be good this day and maybe not the next day.

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What we end up seeing is that God must be good because it comes from his nature. And God's goodness comes from his holiness and his righteousness.

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That causes that he must be good. God's goodness and righteousness ensures his justice that we looked at last time.

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God's goodness also is a balance to his wrath that we're going to look at next time.

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There is such an absolute perfection with God in his nature that there's nothing in his nature that is wanting or defective.

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Nothing that can be added to make it better. He was originally good, if you can say original because he had no beginning.

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We looked at eternality. He always was good. He's essentially good. He is the very definition of what good is.

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We get a sense of what is good and evil by God. That conforms to the nature of God is good and anything that is against the nature of God is evil.

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He is the very definition and standard of what we call good. The last of the four expressions of God's holiness is the attribute of wrath.

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We looked at righteousness, justice, goodness, and now wrath. This is an expression of God's holiness and this is one that many people have a very difficult time with understanding when it relates to God.

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Wrath is retributionary punishment for an offense or crime. God will give retributionary punishment for offenses when people break his law.

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There is actually a day of wrath or the wrath as we see the wrath in Romans 2 .5

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or 5 .9. We see the day of wrath in Revelation 6 .16 -17 that there is a day where God's final judgment will be poured out.

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People think that somehow this cannot be because God is love. That's an attribute we're going to look at in a while.

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But yes, God is love but it doesn't contradict or work against in any way the fact that God is wrathful.

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God will punish because by divine justice he must punish.

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Now we have to keep in mind that God's wrath in the Bible is never capricious, self -indulgent, irritable, or ignorant of facts.

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When God is wrathful it is because there was a crime committed.

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There was an offense made. Someone morally did something that was evil against the nature of God and therefore

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God is angry with the wicked every day because he's just. It is because of his goodness which balances out his wrath.

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God's wrath reveals the result for those without salvation. Looking at the attributes of God, specifically those that we categorize as morality, we notice that we have now three categories within there.

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Holiness, truth, and love. Each of those have different expressions. Today we're going to focus on truth.

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Truth is positively explained as conforming to fact or reality.

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Exact accordance with that which is or has been or shall be. Now negatively, truth is the absence of falsehood or error.

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Truth is explained as God's intelligence, declaration, and representation eternally conforming to reality.

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In other words, what we say is true is that which conforms to reality, well the reality of that is reality conforms to the nature of God.

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So truth gets its definition from God himself. When we look at reality, we see truth.

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Now God cannot misrepresent or deceive others or himself about himself because he is truthful.

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It is due to his truthfulness and his immutability, meaning that he cannot change, that he cannot do anything inconsistent with his nature.

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This is why we see in Titus 1 .2, God cannot lie. It is impossible for God to do something that would be a lie, that would be untruthful.

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God is truthful in his veracity and proven truthful in his faithfulness. What God states as fact and reality must be true because he is omniscient.

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When we look at the attributes of God and specifically the attribute of truthfulness, we saw two different ways that it is expressed.

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Veracity and faithfulness. We're going to look at both of them now. Veracity is the fact that God does not waver on the truth.

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It is God's invariable expression of truth. It is the act of being truthful.

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He does not waver on the truth and he is the source and the standard of all that is true.

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James 1 .17 would say there is no variation or shadow of change. The fact that he cannot change, he's immutable, means that when he is truthful, he can do nothing but truth.

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And this leads into faithfulness. It could be defined as God fulfills all his promises.

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Faithfulness is a steadiness in affection or allegiance. It is expressed in the fact that God fulfills his promises.

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Positively, God never has to revise or renege a promise. Negatively, God will be faithful in his wrath on the wicked.

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Due to God's omnipotence, he is capable and able to fulfill all of his promises.

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Now that's good and bad. It's good because it means when he promises us eternal life and a place with him in heaven, those who believe will have that.

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But it also means negatively that when he promises that he will punish all sin, he will be faithful to that as well.

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So faithfulness is the fact that God will complete his promises, all of them that he makes.

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As we are completing the list of the attributes of God, we are looking at the category of his morality, and in that we have three classifications, holiness, truth, and love.

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This is the last of them, love. And this will be expressed in different ways, grace, mercy, long -suffering, kindness, and forgiveness that we'll look at later.

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As we look at love, it's simply defined as sacrifice. Now there are different ideas of love that we have, brotherly love, erotic love, familial type love, friendships, things like that that we say we love someone.

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But when we're speaking of love in this way, we're talking about a self -sacrificial love.

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In the Greek, it would be agape. It is the love that always involves some effort and time for us.

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The expression of God's love is that it moves him to give of himself.

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God is completely and totally loving, and that's why we see in 1 John 4, 8, it can say, for who does not love does not know

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God, for God is love. God's love is proportionate to the worth of the one love, to the degree and the expression.

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We love him because his love for us is incomprehensible. He has a greater love than we can ever understand.

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The greatest expression of his love is the act on the cross of salvation. God's love is comprised of his grace and his mercy, his long -suffering, but we love because he first loved us.

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Looking at the attribute of God's love, we see the first expression of it as grace. Grace can be defined as God's love expressed in giving to man what he does not deserve, often referred to as unmerited favor.

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So God's love being expressed in giving to man what he does not deserve is the greatest expression can be seen in the fact that God pardons our sin.

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We see this in Ephesians 2, 4 -9, where he says, But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, he made us alive together with Christ.

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By grace you have been saved, for by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not of your own doing, it is a gift of God, not a result of works lest any man should boast.

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Titus 3, 4 -7 says similar things, where it says, He saved us not because of the works done by our righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing and regeneration and renewal of the

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Holy Spirit, whom he poured out richly through Jesus Christ our Savior. So being justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

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When we don't get what we deserve, which is that eternal punishment, that is God showing his grace.

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Grace is giving good things from God to man when man has no way of deserving it or meriting it.

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Grace is often referred to as a gift in scripture. Now as we continue looking at the attribute of God's love, we see it expressed in grace, mercy, longsuffering, kindness, and forgiveness.

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We looked at grace and now we look at mercy, which is the flip side of it. Where we saw that grace was

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God's expression in giving to man what he does not deserve, that unmerited favor.

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We see that mercy is God's love expressed in withholding what man does deserve.

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So mercy is the withholding of merited punishment. God's love is expressed in withholding that which we rightly deserve.

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And the greatest expression of this is seen in the fact that God does not give to us the full consequences of sin for those who put faith in Christ because it was paid fully on Christ at the cross.

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So mercy is that withholding of punishment properly deserved and merited.

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Now we would see that Romans 6 .23 for the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is life in our

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Lord Jesus Christ. So there is a right consequence for that. Wages of sin, the earning of sin is death.

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That would be what we rightly deserve. But God does not give that to us.

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Where the grace is him giving us what we don't deserve, here he's withholding from us what we do deserve.

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We deserve eternal punishment. God has not given us that. Instead, he has given us grace.

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These work together. As we look at the attribute of God's love, we see that this is expressed in five different ways.

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Grace, mercy, long -suffering, kindness, and forgiveness. We've looked at grace and mercy and now we look at long -suffering, which simply means to suffer long.

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God's love expressed in the patient bearing of the stubborn wills of mankind.

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Long -suffering is God's patience towards sin and sinners. God's long -suffering is to allow more people to benefit from his loving grace and mercy.

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He persists to love believers, is seen in his forgiveness to men.

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You see this in 1 John 1, 8 and 9. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.

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If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.

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We see that he's faithful in that. He's going to be long -suffering. We see this in 2 Peter 3, 9.

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The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you not wishing that any should perish.

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We see that he has patience. He says to Peter that we should forgive 70 times 7. Aren't you glad that God is long -suffering with you?

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We don't have a great amount of tolerance, but God is a God of great tolerance. He expects man to be long -suffering as well, just as he is long -suffering with us, so we should be long -suffering with others.

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As we continue to look at the attributes of God, we come to the attribute of kindness.

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This fits under the attribute that we classify as morality, but when we look about God, we see that God is kind.

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He is not harsh to his children. We can show kindness because God has shown kindness to us.

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We know what kindness is because it comes from the nature of God. You can see that David had that expression in 2

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Samuel 9. After Saul is dead, and David is now king, it says in that verse,

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In other words, God showed David kindness, and therefore David naturally wanted to show kindness to the house of Saul.

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He wanted to show kindness because kindness was shown to him. We see in Titus 3 .4, it says,

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This is dealing in the realm of salvation, because the next verse is going to say we're not saved by works.

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It deals with that regeneration, but how does it describe it as the goodness and loving kindness of God?

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God is a kind God because he shows kindness to us. We should rightly show kindness to others.

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That's what we learn from the scriptures and about God's kindness. As we look at the last of the attributes of God that we want to examine, this last one in the area of morality is one of forgiveness.

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This is one that for Christians we value the most. We think about the forgiveness of God, and when we think about this, the fact is that God allows us, as it says in 1

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John, to continually come to him asking forgiveness over and over again. Which is an amazing thing.

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It kind of brings us back to something we looked at in the last couple of episodes with long suffering. But he welcomes us with open arms.

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In fact, James 1 .5 would say when we come asking for wisdom, he gives it to us without criticizing.

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So we can look at the forgiveness of God, and we see in Numbers 14 .18

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that the Lord is slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression.

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We see in Psalm 86 .5, for you, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call upon you.

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How forgiving is God? Well, in Psalm 103 .11 and 12 it says, for as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him.

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As far as the east is from the west, so does he remove transgressions from us.

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You can never meet the east and west. That's how far his forgiveness goes. This podcast is part of the

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Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org