Systematic Theology (part 17)

Elijah’s Prayer on Mount Carmel and the One True God

The last time I was here, we talked about some heresies and some misunderstandings of the Trinity. So we'll just start that, pick up a few other things, and then we'll wrap up. But before we do it, I want us to spend a few moments in prayer, silent prayer for each of us here.

And to preface the prayer, I'd like you to turn with me to 1 Kings chapter 18. It's a very famous passage that all of you are probably well familiar with. And I'm going to read verse, actually I'll have someone else read this, verse 36 and 37.

1 Kings chapter 18, verse 36 and 37. Who would like to read that? Ferdie? That's right. Here is Elijah praying a very momentous, at a very momentous occasion. Those of you who know what this event is, here is Israel having come through a major famine.

You have a wicked king on the throne, Ahab. The people are apostate, and God has now called the people to this mountain. And King Ahab is there, all the prophets of Baal are there, and just before the sacrifice, you have Elijah praying this prayer.

And I'm going to point out something about this two verses, but before we do that, Ferdie, if you can continue to read the prayer that the false prophets make. So if you can read verses 26 to 29, no one answered, no one paid attention.

So here are these people trying to invoke their God through these multitude of ways, putting themselves through this misery, hoping that their God would respond. But there is no such God. On the contrary, we saw what Elijah did.

It was a simple prayer. It should remind you of what happens in John 11, when Jesus is outside the tomb of Lazarus. And as he prays, you know, he prays, there's a dual focus. One primarily upward as he's speaking to his father, there doesn't need to be any magic, no incantations.

This is just a conversation because you have, Jesus has access before the father to speak. And then he, this is a public prayer where he wants the people to know what God is doing. And that's kind of what Elijah is doing here, reminding the people that what's happening is by the power of God and we have access before him and ought not to be like these apostate people.

So with this framing your mind and just to complete this event, you know what happens? These people pray, nothing happens. Elijah prays. And then we see in verse 38, the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt offering and the word and the stones and the dust and licked up the water that was in the trench.

And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said, the Lord Yahweh, he is God, the Lord, he is God. There was no question in the people's mind that there is one true God of heaven and earth and he answers his people in the time of need.

So the reason I brought this up was we've spent, as I said, a disjointed amount of time on a lot of different things, but the bulk of our time was focused on our God, who he is. We've seen many of his attributes.

We have seen how our God is a triune God. He is three persons. Each person of the Trinity, the father, the son, and the spirit are fully God. And there is only one God. We don't have three gods. We have only one God.

And as our mind has been framed with these attributes and the nature and the essence of who God is, we ought to be able to, we ought to be a people who come before the throne with wonder and awe and exalting him in our hearts and unashamed of our triune God in the world we live in.

So, you know, when we think of John Levin, there were these Jewish people who wanted to kill Jesus, but here was Jesus speaking to the father and demonstrating the power of God. And here you have a whole nation that, uh, and the King who is worshiper of Baal and Elijah comes there and says, I am not ashamed of the God whom I worship and you must be following him too.

So the focus of our prayer, we're going to take a few moments now is I'd like you to just take a few moments to pray to our triune God, to our God, who is three persons knowing the attributes that we've covered thus far as they wash over you as you speak to him as your Abba, as your father.

And as you pray, these are four things I want you to pray for. The second one is I'd like you to pray for our world. Those who do not know God to know our triune God. There's many time and I like to talk about a lot of things, but I don't like to talk about our triune God to our people.

So in let's pray for the world, the people that you know, you live with to know the triune God, pray for yourself to know more about the triune God, and that'll be the third. And the last one is that you can show others about our triune God to be able to speak of our, the Trinity, the father, the son, and the spirit to others.

So the four things are first, just to address your triune God with the attributes that you already know. Secondly, for our God, the world around us to know our triune God. The third is for us to know in greater measure, the depths of the riches of who are triune of each person of the Trinity and how they are one God.

And finally, for us to be able to communicate, to show others that our God is three persons in one Godhead. So let's just take a few moments. We'll pray and then we'll resume our class. A loving and gracious father, we thank you for sending us your son to reveal yourself through him in the word.

And we thank you for sending us, giving us your Holy Spirit. To indwell us, to illumine us. And to communicate with you by the spirit. Help us, oh father, the rest of this morning, as we study about you and as our hearts lift, are lifted up to worship you.

In Christ's name we pray. Amen. Isn't it good to just take a few moments to just pray? Does anyone want to say anything about, I'm going to be taking pieces now, but if anyone has something you want to say about what you've heard so far in the previous weeks or anything from your prayer that you want to just share, we'll take a few moments and then I'm going to be picking up from the heresies and then we'll go through several of God's attributes as we wrap up.

Does anyone want to speak about things about the Trinity that you've heard reflected or things you've prayed this morning? Okay. Last time when we met, we talked about a couple of different heresies. One of them was modalism.

Does anyone remember what modalism is? Excellent. So modalism says that there is one person in the Godhead. So they have a desire to maintain the unity. There is one God and we believe there is one God.

But the way they try to reconcile that with the rest of the scriptures is to take the scriptures that talk about the distinction between the Father, God the Father, God the Son and God the Spirit and say that these are not three individuals.

These are not three persons in and of themselves, but they are just three modes or ways in which God appears to people, whether in the Old Testament, New Testament or today. And we responded to that error by showing how there is a relationship between the Father and the Son that are distinct in the scriptures.

And we saw a few other ways in which we looked at those texts that the moralists would use and show them how the right way to interpret them would be not that there is one person, but there is a unity in the Godhead that they're talking about.

So some of the verses we saw where I and the Father are one, does that mean that I and the Father are one person or do I and the Father have a unity of purpose in the way and we act? And so we said you need to look at the context of the broader context of that chapter to understand what that verse means.

And I want to just make a side note here. I was listening back to my previous Sunday school and I realized a lot of this stuff that I'm talking about, we were covering, it seems a little abstract. Does it sound abstract to you when we start talking about the Trinity, the persons, the essence, or is that pretty straightforward, Joni?

Amen. And I think the thing you said about as you say even something as simple as the word Lord, what does that mean and what are the contexts and how do they apply to each of the persons of the Trinity?

And the more you're filled with biblical information, you know, here are some texts that talk about God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit, the more as you pray, as you communicate and as you understand, you are able to fill out the breadth of what God has revealed to us about himself as a triune God.

When I said philosophy, I'll make a comment now, as we close we're going to be talking about this some more. The scripture is not a textbook, you know, here are 10 different things about God, you know, you check these off and then you know God.

That's not how the Bible works. The way the scriptures are given to us, they are the revelation of God, they are progressive. So there is things that are revealed about the nature and the person and the character of God and they build up from beginning to the end.

And so by the time you come to revelation, you have a whole amount of data that is there. But for the first three centuries, people struggled with articulating all the content that is there in the Bible about our triune God.

So the word Trinity, in Latin Trinitas, Tertullian was the one who came up with it, but they didn't use it when he did in the second century. It was later that the term was adopted to even say, this is a term that actually summarizes our understanding.

Oh, thank you. This is a term that summarizes our understanding of all the data of scripture in a way that we can clearly communicate. So I'm going to be talking about communication at the very end, but the two terms I want to just focus and then move on is, we talk about the persons, three persons and being or essence, one essence, the term that I used are usia for the being or essence and hupostasis or the persons that each of them represent.

And these are godly men in the early church that spent a lot of time trying to understand how can I comprehend three persons. Now the challenge that the people had was, we see individuals as human individuals.

When I see two human individuals, two persons, they are not one in anything more than just we belong to the genus or I don't know biologically what we classify ourselves, you know, homosapiens or this is how we share something.

There's nothing more than that when we have a commonality. But when we talk about the deity, there is a whole lot more that goes on there. So when we talk about usia, there is one God and then there is hupostasis or three persons.

Now the person part of it, I think most of us would understand. An individual, you know, as someone who is distinct from someone else, as a person who wills, loves, acts, chooses. So they have all these attributes that they embody in and of themselves.

And then when we think of the essence, that becomes more abstract as we try to say, you know, in what are the characters. So then we think of attributes. Here are all the things that God and God alone has that they all share in one.

This is and we're going to be looking at attributes next. So I want you to know this because sometimes when you look at heretics, you might say, you know, I could have been a heretic if I wasn't taught in the word, if I wasn't shown from the scriptures how all these scriptures come together, how discounting one text of scripture can be disastrous when it comes to the nature of God and who he is.

And so while these concepts may seem hard and difficult, and it was, as I was listening to myself, you want to be careful in realizing this is important just because these are maybe difficult doesn't mean that these are, you know, okay, you know, I could be a Trinitarian or a Unitarian and no big deal.

Trinity is vital in terms of understanding who our God is. Any comments or thoughts on this? That's that is so true that when we say Trinity, we are actually already saying things that we cannot wrap our mind around.

I'm glad you brought that because there is we have analogous principles that we can look at in terms of even the physical universe that we cannot wrap our minds around. You know, quantum physics is a whole bunch of stuff there that we just can't say, oh, you know, it's black and white in terms of trying to explain and how much more when we're talking about the spiritual realm and how much infinitely more when we're talking not just about a created object, but rather about the infinite God.

So we just are jumping scales of magnitude when we think of and then at some point we just lose things. Now, there are two sides to this, and I want to be careful about this because God is triune because his nature is three persons in one being.

You get to see images or reflections of it in the created order in dimly lit ways. So I think some of the examples, I don't think I wrote them down here. Actually I did. Some of the examples we have have to do even with something as simple as marriage, you know, two persons in one flesh.

You know, what does that look like? You get a simple, something to think about as you unravel that. And then you have, you know, the analogies that we try to use are all fall far short of explaining. They may give us a step ladder, step stool, if you will, but it is trying to reach for the stars with that.

When you think of three in one type concepts, you know, people have used what water, ice and vapor, you know, even in triple point at the right pressure, you have all of them at the same thing, but they are still not the same.

You know, we try to think of various ways in which we can describe them, but they all fall short. And so we need to remember our human mind because it's finite, it's limited and it has fallen, cannot comprehend these things, but comprehend these things fully.

But we try to use the data of scripture. And I think as Pastor Bob was saying, that's what we want to stand on as we fill out our knowledge about our triune God. I wanted to pick on one thing that was said by two of you here.

Subordinationism, Begottenness, and the Nicene Response

One of the other heresies we looked at was subordinationism. And subordinationism said that there's a couple of ways of saying it. One of them that the father is the big God, the son is a little lesser God and the spirit is maybe, you know, a little lesser equal with the son or maybe even a little lesser than him, just because of the way in which you see them operating.

And so we talked about the error there being, you know, when you have something lesser than God, then you don't have God by definition, you know, God by definition is unbounded and omnipotent and there cannot be any limitations to the power of God to be God.

So that's why subordinationism, when it comes to the being or ontological subordinationism is a heresy. But on the other hand, we have functional subordinationism. So I think when we are talking about praying to the Lord, we know in the way in which the father is primary in terms of how he functions and how the son is pleased to do the will of the father.

Not because, you know, he's forced to or has to or he's somehow under obligation to, but because of the love that the father, son and the spirit share, there is a role that they each take in each of the functions, whether we've seen in creation, how the father, son and the spirit are involved in the way in which it operates.

We've seen in salvation, how the father chooses and the son dies for and the spirit seals and a whole lot more. So we see how they operate together. So there is a role distinction when it comes to subordinationism and the heretics would take words like, for example, begotten and say, well, if the son is begotten, then he cannot be something else.

You know, maybe he's not eternal. Maybe he is not on par with the father because he was begotten. And so a couple of responses that were given to that. One was, actually, maybe I'll just, for the sake of time, I'm just going to say one thing and then we'll move on.

Modern studies have actually shown the Greek that is used in that period. The people always understood, assumed that only begotten, monogamous, had the root form in being born, you know, the birth. And really, it doesn't share that same root as the birth that we've been used to.

So this is one of those word studies that is worth looking into. So if you want to study more, you can go back and look at the word monogamous or only begotten and you will see that it is actually distinct.

But in the third century, one of the Cappadocian fathers tried to explain the analogous principle, how this would be different than our human begetting. Because most people, they looked at it, they said, begetting, that means I need to be earlier in time.

I need to be the cause of this child's birth. And therefore, there is an ontological subordination between God the father and God the son. And so, one of the Cappadocian fathers, he said, you know, the way you can conceive of the begotten is like the rays of the sun that come out of the sun.

It is not, you don't have the rays without the sun. You don't have the sun without the rays. They are all part of the same thing. But you can understand that one proceeds from the other in the way in which they are structured.

So you know, this is just again a limited, but a way in which to conceive of what begotten could be. And then those were the type of responses that were given. The other one was firstborn. You know, if he is born first in relation to the rest of the creation, then he's a created being, then we shouldn't worship him.

And once again, Hebrews 12, 6, that doesn't talk about birth in time. It is talking about the rights and privileges that Jesus as a human, as fully human has over all of creation as well, because he is preeminent.

And that's the sense you get from firstborn. So let me, there was the, and then you, some of, you know, this term homoousios and homoousios, you know, if, because we cannot understand what it means to be one essence, you know, father, son, and the spirit, we've seen Jesus as a human being.

And for us to, to equate the son to be of the same essence with the father seems somehow to bring the father down. You know, here is a human person that we're saying is of the same essence with a father.

There could be a problem there. And so, you know, Christology would develop later. We'll study Christology at, in a few weeks from now, where we try to distinguish the divine nature and the human nature in Jesus Christ.

So he's both fully God, as well as fully man. And when we talk about the divine nature of the son, there is absolutely no distinction when it comes to the essence, they are homo or same oozeos substance.

So son and the father have the same substance. And in fact, in the Nicene Creed, Nicene Council, one of the big mediators was trying to say, okay, let's not call them hetero oozeos, you know, hetero is different.

The son is not different from the father, but let's call them homo oozeos, similar substance. You know, maybe they are, Jesus clearly has divine attributes, but to call him God would be challenging. So let's call him homo, and that would be another heresy.

And in the Nicene Council, that was refuted to say, Jesus from the scripture is fully and completely God, to say anything less than that would impugn the character of God, the second person of the Trinity.

And it would also hazard your salvation, because without Jesus being fully God, you do not have atonement in your place, as the Bible would speak of it. All right. So here are some of the heresies we looked, so I'm just wrapping that up.

Now, I want to, any questions or thoughts or comments? Yes, Charlie. Excellent. Well said. You know, just again, connecting with what Pastor Bob said, our responsibility is to let the scripture speak.

The best way for us to understand the scripture is to let the scripture interpret itself through its breath, and to rightly exegete. So when you look at any text, like, there is a specific reason why God the Father is called Father, why God the Son is called the Son.

And we want to draw out the implications of those, but we ought not to exegete or put in our idea of Father and Son into the text and say, oh, because I am a father and I have a son, this is how God the Father and Son must be.

So we want to perfectly set, you know, and that's one of the things I was talking about Trinity. When we talk about the triune nature, we see the reflections on it, and scholars write like tons of papers on these things about the various areas, you know, work and family and love, all these areas where you see the overflow of the triune nature and the essence of God and his attributes that we can see reflections of.

We as humans are image bearers. We ourselves reflect, like even spirit and body, you know, two things in us that work together. I mean, how do you divide the spirit and your body? You could die, but I mean, to distinguish, to understand how they operate, you can't.

It's something as simple as what, who we are. And you know, we have things there that flow out of the nature of God as we reflect him and all of creation reflects him. Thank you. Any other thoughts? All right.

Communicating the Trinity to Unbelievers

I want to switch now gears a little bit. Until this point, I was focusing primarily on worship. You know, we want to understand so our hearts are lifted up and exalting as we understand who our God is.

I want us to switch now to show. Until now, we were focusing on knowing. Now we want to focus on showing to a world that does not know God. How do we communicate the God of the Bible? So for example, if you think of atheists, they may think of two different responses.

One could be okay. If you say father is God, son is God, Holy Spirit is God. You know, you must be worshiping three gods, you know, actually, is that a heresy that does try theism in Christian niece world, try theism, three gods, God, the father, I worship God, the father, God, the son, God, the spirit as three gods, that that's right.

So it would be a heresy. Can you think of anybody today who does that? Yeah, I'm unfamiliar with that. But you know, that would be a danger in terms of losing the unity of the Godhead. And especially for someone from that background, when you think of Deuteronomy six, you'd want them to say, I have to focus more to understand how they are one.

But separating out would be a challenge, would be dangerous. Now, as I was looking for examples for this one, I was shocked because I was thinking, you know, sometimes I'm probably a practical try theist, because I can, when I'm praying to God, I can reflect on God, the father, I reflect on God, this son, or when I'm thinking about some attributes, when I'm thinking of the spirit.

But there are times when I generically pray, and I can think of, you know, there being one God. But I don't think I spend enough time reflecting upon the unity or the one essence of the Godhead. And just something to think about it, it was just me as I was reflecting on my worship of God in my quiet times, you know, I can, I often think of each of the distinctions in the three persons, but I don't often remember that there is one God in three persons.

Just a passing comment. But that one thought to keep in mind as you're speaking to unbelievers, possibly atheists or any other religion. The second one is the irrationality of it. So you know, you have three persons, you have one God, and you know, there's really no way for us to put them together.

And I think Pastor Bob was trying to say, you know, the reason is because your mind is incapable of doing this, this higher math, if you will, you know, there is a math, our brains are wired to do a certain type of math, and that is incapable of doing this.

And I think one of the apologists, you know, said this in a joke, he said, well, I can kind of give you an analogy for you to think of when you do this equation three and one. Well, how would you give me this answer?

What's infinity plus infinity plus infinity? Okay. So, you know, that's just a simple way of saying, oh, okay, conceptually, even our earthly math has that idea that, you know, there is only one, but the thing is, in the end of the day, we don't have the capacity to understand them further.

Okay. So with that, I want us to take a few moments, we are going to just rapidly rush through a bunch of attributes here. I'd like some volunteers to read some scriptures, so just raise your hand and you can turn to it.

Then we'll go through them one at a time. So if someone can read, I need someone to read Acts 17, 24 to 25, Larry, I need someone to read Psalm 102, 25 to 27, Mark, I need someone to read Psalm 90 verse two.

Okay. I need someone to read Psalm 139 verses seven to 10. Okay. And then I need someone to read Exodus 34, six to seven. Thank you. And then John four, 24, maybe I can have the other person. And then first Timothy one, 17.

Okay. And then one John three, 20, Roman 16, 27, Brad. And then Jeremiah 10, 10 and 11, numbers 23, 19, we had a few hands here. Thank you. And then Luke 18, 19, thank you. One John four, eight. Thank you.

All right. And then, uh, let's stop with the second Samuel, 24, 14. Last one. Thank you. All right. So I'm going to just run through a bunch of attributes here. You know, we've, we've been looking at some of these attributes in the triune Trinity, but I just want you to focus on the attributes as you think of who God is.

And then we will apply that in communicating this to unbelievers. So, um, before we begin, just, just to, uh, remind ourselves, God, actually, let me give you this definition, incomprehensibility of God, because God is infinite and we are finite.

We can never fully or exhaustively understand any single thing about him. Uh, well, let me rephrase, reread that we can never fully or exhaustively understand any single thing about him. Not every single thing about him, but any single thing about him.

You take any attribute, that attribute, you can only know that thus far and no more because we are finite and he's infinite. On the flip side, the knowability of God, we can know God truly because we are the Bible.

We can know him personally because he's in a relationship with us and saves us and sufficiently what we need to know the word reveals to us and we, we know about him. So we know him as he is, and we can have an abundant and eternal life that comes from this knowledge.

So just keep that in the back. And now let's look at the attributes. The first few attributes are the incommunicable attributes. These are attributes that God and God alone possesses, and, uh, we don't.

So the first one is independence or asiety. We've talked about this a little bit before, but the definition goes this way. God does not need us or the rest of creation for anything yet. We, and the rest of creation can glorify him and bring him joy.

So God is independent. That's the attribute of asiety where he does not need anything at all. And we as contingent creatures all need something, but God doesn't need anything in his existence. So the worst we had, there was act 17, 24 and 25.

Who has that? Excellent. I'm not going to comment on this, uh, just a idea of pagan worship. You know, the, their gods are served and therefore in some way need something. Our God doesn't need anything.

He's the one who gives us all. Uh, the next one is, uh, unchangeableness or immutability here. God is unchanging in his, let me ask the question. Is God unchanging before I read the definition? Okay. Anybody want to dispute that?

Okay. We have two heads disputing that. Let me go this way. Yes. He is unchanging, but he can change his mind. Okay. Okay. I hope, could you all hear what Charlie said? Okay. Okay. And, and as he was using, you know, there are many words there like anthropopathism, you know, where there is an emotional content in God's, uh, response to us.

That is similar to our thing, but it is a, it is a bringing down of the way God thinks in order for us to comprehend it. So that's the, that, uh, we see a lot of that language there now. And again, Charlie used a couple of other concepts.

One being the decree of God, which is settled. It never changes. And yet you have the, uh, communication of God in time and space. You know, this is eternal, but in time and space, you know, uh, Jonah to Nineveh, you know, here is what is said.

And Jonah doesn't know the rest of the story because God's decree is already settled. But when, uh, Nineveh repents, there is a response that comes. And when you take that down and put it in a human frame, you know, this is where it becomes very complex for us because in the mind of God, everything is settled.

He is outside of time and eternal. We live in time and we are contingent beings who, who pass by choices and decisions and actions. And God promises certain certain responses to unbelief, wickedness, repentance, and godliness.

And so here, as we walk through the corridors of time, you have God interacting with us and communicating to us in the, in the pages of scriptures. And so I think, you know, both of you kind of summarize the challenges we normally have with understanding the unchangeableness of God, but now let's look at the definition immutability.

And here are the things in which he is immutable, immutable. He is unchanging in his being, in his perfections, in his purposes, in his promises, and that's the unchangeableness. Yet he acts and feels emotions in response to different situations.

Now, this is an implication of what you both mentioned, where sometimes people would push the idea of unchangeableness to the point of saying, you know what? If God is to be, you know, my idea of the ideal God, he shouldn't feel emotions as he responds to humanity.

So, you know, yeah, I knew this guy was going to sin. I knew he was going to repent. So I'm just going to be above it all. You know, that's not the kind of God we worship. He is a God who loves, who is actively involved.

Although he's outside of time and space, he is engaged with his creation, especially those who are his redeemed and he loves them. And, you know, the scripture is filled with those texts. So you need to be very careful in understanding in what sense is he unchangeable and in what sense in which he actually experiences joy with us.

So just keep that in mind. Um, and we'll move. Oh, well, I haven't read the verse. If someone can read the person with Psalm 102 verses 25 to 27. And if part of it talks about the eternal nature, but in comparison, when you look at creation, these things change, whereas God does not, uh, the next one eternity, God has no beginning end or succession of moments in his own being.

He sees all time equally vividly yet. God sees events in time and acts in time. So similar ideas, unchangeable as God is above it all in this, he can see everything in time and space, but he can also intervene as he did with Jesus Christ coming at a specific point in time.

And today, when we pray, God intervenes and he acts and he sustains and does all those. So, uh, Psalm 90 verse two, and we've been looking at that was a lot from everlasting to everlasting, you know, infinity to infinity of time.

God exists, uh, omnipresence. God does not have size or spatial dimensions, and he is present at every point of space with his whole being. Yet God acts differently in different places. We've seen this attribute as well because he is spirit.

We don't want to think of him as an extended being, meaning he just is stretched out to all of the universe, uh, because he doesn't just inhabit this universe universe we think of as time and space. And matter, but God is beyond all of this because he is spirit.

Uh, but at the same time, God does inhabit the heaven in his glory and his worship. God is present right here, right now in his in triune nature. And God, we saw the other time we will be in hell as well judging.

So he will be at, he is everywhere acting according to his, uh, good pleasure. The verse for that is, uh, Psalm 139 versus seven to 10. Thank you. Um, the next one is unity. God's attributes are not divided into parts yet.

We see different attributes emphasized at different times. Uh, I think Sinclair Ferguson told pastor Mike this, you know, what is God doing right now? He's exercising all of his attributes perfectly. You know, at, there is no one attribute is, is I don't exercise that right now because he exercises all of them.

So the versus Exodus 34 versus six to seven. Who, who has Exodus 34? Yes. And you can see some of the summary attributes of love and, uh, uh, holiness and judgment. So all of these things, you know, are some of the attributes that are listed here.

Uh, I'm going to take a few more moments here. So if some of you need to leave for your classes, feel free to, we'll, we'll just read the rest of the verses that we have read and then we'll stop. Uh, so, so far we've seen the incommunicable attributes.