March 3, 2025 Show with Mark Jones on “God Is: A Devotional Guide to the Attributes of God”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours and we hope to hear from you the listener with your own.

Questions. And now here's your host Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this third day of March 2025. Before I introduce my guest and our co-host and our topic for the day, I just want to remind our listeners to please pray for my sister Mary.

I first of all want to thank you, all of you, the hundreds of you who have assured me you are praying for my sister Mary who not only recently had a leg amputated but is now back in the hospital with an upper respiratory virus.

She had tubes, breathing tubes, inserted down her throat until yesterday. They were removed so she could eat and drink. She had not eaten or drank in three days. Please pray for her physical healing. Please pray for her to be drawn closer to Jesus Christ that she would shed and repent of any of her false and idolatrous beliefs within the Roman Catholic Church.

And please pray that she is restored to full health and that I can enjoy her as my sister here on this earth for at least a few more years. I also want to thank all of you who had been praying for my brother Andy who just died last Saturday, and I appreciate your continued prayers for me and my family as we mourn and are going to be arranging, God willing, at some point in the month or two to follow, arranging a memorial service out on Long Island, New York, where we are from, and I appreciate all your prayers.

The prayers of the brethren have been indescribably supportive, encouraging, and comforting to me, and I can't say enough to thank you for them. But today I am very delighted to have a first-time guest.

His name is Mark Jones, and he's an author and pastor of Faith Reform Presbyterian Church of Vancouver, British Columbia, which is a congregation in the Presbyterian Church in America, also known as the PCA, and today we're going to be addressing one of his latest books, God Is, A Devotional Guide to the Attributes of God.

It's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Trip.

And Zion Radio, Pastor Mark Jones. Thank you very much for having me. And I also.

Salvation Testimony and Reformed Conversion

Want to welcome back to the show my pastor, Simon O'Maney, at Trinity Reform Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and he is going to be serving as our co-host today. One of the reasons I asked him to do so is that he is actually running a men's book study on the devotional we are addressing today, God Is, by my guest, Pastor Mark Jones.

So I thought it was ideal to have Simon on with us today as a co-host, since he thought so highly of this book that he wanted to do a weekly study on it. But it's great to have you back on the.

Program, Simon O'Maney. Thanks, Chris. It's a pleasure to be able to discuss this.

With you brothers this afternoon. Great. Well, first of all, Pastor Mark, if you could let our listeners know something more about Faith Reform Presbyterian.

Church of Vancouver, British Columbia. We are, as you mentioned, a Presbyterian church, and I've been ministering there for roughly 17 years. And we have now, in a bit of a strange providential twist, we have two sites.

So a Sunday morning at 9 a .m. I drive to our site. We just started in Surrey, which not just started, a few years it's been going, and it's really ballooned in a certain sense. And then after that, I drive into Vancouver, where historically we've met for many decades.

And I preach at the 11 a .m. service, and then we have our 5 p .m. We're one of the few churches, I think, in maybe Western Canada that has a morning and evening. So it's a busy Lord's Day, but a fruitful one, I hope.

And I've got a great, great church body. Very grateful to the Lord for sustaining me this long in one church, and couldn't ask for anything more, really.

Well, if anybody wants to find out more about Faith Reform Presbyterian Church of Vancouver, British Columbia, you could go to faithvan .com. Faithvan .com. And Pastor Simon O'Maney, if you could please give our listeners a description of Trinity Reform Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Yeah, we are a body of believers, covenanted together as a church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. We subscribe to the London Baptist Confession of Faith. That's what we believe is a solid and reliable, accurate representation of the doctrines of Scripture.

We gather, of course, each Lord's Day, and you can find our details on Facebook, or you can find our website by googling Trinity Reform Baptist Church Carlisle.

And I have been rejoicing to see the small and new church growing, and I think are we close to 40 members already?

We're getting there. We're also blessed with a lot of children. Maybe if we were Presbyterians, we could, I don't know if we can add those numbers, Mark, what you think they're at. We have about almost 40 children, so as many, if not more, children than members.

So we take that responsibility very seriously, and are desiring to train up our children well in the fear and admonition of the Lord.

Well, the website, once again, is trbccarlisle .org, and I believe our deacon, Daniel Wolford, has even secured .com as well. Well, we have a tradition here, Pastor Mark, whenever we have a first-time guest on this program, of which you are one, we have that guest give a summary of their salvation testimony that would include any kind of religious upbringing that they may or may not have had, and the kinds of providential circumstances that our Sovereign Lord raised up in their lives that raised them to himself and saved them.

So we would love to hear a summary of your story.

Thanks. I grew up in a family that was very, I would say, the classic word is nominally Christian, and to varying degrees through their lives, my parents. So sometimes, you know, we were dragged off to church for weeks on end, and then we wouldn't go to church for months on end, and kind of that pattern.

But I always had a very strong sense of God and Christianity being true, and I grew up, I was baptized as a baby in the Church of England in South Africa. I was the only one in my family, actually. My dad wasn't even baptized, my mom, my sister, and then my younger brother.

So I was the only person baptized. So I kind of had this feeling that I should be a Christian. So growing up, as much as my parents offered, you know, certain benefits of what the faith was, I also, at different parts of my life was closer or farther away from God, but never really, what I would say, truly living for his glory on a consistent basis.

I mean, I asked him into my heart, Christ, you know, I heard that's what you're supposed to do, and did it several times. And then when you don't have a church life or anything, you can do that with all the good intention in the world, but it's, you know, a day later, a week later, you're going to just go back to living how you were.

So it wasn't until the university, I went to the University of Wisconsin to play soccer. I got a soccer scholarship there and thought, you know, I had everything going for me and kind of realized quickly that I didn't.

And got quite depressed and realized that I needed the Lord. And I heard some tapes, some cassette tapes that were sent to my dad from South Africa by a friend of his, of a preacher whose preaching was so different than what I'd ever heard.

And it was listenable. It was interesting. He had a great preaching voice. And so I was converted listening to these tapes, I believe, while working for my dad on the roof. He owned a roofing company in the summers, and I'd be listening to cassette tapes all day long of sermons and content about the Baptist preacher, Albert Martin, that way, and listen to a lot of his stuff eventually.

So that's sort of how it happened was just university first year and cassette tapes, which I don't think many people listen to cassette tapes anymore. But that was.

My, my entrance into the faith. So I'm assuming... Go ahead, I'm sorry. No, sorry.

The first church I went to in Wisconsin, when I felt I'm a Christian, I walked down the street and walked in and there was this lady preaching and it turned out it was a LGBTQ friendly church. I didn't really know what was happening.

So that was the first and last time I went in there. I just knew something was off. And yeah, so it took a while to find a good Reformed church, but the Lord eventually took care of me.

So I'm assuming since the preaching of Albert N. Martin of Trinity Baptist Church in Montville, New Jersey, well, the former pastor there before retirement, I'm assuming since he was a part of your introduction to the Christian faith, or you're getting drawn into the faith and into Christ, especially, that your embracing of Reformed theology was very soon after or simultaneous with becoming a Christian?

Yeah, yeah, kind of always. When I became a Christian, I just, everything I believed and upon I believed matched up well with Calvin. And I had a little mini book of his institutes that my dad had, and I read through it and, you know, it just all made sense to me.

And yeah, so it was, there was no sort of wrestling with Arminianism versus those types of things. It was just a sort of, I knew God was sovereign. In fact, the verse that converted me, I think, was Romans 8 .28, that God works all things together for good to those who love him.

And I, you know, I just wanted everything to work together for my good, but needed to love him. But it could only be a promise if God was in fact sovereign. So it wasn't hard for me to embrace Reformed theology.

Well, Pastor Simon, and I will forgive you for not following Pastor Martin all the way into Reformed Baptist ecclesiology.

I was in the basement of Trinity Baptist Church in Montville, New Jersey, listening to his tapes on baptism, and I actually can say with a clear conscience, I tried with all my heart to become a Reformed Baptist.

Okay, well, there is still hope while you're alive. But, Pastor Simon, what was it about The Devotional Guide to the Attributes of God, what was it about this book that stood out as a book that you wanted to begin a men's study using it?

The Doctrine of God and the Structure of God Is

Yeah, well, I think the doctrine of God in general is a doctrine that the church needs to recover, and it has been encouraging to see maybe more of a resurgence in an interest in that doctrine. And so when I had read Dr. Jones' book on knowing Christ and thought it was extremely helpful, just even in terms of the organization, I think the organization itself, with each chapter being somewhat short and sort of punchy and to the point, I think that lends itself to help people understand what could be something quite complex and difficult to understand.

And I think God is organized in the same kind of way. And I think it's very, very helpful for introducing people who maybe don't have those Christian Reformed Orthodox categories for understanding the doctrine of God.

And so I thought for my own group of guys in our church, that would be something very, very helpful. Mark, if I could ask you what led you to write God is, was there perhaps a particular need or gap that you wanted to address?

I don't know if there was a need or gap, I just after writing Knowing Christ, I always wanted to write something on God because the attributes of God was something that I tangentially studied as I was working on the Puritans and Thomas Goodwin.

And in fact, there was a book, A Puritan Theology, that I co-authored with Joel Beakey. And I remember writing chapters and he'd be like, OK, we need another one this week. You've got a week to write on Charnock and the attributes of God.

I was like, what? So I managed, I think I pulled it off. Maybe the chapter reflects the fact that I should have taken longer, but reading Charnock, I thought, OK, this is amazing, but how many people are going to read Charnock?

So what I wanted to do is take Knowing Christ, take the doctrine of God and almost wrap them up together and put it out. So that's why the format of God is very structured in terms of doctrine, Christ and then application, because I'm a preacher.

So what's the point of these doctrines for how we live the Christian life? And I thought if I can just have that threefold focus in each chapter, it'd probably be useful to the church in a way that maybe Charnock's volumes might be intimidating to the average lay person.

I just wanted to read a few commendations for this book by one sister in Christ and two brothers in Christ who I have all had on this program a number of times. My friend, Rosaria Butterfield, former professor of English at Syracuse University and author of The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert.

She is also, for those of you unfamiliar with Rosaria, a former lesbian and leftist and Marxist who was rescued by the sovereign grace and mercy of Christ and is now a vibrant Christian and married to a Reformed Presbyterian pastor.

And just a delight to know and call my friend. But she has written about this book in 27 concise chapters. God is, invites, equips, edifies, confronts, and challenges God's people to know God better and love him more.

This is Mark Jones at his best, combining his theological breadth and depth with his pastor's heart. My longtime dear friend, Dr. Joel Beakey, the aforementioned Dr. Beakey, president of Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, says most treatments of God's attributes are like vast mining operations that use massive theological machinery to plumb the depths of divine revelation.

Mark Jones hands us the diamonds of God's perfections already mined out and polished to enrich our souls immeasurably. Study this book, read it with your family, discuss it with your small groups, teach it to your church class, and give it to your neighbor.

This is a gem indeed. And finally, Dr. Michael A .G. Haken, professor of church history and biblical spirituality at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, writes, written in the tradition of J. I. Packer's Knowing God, Jones's work is an extremely helpful and needful primer on our great God and his all-beautiful character.

Highly recommended as a tool for personal devotion or group study. And that's just three of many of the commendations that this book has received. What of the attributes of God can you highlight in this book that you believe many Christians get wrong or just have an inadequate understanding or explanation of.

Them?

Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I haven't really thought about what attributes many Christians get wrong, I think probably God's sovereignty, God is sovereign or his providence. And I don't mean that they get that wrong, but I think Christians struggle with the Reformed view of how secondary causes work.

The Westminster Confession, chapter three, section one has a great summary statement of God being sovereign, but also that secondary causes are a big part of how God is sovereign and that the liberty of our will is not in any way taken away by God's sovereignty.

And I think most Christians, when they become Reformed, a lot of them kind of almost swing a little too far and don't quite affirm the freedom of the will, which is a phrase that is used all the time throughout Reformed history.

So that's one where I think we could probably tighten up a little just on how do we speak about both truths adequately. And, you know, there's other things like God's love. I think Calvinist Reform, you know, again, new early cage stages, the popular phrase people use, but God's love for all his preachers, you know, and then God's sort of love for his son and God's love for himself and God's love for his people.

And then even God's, you know, unique love that he has for us when we please him. And there's so many different concentric circles of God's love that it's not just one or the other. It's quite multifaceted that God loves all that he's created.

He loves even the non-elect in a certain sense. So I think if that's another one, Christians probably don't do so well on in terms of understanding God's love. There's no way that we can ever charge God with not having loved his creatures, and no one will be able to say to God, you never loved me.

Now, before I have Pastor Simon ask a question, just to clarify, since Romans 8 tells us those who are in the flesh cannot please God, that would include a willful act of embracing him for salvation and trusting in him alone for salvation.

This text would indicate since that pleases God, it cannot be an act performed by a lost person still in the flesh. So when you say that we do have a freedom of the will, even innately as dead, lost sinners, I'm assuming what you mean is we have the freedom to make choices and act upon them, but because of our natures, we will not seek to humble ourselves and please God by our nature.

And we always act according to our nature, and we are free to act according to our nature, but we will not freely run to Christ until we are regenerate. Am I making sense there, and do you agree with what I said?

Yeah, I think we choose freely according to the nature that we have, and those that are in the flesh cannot please God. That's, I think, pretty standard Reformed theology. But on the other hand, there's other things like, I'm able to use my mouth right now, and I'm not being impeded in any way.

I can move my arm. And, you know, there's things like that type of freedom as well. It's like a physical freedom, which can be limited, obviously, by sickness or things like that. So, you know, there's just different, it's like God's love.

There's different ways of understanding these things. And as long as you have the time and patience to explain what you mean, that's why I don't like Internet drive-by theology. I'm not a big fan of theology on Twitter, because I just, I feel like so much is left to the reader to fill in everything, to make it all make sense.

So that's why books are important. That's why sermons are important, because it allows the reader, the writer, the speaker to understand exactly what's being said and what's not being said.

You don't think that Christians are at their most well-behaved on the Internet?

I've seen my own self not well-behaved on the Internet, so that's why I'm like, listen, this is not a good place. You know, on Twitter, I just, I just get mad because so much stupidity and then I'm part of it.

So I just now just look at Liverpool winning games and news about them, which, which is something I'm sure Simon is really happy to embrace with me as well.

But as far as love, as far as the love of God to all of creation, would you not say to clarify that statement that he only loves his elect, his children, as a spouse or as a father, and that is a privilege that cannot be claimed by those outside of Christ?

Yeah, I mean, in the chapter on God's love, I believe I start with God has a universal love toward all things. You know, the Lord is good to all his mercies over all that he's made. And then, you know, God has a love towards human beings, both elect and reprobate in terms of the fact that he allows his son to shine on the just and the unjust.

But then he has a special love towards his people, which, you know, Peter will describe in 1 Peter 2 .9, you know, things like you're a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, and there's certain language that's reserved only for the bride of Christ.

So, again, it's trying to balance all of the different concentric circles, is what I call them, of God's love. And, you know, this is, again, something that you've got to affirm, but then explain why you do that.

So even, you know, I make a statement and you then go, OK, so what you mean by this is that. And I'm like, yeah, that's precisely what I mean by that when it's explained. And that's what the book obviously is attempting to do.

And even in a summary fashion.

And Pastor Simon, you have a question?

Yeah, something maybe a little bit more, you know, of a practical question. How would you say that. Our view of God and. You know, having a high view of God impacts our pastoral ministry or preaching, even our worship services in our churches.

The Practical Impact of a High View of God

Yeah, I think, you know, everyone would I mean, every pastor I talk to who has half a soul and half a heart and half a brain would say, and that's most of us, you know, we all want to have a high view of God.

But then, you know, sometimes it's like, OK, do we have a high view of God? And, you know, if you have God's love almost created in a sense to envelop everything else, what role does God's trinity or what role does God's holiness, what role does God's, you know, majesty of a chapter on the majesty of God, how does that affect the way in which you come to worship, the way in which you enjoy worship, the way in which you leave worship?

And I think what's helped me over the years is to not have a view of God that is somewhat partial, but true. So, you know, there's things that people believe about God and it's true, but it's like a half truth, which J .I. Packer says, you know, when a half truth masquerades as a full truth, it quickly becomes a complete untruth.

And so I think, you know, Hebrews 12, 18 to 29, I think, would be a great example of the attributes of God all coming together in a sense when it comes to worship. And there's a lot of majesty there, a lot of holiness, but also love.

Well, we have to go to our first commercial break right now. And if you would like to join the conversation on the air with a question of your own, you may submit it to chrisarnsen at gmail .com. C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-S-E-N at gmail .com.

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Christology and the Attributes of God

Welcome back, and if you just.

Tuned us in, our guest today is Mark Jones. We are discussing his book, God Is, a devotional guide to the attributes of God. And my co-host today is my pastor, Simon O'Maney, at Trinity Reformed Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, who has recently started a men's study on this book, God Is.

And for more details on Trinity Reformed Baptist Church of Carlisle, go to trbccarlisle .org. And Simon, I know that you are itching to ask our guest questions because of your love of this book. If you want to continue and start the next segment with a question.

Yeah, earlier, Mark, you mentioned how you frame the book around the attributes of Christ, or each chapter leads into relating the attribute to Christ, and then going into application. Why do you think that's, why did you think that was helpful?

Why do you think it's important that our theology of God sort of flows into our Christology?

My basic understanding of the Scriptures is not only that, you know, Christ's words on the road to mass, where, you know, beginning with Moses and the prophets, he explains to his disciples how all of the Scriptures, you know, speak of him in one way or another.

It's also the fact that he is the clearest representation of God that we can possibly conceive. He is the visible image of the invisible God, you know, the exact imprint of his being, you know, there's he who has seen Christ has seen the Father.

And so if you really want to understand God's attributes as they are revealed to us, you can look nowhere better than in his Son, who is the one that God has spoken through and in and by and so on. So I think any doctrine of God that doesn't have a rich Christology built into it is probably biblically defective for those reasons, and would then be pastorally defective, because you're leading people to possibly a conception of God that is sub-Christian.

By the way, we do have...

To my shame, to my shame, I haven't read Charnock. But from what you remember, is that something that Charnock does?

He does, in sort of the uses or applications, it comes up quite a bit. And then he also will scatter comments throughout in ways in which clearly Christ is able to reveal these attributes of God in unique ways.

In fact, in some ways, only he can, that wouldn't be true of anyone else, in terms of the analogy of what it looks like in a person, a human being, even. So, yeah, I think Charnock did that. But maybe it's something that I've read some books on, the doctrine of God, and I haven't really been as convinced of the Christological focus as I think needs to be there.

We do have a listener question from Bobby in Hartsdale, New York, and he says and asks, I know that there are some Christians, perhaps even especially Reformed, who have a very strong rigidity about their views of the attributes of God and other things of God that I think sometimes may be delving into the secret mysteries of God, and yet they are holding them as dogma and judging other Christians accordingly.

Do you think sometimes we go overboard in thinking that we can know the mind of God without being God Himself?

I mean, I assume that the questioner has some specific examples in mind. So for me, it's hard to, I mean, in one sense, I'm sure there's people who could go overboard. I'll just speak in my own context.

I don't find people say things and believe things that would be necessarily so rigid based upon unknowables. That's just not something I've come across. I mean, we have our problems in Canada, don't get me wrong.

But that's like a huge problem for me in my local context. Maybe Simon has a better understanding of it out on the East Coast there, but it's not something I deal with a whole lot, to be honest.

Do you have any comments on that, Simon?

Yeah, I mean, I would comment to that and say that, you know, some of it is going to depend on what kind of church tradition you're a part of. So for Mark and myself, we are both part of a confessional tradition.

Not only do we hold to the ancient creeds of the Church, but also to the London Baptist Confession and the Westminster Confession of Faith, respectively. And in terms of the Westminster and the London Baptist Confession, they both commonly affirm the same things with regard to the doctrine of God.

And so, well, I won't speak for Mark, but I think I can. But certainly for myself, when I get into the pulpit and when I preach and when I teach, and even in informal ways as I'm teaching Bible studies, that sort of thing, there is a truth that's being confessed and taught.

Could one call that rigid? Perhaps. But again, it's being consistent with the truth that we believe Scripture teaches as formulated in our Confessions of Faith.

Well, Bobby, you have won a free copy of God Is, A Devotional Guide to the Attributes of God by our guest Mark Jones, compliments of Crossway, and also compliments of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com, who will be the ones actually shipping the book out to you at no cost to you or to Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

So please make sure we have your mailing address so we can have cvbbs .com ship that out to you. We have another listener. We have C .J. in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York. And C .J., this is a very commonly asked question throughout the years that I've been doing this program since 2005.

What would you say are a bare minimum of the attributes and understanding of God that a person must know in order to consider him or her a brother or sister in Christ?