None Greater (part 5)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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All right, well, last week, after four lessons, four, four weeks, we finally completed the introduction.

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It's like a nightmare of a sermon, right, where the introduction is 45 minutes.

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We finally completed the introduction to our study of the attributes of God in none greater.

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And if you're worried that this is taking a long time,

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I assure you we are, in fact, right on schedule, that Barrett himself in the book, while there is a chapter called

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Introduction, and then there are chapters one, two, and three, that if you read them and you explore how he is writing those chapters, it's very clear that all three of those initial chapters and the introduction are all meant to be setting a foundation, setting a foundation before we finally get into really sort of going through the list of the attributes.

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But why? Does anybody remember? We talked about this already. Why do we need so much introduction?

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First off, what? OK, yes. No, it's not. Well, I mean, it is, but I have one copy here if somebody wants to go make more.

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You want to go? OK, thanks. Why do we need so much introduction?

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Yes, because of the anthropopathic, anthropomorphic language of the Bible. We talked a lot about analogy, analogous language, analogous thinking.

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What was the very first attribute that Andrew did? He was the teacher.

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What was the very first attribute? Starts with an I. Nope, the other

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I. Incomprehensibility, that's right, incomprehensibility.

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We talked about the incomprehensibility. And Bill, what does incomprehensibility mean, the two -second definition?

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You can't understand it, right? You cannot fully comprehend. You can't get your arms completely around the essence of God.

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Why not? Because God is so unlike us, right? He is so unlike us in essence that it is impossible for us to comprehend him fully.

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Since we cannot comprehend him fully, he has to practice condescension, yes, and the word we used was accommodation, right, accommodation.

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He has to accommodate us with his language, with how he talks to us. In fact, even the theologians themselves, like Calvin, if you remember, they just flat out said,

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God is talking baby talk to us from his perspective, right, relative to him when he's speaking to us in his word.

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It's baby talk to us about himself. But it's what we can understand.

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It's what on our level. So while we cannot fully comprehend him, he is incomprehensible, that does not mean that we can't know him.

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And we can know him through the lens through which he has provided. Naturally, of course, we know that that lens is this, right, the

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Bible, the word. And we also talked about perfection, right, about God's perfection.

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And in the same way, we said that that also makes it important for us because we, you know, the name of the book is none greater, right, that God is the perfect one, the perfect being.

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And so we need to set our minds on these things first. We had to go through all this because it's very important that as we now enter into a more full discussion, enumeration of all the different attributes of God, that we are approaching this humbly.

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We're approaching this humbly. To recognize God's incomprehensibility is that humble recognition that we can only know him by his accommodation of us rather than, most importantly, rather than our ascension to him.

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That many, most, maybe all, false teachings and cults, this is one of their root errors, that we can ascend our understanding up to God rather than he condescending to us.

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Last week, Andrew quoted Anselm, and he said, when Anselm called God the fullness of being itself, capital

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B being, the fullness of being itself, the absolute plenitude of reality upon which all else depends.

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We said that God is the most perfect being imaginable.

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So that was last week and really all the first four weeks. This morning,

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I want to stop for a second. We're going to spend a whole chapter pausing to recognize what we just said there about perfect being and to think deeply about it.

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What do we mean by the phrase perfect being? That's going to be our launching point this morning.

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Last week, we proved, hopefully, in your minds that God is the perfect being.

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This week, we're going to ask just what that means, that he is the perfect being. R .C.

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Sproul had a great lecture on this at a Ligonier conference, I don't know, some years ago. The video looks pretty old, so I don't know what year it was, but it's definitely from a while ago.

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And he said, you know, he wrote on his whiteboard, he didn't have a chalkboard, he had a whiteboard, but he wrote on his whiteboard a list of beings.

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And he had human beings, right, and there's plant beings, and there's even,

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Sproul said, there's a sense of a box of rocks as being, right, that it has being, it is, it exists.

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What is, is, is the famous philosophical quote. And God, and then he wrote at the top of the whiteboard,

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God is the most perfect being, the supreme being, right.

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How many of you have heard that phrase before, the supreme being, right? Yeah, exactly. I went to a secular college for undergrad, but I remember very distinctly at the convocation of my freshman year, when we, all the freshmen came together and there was this, you know, opening,

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I don't know, the opening ceremony, so to speak, for the academic year, that the college chaplain stood up and prayed.

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But being a secular college, the college chaplain had to pray in a very ecumenical, you know, non -offensive way.

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And he addressed God in his prayer as, oh, most supreme being, the architect of the universe.

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All right, well, I did go to an engineering school, so, you know, calling him the architect, but, right, supreme being.

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But when we call, Sproul said, this was the most, this was kind of shocking as you're watching the video.

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Sproul says, when we call God the supreme being, we're actually doing him a great injustice.

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A great injustice. Why? Anyone want to guess?

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Charlie? It's exactly right. It puts him on the continuum.

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It's as if we've got a scale, right? We're all beings, and there's us, human.

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There's angelic beings. They're a little bit higher, and then there's, we'll go up a little bit more, and then there's God. As if we're all, as if the difference is only the adjectives.

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Supreme, human, angelic, plant, those are all just adjectives to the word being, right?

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The difference is not the adjectives, Sproul said. The difference is not in humanness and supremacy.

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The difference really is in the word being. The difference is in the word being.

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He went on to say that the real mistake in these phrases is actually calling, is actually that we call, even bother to call humans or animals or trees or rocks beings.

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Because only God is being. Only God is being.

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That's number one on your worksheet. When we talk about the injustice, and when we use those terms, the reason is that only

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God is being. The philosopher, there's a

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Greek philosopher who predated Plato. He's even older than Plato and Aristotle.

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His name was Heraclitus. Heraclitus is said to have taught, you cannot step twice into the same river.

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You cannot step twice into the same river. Anybody ever heard that? It's like a fortune cookie, right? Sounds very deep.

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That was a pun. Thank you. You cannot step twice into the same river. Can someone interpret that for us?

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Yes, sir, Mr. Dunn. Everything is always changing. Everything is always changing.

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And why is that? Because the water is flowing by you, right? So you step in, and at this instant, you're surrounded by some bucket of water, if we could bucket it.

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But within moments, that bucket of water has passed on by, and there's a new bucket of water that's around your feet, right?

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And most would say that. Most would say it's about the flow. The river is constantly changing.

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That the only thing constant in the world is change. There was another famous person who once said, right, the only two things that don't change are death and taxes.

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But actually, actually, the quote I just read for you, well, it's the famous one.

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It's the one you'll see in pretty picture quote format on your Facebook wall from your friend who thinks he's really smart.

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That quote is actually not Heraclitus. Sorry to myth bust you on that.

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It's not really Heraclitus. It's actually Plato paraphrasing Heraclitus. Okay, so the famous version that we all know, that short pithy version is

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Plato paraphrasing him. The best manuscript evidence we have that what

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Heraclitus actually said was, listen carefully because this is a little denser, on those stepping into rivers, staying the same, other and other waters flow.

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Plato's version is better, right? On those stepping into rivers, staying the same, other and other waters flow.

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Now that's really dense. So rather than calling anybody, let me just share the interpretation for you this time instead.

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I got this from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. They said, this statement is on the surface paradoxical, but there is no reason to take it as false or contradictory.

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It makes perfectly good sense. We call a body of water a river, precisely because it consists of changing waters.

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If the water should cease to flow, it's not a river anymore. Now it's a lake or a dry stream bed.

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There is a sense then in which a river is a remarkable kind of existent, one that remains what it is by changing what it contains.

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If the rivers remain the same, one surely could step in twice, not into the same waters to be sure, but into the same rivers, right?

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So we can go down, we can go east from here a little ways, and we can step into a body of water that we call the

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Charles River, right? And we all know that's the Charles River.

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Probably, there's a sign. And no one would step in, and then step out, and then step back in again and say, the second time

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I didn't step into the Charles River. I did step into the Charles River. It is the Charles River, even though it consists of something slightly different than it did that moment before.

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Our only perception of being is of things that are changing. Our only perception of being is of things that are changing.

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At this moment, at 9 .14 in the morning, in 20 seconds, Daniel told me that's a little off.

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If you're still conscious anyway, you might be thinking, where are you going with this, Corey? I'm running out of duct tape to wrap around my head that's exploding.

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Okay, well, I'm glad you asked. The river is a river, but it is every moment made up of different water.

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Do you know that's also true of you and me? It's also true of you and me. Nearly all the cells in our body die and are replaced within a 10 -year span.

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How many of you are older than 10? Okay, very good. So, that means most of you is not the same as you 10 years ago.

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Nearly all of you. There's a few things in you. For those of you who are anatomy and phys majors,

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I don't want to get into a fight with you. There are some parts, there's a few cells in you that don't replace, but by and large, almost everything in you dies and is replaced within 10 years.

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Some much faster. You know, the cells in our stomach, they only last like four days, and yet you still have a stomach, right?

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I can point to it. I still got it. It's still there. It's kind of talking to me right now.

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Our skin lasts only about two to four weeks before you got new skin. And if we go even deeper, if you go all the way down to the molecular level, sorry to nerd out on you a little bit this morning, but that's what you get when

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Andrew and Corey teach Sunday school. If you go all the way down to the molecular level, every new breath of oxygen that you take, you're bringing new oxygen in and you're releasing carbon out.

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You're constantly exchanging the stuff that makes you, and yet you're you.

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You don't stop being you, but you're always changing.

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And that is true, essentially, of everything in creation. Everything in creation is constantly changing, and yet it exists.

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But that's why we say, that's why probably the best thing to say is not that we are human beings, but rather that we are becoming.

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We're not being, we're becoming. I don't know about the composition even of angelic beings, but I'm convinced that even something similar is going on with them, even though they're spirit beings and not physical beings, so they're not taking breath.

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But I'm convinced something's going on with them, because I do know that they can learn, and they can discover, and they can grow.

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So just like us, rather than being, they are becoming. Everything is becoming, except God.

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God is the only true being. Acts 17, 28 says,

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In Him we live and move and have our being.

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In Him we live and move and have our being. So if you want to add to your answer on number one, we already said

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God is the only true being, the rest of the answer is, all else is only becoming.

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All else is only becoming. He is the only true

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I am. The only true I am. Sproul put it perfectly when he said,

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Without God, there can be no beginning. Without being, or a being, there can be no becomings.

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And if there was a beginning, nothing screams louder than before the beginning.

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There was not nothing, but there was one who has the power of being.

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One who has the power of being in himself. In himself, or from himself.

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That power of being, that is the attribute this morning that we call aseity.

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God's aseity. That's the attribute we're studying this morning, aseity.

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It's entirely possible you've never even heard the term aseity before. I confess that I had only heard it maybe once or twice in all my studies before reading the book

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Dungrater. And I actually, in preparation this week, I watched several

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YouTube videos to try to make sure I got my pronunciation right on this. And sure enough, I heard it said like three different ways, even trying to listen on YouTube.

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But this is how Steve Lawson says it. He says aseity, so I'll die on that hill with Steve Lawson.

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Aseity. Now, it comes from two Latin words. I mean, it comes from Latin, and it's actually two

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Latin words smushed together. Aseity. The first Latin word is a.

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See, Latin's really easy. Why does anybody have any trouble with this? The first Latin word is a, like literally just a.

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That's the word. It means from. Okay? A, from.

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And c, just s -e though, not s -e -e. S -e, c, but it's pronounced c in Latin.

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And that means self. So a, c, from, self. From, self.

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Aseity. That is an attribute of God, and that is an incommunicable attribute of God.

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That is one that only he has, that he cannot give to another. So there are number two on the worksheet, the two

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Latin words, a and c, which means from and self. So God's aseity means that he is from himself.

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The term that we see more commonly used probably in books on attributes of God, if you've read any, would be the term self -sufficient.

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Right? Everybody, lots of people have probably heard God is self -sufficient. Now, my hope is that by the time

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I'm done this morning, you're going to understand that a C80 goes much further than just self -sufficiency.

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But let's start there. All right, let's start there with self -sufficiency. Yes, Dave. Yes. No.

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We won't get there. Yes, it is, but we'll explain why. I know exactly what you're getting at.

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Yeah, well, maybe. I guess I don't really know. Let me keep going, and then you can chime in later.

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All right, so we're going to do the via negativa. Who remembers what via negativa means? Yes. Right, what something is not, the way of negation.

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Right? So we're going to go with what is not. So how do we define God's self -sufficiency by the way that is not, the way of negation?

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Somebody want to define self -sufficiency? Yes. He's not dependent. Bob? Yep, not dependent.

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Yeah, he doesn't need anything. Right? Be another good way to say it. Yep. Not created.

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Yep. That also gets to the related one, which we're going to talk about in a few minutes, about self -existent.

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He doesn't need anything. He's not created. Not from anything, except maybe himself. Can someone read

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Psalm 50? Not the whole thing, but somebody want to volunteer to read part of Psalm 50 for me? Sure.

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Gary. Psalm 50, verses 10 through 12, please. Why doesn't God need anything? Why doesn't he?

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Well, one reason, of course, is that he already has everything. That's what Gary's going to read for us. Psalm 50, 10 through 11.

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10 through 12. Sorry, yes. Yes, 10 through 12. Yes. So in a very poetic sense, right, here's God talking about how everything is mine.

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I own everything. If it were possible for me to be hungry, which this is a rhetorical question on God's part.

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It is not possible for him to be hungry. But even if it was possible for him to be hungry, he wouldn't need to tell us, because he could just take whatever he wants and whatever he needs.

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He already owns it. It's his. Right? The world and its fullness are mine. And, you know, there's language of accommodation here going on, in that he's only talking about just the world and the earth or the birds and the cattle.

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But we can understand that this goes far beyond that, of course. He owns all of creation.

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Not even just our physical cosmos universe of time and space and matter, but even also the heavens.

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Right? And the spirit realms that he has created. He owns everything. As creator and sovereign, everything that exists is owned by him.

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It belongs to him. We recognize, we talk about this all the time, we talk about stewardship, right?

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We recognize that everything we are given is on loan from him. It's on loan from him.

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Even our very breath of life we talk about as being on loan from him.

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There's also, though, beyond that kind of the need, there's also an element of satisfaction in self -sufficiency, that God is self -satisfied.

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What do I mean by that? Anyone want to take a stab at that one? What do you think it means for God to be self -satisfied,

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Josh? Yes, he's totally and perfectly content with himself.

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In and from himself, he is totally content. Jonathan Edwards said that God is infinitely happy in the enjoyment of himself.

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Infinitely happy in the enjoyment of himself. Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

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Yeah. Yeah, pride kicks in, right? Yeah.

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Right. That's totally true. Funny enough, I'm glad you mentioned that because I didn't put it in my notes, but as I was just searching for resources on this, if I just Google self -sufficiency, right, what kept coming up was less about the attribute of God and more about people acting self -sufficient and how that was a sin for people to do that, right?

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So in that way, I think, you know, like I said a minute ago, this is one of those incommunicable attributes of God, and whenever we as people dare try to ascend to that, dare try to take on that for ourselves, it's a sin.

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Andrew. He's already perfect, right? He doesn't need anything else because he's already perfect. If it was possible for him to need something, then he'd be less than perfect.

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Right, right. Which is why, as Andrew said, it's probably more, the more complete picture is both, you know, the ability to carry, you know, to weather the storm, but also in the self -satisfaction, the self -contentment, you know.

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Yeah. Any more perfect -er? Yeah, yeah.

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Exactly, yeah. That's page six of my notes, so we'll just skip that later. Yes, Charlie. Yep. All the time, right?

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Yes, he's the very source of life, right. Yep, life springs from him. That's a really great way to put it.

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Yes, Steve. Seedy.

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Brian. He's not expending energy.

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You realize that? He's not, he doesn't have a, some kind of limited storehouse amount, a battery pack, right, that thankfully is a danger.

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Exactly, yeah. Bill. As he gives it out, that's right, yes.

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He gives out power, but in doing so, he's not diminishing his own power. That is really what's great about infinity, and the mathematicians in the room, we'll just do real quick the math problem.

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What is infinity minus 10? Infinity. What is infinity minus a billion?

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Infinity. It's still infinity. You can't reduce infinity, and when we talk about self -satisfaction, you have to remember that, and Barrett says this in the book, had

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God not created anything, had he chosen not to create anything, he still would have remained perfectly satisfied and content in himself.

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In and of himself, actually, is how Barrett puts it. Yeah, Charlie. Yeah, right, well, yeah.

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I think we get into that in a future chapter, but that requires another roll of duct tape, so we'll hang on for that for a little bit.

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So that's self -sufficiency. I want to move on, though. God is self -sufficient. Now, we also heard this morning that wrapped into a

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CD, though, is the notion of God is self -existent. Self -existent. And here's the from and in thing,

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Dave, so get ready. The four -year -old child asks, where did God come from? Where did

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God come from? And the answer is, a CD would say, from himself. He comes from himself.

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He is self -existent. Everything else around us has a source. The light from the windows, it comes from the sun.

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The electricity comes from the power plant. You and I come from our parents.

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But not God. God comes from no one else. He is, as the philosophers say, the uncaused first cause.

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The uncaused first cause. Or the unmoved mover,

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I've heard it said, too. The unmoved mover. Now, what I and Barrett are not saying is that God caused himself.

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He is uncaused. He didn't self -create. He didn't self -spontaneously generate.

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He is uncaused. Science, when it comes down, you know, the astronomers, and I'm going to quote an astronomer here in a minute, when the astronomers, when they come down to the

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Big Bang theory, once you get to the notion of the Big Bang theory and that there is a definitive beginning to the cosmos, we can argue about how long ago that was, but when we talk about the fact that there was a beginning, right, we're left with only two options at that point.

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Either one, and Sproul said, you know, he went to a college and debated the folks, and the astronomers agreed with him on this, that there's two options.

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One, that the universe self -generated, or two, that there was something else before it that created it, where it came from.

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We can argue over what that something else is. And most everyone, philosophers and scientists included, dismissed the first one as nonsense, because you can't self -create, because in order to self -create, you had to exist before you created yourself, like, it's a paradox, it's impossible, it's nonsense.

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So it's got to be the second one. There had to have been something before the beginning that created the something.

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Now, also, God, that's the past, but he also has no root in something else, so he doesn't have to rely on something else or need something outside of himself in order to continue.

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And that is why he is the Alpha and the Omega. Have you ever thought about that?

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Think about that a little bit more. You know, I think we have no trouble understanding Alpha, the Alpha part of that.

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At the beginning, before all things, there was God. He was alone, and he alone, and so he is the

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Alpha. But at the end, you know, on the other end, doesn't

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God promise us a future into eternity? There aren't the angels that he created eternal to, so he's not going to be alone at the end.

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There isn't really an end exactly in the same way, right? So he's not alone, so what do we mean when we say

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Omega? Well, we say he's the Omega because our eternal continuation, as Steve even just said when we talked about the power bank thing, our eternal continuation is dependent on him.

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But his continuation is dependent on no thing. He is the final answer.

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He is the final answer. So that's why I said in the worksheet there that we'd say that God is the Alpha because he is the uncaused first cause.

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He is the Omega because he is the final answer, the powering of the continuation into eternity.

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Yes, Dave, I am, right?

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He just is. Well, this is where we get into the fact that our language, you know, it's not exactly anthropomorphic.

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It's whatever the word for anthro something temporal, right? Like our language is rooted in our temporal existence, and so our prepositions lend them, you know, so you see in and from and whatnot, and there's like relationship of time and space, right, in those.

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But God is not bounded by that in any way. So we can't really use.

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There is no perfect preposition for this to describe this. What you're saying is completely true, right?

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That's why he calls himself the I am because he just is. And he is, as I said at the beginning, the only is the only real true being.

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So where did God come from? Well, he never came from anywhere or from anything. He just always has been and always will be.

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But that's because he exists outside of time. And that's another chapter. All right.

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We are way late. Here we go. So I promised the quote from the astronomer Robert Jastrow. He was a 20th century astronomer.

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He was a NASA scientist. He once wrote this about astronomy's pursuit of trying to understand the beginning of the universe.

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And I just I really like this quote because it just it puts the agnostics of the atheists in their place.

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He says, for the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream.

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He has scaled the mountain of ignorance. He is about to conquer the highest peak. He pulls himself over the final rock, and he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

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So let's let's pause here to ponder. And I don't have a whole lot of time, so it'll be a very brief pause. But we're going to pause here to ponder, because I realized last week when

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I was sitting out here with you folks, and Andrew was up here teaching that Andrew and I, we need to make sure that we connect all this that we're talking about to our daily lives.

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Some we need to take some time as we talk about each one of these attributes about what the impact is, what's the application.

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So what should be the impact of this truth on us that God is self -sufficient and self -existent?

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Yes. I'll take all answers. And then, yeah. So not right.

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That exactly. So that that is one of the ones I wrote down an attitude of trust. You said the word trust in there, too. There's this attitude of trust.

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He is so great. There is nothing that God cannot provide. Right. Nothing that he cannot provide.

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Andrew. Right. We shouldn't trust in the leaders. We should be trusting in the great shepherd himself.

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Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll in my notes, how

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I wrapped. That's great, because I think I'll wrap it up in my notes. I said an attitude of dependence.

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Right. So we have an attitude of trust, and we have an attitude of dependence on him.

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And we can totally depend on him. And we don't have to worry about exhausting him.

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We don't have to worry about him running out of patience or running out of anything.

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The smallest detail. He numbered. He's he numbers all the hairs on his head. Our head.

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I'm sorry. Okay. So, so far.

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We've covered that God's a city means that he is self sufficient. And then he self existent.

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And now here comes the a team to define this further for us. Who can name all three of theologians from the a team?

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Steve. Whoo. Quintus, Augustine and some.

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And some wrote that God has of himself. As of himself, all that he has, while other things have nothing of themselves.

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He has of himself all that he has, while other things have nothing of themselves.

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And other things, he goes on to say, have nothing of themselves, have their only reality from him.

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Our very reality. Is from him. Augustine, he wrote that all things when compared to God are deficient in beauty and goodness and being.

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Deficient in beauty and goodness and being. Beauty and goodness and even our only reality.

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The a team says is from him. We see then a city that which is an incommunicable attribute.

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The key that unlocks further understanding of the communicable ones. Things like beauty and goodness.

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God's beauty is from himself, which means he is not just the source of beauty, but he is the very definition.

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Of beauty. The same is true of love. And of goodness.

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What God does defines what is good. That makes it good.

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Because God does it. And and and what he does is right and just.

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In the same way. And none greater in the book, Barrett, he once he gets to this point, he starts to go through many more aspects of a city like in rapid fire.

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All right, we're going to go through a whole bunch of self's. Self somethings. And this is the last question there on the worksheet.

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All this list of self somethings. So I'm going to just name them and just raise your hand quick and see if you can't just offer me what you think it means.

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All right, it's don't overthink it. These are all. They're all pretty basic in their terms.

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All right, here we go. Self divine. Self divine.

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Yes, his Godhood is not granted by another. He didn't receive his deity from anyone outside of himself.

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Not like the Greek myths, right? Where you bestowed Godhood on. On him.

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Self wise. Didn't learn from anybody.

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Can't learn from anybody. Isn't going to learn from anybody. None other can give him counsel,

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Isaiah says. Proof text.

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There we go. No other can give him counsel because he cannot grow in wisdom.

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Self virtuous. Self virtuous. Nobody gave.

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You guys are getting this. Nobody gave him virtue. But even more so, what do you on the positive side of things?

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What do you think, Josh? Yeah, he is. He has all virtue.

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He is the standard of virtue. Self attesting.

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Self attesting. All right, I'll do this one. He can and does prove his own existence.

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And he knows perfectly what is true and what is false. I am the way, the truth, and the life.

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Self knowing. How well do you know yourself?

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Not very well, right? The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it? How well does

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God know himself? Perfectly. We said he's incomprehensible to everyone but himself.

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He does not need to reflect. Doesn't need to talk it out with somebody to figure out what he's thinking right now.

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Or how he's feeling right now. For he understands himself completely.

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Self justifying. Boy, that one almost sounds bad, right? It would be bad for us to be self justifying.

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What's that? He is the standard of justice. Yeah, and Charlie, you said? Right, there's nothing above him.

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There's no standard above him that he has to conform to or follow in order to be just.

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What he does is just because it is what he does. Self empowering. He has all power.

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He's the battery pack. But that's a terrible analogy because he can't drain. He doesn't need to refuel or derive power from any other source.

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And the last one. Yeah, sorry. Never slumbers or sleeps. The last one, self excellent.

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We can do the negative again here on this one. Self excellent. Anitra. He is not excelled by anything.

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He, in fact, as the book title says, there is none greater. There we go.

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It's the ontological argument again. If you could imagine another being more excellent.

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Then that would mean that he would be dependent on that being for his very excellency. So, well, all right,

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I could I could actually talk about a CD for hours more. And in fact, if you've read the book already, or if you go on to read chapter four, you'll realize that I left out a ton of stuff.

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Because there is a lot in here about a CD. But let me conclude with the time we have left with another moment to stop and ponder the application of a

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CD on our lives. You'll note from your worksheet. There were three attitudes, and we only talked about two. We talked about attitude of trust and attitude of dependence.

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So let's get the third attitude in here. We talk. We talk of serving a god who does not need anything.

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Right. We talk of serving a god who does not need every anything. A god who does not need our service.

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So why do we serve? Interestingly, one time when the twelve disciples asked

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Jesus to increase their faith. Jesus responded by talking about God's a city and their service.

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Luke chapter 17. If you can turn their Luke chapter 17.

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I'll just read it, but you can read along with me. Luke 17 verses 5 through 10.

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Luke 17, 5 through 10. The apostles said to the

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Lord, increase our faith. And the Lord said, if you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, be uprooted and planted in the sea, and it would obey you.

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Will any of one of you who has a servant plowing or keeping sheep say to him when he has come in from the field, come at once and recline at table?

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Will he not rather say to him, prepare supper for me, dress properly and serve me while I eat and drink, and afterward you will eat and drink?

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Does he thank the servant because what he did, what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, we are unworthy servants.

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We have only done what was our duty. We are unworthy servants.

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We have only done what was our duty. When we spoke of applications earlier in those two attitudes,

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I said that the knowledge of God's city should produce in us an attitude of trust and an attitude of dependence.

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And so I'll add to that now that it should produce an attitude of unworthiness. Unworthiness.

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Because what Jesus was teaching here is that we cannot ever put God in debt by our service.

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Do you recognize that is what's going on when you work for your employer? You give them service, you work for them, and for a brief moment, an instant, they are in debt to you until they pay you your wages.

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You have indebted them to you. They owe you something. Or, I don't know, if for some reason your employer prepays you, it would be the opposite way around, but we are putting our employers in our debt in that they owe us wages.

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God does not owe us anything. We cannot put him in our debt. Other translations, like the

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NASB, they use the word unprofitable here instead of unworthy. Unprofitable, because we are adding no value to what

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God wanted to do through what we have done. We are ourselves, we in ourselves have added no value to the whole proposition.

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We are unworthy servants. There are no wages he owes to us, no blessing that we can force out of him by our works.

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We need to beware that when we've done well, we do not come to expect ease or comfort or blessing.

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Is he pleased to give us those things? Yes, absolutely, and in fact, praise

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God, he does not tie them to how well we serve. Because if he did, we'd get pretty much nothing, because we are unworthy servants.

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We are adding no real value to the whole thing. We might toil in service to God our entire lives and not ever be allowed to see fruit of that work.

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Isaiah was sent to speak to a people who would not hear. God told him right up front,

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I'm going to send you as a prophet and no one is going to listen to you. Talk about unprofitable, unfruitful.

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But whatever we are given, whatever we are blessed with, all those things are sourced from God himself.

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And even in that is designed, as Roman 8 tells us, to move us along that golden chain.

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From justification, to sanctification, to glorification. We can be an attitude of unworthy servants because we are rewarded not for our labors, we are rewarded because he loves us.

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We are rewarded with God. Let's pray.

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Heavenly Father, I thank you so much for this morning and for being able to take time to try to unpack this.

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Thank you for those who have come before us, who have plumbed, tried to plumb the depths of this attribute of yours of a seedy to explain it to us.

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And we recognize that we can't truly comprehend you or even truly comprehend this.

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But in what we do know, we are humbled by it because you are so unlike us.

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And we recognize that every time we have, in and of ourselves, tried to be self -sufficient, we have tried to have our own way or take pride in our accomplishments or expect something in return for what we have done.

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We have sinned in that. We ask for your forgiveness. We pray that we would instead replace that with an attitude of trust and dependence and unworthiness, that we would serve out of a glad heart in recognition of all that you have done for us and continue to do for us into eternity.