The Character of God | The Whole Counsel

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Welcome back to the podcast. I'm John Snyder and I'm with Chuck Baggett and we're looking at the first chapter of a book called

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Salvation in Full Color, which we introduced in a previous podcast. Now, just a reminder, this is a book compiled and edited by Richard Owen Roberts, but actually the book itself really is simply a series of 20 sermons, all of them dealing with the topic of salvation, and they are laid out in a very specific theological order.

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So as we mentioned last week, it's particularly beneficial to come to the book in the order it's laid out.

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So it begins with the theme of the character of God, and we're going to be talking today about why that's such an important starting spot.

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And it ends with, you know, divine retribution, the final salvation of God's people, wrath, and the final warning.

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So a wonderful resource for any individual Christian, and we've used it at the church a few times and found it to be very beneficial.

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Now, one thing that Roberts did that is really worth the price of the book is that with each sermon, he gave a biographical sketch, just a one -page sketch of the author of that sermon, so of one of these great awakening ministers.

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So each week we want to do that. We want to kind of give you the highlights from that. This week, the chapter is written by Timothy Dwight.

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Dwight was born in 1752. Now, if you're not up to date on the 18th century work of the

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Lord in the colonies, the great awakening has pretty much started to die down by 1752.

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So he's born into a time where the fruits of the first great awakening are still being experienced, but the real pinnacle of it is his past.

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He was the grandson of Jonathan Edwards. His mother, Mary, was Edwards' third daughter.

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His father was a merchant, but a very godly man. Dwight was taught early by his mother, taught to read.

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By age six, he was able to read the Bible fluently. He eventually entered

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Yale College at a young age. His first two years at the college were marked by moral and intellectual decline.

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He's not a Christian yet, raised in a godly home, has a trained conscience, not a renewed heart.

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But someone at the college took interest in him spiritually, and God used that to bring him to himself.

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After conversion in the midst of college, he excelled in his studies and graduated when he was 17.

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Now, in 1774, that puts Dwight at about 22 years of age.

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He professes Christ as his Lord and Master and joins the college church. Also, he is determined at this time to lay aside his interest in law, which is what he went to school for, and he wants to devote himself to the

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Christian ministry. 1777, he becomes an army chaplain in the

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Revolutionary War, but soon after that his father dies and he's required to go back home and help mom and the younger siblings with the farm.

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While he's there, he is a teacher and he's involved in church. Then, in 1783, at 31 years of age, he accepts the call to pastor a congregational church in Greenfield, Connecticut.

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Now, because of insufficient funds, he has to continue his life as a schoolteacher on the side. 1787, he's given the degree of Doctor of Divinity by the

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College of New Jersey, which later is renamed Princeton. 1810,

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Harvard gives him the Doctor of Law degree. Now, 1795, while he's pastoring the president of Yale College, which at this time is a pretty serious spiritual

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Christian institution, the president dies and immediately everyone in the region thinks of Timothy Dwight as an appropriate replacement.

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He accepts that call and he quickly becomes one of the most profoundly influential presidents in the history of Yale.

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In particular, not just because of his decisions, but because he took the responsibility of teaching chapel.

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Throughout a three or four year process, he taught through the great doctrines of God's character, the rights of God, the law of God, and the way of salvation.

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It was wonderfully used by the Lord. This is how Roberts summarizes that. Dwight's preaching, he says, was mightily used by the

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Holy Spirit in some of the deepest and most extensive college revivals in the history of American education.

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Not less than four distinct periods of awakening gripped the college. Revived graduates became the spiritual bulwark of many

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New England churches and the human factor in the precious protracted season of awakening, which blessed

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America from 1795 until after the midpoint of the 19th century.

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In other words, young men that graduated during the time that Dwight was an influence at Yale, converted under his preaching became ministers in the second great awakening.

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He goes on to say, many of the sermons which were so used by the Holy Spirit at this time were published after Dwight's death in the five volume set called

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Theology Explained and Defended in a series of sermons. Among the most poignant and useful of these messages are those in which the attributes of God were illustrated and enlarged.

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And the sermon we're going to look at today is one of those. Yes. Also, if you want to read these,

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I was going to mention that this particular sermon, and I'm sure there are others, but this particular one is not as hard of reading as like a

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John Owen or even his grandfather, Jonathan Edwards. Dwight's language is much more accessible.

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There are some words that we don't use as commonly today, but it's not that hard of a go.

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So I would encourage you to read. The structure of the sermon, the sermon itself is on the character of God.

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He's preaching from Job 42 verses five and six. I've heard thee by the hearing of the year, but now mine eye seeth thee.

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Wherefore, I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes. So he introduces this and lays out a doctrine from this text and then seeks to press that doctrine.

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And before I read the doctrine, I was going to mention that it's interesting, you know, as we lay out these doctrines and we see them laid in this order, he doesn't start with the love of God, although he does mention the

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God's love in the sermon, but he starts here and what he's trying to press in showing us the character of God.

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I think he demonstrates why he starts here. The doctrine is clear and just views of the character and presence of God naturally produce in the mind abasing and penitential thoughts concerning ourselves.

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So I guess in more modern vernacular, the more clearly we see God's character and his presence, the more we feel humbled and it should produce repentance.

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So he starts there, not with God's love, as wonderful as that is, but do you see who this God is who does love?

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So he sets out then in the main part of the sermon to show that, to demonstrate that doctrine in three or four different ways that we'll talk about and then make some applications.

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And that's kind of the overarching structure of the sermon. Yeah, really this is one of the clearest illustrations in one sermon of what we mentioned last week, that there is an order of truth.

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What a man believes about God will fashion what a man believes about himself. And those together fashion what he thinks about sin and then ultimately what you think salvation is.

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What am I saved from? How, what would it take to save me? And what would a saved life look like?

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I mean, all of that is determined by a man's view of God ultimately. And I think that, you know, as pastors or as dads or even dealing with our own souls when we look in the mirror of the scripture, it is such a benefit to know that truths do affect us in that order, so that we don't waste our time just hammering away at, you know, we ought to do better.

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Or the church needs to act right. You know, don't you see this? But the reason that we are okay with sins is because something's wrong with our view of God.

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And as Dwight said, the most beneficial thing is to get right views or what we tend to think of as high views, really what we're saying is biblical views.

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When we think of an infinitely high God, no matter how high we think of him, still it's not as high as he is.

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So while we say high views of God, we mean higher than we've had in the past, more biblically influenced, you know, informed views.

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But when we see those, it just changes everything. You know, I mean, when we read our Bibles, it changes everything.

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And ultimately, it changes the way we live. When those are preached and in this order, that's initially not very comfortable for everyone, is it?

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It can really bother people. And as they see their sin and they see

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God, they may not expect that. Yeah, yeah.

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So you start a series of sermons and a person comes to church and they go from bad to worse.

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And they say, well, that's not exactly what I'm here for. Also, another thing, especially as parents or pastor, you think about those who have the responsibility of other souls and you do care.

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And so I find that when a person cares about souls, pragmatism, shortcuts are very tempting because you care.

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And maybe you feel that you're ineffective. So you think you begin to search around for a way to become more effective.

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But I find that approaching things the way that Roberts has laid it out in this book, the way these men would have laid it out, the way

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Timothy Dwight explains it, I find that that often is a long haul.

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And at first, it doesn't look like anything's getting better from any perspective. And it's certainly we found that true in the little church here in New Albany, the first three years of the church, very much kind of plowing up wrong views of God and trying to put into place right views of God.

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And it was a long time before we had a real conversion. But when that was in place and then we read the

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Bible together, suddenly the Bible carried a wonderful weight and we saw people saved, you know, quite amazingly.

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One of the first things he mentions is that a right view of God, you know, a holy high view of the transcendence, the infinite power and knowledge of God, one thing it ought to do for us is immediately removes any plan that we have, you know, it rescues us from the fiction that we'll somehow escape

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His judgment. Yes. There's a wonderful chapter he gives here where he kind of just describes his power over all creation.

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And Chuck and I have talked about this personally, but I remember reading this maybe 18 years ago, thinking this is so gripping and really wishing that I would be able to hold this before my eyes more frequently.

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So let me just read a paragraph. This unlimited right, God is infinitely able to vindicate.

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So He has the right to rule us. If we disobey, He can vindicate it. His power is immeasurable.

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Disobedience to His commands, He can punish without bounds, without end. He knows every avenue to the heart and can make every thought and every nerve a channel of suffering.

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To escape from His eye or His hand is alike impossible.

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Every element, every faculty and even every enjoyment, He can convert into a minister of vengeance.

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He needs not the famine nor pestilence, the storm nor thunderbolt, the volcano nor the earthquake, the sword nor the scepter or tyranny to execute

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His wrath upon rebellious creatures. He needs no lake of fire and brimstone to torment the workers of iniquity.

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He can arm an insect. He can commission an atom to be the minister of His anger.

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He can make the body its own tormentor. He can convert the mind itself into a world of perdition, where the gloom of despair shall overcast all the faculties, the sigh of anguish heave, and the stream of sorrow flow forever.

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So in other words, God doesn't have to bring some terrible tragedy on the world to get our attention.

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All it would take is microscopic things. You know, we think of COVID, and the whole world shuts down because of a virus that we can't even see with the naked eye.

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Yeah, I was thinking about how you can arm an insect to earlier this summer when

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I was trying to sleep, and there was a mosquito in the house, and it was buzzing around my head, and I could hear it buzzing, and occasionally it would land, and I would slap at it.

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It was just miserable, and I'm not saying that God necessarily sent that to torment me, maybe, but how easy it would be, something so small, something so simple, and yet He has that at His command, but He has everything else at His command also, and the foolishness of thinking that we can escape

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Him. I hear people expressing a couple of things in regards to this.

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One, kind of the idea that you hear people talk about God being too busy to notice me, so obviously a very low view of God, but He's busy with other things or other things more important than me, but when we read something like this, and we see how

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God describes Himself, well, no, He's not too busy, and it's no effort for Him to keep up with you and every other creature that exists, and Hebrews 4 .13

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says that there is no creature hidden from His sight, and not only does He see us, you know, He doesn't see us kind of in a social media kind of way where we put on our best face, you know, with our coffee cup and our

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Bible, and we take a picture like life's perfect, but we are naked and laid bare before Him. He sees everything.

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He sees us like we are, and not just the things we do, but the thoughts and the intentions of the heart. I mean, if you believe that, then it's got to change the way you think about Him and yourself and sin and salvation.

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Yeah, and so really this point is for the man who remains unrepentant, so God has certain rights, but I deny those rights.

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I argue His right to rule over different areas of my life. I'm willing to give Him this, but not this, and then if some

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Christian says to me, yes, but do you never fear the Lord? Is He not your dread?

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And the answer is no, because of a small view of Him, but if we think how anything, even the thoughts of our minds that can torment us at night and we can't sleep, how easy it is for God to get our attention, and so I think one application of that, not only is that we might have a holy sense of God's dreadfulness outside of Christ and to the unrepentant, but also how merciful

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God is to us that in a world of sin, we are so infrequently tormented, you know, and God's kindness is the fact that I can sleep at night or that my body does work or that, you know, my children are healthy.

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Those things ought to crash against my indifference and wake me up and say,

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God could have tormented you to get your attention, and yet He uses His kindness. Another thing that, you know, that a right view of God, a biblical view of God, ought to do is it ought to remove sin's false advertising.

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It ought to just strip it of all of its prettiness, you know. Here's another quote from Dwight. He says this, sin is an act of bold and unholy rebellion against God's righteous government.

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So here's a perfect king who always rules perfectly, and yet we are constantly in an unclean way fighting against it.

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Then he goes on to say, sin shows gross and dreadful ingratitude to God's goodness and mercy.

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Sin is an unholy disregard of God's perfect and glorious character.

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So whether we're talking about His government or His kindnesses or His own character, sin is constantly against Him.

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One thing that Roberts used to mention every time he would come and preach is that you can see sin in one or two ways, and it depends on how you see

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God. Big God, little you, sin is a thief of His glory. That's what's so bad.

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Little God, big you, sin is a thing that might take you to an unpleasant place, that might bring unpleasant consequences to your life, you know, a very different view of sin's nature.

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I was thinking about this in terms of parent and child. So if you're a parent, you can perhaps see in your children rebellion.

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If you have a rebellious child, the child doesn't show respect for your rules, and in doing that, he's not showing respect for the rule giver.

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And they disobey, they're disciplined, and then they're mad at you for disciplining them.

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Like, how dare you? You've assaulted my rights. I wasn't wrong, you were wrong. And ingratitude, just on and on.

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And it is an imperfect example or illustration because even as you're pointing out the child's anger, you may have to repent and think,

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God, I'm angry too, or ungrateful, me too.

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And the child might even land some blows, you know, son, you shouldn't be angry like that, but you get mad. So it is imperfect.

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But if you turn it around and think, we're children, and we often have no regard for God's law, especially as a lost person, no regard for God's law, no regard for the law giver, ungrateful, etc.

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The least little thing happens, and we're sure God is just out to get us, clearly.

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But there are no blows landed on God. He's not pointing out anger in us and at the same time having to repent of anger.

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He's perfect, He's good, He's holy. So that gap should make the weight of our sin all the greater.

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And His holiness, as I think you're saying, should both humble us, remove our pride, but also help us to see how terrible our sin is against God.

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It's not against someone who's out to get us, it's against a good and holy God. Yeah, I think two evidences that we have seen sin in its correct nature.

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So if you think of it this way, the law of God exposes the existence of sin, okay? You didn't even know that was a sin until you read the

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Bible and it said, God hates this. And you think, but I do that. And God demands this.

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You think, but I don't do that. So I didn't even know I was sinning. So the law lays the no trespass sign in front of us, and we trespass, or what we're expected to do, and we don't do it.

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So it reveals the existence of sin. But it's seeing sin with God in the background of that sin as He really is, not as we thought

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He was. It's like walking into that room, and there's that blazing throne, and there's that infinitely perfect being.

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And somehow when we see Him for the first time, as an illustration, we are horrified at how unclean we are.

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And yet there's something about Him that though we dare not draw near to Him without a mediator, yet we wish we could.

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He is not only infinitely pure and an all -consuming fire, He is infinitely attractive. He is pure goodness, and we feel how inappropriate it is for us to come near.

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And so the result is, twofold, I'm empty -handed, and I'm silenced.

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So nothing we have, no tool that we have in our hands can ever bring a sinner to feel that way.

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They must see what God says about Himself in Scripture to be true, and then

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God does that. Another thing that, you know, a biblical view of God does is that it begins to remove one of the most insidious lies that the enemy tells us about our

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God. And so I think we say it this way. At first the enemy may whisper to our hearts,

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God wouldn't accept you, God wants nothing to do with you, maybe

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God doesn't even exist, why would you waste your time? But what if a person reaches a place, you know, they go to church a few times, and they think, you know what,

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I think this God stuff is probably pretty true, and I've been ignoring that for a long time, so I'm not so sure that He wants anything to do with me.

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And then you hear the preacher preach, God offers forgiveness, and here's the lie. Well, He offers that to you, okay, fine, now that you know, you know.

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But you do know it's a deal. He's going to use you the rest of your life, you're going to become

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His servant, and then, you know, you scratch His back, He scratches yours, there's going to be kind of a payoff at the end. So it's a mutual using relationship.

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When we see God in His infinite fullness and self -sufficiency, self -existence, you know, unchangeable sufficiency,

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He cannot need. That means we cannot give Him something He needs.

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That means none of the love He's offered us has ever been because He intended to use us.

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It is what the Bible calls it. It is the purest form of grace. It's also very humbling to realize that you're entering into a relationship in which you're not needed.

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Yeah, yeah. I mean, what other relationship do you have that is that? Yeah, it's extremely humbling.

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I mean, you think, we're both married, so if our wives came to us today and said, I want you to know,

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Chuck, if Elizabeth said, Chuck, I want you to know, I love you so much. It's nothing about you.

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I mean, no, no, I mean, there's nothing about you that's lovely. I just love you unconditionally. I mean, it's so humiliating to a human to hear that.

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But if we turn to an infinitely holy God and we see that we don't deserve love, and then

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He offers us a free, unconditional love, then it's the most wonderful thing. Another thing that an increasingly high and biblical view of God ought to produce in us is humility, and we've kind of been talking about that, but we were talking before the podcast about different ways that humility is generally pursued among Christians.

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I remember reading Andrew Murray's little book on humility. He was an author in, I think, late 19th century, and Murray was a

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Presbyterian minister in South Africa, and in his book on humility, his opening chapter, which is my favorite chapter, he mentions three different sources of humility.

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One is the awareness of your sin. One is the awareness of God's undeserved love in light of your sin, and one is the awareness of the bigness of God, and what he points out is this.

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Generally in evangelical churches, we try to humble people or we try to humble ourselves by hammering away almost exclusively at number one, at how sinful

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I am. Now, he was not soft -peddling sin. He wasn't saying it wasn't a problem. He said, are sinful, and that ought to humble us, and we receive grace instead of justice for our sin, and that ought to humble us, but he points out that if you only try to humble yourself with looking at how bad you failed, that humility may be seen by you as a pretty bitter virtue to cultivate.

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So he said, what about the other thing? And biblically, he said, this seems to be the larger thing, that as we have an increasingly clear view of the transcendent

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God and the gap between me and God, then I, if I love this

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God, then I am glad for him to be everything and me to be nothing. That creature -creator relationship becomes a delight to me, and I don't want to compete with him anymore.

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You know, I want to be his and him to be all, and he points out that Jesus Christ, the most humble man, the

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God -man, but in his humanity, he is perfectly humble. He never promoted humility.

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He never cultivated humility in his heart by looking at how bad he was that week or how God had loved him undeservedly.

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Jesus of Nazareth was never loved with grace. He was loved with love that was always deserved, and he was never forgiven of sin.

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So what moved his soul to constantly delight, to place himself in a proper perspective to God, and that was the awareness of the infinite worth of the

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Father. That gap between creature and creator, even greater with us because we are imperfect, unlike Christ.

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He's still in a category of his own, even though he takes on humanity. Mr. Roberts has said to us in the past that one of the problems we have with pride and lack of humility is we make false comparisons.

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So Christ in his humanity views himself not by looking at Peter and Paul but by looking at God himself, the

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Father. And we often have a problem with pride because we don't do that.

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We look at the wrong places. You know, there's always someone to point at and say, yeah, but at least I'm not doing that.

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And you can see this in so many areas of life, but I saw it illustrated really well some years ago doing jail ministry.

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You know, here are these guys, you would think that they, you know, they're in these what you would think would be humbling situations, and yet not protesting their innocence but just saying, but I didn't do that.

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So there's this one particular period of time where there was a guy there for capital murder, and there's another guy there for child molestation, and the child molester is pointing at the other guy and saying, but I didn't kill anyone.

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You know, I didn't really hurt someone like that. And the guy that's there for capital murder is pointing to the other guy and saying, but I didn't molest anyone.

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And both of them are propping themselves up, pointing to this other person and saying, but I'm not that bad, which

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I guess kind of comes back to the idea of escaping judgment also, doesn't it? Because, you know, surely

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I've got an end. That guy's worse than I am. But then we look at God, and this gap is immeasurably large.

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There's no comparison. There's no point where I can say, well, maybe here.

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It's undeniable. Yeah, and it's infinite. And so, you know, you're never getting closer in your quality to the quality of God.

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You know, like you said, He's in another category. So it's not that God is 1 ,000 miles higher than us. And if we really worked at growing, we might reduce that to 999 miles higher than us.

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It's that it's infinite. And so, no matter how much we grow in Christlikeness, the gap is infinite.

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And as we feel that, the things that follow in this book, the work of Christ to rescue us, the work of, you know, the outworking of the triune

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God's redemptive plans, these things then greatly enlarge in front of our eyes because we need something to fill the gap between where I realize

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I am and where He is. Did you want to say something else?

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Were you about to say something? I was going to say, so one way to express that perhaps is as we, the more we see

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God, God's character, God's presence, He will look larger, not smaller.

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The gap's not getting smaller. It may feel like it's getting larger because we see Him more clearly. Yeah. Well, the last thing we wanted to point out from this chapter is that this is a lifelong pursuit.

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And Job, the passage that's given as an example, is just perfect. Job is the godliest man on earth, as far as we know.

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God brags on Job. And at the end of Job's terrible experiences of being stripped and emptied of any self -significance, and, you know, and in a period of terrible confusion where he's crying out to the

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Lord and the answers don't seem to come, what the old writer called the age -long moment, you know, the cry is raised to your

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Father in heaven, and it seems silent. Finally, God responds.

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And when God responds, He takes Job, in a sense, for two metaphorical walks, and asks

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Job a series of questions in chapters 38, 39, 40, and 41, where He shows

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Job the infinite gap between Him and Job. And chapter 42, Job says, you know, this man who knows

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God so well, has walked with the Lord so long, has to say that after these events, everything

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I knew about God before, it was like hearsay. It was like a compared to what now, it's like seeing

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Him, and I repent. You know, I turn from my smallness to Him again, more thoroughly than ever.

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But Job was an extremely godly man, and so I think one lesson we learn is this is a thing that by long soaking in the

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Word, it's a thing we could cultivate every day of our Christian walk, until we see our

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King face to face. So may the Lord help us. Next week, we're going to look at what follows, and that is a sermon on this

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God's law for His people, and how that should change our view of that law.