Theology is the Love of God

Andrew Rappaport's Rapp Report

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

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This is a ministry of striving for eternity. It is important to understand Christian doctrine.

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You know, many people claim to be Christians, but they don't know the basics of Christianity.

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They don't understand the richness and the depth of theology, the study of God.

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And if you claim to be a Christian, well, studying God should be, well, the number one priority.

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In fact, as a Christian, that should be our love. The love of our life is

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God. We would want to study Him all the time. And so we want to delve into looking at theology, taking a look at some of the things we can learn about God.

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We want to take a look at some of the major Christian doctrines. And if you want to get more information about each of these doctrines, you can get my book,

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What Do We Believe, at whatdowebelievebook .com, where we get into explaining some of these doctrines.

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It is a book that is designed for newer believers or people who, well, may not like to study theology so much to whet your appetite, to fall in love with theology, because it is the study of God that is the foundation of all of Christian faith.

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I hope that you enjoy this, and I hope that you start to love theology. Some people think that the doctrine of the

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Trinity is a problem, when in fact, the doctrine of the Trinity is actually the solution to a problem.

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What is the problem? Well, as we look at Scripture, we see that God the Father is referred to as God, and God the

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Son is referred to as God, and God the Holy Spirit is referred to as God. And yet we also see in many passages, such as when

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Jesus was baptized, we hear the voice of the Father, we see the Spirit descending as a dove, like a dove, and yet we see

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Christ standing in front of John. So you end up seeing that all three of the persons of the

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Godhead are separate and distinct from one another. We also see that each of them,

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Father, Son, and Spirit, all do the works that only God can do, such as creation, also all are involved in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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We also see that they have attributes that only God can have, such as omniscience and eternality.

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And so what you end up seeing is that the Trinity is the solution to a problem, because what we see in Scripture is that we see three persons who are all referred to as God, have the attributes of God, do the works of God, yet separate and distinct from one another, yet all referred to as one

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Godhead. Christianity is monotheistic. We believe in one God, but that one

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God is described as having three persons, the Father, the

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Son, and the Holy Spirit. One of the things that we see very often by the cults and false religions is that they struggle over the person, and more specifically, the deity of Jesus Christ.

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Now we've already looked at the Trinity and seen that all three members of the Trinity have the attributes of God, are called

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God, and do the works that only God can do. We see that in the Old Testament even,

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Jesus Christ is referred to as God. In Isaiah 9, verse 6, he's called Mighty God and Everlasting Father.

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In Isaiah 7, verse 14, he's referred to as Emmanuel, which is translated God with us.

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And in Jeremiah 23, verse 5, he is referred to as Jehovah Sikhenu, God of Righteousness.

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Now what we end up seeing is that Jesus Christ has attributes that only God can do.

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In Colossians 1, verses 15 to 17, we see that he is the creator of all the universe, and the whole universe is sustained by him.

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He is the firstborn, that is not referring to an offspring, but is referring to a preeminence.

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He is the firstborn of everything. He's the preeminence of everything. We end up seeing that he has the attributes that only

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God can do, or have. He has omniscience. Go through the Gospels and see how many times he reads people's minds.

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Over a hundred references to Jesus Christ knowing things that no man could know, but only if he has omniscience.

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He had the attributes of God. We end up seeing that Jesus Christ is God. You can learn more about this in my book,

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What Do We Believe? at whatdowebelievebook .com One thing we must look at when we look at Christian doctrine is the doctrine of mankind.

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We end up seeing within Christianity that there is a doctrine that teaches us that ever since Genesis chapter 3, when

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Adam and Eve chose to rebel against God and disobey his commands, and to act as if they could become

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God, they ended up bringing a curse of sin into all of mankind.

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It is passed on, as Romans chapter 5, 12 and following says, from father to child.

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This is, by the way, the reason that Jesus Christ had no earthly father. He had no one to pass the sin nature onto him.

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Now, as we look at that, we see that even when we are born from the womb, we end up with a sin nature.

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We all fall short of the glory of God. Romans chapter 3 details that.

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None is righteous, no not one. No one understands and no one seeks after God.

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We all will fall short because we have a sin nature. Now, when we look at this, it means that our complete nature, our intellect, our emotions, and even our will, have been influenced and in fact are enslaved to sin.

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Because of that, we are enemies of God. However, God has made a way of escape, but what did he do?

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He had to become a man like us, living perfectly under the law. Then we can be set free.

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You can learn more about the doctrine of man in my book, What Do We Believe, at whatdowebelievebook .com

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The one Christian doctrine that is perhaps more important than any other is the doctrine of salvation.

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In other words, how do we get right with God? Because this is the one doctrine that separates

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Christianity, biblical Christianity, that is from every other false man -made religion.

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Because it is only in Christianity, what we see in the Bible, that says that God did all the work and that he brings us to repentance, that he gifts us salvation.

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So what we end up seeing is that every other world religion will add human works to getting right with God, and yet what we see in the

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Bible is that God is the one who did all the work, when he himself became a man on the cross and died in our place.

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What ends up happening at salvation? Well, there's a lot of things that happen simultaneously. We end up seeing that we're regenerated.

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At the same time, we're converted. There's also justification, meaning that we are in a state where we are now just before God.

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We're adopted into his family where we were previously an enemy of God. Now we're adopted as a child of God.

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We are baptized into the Spirit, the Holy Spirit indwells us, gives us gifts, and we start the process of sanctification.

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We are now persevere. We now will remain in a state where we have eternal life, and we await the day that we will be glorified.

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When we look at all these things, we end up seeing salvation is a wonderful gift, something that the Jews look forward to, and something we can look back to in awe that God would save us.

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The last doctrine that I'd like to look at as we have been examining the doctrines of the Christian faith is the doctrine of the church.

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Now, there's a little bit of confusion on that word, church, because it actually came from the

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Greeks with the idea of a called out. It was actually called out for, well, a vote.

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But it came over time to have more specific meanings. Now, though it historically was a general meeting of people, a gathering of people, after Christ it became more specifically to the gathering of those that gather to celebrate and worship

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God. Now, we end up seeing that through the Middle Ages, and there's some issues with it, but there became definitions of the church referring to the invisible or universal church, meaning the body of all the believers, and then the visible or local church, which was the church that gathered.

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Now, the local church is those that gather within a building. The building, by the way, is not the church.

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But they gather in the building, and what you end up seeing is that there you can have believers and unbelievers, where the universal church was always the church that was of believers.

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Now, during the Reformation, they ended up defining the church even more by saying the church had three functions, to proclaim the word of God, to practice the ordinances, baptism and communion, and to keep the purity.

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In other words, practice church discipline. So we see that the definition of the church has actually changed over time.

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You can learn more about the church in my book, What Do We Believe, at whatdowebelievebook .com.

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This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.