Wednesday, September 28, 2022 PM

All right, well, let me open us in prayer and ask the Lord's blessing on our time this evening. Gracious Heavenly Father, we come before you and we are just so humbled to be in your presence. We thank you for this time of fellowship with our brothers and sisters to be able to sit down and share a meal, talk about the week so far, ask how we can pray for one another and encourage one another.

Now, as we open your word, we just ask for wisdom and understanding. Father, grant us that. Help us to come before you with clean hearts that we might receive this blessing from you. We ask these things in Jesus' name, amen.

Why Holiness Matters and Why the Study Will Focus on God's Attributes

Don't be scared. It's a big book, but I'm just looking at a little section in it tonight. So, first of all, rejoice and be glad because God is going to grow you in patience and forbearance tonight. As you have to listen to me.

So, I thank you for just your patience as we work through this together. I will try and be on time as much as I can. When Michael asked several of us a couple weeks ago if we wouldn't mind filling in for him while he's working in TAG, I got to thinking like, what am I gonna talk about if I volunteer here?

And the first thing that came into my mind was, well, what about a study on holiness? I had done a little bit of a study on holiness a few years ago before Holly and I took over the first through third grade Sunday school class on Kevin DeYoung's book, A Hole in Our Holiness.

And it kind of came out of stuff that's been going on at Christian Heritage Academy where I work. The first few chapels this year have been kind of heavy in a way because I think our administration is realizing that a lot of kids, particularly in the upper grades, are dealing with some difficult issues from anxiety to depression, suicidal thoughts, pornography, things like that.

And they want to present this clean facade on the outside that they're good Christian kids. But I thought, what is the remedy for that? And it is, I think, part of it is looking on the holiness of God.

And so I thought, well, maybe that can be something that I can talk about. But as I started to think about it, the Lord just kind of said, no, I think it's bigger than that, Kyle. I thought, well, also, I don't want to burn through all my potential material in one go, so maybe I need to think through something that we can stretch just in case.

So that's when I kind of landed on, or the Lord led me to, looking at the attributes of God. And so tonight, really, I just wanted it to be kind of an introduction into this study. And Lord willing, whenever I might have a chance to get back up here, we'll just continue in this.

I'm probably the least qualified person to teach on this, in my personal opinion. But thankfully, it's not about me. Lord equips those that he's called to teach. So I want to open with a question here.

What does it mean when we ask the question, what does it mean to be like God? And if you have your Bibles, I'm gonna be jumping around in Scripture a little bit. We'll look at a couple of passages here to try to answer that question, what does it mean to be like God?

Let's start in Genesis, chapter three. You might know where I'm going with this, but play along. Genesis, chapter three, verse one. Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.

And he said to the woman, has God indeed said, you shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree, which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, you shall not eat of it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.

Then the woman said to the serpent, you will not surely die, for God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. So what do we see in this short passage about God?

We see that our desire to be like God led ultimately to our separation. And ultimately, that desire, God forbids from us. What are some other examples? If we look at the picture of Adam and Eve, what are some other examples we see in scripture of this desire?

The guy in the New Testament who wanted to pay money in order to be able to do miracles. Good example. Thing that always pops into my mind is if you just look a few chapters later, we get to the Tower of Babel.

And they build the tower, and God looks down from heaven at this tower that they've built, and they are aspiring to be like God, to be equal with God. You look in Isaiah chapter 14. Scholars are a little bit here and there on who exactly it's referring to, but Lucifer, the name, is there in some translations.

It may also be talking about the king of Babylon, but his desire to ascend to the throne in heaven. And even King Nebuchadnezzar himself, he's walking on the roof of his palace and saying, look at all that I have done, and God brings him low.

So I think it's safe to say that this is not what it means when God says to be like God. Turn to Ephesians chapter five. Ephesians chapter five, verse one. Paul's writing, and he says, therefore, be imitators of God as dear children.

A short verse, but here we see the desire to be like God leads to what? It leads to an intimate fellowship with God, and God is commanding it of us. It's an imperative. He's saying, be imitators. How do we know that there's intimate fellowship there?

He uses the phrase dear children as a loving father would of his children, which indeed we are. For the Christian, for the child of God, for the redeemed, we should be imitators of God. If you wanna be like someone, if you want to imitate someone, you have to get to know them, and if you want that imitation to be deep and go to the point where it is said that he's just like his dad, then you have to go beyond just knowing facts about a person.

One of my favorite pictures, and as I was kind of thinking about this, the Lord brought it into my mind because I haven't seen it in such a long time. Holly took it years ago. I looked at the date on it, and it was 2012.

It was me in the front yard mowing the lawn, which I've not done in a while now. If you know my boys and see their size, I let them take on that responsibility now. But I'm mowing the lawn, and right next to me is a little five-year-old Hudson, and he's got his Fisher-Price bubble mower, and we're like right in stride with one another.

The reason that this brings me joy, not just for the fact that I'm seeing hope for me not having to mow the yard for much too longer, but the reason it brings me joy is to see his interest in his father and reciprocally my interest in my son.

We are, at that moment, spending time together in space, together, very close proximity. He's the one that's learning. I'm the one that's teaching. He's imitating me. He's not me. He's still Hudson, but he's becoming like me, and that pleases me.

So as we look at this word imitate, I'm gonna be a good CHA student here and define my terms, first of all. So how do we define our terms? We go to Webster, right? 1828. So the first definition in Webster's 1828 of imitate, to follow in manners, to copy in form, color, or quality.

We imitate another in dress or manners. We imitate a statue. We imitate a painting, a sound, an action. When we make or do that which resembles it, listen to this next part. We should seek the best models to imitate, and in morals and piety, it is our duty to imitate the example of our savior.

But as we cannot always make an exact similitude, there's a Webster word for you, of the original, hence, we come to definition number two, to attempt or endeavor to copy or resemble, as to imitate the colors of the rainbow or any of the beauties of nature.

Thinking about a rainbow, okay? A rainbow in reality, in creation, when we look outside after or during a rain, and God blesses us with that, it has an infinite, literally infinite number of colors that you can somewhat pick out.

I've looked at some of the statistics, and I think they've determined humans can maybe perceive upwards of 10 million colors with their eye. Now we try and replicate those colors on screens, and yet we're still nowhere close to the possibilities that are there.

That's like our imitation of God. He is infinite in his, he is infinite in his character, in his attributes. As I was thinking about this, those of you who may not know me very well, I'm the Director of Technology at CHA, so along with staying really busy, one of the things that I love to do when I get the chance is every once in a while, there'll be some kind of keynote address introducing some new technology.

And over the years, I've always kind of been interested in, I'm not a programmer, but interested in programming and the possibility of artificial intelligence. Now I say interested, not necessarily excited, because I have seen a few sci-fi movies, and I know what the potential is there.

But you kind of go back to the grandfather of artificial intelligence, and his name is Alan Turing. Turing proposed back in the middle of the 20th century these things called thinking machines. And one of the things that he came up with that we even use today and haven't necessarily figured out was something called the imitation game.

And what this is, is you have an interrogator, and then this interrogator is interrogating two entities. They may be human, one of them may be a machine, but the idea of the imitation game is to have the interrogator try to guess who is who based on the questions they are asking and of what nature are they.

So Turing said, you know, it's probably gonna be 30, 40 years before we see anything approaching this. In 2018, I was watching a keynote, it was a Google I-O conference in San Francisco. And kind of low key, they started at first, but introducing this product they've been working on called Google Duplex.

And what this is, is it allows someone using the Google Assistant, which probably you all have heard of by now, it's on your phones, maybe in your homes, using the Google Assistant to do things with businesses if the businesses say they don't have an online booking page, but you'd like to make an appointment with them.

Using the Google Assistant to call the business and impersonate an actual human to make the call. It was one of the craziest things I've ever seen, but it actually worked. And on the one hand, I was amazed, on the other hand, I was like, what did I just see?

And you would see the reaction of people in the crowd, and that trepidation, I think, came from a sense of there's some obfuscation going on here. There is, something is being presented that is not its true nature, and the person on the other end of the line doesn't know it.

Okay? A lot of times, that's what we experience imitation as. A spy might wear a mask. They're imitating someone else. Even now, in film and movie production, and this is a technology piece, they don't really have to go to actual sets anymore.

It's not just green screen and blue screen anymore. Now they have this thing called the LED volume, where they project images, and it's actually the set that the actors and actresses stand in, and it really looks like they're in the middle of the desert or in the middle of the city, when they're really just in a room with a really big screen that goes around the room.

And so you look at those things and you're like, who can I trust anymore? Imitation. But here's the good thing. Our proper imitation of God brings us closer to the truth, and I think that we will see that.

Knowing God Through Revelation, Scripture, and the Limits of Human Knowledge

So before we jump into the attributes, let's ask the question, is knowing God, is imitating God really all that important? I mean, isn't loving others more important? Isn't giving to the poor or whatever more important?

And I don't think that it is. And I'll use a few quotes here to back me up. The two A .W.'s. First, A .W. Pink. He says, a spiritual and saving knowledge of God is the greatest need of every human creature.

A .W. Tozer says, what comes into our mind when we think of God is the most important thing about us. Steve Lawson, in his study on the attributes of God, he says, how we understand and how we know God is the continental divide in the life of every man and every woman.

What does he mean by that? What does he mean by it being a continental divide? When you go to the continental divide, okay, on one side, the water runs this way, and it flows into the little tributaries and the streams and the rivers, and it all empties into this ocean.

And on the other side, it goes the other way in the same manner. But the two oceans are different. On one side, you have a very man-centered view of everything, of the spheres of life. On the other side, when you know and understand God and view everything in that light, it all is colored and flavored with that.

Rightly knowing who God is helps us to rightly know ourselves. Why? Because we are made in his image, the Imago Dei. Rightly knowing who God is helps us to order some things. It helps us to order our worship of him.

It helps us to love others. It helps us in our calling, in our vocations, in our understanding of how we should relate to authority. Any other ideas or thoughts of a right understanding of God helps us to do what?

Practically, to love others. That's exactly the point, to be like him.

To regain that experience.

Yes, the pre-fall experience. If you have a low view of God, what do you end up with? High view of yourself. What else? What's some fallout from that? You don't have a right relationship with man. Exactly right.

Can we really know God? How much can we know him? Is this all just a futile exercise? If we just focus on, well, he's God, I'm not, why bother? No, because number one, he commands it of us. We would not know God, and this is an important point, we would not know God without his willful act.

This is God's willful act of revealing himself to us, his revelation, and that happens in several ways. Turn to Romans chapter one, verse 19, kind of in the middle of the sentence, but we'll get back to a little bit more of it in a minute.

Because what may be known of God is manifest in them for God has shown it to them, okay? God has shown it to them, revealed it to them in nature. They are without excuse. Go to Matthew chapter 11, verse 27.

Matthew chapter 11, verse 27. All things have been delivered to me by my father, and no one knows the son except the father, nor does anyone know the father except the son, and the one to whom the son wills to reveal him.

We know God because he's been bodily revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. It's also when we look back at Romans, hopefully you kept your finger there, go back to Romans chapter one, verse 18, right before what we just read, the necessity to interpret natural revelation through the lens of his special revelation in scripture in his word in the Bible.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth and unrighteousness. Jump ahead to verse 21. Because although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God, nor were they thankful but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Verse 25, they exchanged the truth of God for the lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who was blessed forever, amen. We can never fully know or understand God. That's not a bad thing.

It's not a bad thing to say that God is incomprehensible. That means he, that's not that he cannot be understood at all. That means he cannot be fully understood. It's a little bit older definition. In Psalm 145, Psalm 145, verse three, great is the Lord and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable.

Psalm 147, verse five, great is our Lord and mighty in power, his understanding is infinite. Psalm 139, verse six, give you time to get there. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. This is David speaking.

It is high, I cannot attain it. And then going down to verse 17, how precious also are your thoughts to me, oh God, how great is the sum of them. Even when we look ahead to what Paul wrote in Romans chapter 11, there we see the unsearchableness of God.

Romans chapter 11, verse 33, oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out. So our application to us here, this is the great thing that we have to look forward to.

We will have a never ending delight and joy in eternity in growing in our knowledge of God. And here's where I'll read just a brief excerpt from Grudem's systematic theology that he writes regarding this.

He says, the doctrine of God's incomprehensibility has much positive application for our own lives. It means that we will never be able to know too much about God, for we will never run out of things to learn about him.

And we will thus never tire in delighting in the discovery of more and more of his excellence and of the greatness of his works. Even in the age to come when we're freed from the presence of sin, we will never be able to fully understand God or any one thing about him.

We can know the truth about who God really is because we know that scripture is true. When scripture reveals something about God, we know that what it says about God is true. Knowledge can be true, but it doesn't necessarily have to be exhaustive.

Okay, and that relates back to the previous point. God commands us not to merely know facts about him. And I said this earlier about truly knowing a person, but to know him personally. Look in Jeremiah chapter nine, verse 23 and verse 24.

Thus says the Lord, let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, let not the mighty man glory in his might, nor let the rich man glory in his riches, but let him who glories glory in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord, exercising loving kindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth, for in these I delight.

The Attributes of God: His Being, the Trinity, and Their Interconnection

Let's give a quick preview before we run out of time here of God's attributes. When we are talking about God's attributes, here's what we're talking about. We're referring to his character, his nature, his personage, his perfections, his essence, his very being.

They define in our finite capacity to define who God is. So I'm gonna list off, and as I make this list, it doesn't necessarily mean, Lord willing, if we're able to go through more of this study, that this is necessarily the order that these things should proceed in.

I think they do need to be rightly ordered, but this isn't necessarily the right way to order them. But I'll start with God's self-existence, and I really do think that that's the first one for us to talk about.

God's self-existence, his spirituality, his sovereignty, his holiness, the three omnis, his omniscience, his omnipresence, his omnipotence. God's immutability, kind of a big word, but it means unchangeableness.

God's truthfulness, we'll look at God's wisdom, we'll look at God's goodness, his grace, his love, his foreknowledge, and then two that go together, his righteousness and his wrath. Some others that you might include in that list, eternity, unity, peace, mercy, justice, jealousy, freedom, beauty, I know that I can go on.

There's a few items to note regarding these attributes as they relate to God and the Godhead. Number one, all of these attributes that we will list and we will study together are fully present in the three persons of the Godhead simultaneously.

It's their ministries that differ, but they are all fully complete in all of the attributes, each of them in the unity of the one Godhead. Number two, all attributes have eternally existed in God, eternally existed in God.

God is not in the business of self-improvement, okay? There is no such thing as a God of the Old Testament and a God of the New Testament. There is only God. Number three, all attributes are inseparably interconnected to each other perfectly.

We can't think of it like God is a pie and all of his attributes are slices of that pie and one slice might be bigger and because it's bigger, we can kind of, well, that's more important or we can play them off of one another.

Think of it more like threads in a tapestry, creating this beautiful, majestic piece of art that we look upon and it's really, they're inseparable from each other because when you try to take it away, it pulls on another and then it just completely falls apart.

That's what we're talking about when we talk about the inseparable interconnectedness of God's attributes. It's related to something that R .C. Sproul says in terms of the simplicity of God and it sounds kind of heretical until you hear him explain what this is.

Sproul says, though love is an attribute of God, an extremely important attribute of God, God is a simple being, not in the sense that he is simplistic, but we understand that God is not made up of parts.

God is his attributes so that to understand any single attribute of God, you must understand that attribute as it relates and connects with all the other attributes of God. The love of God is an eternal love.

The love of God is a sovereign love. The love of God is an immutable love. The love of God is a holy love. A God who is stripped of his attributes of justice, of holiness, or sovereignty, all the rest is just as much an idol as something made out of wood or stone.

We imitate God's attributes as he reveals them to be. We don't get to decide what God's love is. That's not our job. We submit to his authority. We look to his being as love. Love is not love. We hear it all the time in our culture today.

No, God is love. How has he revealed his love to us? Through his son, Jesus Christ. So in conclusion to our study here, remember this phrase, our theology determines our doxology. Our doctrine flows from a right understanding of God.

An accurate knowledge of God will have practical effects on our Christian walk. I'll go back to A .W. Pink in his preface of this small book, but really powerful book that Michael lent me. He says, the foundation of all true knowledge of God must be a clear mental apprehension of his perfections as revealed in Holy Scripture.

An unknown God can neither be trusted, served, nor worshiped. Something more than a theoretical knowledge of God is needed by us. God is only truly known in the soul as we yield ourselves to him, submit to his authority, and regulate all the details of our lives by his holy precepts and commandments.

We look at Hosea chapter six, verse three. Then shall we know if we follow on in the path of obedience to know the Lord. I can't help but close with this, and it's a longer section to read, but it's Spurgeon, so how can you not read the whole thing?

He preached a sermon when he was relatively young, I think like 20 years old, on the immutability of God. But he opens, it's really a good introduction for looking at the attributes of God. So bear with me, we'll run over time just a tad.

Spurgeon. Spurgeon says, it has been said by someone that the proper study of mankind is man. I will not oppose the idea, but I believe it is equally true that the proper study of God's elect is God. The proper study of a Christian is the Godhead.

The highest science, the loftiest speculation, the mightiest philosophy which can ever engage the attention of a child of God is the name, the nature, the person, the work, the doings, and the existence of the great God whom he calls his father.

There is something exceedingly improving to the mind in a contemplation of the divinity. It is a subject so vast that all our thoughts are lost in its immensity, so deep that our pride is drowned in its infinity.

Other subjects we can compass and grapple with, and then we feel a kind of self-content and go our way with the thought, behold, I am wise. But when we come to this master science, finding that our plumb line cannot sound its depth, that our eagle eye cannot see its height, we turn away with the thought that vain man would be wise, but he is like a wild ass's colt.

And with the solemn exclamation, I am but of yesterday and know nothing. No subject of contemplation will tend more to humble the mind than thoughts of God. We shall be obliged to feel, great God, how infinite art thou, what worthless worms are we.

But while the subject humbles the mind, it also expands it. He who often thinks of God will have a larger mind than the man who simply plods around this narrow globe. He may be a naturalist, boasting of his ability to dissect a beetle, anatomize a fly, or arrange insects and animals in classes with well-nigh unutterable names.

He may be a geologist with the ability to discourse of the megatherium and the plesiosaurus and all kinds of extinct animals. He may imagine that his science, whatever it is, ennobles and enlarges his mind.

I dare say that it does. But after all, the most excellent study for expanding the soul is the science of Christ and him crucified, and the knowledge of the Godhead in the glorious Trinity. Nothing will so enlarge the intellect, nothing so magnify the whole soul of man as a devout, earnest, continued investigation of the great subject of the deity.

This is important to us, especially in our world today. And whilst humbling and expanding, this subject is eminently consolatory. Oh, there is in contemplating Christ a balm for every wound. In musing on the Father, there is a quietus for every grief.

And in the influence of the Holy Ghost, there is a balsam for every sore. Would you lose your sorrows? Would you drown your cares? Then go, plunge yourself in the Godhead's deepest sea, be lost in his immensity, and you shall come forth as from a couch of rest, refreshed and invigorated.

I know nothing which can so comfort the soul, so calm the swelling billows of grief and sorrow, so speak peace to the winds of trial as a devout musing upon the subject of the Godhead. This study brings fear, but it's a holy fear.

It brings excitement. May God give us the grace as we look at his attributes to, in humble humility, ask for blessing. So, we will break up and pray, prayer request tonight.