Becoming Better Theologians: Godhead Quiz

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Our Father in heaven, we come before you this morning just rejoicing in your goodness to us, thankful that we have yet another day to gather together to worship you, to contemplate what you have done on behalf of sinners.
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Father, I pray that as we meet here this morning, that you would bless our time as we look to your word, as we study about you, that we might know you, the one true living
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God. In Christ's name I pray. Well, quite a week this morning and I thought
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I might just grab your attention with a quiz. Who doesn't love a good quiz on Sunday morning?
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And if you fail, you know what that means. Did I see a hand on that? I wasn't asking for hands. Alright, well we've been going through Culver's Systematic Theology book.
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Some of you know that, some of you don't know that, but that's what we've been doing.
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And does everybody have a copy of the quiz? Okay. Deb, you don't?
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I have a couple extra here. Oh, Linton has one. Alright, good. I could give you time and go through it, but why do that?
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Let's just wing it. Number one, true or false, that God is spirit points toward the truth that his church need not meet physically.
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That is just the worst question I've ever seen. Who wrote that? Oh, it was me. Okay. Yeah, that's false.
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There are people, of course, that say that. Where would I get the idea that God is spirit? John 4 .24
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I hear, and John 4 .24 is correct. In fact, Culver goes on to say this,
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God is spirit, a saying of Jesus, John 4 .24, was spoken for practical reasons.
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Jesus was introducing an age wherein the geographical location and physical implements of worship are no longer of great importance.
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What does Culver mean by that? Why would the physical location and the physical implements of worship no longer be of great importance?
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Coffee room is open, by the way. God is no longer just, we don't have to go to the temple to worship him any longer.
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It's not the physical implements that were in the temple, all these kind of things. Jesus is with us.
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Christ is with us. So good. Culver goes on to say, whatever temporary value the
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Old Testament ritual actions and materials may have had, they are worthless now.
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Suppose they make good museum pieces, but that's about it. They may teach us, but we dare not perpetuate them.
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God is spirit, and they that worship him must worship in spirit and in truth. It is all in the spiritual realm, however much mankind's unity of body and spirit and residence and material world require such things as buildings, music, hymns,
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Bibles, pews, and central heating, to which I add central air conditioning on occasion, as well as a convenient location and accessible premises, blah, blah, blah.
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Ceremonies, religious buildings, and objects are now secondary to the purely spiritual. You know, so some folks say, well, then
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I don't need to go to church. Well, that's not right.
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How do you participate in worship? Well, I worship at home. I worship in the forest.
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I worship in the... We gather together for a purpose. We gather together to worship him, and we do so because,
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I mean, for several reasons. I don't want to recreate the entire new member's class, but we gather together to equip the saints.
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Ephesians 4 would tell us that we are to equip the saints for the work of ministry. We also gather together to edify one another.
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We gather together to bear one another's burdens. We gather together to serve one another. And then what do we do?
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You know, is it Sunday? Here's kind of the way I've been really just focused on this here lately.
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What is the purpose of Sunday? Why do we gather together? What's that?
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First day of the week. So we come together on the first day of the week because that's what the church did in the beginning. Why else?
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What else is special about Sundays, Bruce? To glorify
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God, we gather together on Sundays. But is the purpose of Sunday just to show up, to get together with a bunch of believers, and then to go out the rest of the week and just forget about it until the next
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Sunday? I think the problem with some Christians, quite frankly, is we have the idea that Sunday morning is more of an appointment in our calendar book.
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I won't call it an inconvenience, it's just something that we do. We need to have that right mindset that we come here to worship the king, that we're here to honor him, that we're here to focus on what he has done.
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We're here to serve one another. We're here to get equipped. But Sunday is just the beginning of the week.
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What do we do for the rest of the week? No, we carefully hide our candle under a bushel.
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We leave here, we take off the suit, and we put on the camouflage. Low crawl around the world so that nobody knows.
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You know, it's kind of like the opposite of Jude 3 and 4 where, you know, the unbelievers creep into the church and kind of gain stature and everything.
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And we leave here, we sneak into the world so that nobody knows. That's not the point.
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We worship on Sundays, yes, but the rest of the week, that worship needs to be on display. We need to be joyful.
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We need to be happy. We need to be focused on how we present the good news to a lost and dying world.
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Culver goes on to say, we're free from an elaborate ceremonial system. Which I just think, you know, where's the incense?
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Where's the big, you know, we need the censors and things waving in the air. No. He says here that no one has ever framed a definition of spirit that fully satisfies everyone.
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I mean, what does it mean that God is spirit? We understand some of that, but how do we... We can't fully define what spirit is.
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Commitments about reality in general are involved for those who believe matter and chemistry and the chemistry of it to be only a part of reality, blah, blah, blah, blah, who cares?
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Number two. Sorry, Mr. Culver. Number two, true or false? That God is a spirit means that he cannot have substance.
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False. Very good. You guys are right on top of it this morning. There's a certain reluctance to speak of the divine spirit as a substance.
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This is because our minds can scarcely conceive of a substance without the quality of materiality.
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In other words, we want to... If something has substance, what do we think? We have to be able to touch it.
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We have to be able to kind of get a sense of its texture. It has to appear to one of our senses anyway, you know, whether it's sight, sound, whatever.
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We have to kind of have some idea that there's something physical there.
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Culver goes on to say that, yet we know that God is not a mere idea, in other words, he's not just ethereal and doesn't have some substance, but God is not a thing.
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The truth is God is a spiritual substance, one that we cannot really define. Just as we cannot define who can tell me what a soul looks like, who can tell me what a soul feels like, who can kind of give me the texture of their soul.
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And the truth is you can't. God as a pure spirit is as insubstantial, or is as, let me back up, is as substantial as our own spirits, though his spirit is not spatially enclosed in a body as ours is.
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There must be an agent in order to choose a substantial being in order to act.
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In other words, he's saying that God must have a will, and yet he must have some manner of substance in order to act.
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He can't just be a thought, an emanation. The Bible presents
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God as a self -conscious, personal spirit. He is the living God, active and intelligent.
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He is not only a God who acts freely, he self -determines what he will do and what he wants to do, but also with sovereign purpose.
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We must think of this group of ideas in connection with the spirit, or with this statement,
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God is spirit. We are not to completely isolate these elements, even for purposes of discussion.
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In other words, we need to think of God as a whole person in all of his attributes, in all of the truths that are true about him.
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Number three, true or false. The Bible often portrays God as an impersonal force.
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Only the movies do that. A person is a subject who thinks.
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God is a person. A person is also an object of thought. By this we mean that there is a kind of relationship of persons to persons that is unique to persons.
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I love my dogs, but none of them are a person, although sometimes we think they are.
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Anything other than a person with whom I relate myself, this is Culver speaking, anything other than a person with whom
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I relate myself as a person is an it. My dogs, for example.
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Of course when I discourse about thee with another thou, then thou art a he or she for purposes of discourse.
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In a definite matter, we now have seen a practical demonstration of how personality works rather than what it is.
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In other words, we know ourselves to be persons. We know other people to be persons. We know other persons to be persons.
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We understand that interaction and there is a separate relationship with things.
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But the Bible makes it very clear, because God always says what? He doesn't say, well, let's just say what it says.
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He says I, meaning personal me, you know, a person.
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And when he speaks to other people, he says you or you plural, referring to other persons as other persons, because that's the relationship he has.
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Most readers will need to trace these matters through only a fragment of the biblical evidence to be convinced. God is never in a distant impersonal ghost that sounds itself impersonally through some occultist medium, you know, it's not like there is a sense in which...
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We never see the Bible talk about him like that. He is an eternal person, not a force.
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He's not impersonal, he's personal. He regulates all things.
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He is involved in all aspects of creation personally. Personal character of God is plain in his conversations with Adam and Eve.
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Let's look at Genesis 3, Genesis 3, verses 9 to 23.
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And if I could get somebody to read that please, Genesis 3, verses 9 to 23. Now here's an extra credit question.
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Does the Bible ever call God a person? God is a person, those who worship him must worship him in his...
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Does it ever say that? No, it doesn't.
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So how can we say then that God is a person, Charlie? He has personhood, which means he exists in three persons.
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You're not helping me, Charlie. He has the characteristics of personality.
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Do we see the Bible expressing, laying aside the anthropomorphic language here, do we see
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God expressing emotion in the Bible? Do we see God taking action in the
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Bible? He does all the things that a person would do. For example, does
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God have friends? Calls Abraham his friend.
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And this is interesting. Just think about this. In discussing
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Abraham, in Genesis 18, 17, the
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Lord said, shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? I mean, there is a distinct personhood to God in the way he's presented in the
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Bible, in the way he speaks, in the way he acts. There's no doubt about it. Now he says,
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Culver goes on to say, a first caution should be observed in saying God is a person, or God is a personal spirit.
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The meaning is not exactly the same as when the three members of the triune God are called persons.
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The three persons are persons of the one God. It indicates the sense in which
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God is three, but there is only one God. Peter, James, and John are three, he gives an example. Peter, James, and John are three separate persons, yet they share a generic unity of nature, humanity.
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But there are not three gods, each of whom shares in a generic something called divinity, godness, or godhead.
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Where the father is, there also are the son and the spirit, but they're all each everywhere.
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Second caution should also be observed. Our personal nature is analogical to God's nature, his essence being in some important ways.
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Yet God is an infinite and self -existent person while we are limited and dependent wholly on him.
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Okay, number four, true or false, in the eyes of God, animals are just as important as people.
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I could rewrite that and say, in the eyes of people, animals are just as important as God, and I could probably get a true, because a lot of people do that.
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I mean, I see these things on TV, and I'm very much a dog person.
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I love animals. But when I see these advertisements for, you know, just for $18 a month, you can save a dog or whatever, and I'm going, okay.
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Or for $18 a month, I could actually save a child, or all these different things.
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I mean, it's like apples and oranges. It is difficult when a pet dies.
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It's a lot more difficult when a person dies. People have souls, and we need to keep that in mind.
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Culver says this, self -consciousness is part of what it means to be a person. I mean, it's amazing.
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You learn so much about dogs, because that's all I have, by having a dog. You know, when you start studying them and reading about them, you know that dogs are, they are pet creatures.
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We understand that. But did you know that they, why is it that dogs don't want to show weakness? Because what happens to a weak member of a pack?
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They get taken out. The leader of the pack says, you're useless, and they get rid of them. And so they live in that kind of fear of becoming useless, of becoming too weak to have any value.
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But that's the only kind of sense of personal awareness.
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I mean, a dog is never worried. A dog never says to you, obviously they can't speak. But a dog is never concerned that he's naked or she's naked.
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They're never concerned about that. They have no self -awareness. They don't, you know, they don't ever have to say, excuse me.
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They're just, they just are who they are. There's a complete difference between an animal and a person.
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So, I mean, that's just ridiculous, but that's how some people think. If you have a biblical worldview, you'll love dogs.
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You'll love dogs as part of God's creation. You'll marvel that he made cats. But that's a whole separate issue.
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He goes on to say, Culver says, our pets and domestic beasts are conscious, of course.
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They go to sleep and awaken. They receive stimuli, have sensations, and respond to them. But only human beings among God's creatures have the ability to think of themselves objectively.
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Although some people don't really think of themselves objectively. Engaging in introspection as we do, we are aware of our own actions and states of mind, and we can rationally distinguish the self, which is the subject of those states of mind, and which initiates actions.
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Brutes or animals cannot accomplish these feats of personal beings. In other words, there's a categorical difference.
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And then again, between us and God, a categorical difference in so many ways.
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You know, even as we talk about animals sleeping. I mean, sometimes I think my dogs would be happy to sleep about 23 hours a day, like teenagers.
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But I digress. We need sleep. We need rest.
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God never slumbers nor sleeps. We have a tendency to flit about from thought to thought to thought.
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God is capable of massively multitasking and handling all thoughts at all times.
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That's how we can listen to all prayers. There's a categorical difference between animals and us.
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There's a categorical leap between us and God. Number five, true or false.
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Like God, we have perfect self -consciousness. Repeat with me. I mean, that is,
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I have achieved self -consciousness. Yeah, that's...
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Culver says, this patent truth is one aspect of the famous declaration of God to Moses as he responded to Moses' question, what is his name?
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What is the name of this God that I'm going to go represent to the people of Israel? And God, of course, said in Exodus 3 .14,
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I am who I am. It's not just self -existence, but it is a self -conscious person.
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This is the ultimate verbal self -disclosure, Culver says. God's self -consciousness, like all other features of his being, is his in perfection.
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He's perfectly aware of all that he is. I mean, we don't have to go very far to understand our own limitations in this.
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I mean, I'm always shocked at the old guy staring back at me in the mirror. I mean, you know, mentally,
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I'm still probably about 15. God's self -consciousness is perfect.
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But in this respect, our Creator is both like and unlike the most excellent crown of his creative art, mankind.
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He is like us in that we are self -conscious, but unlike us in that he's perfectly self -conscious. Culver says this, gives us a little self -disclosure.
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There are innumerable crannies of my personality of which I am unconscious. Right? I mean, we don't even realize how we come across to some people.
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I'm reminded of that all the time. Culver says, some I do not wish to acknowledge, even when others who see them clearly point them out to me.
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David said, who can discern his errors? And that's exactly right. That's, that's the way we are. We don't understand all of our flaws.
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God knows himself completely, and he's without flaw, of course, but he is never surprised at what he says or does.
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And may I just add, he's never disappointed at what he says or does. He's never ashamed of it.
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He never has to take it back. So it was with our Savior in the days that he walked on this earth.
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Because this is so, we may ask our God to help us discover ourselves. Reveal to me my faults.
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Reveal to me my sins. We can also ask him to reveal the deep things of God himself.
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We need his spirit to give meaningful effect to the very words about him that we read in the
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Bible. We can't understand, right? 1 Corinthians 2 would tell us that we can't understand the deep things of God.
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What? Apart from his spirit. Apart from his spirit enabling us to discern those things.
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Number six, true or false? The gods of Buddhism and Hinduism are self -conscious and self -determining in a manner similar to God.
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That is my self, or that is my coexist, you know, salute for the day.
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That's false. You know, it's like Dagon. You set them up, they go down.
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They have nothing. That whole section of Isaiah, you know, in, what is it?
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Maybe Isaiah 42 to 48, where he just, he talks about how men make these idols who can't hear, they can't see, they can't smell, they can't do anything.
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They can't speak, and they worship them. Carve them up, set them up, and then worship them.
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Dumb, really, really dumb. And that's the same thing for the gods of Buddhism and Hinduism.
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They are nothings. They have no self -consciousness. Culver says, later we shall discuss life and activity as aspects of God's personality.
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They are prerequisites of self -consciousness and self -determination. So let's just focus on that for a second.
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Life and activity are prerequisites of self -consciousness and self -determination. Well, Buddha has no life, you know, or the gods of Hinduism have no life.
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And therefore, they have no self -consciousness and no self -determination. In fact,
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Culver says, in this respect, the Christian God is wholly different from the gods of the great Oriental religions, i .e.,
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Hinduism, Buddhism, Parsiism, which I don't even know, I don't even know what that is.
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There is no personal, self -conscious, self -determining, active, self -moving, living center in these gods.
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The center of reality is impersonal, unconscious, unmoving, and certainly not alive. These religions are pantheistic at heart.
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God, insofar as it is correct to speak of the central fact of their religion as God, is personal only in mankind or other spirits.
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The idea of freedom or self -determination, though somewhat self -explanatory, needs some limitation of not clarification.
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All things we can think of are determined in some way, certainly by their characteristics and their natures.
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Let's see, to a certain, to a limited degree, human beings are thus determined, and much of our societal behavior, eating requirements, recreation, and the like, is to a certain degree predictable, right?
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We know that when we get up in the morning, even if we don't eat breakfast, and you really should, it's the most important meal of the day.
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Even if we don't eat breakfast, we're going to be hungry. We know that sometime during the middle of the day, we're going to get hungry.
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Why? Because this is just the subject, or it is a truism of our existence, that we are going to have these things.
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We're going to experience hunger. He says here, insofar as politicians, social planners, technocrats, and similar can manipulate us individually and collectively, we are beings determined by what we collectively are.
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We need to eat. We need shelter. We need clothing. We need all these things.
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We need work. We need, we are creatures who have certain conditions that we need to exist. We are truly within limits, self -determined.
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Listen to this, to date, every totalitarian political regime has run aground on people's unwillingness to yield determination of their behavior to someone else for a very long period of time.
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Why is that? Why is it that all dictatorships fail? It might take decades, but why do they fail?
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Well, because we are longing to be free, for one thing, but I think it's also, it's just this self -determination, this desire within us to determine our own destiny.
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But more than that, when we have, sooner or later, we know that the dictatorship, for example, in North Korea is over.
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It's going to fall because people will not starve to death voluntarily indefinitely. You can't continue that.
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Sooner or later, it's going to get overthrown. But mankind's self -determination is under Almighty God.
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Humanity has faculties for self -determination. They were great before man fell and thereby ceased to operate wholly in God's moral will.
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God only is self -determined. In other words, we have a will. It is, it moves in a given direction.
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But only God, let me see if I can, we have a will.
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But it is subsumed, it is under God's will. Only God does exactly what he wants, as he wants, always as he desires and makes it come to pass.
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We don't. Let's go on to number seven. True or false?
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Our freedom for self -determination is like God's. Well, we already know that's false. The Bible speaks frequently of the will of God in such a way as to show that there is a human will just as there is a human will as a person.
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So there is a will of God as a person. Classical theologians of great repute warn us against carrying the parallel too far.
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Calvin makes the point at the very beginning of his institutes that to know one's genuine human self -will is to know something of the creator in whose image we are made.
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He immediately follows with warnings against carrying this example too far because of the sin in our hearts which distorts the image and leads to a warped opinion of ourselves.
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So our self -determination is not like God's. Number eight, true or false? God's great power is the ultimate reason everything exists.
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True. Culver says the will of God is the ultimate cause of all things.
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Think about that for a moment. We talk about his power. But if God willed or if he no longer willed, if he no longer desired everything to exist, then it would no longer exist.
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But he has decreed that it will exist and so it will. To join God's will of this or that to his nature without notice that God is a spirit who performs free acts of personal expression leads to pantheism.
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That is, everything is in God and not to the biblical
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God. Freedom is part of the law of his being. Okay, number nine, true or false?
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Since evil exists, it must reflect some bad part of God's personality. It's false.
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Good. God is the ultimate and highest good. In Latin, that is, it's not even in my notes here, is,
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I learned this from R .C. Sproul, is sumum bonum. It's the highest good. He is the best. He is the ultimate highest end and the highest good which cannot but will and love.
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For he cannot nullify his own glory or deny himself. Why does evil exist?
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You know, there's a question you often get from unbelievers. Why does evil exist? Okay, so evil exists in part because that's the output of man, right?
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And God bounds that. He puts boundaries on it. But ultimately, why does evil exist?
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Evil exists so that Christ might be glorified by redeeming men from sin, right?
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Okay, that's certainly one reason, John. Okay, you actually said two important things here.
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Number one is God allows it. God allows evil. Can he stop evil? Okay, secondly, we're not for evil.
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We're not for sin. There are a lot of things we would not understand. We wouldn't understand God's mercy. We really wouldn't understand what?
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God's justice. We wouldn't understand. I mean, you could just go down a list of attributes and anything that kind of weighs against evil or stands against it.
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In other words, would we understand God's holiness? Would we understand his purity? Would we understand any of these things?
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The answer is no. We certainly wouldn't understand our need for a savior because there wouldn't be one.
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So all these things exist. And ultimately, you said this too, or this is kind of combining what you and Bruce said.
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But ultimately, it's so that we might understand his personhood. So that we might understand more about him.
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So that we might see his attributes on display. And ultimately, it's for his glory. Evil exists for God's glory.
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And there's an amazing thought, you know, when an unbeliever says, you know, well, why does
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God allow evil to exist? How about this answer? For his glory. That's the short answer.
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And then, you know, if that doesn't drop their jaw, then I don't know what will. Yes, Donnie.
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What's the difference between sin and evil? I think that's an excellent question. I think sin is an action. I think evil is just the overall kind of system or arena in which sin exists.
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You know, evil will not exist in heaven. Sin will not exist in heaven.
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Sin is an individual act or series of acts. And evil is the system that results there from.
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So, or the mindset that exists there from. So, I think that's the distinction
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I would make. Any other thoughts on that? Difference between sin and evil? Okay, moving on.
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Number 10. True or false. We can know God's will concerning everything. What's that?
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This side of the grave. Let's read that again.
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True or false. We can know God's will concerning everything. How do we know that's false? Is there a scripture?
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Deuteronomy 29, 29, 29. The parents' favorite verse. Come on.
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Haven't you ever said to your kids, Deuteronomy 29, 29? And then have them come back to you and go, but you're not
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God. Well, you know, but I'm God's agent. And I'm telling you that some of the secret things that he has, he's given to me.
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And come on, you never use that.
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You know, you're not as bad of a parent as I was. The secret things belong to the
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Lord, but the things revealed belong to us, right?
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We can know a great many things. We can't know everything. You know, there are certain imponderables.
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And when people ask you things that just go outside the nature of scripture, then you just have to say what? Well, here's what
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I do. Let me make up an answer. No, you have to say, I don't know. Or God hasn't revealed that.
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Or let me, you know, at the very least, let me research that. But here's what Culver says.
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He says he did not have to make the world true. I mean, there's nothing in God's nature that forced him to do what he did.
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Creation, preservation, and salvation are free acts of God. Some distinguish between the decretive, that is that which
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God has decreed, and the precept of will, that which he would like to come to pass.
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The former refers to God's decrees or plans. The former is always accomplished while the latter is often disobeyed, right?
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God says, thou shalt not murder. And yet what happens? People murder.
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Thou shalt not steal. And yet what happens? People steal. There is a general call, an invitation to where all people everywhere are commanded to repent and believe.
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But what happens? Many reject. So let's move on here to number 11.
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Sure false one of God's attributes is that he is living. True.
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As one examines the text, it becomes apparent that the living God is associated with all of God's attributes and works.
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Let's see. I mean, are we going to sing children of the living God? I don't know. But why does
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God get angry? Especially in the Old Testament, we see this over and over again. God, his anger is kindled against Israel.
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Why is that? Because they are worshiping idols, but they're dead idols.
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They have no ability to do anything. Scripture indicates clearly how important it is that Yahweh is the living
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God. And why? God is greatly to be feared because except for the elect people of God, no other can hear
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God's audible voice and live. Says that in Deuteronomy 5 .26. How about Hebrews 10 .31?
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It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
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I mean, it could just say God, right? But it doesn't say that. What's the clarify out of any
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God that any person might think about? It's a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living
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God. And again, that's just in contrast to the idols of pagans. And this must surely have been in Paul's mind when he wrote to the
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Thessalonians how they turned from God or to God from idols to serve the living and true
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God. First Thessalonians 1 .9. Since he is the living God, his people may safely go on the offensive in pursuit of the goals of his kingdom.
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The living God is among you. He will, without fail, drive out from before you the
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Canaanites. We would read that in Joshua. The living God also rescues his people from physical threats to their lives when his purpose and will are served thereby.
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To his great surprise, Nebuchadnezzar discovered this in Daniel 6. Missionaries sometimes passed by various promising exercises lead to freedom.
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Anyway, they survive things. I mean, just think of the life of Paul and all that he got through. All right, number 12, true or false,
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God acts effectually and omnipotently. Let me try that again.
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Omnipotently. And notice that I capitalized and so you can't separate the two. Okay, it's still true.
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God acts effectually, he notes here, as we shall see when he acts, he does so omnipotently.
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This idea activity is scarcely separable from the idea of life. In other words, that God is, that he has being, that he exists is really not separable from the idea that he acts and that he acts omnipotently.
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It is nevertheless a distinct feature of the biblical God who can act. The prophets of the
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Old Testament pour scorn on the gods of the heathens, the dead idols, which never move unless their devotees move them.
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I love that. You know, you want your God to move? Well, then you better scoot him. You better just pick him up and move him a little bit.
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It's funny because he says here that various ceremonies, dressing, going to dinner, retiring for the night and similar were conducted for the gods and goddesses of Mesopotamia.
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You know, they would actually dress them up and have them come to dinner and whatnot. You just think, boy,
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I mean, it's kind of like playing dolls. You know, they were just moving these little gods around. A recent article in one magazine described in detail these fruitless processes, which would be hilariously funny if not so tragically unreal.
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I still think they're funny. But they are utterly offensive to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Why? Because no matter who these people are, no matter the fact that they were outside the people of Israel, think about what they are.
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All men are. They're image bearers of the living God. And yet what do they do?
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They worship creations. They carve them around. And then they literally, you know, it's like a little
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Barbie doll or a Ken doll or a G .I. Joe. And they dress them up and they march them around. They worship to them. They pray to them.
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They sacrifice things to them. You just go, it's insane. But that's,
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I mean, imagine if you caught your kids, you know, get them a little G .I. Joe. You have a little boy, want him to grow up to be a
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Marine. So you give him a G .I. Joe. And he started praying to the G .I. Joe. Started dressing him up and bring him to dinner and talking to him and asking him for things.
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You'd probably get rid of that G .I. Joe. But back then they thought that was perfectly logical action for these other peoples.
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People intuitively discern action or possible action as an integral aspect of life, even though, in other words, it's just this idea, self -movement is a sign of life.
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He gives a great example here. When we see somebody in a coma and they move their hand, their finger, they flip their right, you know, their little eyelid flips open for a second or whatever.
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We think that person might still be alive. They might be coming back. And the most minimal movement by a person in a coma is more than these idols could do.
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And yet they're worshipped here. But God's ability to do all these things is what makes him
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God and separates him from all these dead, false idols.
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Well, we're going to have to close here and we'll continue next week. Father, we thank you that you are the living
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God, active, a creator, a sustainer.
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Father, the shepherd of our souls,
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Lord, I just pray that as we think about who you are and about how you are omnipresent, how you are with us always, that we would have a self -conscious desire to lean on you at all times, to be in communication with you at all times, to confess our sin to you at all times.
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Lord, I would pray for each one here this morning. That our first thought when we get up in the morning would be of Christ.
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And our last thought when we go to sleep at night would be of Christ. And that all our actions and thoughts in between would be governed by the reality that you are ever present with us.