1689 2nd LBCF Chap 2

Okay, so this is the second class in our series of the 1689

Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, and this morning we're looking at Chapter 2, which the title of the chapter is

Of God and the Holy Trinity. Let's pray and then we'll get started. Father, we thank you again for the blessings you've given to us in your

Son. We would simply ask now that you'd be pleased to open our eyes and our ears and our hearts to see what you have to say to us through your

Word. And Father, as we look at our confession of faith, which leads us back into your

Word, and especially on this chapter, which tells us about you and who you are, we pray that you would help us to understand that we would be able to worship you in spirit and in truth.

We pray in Jesus' name, Amen. Okay, as I mentioned, we're looking at Chapter 2, and we just want to reiterate that the way this confession is structured, there's 32 chapters and then there's paragraphs under each of those.

The first paragraph of every chapter is a summary of what that whole section, that whole chapter is about.

And then the subsequent paragraphs are just explanatory paragraphs explaining a little bit more detail.

So the first paragraph is the crucial one. We're not going to go through every single paragraph of every single chapter because that would take us 32 weeks at least, and the class is not going to be anywhere near that long.

But we are going to spend some time on the first couple of chapters because they're the most important, because they lay the foundation.

Last week we looked at the doctrine of Scripture, of the Holy Scriptures. And some of you who were in the class, why do you think the

Holy Scriptures, the chapter on the Holy Scripture, why is that first? It's God's Word.

What's that? Yeah, because the Scriptures is our foundation for all the other doctrines.

Why do we believe what we believe? Because it's what the Scriptures teach. So I'm not saying it's the most important of the doctrines, but it's the foundational doctrine because all the other doctrines, what do we believe about God, what do we believe about Jesus Christ, and all of these things are all based upon the

Scriptures. It's the Scripture that speaks to us. So that's why the Scripture is first.

And there is a logic and cogency to how the confession is put together. Notice the very second chapter, and we looked at this, is of God and the

Holy Trinity. Well, of course, now here is the root, the foundation of everything.

What we believe about God is going to determine our relationship to Him.

What is our need in front of a holy God? So we begin here, and remember what

I said is that the confession is structured in such a way that the opening paragraph is kind of like a summary.

And what you notice here, well, let me read it first, okay? And I'm not going to read every chapter and every paragraph, but this one is important.

The Lord our God is but one only living and true God, whose subsistence is in and of Himself, infinite in being and perfection, whose essence cannot be comprehended by any but Himself, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions, who only has immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto, who is immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, every way infinite, most holy, most wise, most free, most absolute, working all things according to the counsel of His own immutable and most righteous will for His own glory, most loving, gracious, merciful, long -suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin, the rewarder of them that diligently seek

Him, and with all most just and terrible in His judgments, hating all sin, and who by no means clear the guilty."

That is a mouthful. All right. If you notice in this chapter what has been done by the writers of our confession, this first whole paragraph is what we would call the attributes of God.

This is who God is. It defines who He is. And what you'll see is that it's all based on Scripture.

Those are all the Scripture proofs. If you have a copy of the Confession, these would be in the bottom of each of the paragraphs.

So, notice what we just read, while it's the words of men summarizing, all the facts in there are based upon Scripture.

So, we'll go back to the paragraph here. So, this first paragraph is all about the attributes of God.

The second paragraph is the relation of God to His creatures.

And then the third paragraph defines what we believe about the Trinity. So, you can see how there's a progression.

All right. And this is one of those chapters that we're going to spend a lot of time in because it's so crucial that we understand who

God is. So many errors that lead to cults and whatnot are because people just don't understand who

God is. And this is how God has revealed Himself through the Scriptures to us.

Okay. So, I'll go through this and I'll try to make it as simple as I can, especially since we have a bunch of young people here.

If you don't understand something, ask. Okay. All right. The Lord our

God is but one only living and true God. All right. The important point there is we're not polytheists.

We don't believe in many gods. A lot of people accuse us of that based upon the fact we believe that God is triune, that He is

Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But notice right at the beginning of the confession, it says, no, we believe in only one living and true

God. This is one of the things that annoys people too about Christians is that the

Bible gives us no room that there are many gods or many different ways to heaven.

There's only one way. There's only one living and true God. Notice what it says next, whose subsistence is in and of Himself.

In other words, nobody caused Him to be born. Everybody here was born at one point.

There was a time when we weren't here. And then through the God -ordained method, we came into existence.

God never came into existence. He always has been and always will be. That's what it means when it says

His subsistence is in and of Himself, infinite in being and perfection.

All right. The perfection is an important phrase there too, because we have emotions.

Everybody understand we have emotions, right? There's times when we get sad, times we're happy. You know, there's all we can get depressed.

You can have joy. All we have a range of emotions. All right. God has perfections.

Everything He does is perfect because we know that not all of our emotions are perfect.

You ever get angry and say something or do something that you regret it? We all do.

God never does anything like that. He has perfections. All right. And it says whose essence cannot be comprehended by any but Himself.

What that is saying is that if you try to think and think you can comprehend or understand all that there is to know about God, you can't.

Because we have finite minds. So we're limited by the capacity that God has given us in our brains.

Some of us have greater capacity to understand things. Some of us have limited capacity.

But none of us, I don't care the smartest man or woman in the world, all right, can never understand all there is to know about God.

This confession doesn't claim to explain everything there is to know about God, because you can't.

All right. What the purpose of the confession is, is to explain to us everything that God has revealed to us about Himself.

Okay. So we have the Bible. Okay. Here's my copy of the

Bible. And this Bible, in fact, let me give you a true or false question.

This book contains everything there is to know about God. True or false?

False. False. False. The wording is important.

All right. The Bible contains everything God wants us to know about Him, but not everything there is to know, because there is no book that could adequately contain all the knowledge of God, because His knowledge is infinite.

You know, so, and that's something that we need to understand. We don't claim to know everything there is to know about God.

And somebody who does, don't believe them, because they can't, because that means that they would be as equal to God.

And so nobody. So that's why we always come to God in humility.

All right. Never claiming that, oh yeah, we've got it all together. I'm a

Reformed Baptist. I believe that this confession is the best summary of the

Bible that I have ever seen. That's why I became a Reformed Baptist.

But I don't believe that this confession is without error. If there is error, it's very possible there's errors in here.

I just don't happen to know what they are. So that's why we have to be very cautious, even some churches that teach different doctrine than we do.

We have to be very cautious about, you know, we have to, if we think it's an error, we need to point it out, but we need to do so with humility and with love and with grace, because chances are somewhere along the line, we're an error too.

We just don't know where it is. So that's why I want to always, you know, make sure that we come to that point when we're teaching this confession.

We're not going to know all there is to know about God, but we should know everything that he wants us to know.

Okay. All right. So that's what it means when he says we can't be comprehended by anybody himself.

Notice the next phrase, a most pure spirit. God is spirit.

He does not have a body like we do. We'll get to this a few chapters that God took upon himself.

In fact, this is actually the subject of the sermon this morning. Providentially, it works right in.

We're going to be looking at the eternality or the deity of Christ, and then the humanity of Christ.

There came a time in history over about 2000 years ago when

God took upon himself human flesh and became a man. All right. But that's something that he did.

He himself is pure spirit. Okay. Does everybody follow that?

All right. Because a lot of times we get a picture, especially because of movies and stuff, they picture

God as a big man, old man sitting on a throne in heaven.

All right. God is everywhere. He's spirit. There's no place where God is not.

Okay. So that's some of his characteristics.

He's omnipresent, he's omniscient, he's omnipotent, has all power, all knowledge, et cetera.

Okay. In fact, we need to, and here's another reason why we need these terms, understand these terms.

Savvy, what grade are you going into? You're going into seventh? Anthony? Sixth. Sam, what grade are you going into?

Yeah. James. James. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It helps if I got the right name. James. Fourth.

Okay. And what grade are you going into? Fourth. Fourth. Oh, wow. You got a big, big grade here.

Let me ask you, let me ask you all the questions. Can God create a rock bigger than he can lift? No. All right.

So then that means that there's something he can't do. Can God do everything?

Let me put it this way. Can God do anything? But then he can't, but you just said he can't create a rock bigger than he can lift.

Okay. It's another one of those trick questions. But the reason I asked the question is when you get to college, if you take any philosophy courses, that's one of the questions the professor will ask you if he finds out you're a

Christian. All right. Because they love to trip up Christians. They start by asking, can

God do anything? And almost every Christian, everybody here said, yes. You know what the answer to that question is?

No. God can't do anything. He can't do, there are things that he can't do.

He can't die. He can't lie. He can't cheat.

All right. So the, so the definition of omniscience or omnipotence is not that he can do anything.

He can do anything within his, within his own being that is not contrary to who he is.

All right. So the answer to the question, everybody answered the question, right?

Can God create a rock bigger than he can lift? No. But why? Because if he created something that was outside of his control, then he would no longer be in control.

And he can't lose control because he's God. Does that make sense?

That's why it's important because people love to trip up Christians with these questions and they frame it in such a way that you think, wow,

I don't know, you know, now I don't know. And they try to cause Christians to doubt what they've learned. So the answer is definitely no,

God can't do just anything. He has all control over the whole, the power in the universe is under his control.

That's what omnipotence means. All right. So he has all of that, all knowledge is under his control.

There is no knowledge outside of God. All right. But it always has to be within his parameters. And he himself tells us that he can't lie.

You know what else? He can't break a covenant. If you come to faith in Jesus Christ, you can never lose that salvation.

Not because of what we do, but because God says, I will never break my covenant. He's the covenant keeping

God. Does that make sense to everybody? Yeah. Okay.

All right. So let's keep going a little bit. Most pure spirit, invisible, can't see him.

All right. Without body parts or passions. We talked a little bit about what that means, body parts or passions.

He doesn't have a body. He doesn't have, oh, this is the other thing where it says parts. You can't break

God into parts. As humans, we love to be able to organize everything.

Okay. If you go into my workshop, I have cabinets full of screws and nuts and bolts and everything else.

And I got them all labeled. And I put down, you know, this certain size is here. And we love to be organized and, you know, and put things in the right place and all.

Well, maybe not all kids don't do that. But with God, he doesn't have parts.

It's what we call the unity of God. All right. Even when we get to the Trinity in chapter three, paragraph three, we'll see that God, you can't break the

Trinity into parts. You can't separate them. They are one. Okay.

But you can distinguish between them. You can distinguish between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. All right.

Who alone has immortality? Immortality means he cannot die. Dwelling in the light, which no man can approach unto, who is immutable.

Anybody, who knows what immutable means? You young guys? It means he can't change.

All right. Mutability means the ability to change. God can't change. He makes it very clear, especially in Malachi, I, the

Lord, your God will not change. Therefore you are not consumed. Okay. So he doesn't change.

All right. He's immense. I mean, that means huge. All right.

Eternal. He has no beginning, no end. All right. There was never a time when there was not

God, and there never will be a time when God is not. All right. Incomprehensible.

We already talked about that a little bit. It means that we can't understand everything there is to know about God, but we can understand those things that he has revealed to us.

All right. Almighty, every way infinite, most holy, most wise, most free, most absolute, working all things together to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will for his own glory.

Notice what that says. I'm going to lump all of those together. Most holy, most wise, most free.

There is no being like him. He is above everything, all of his creation in every single way.

And he works everything out in this world, according to his own glory, because he deserves glory.

And we'll get into that a little bit later. But everything that God does, he does for his glory, because he is worthy of the glory because of who he is.

And our purpose in this life, the reason he created us was to give him glory.

Anybody study the catechism at all? Who can tell me what's the chief end of man to glorify

God and to enjoy him forever? That's the chief end of man. That's the first catechism question. And that's our chief end.

Why did he create us? For his own glory and we are to glorify him. All right.

Notice most loving. There is no creature, no being that is greater love than God, because God is love.

He defines what love is. All right. Mankind has a habit of redefining what love is.

All right. But God defines what love is. He is most loving. He is gracious, merciful, long suffering.

And the proof of that, you know, that he's gracious, is that he saves us when we don't deserve it.

All right. Not one of us deserves salvation, but God is gracious and merciful.

Long suffering just means patient. Okay. Abundant in goodness and truth.

Forgiving iniquity. I mean, isn't it great? He's a forgiving God. When we don't live up to the expectations that he has for us, he still is willing to forgive us based upon our repentance.

All right. Forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin. The rewarder of them that diligently seek him.

When you are following after him, he rewards you. All right. And with all most just and terrible in his judgments, hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty.

And this is one of the things that we have to understand. And one of the reasons for this class, those of you who have made profession of faith, you know, you have been freed from his judgment.

Everybody else, God hates sin and will no means clear the guilty. The only way that you can be relieved of the guilt of sin is by putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ.

Now, again, that's a very brief overview. Any questions on this first paragraph of chapter two?

No? Okay. All right. I just put up those are the scripture proofs.

Everything that we just talked about can be found in the word of God. And those are the proofs. So we're going to go to paragraph two.

And this paragraph talks about the relation of God to his creatures.

So I'm going to read this paragraph, and then we're going to go over it rather briefly. Okay. God having all life, glory, goodness, blessedness in and of himself is alone in and unto himself all sufficient, not standing in need of any creature which he has made.

All right. Important. Notice, does God need us? No. He doesn't need us.

He's all glory in and of himself. He doesn't need us. It is by his mercy and his grace that he even created us.

All right. So he does not need any creature which he has made nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting his own glory in, by, unto, and upon them.

In other words, when God created us, he didn't become more glorious or become more complete.

He was complete in and of himself before he created us and doesn't need us, but we can glorify him.

And that doesn't mean to give him more glory than he has already, but we can proclaim and announce the glory of God.

That's what we do when we preach. That's what we do when we sing. Why do we sing so many hymns in the worship service?

Because we're proclaiming, those hymns are chosen very specifically to give glory to God, to acknowledge to everybody who's listening that God is most glorious.

Do you follow that? Okay. He is the alone, the fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom, we're all things.

And he has most sovereign dominion over all creatures. It's what we call the sovereignty of God. All right.

When we get into the next chapter, we'll talk more about his sovereignty. So I'm going to jump over it here because the next paragraph, the next chapter is called his decree.

And we'll find out what that means in the next chapter. So I'm going to skip over this a little bit here. But he has most sovereign dominion over all creatures to do by them, for them, upon them, whatsoever he pleases.

In all sight, in his sight, all things are open and manifest. His knowledge is infinite, infallible, independent upon the creature.

Notice, God can do with us as he pleases. Why? Because we're his creation.

We belong to him. And so when we make errors, when we sin, he has every right to punish us, even to take our own life.

He has that power because of who he is. Okay. He also has the ability to forgive based upon repentance, et cetera, in Jesus Christ.

Okay. Now notice what his knowledge is. It's infinite. In other words, there's no beginning, no end.

If you were to start to study right now everything there is to know about God and continue to do that throughout eternity, you would still never reach the full limits of who

God is and the knowledge that he has. And just think about that.

When I was a young fella, all right, back in the stone age, okay,

I have a phone here someplace, I think. I don't know where I put it now.

Okay. I lost my phone. Okay. All right.

Anyway, here it is. With age comes diminished capacity.

All right. If I was just to reach out and take a picture of this class, anybody have any idea what's the storage capacity of one photograph, one digital photograph?

It's somewhere around one meg. The average picture. I mean, it varies inside depending, but it's typically about one megabyte.

Okay. Anybody have any idea of how much memory the computers that sent our

Apollo astronauts to the moon, how much memory that had? It's about one

K. Imagine the difference. All right. And those computers were huge.

Now, when I was a young fella, the first computer that came out was called

UNIVAC. Do you know how big it was? The size of the wall?

Bigger. It took two whole floors of a city block in downtown New York. Two full floors.

You could actually walk between the circuits. Okay. And again, it only had one

K of memory. And I mean, it was just ridiculous.

And yet, when that came out, we thought this was something. I mean, it was amazing.

Didn't have tapes even. It had punch cards. You had to have to sit there and punch, type in and punch cards came in.

Now we have in our hands, and sometimes even on your wrist now, you got a computer on your wrist.

What's the memory on that? I think it's 64 megs. 64 megs. I've got a hard drive here.

It's four terabytes. All right. It's amazing, the amount of storage we have.

Look at all of this knowledge that we've gained in just under 70 years. We're computers where nobody ever heard of a computer.

Okay. Imagine how this knowledge explosion, and this doesn't even scratch the surface of the knowledge of God.

And we need to think of these things to put God in the right perspective.

Okay. All right. So, in his works and in all his commands, to him is due from angels and men whatsoever worship, service, or obedience as creatures they owe unto the creator and whatever he is further pleased to require of them.

In other words, because of who he is, we owe him worship.

That's why we gather here every Sunday morning. Not just because we like to, we should like to, all right, but because he is worthy of it.

He deserves it. And if we're his children, we want to be here and we want to worship him.

We should look forward to the worship service. All right. And notice that not only just worship and service, but anything else that he requires in the scriptures.

Let me just rephrase that again. The only thing that can bind your conscience as to what you must and must not do is in the scriptures.

We have many different services here. We don't tell everybody you have to come to every service, you know.

Now, but why do we have so many other studies and all? Well, to help you in your knowledge. That's why we have it.

But the only service that is really mandatory is Sunday morning worship service. It's nice to come to prayer meeting.

It's, I mean, you learn, you pray, we intercede, there's power in corporate prayer. But the worship service is special because that's specifically we're commanded by him to gather, you know, one day a week and we'll get into the

Sabbath thing much later on. So, okay. So again, there's the scripture proofs.

Notice all the scriptures that we have. All right. All right.

That slide is wrong. It's what is this somewhere?

Yes. Something made a mistake today.

There it is. Okay. Sorry about that. So this is the last paragraph. And I'm just going to go through this briefly.

This talks about the Trinity and we'll be talking about the Trinity throughout this class. So in this divine and infinite being, there are three subsistences, the father, the word of the son and the

Holy spirit. One of substance, power, eternity, each having the whole divine essence, yet the essence undivided.

The father is of none, neither begotten or proceeding. The son is eternally begotten of the father, the

Holy spirit proceeding from the father and the son, all infinite without beginning.

Therefore, but one God, which is not to be divided in nature and being, but distinguished by several peculiarly relative properties and personal relations, which doctrine of the

Trinity is the foundation of all our communion with God and comfortable dependence on him.

Okay. Now that's a mouthful. And let me say this.

No one can really understand the Trinity. We know that God is

Trinity because the Bible teaches it. Okay. However, how can you really understand?

How can you understand that three is just one? And I've heard all kinds of explanations.

None of them I think are satisfactory. This is one of those things you have to accept by faith because the

Bible teaches it. Okay. The father, the son, and the Holy spirit, you can differentiate between them.

Sometimes we, the scriptures talks about the father, sometimes the son, sometimes the Holy spirit.

Each one has a particular part in the plan of salvation and in God's plan of redemption, but you can't separate that.

All right. And that becomes even more confused when you realize that at some point the son took upon himself human flesh.

All right. And we'll get to that in another chapter. All right. So don't try to think that I somehow

I can grasp this idea of Trinity. You can't. This is one of those things that is incomprehensible.

It's beyond our ability to understand, but it is exactly what's taught in scripture. Numerous times you see the father, the son, the

Holy spirit. Okay. And, and each person of the

Trinity plays a particular role and there is perfect harmony. And one of the things that, that I just want to emphasize, we've only got a couple of minutes before we close.

One of the things that I want to emphasize is that it is this idea of the

Trinity that gives us an idea of God being perfect in harmony and complete in and of himself.

That's why he does not need anyone. He does not need the creatures. It's not like God was alone and said, okay,

I'm all alone. I need to create some people. No, because in the Trinity, he was perfect. He had perfect communion, perfect harmony.

Okay. So between the father and the son, you see that the son, the father sent the son to come to earth, but then you also see that he willingly came.

It wasn't that God had to tell him and he said, no, I don't want to go. Okay. Holy spirit proceeds from the father and son.

The number one job of the Holy spirit. Well, who can tell me this? What's the number one job of the Holy spirit? How do you know if the

Holy spirit is present? I've been preaching about this. This is a quiz.

Yeah. Nope. That's part. That's definitely part of his, his ministry. But the number one way, you know, is

Jesus Christ being glorified because that's the ministry of the Holy spirit. Remember Jesus in right in John 16, 14 to 16, he says, he's going to send another comforter.

And when he comes, he will testify of me. So that's the number one way we know that the

Holy spirit is present is Christ being exalted is Christ being glorified because that's the job of the

Holy spirit. And how does he do that by convicting of sin? All right. And, and giving that comfort, you know, that the faith your faith in Christ is assured.

All right. That's why he's called the other comforter. All right. And we see that throughout all of the scripture.

Okay. Now that was a very, very broad overview. All right.

Any questions on our doctrine of, of God and the

Holy, Holy Trinity? There's the scripture scripture proofs questions.

You can see how, again, this is very foundational, very fundamental. And as we go through the confession it'll get more practical as to, you know, what, what do we have to do, but this is the basis.

We have to understand these things first. That's why we labor some of these in the early stages. Later on, we'll go through multiple chapters in one, in one class.

So it'll move along much more quickly, but this, this is crucial. We have to know who God is to the best of our ability.