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Very warm of you guys. Thank you. I'm glad to be here in Oregon for it's been a long time since I've been to Oregon I'm a native
Californian and it's good to be back up. Thank you for your hospitality and Kofi and I were talking about over lunch
Just the different interweaving intersections of our life and his former pastor in the
UK was a good friend of mine in seminary so we have a lot of overlap and Connections and just as he said what
I want us to do this weekend is really just embark together on the great adventure Of not just your life but of your soul if you belong to the
Lord Jesus, which is knowing and rejoicing in the goodness and greatness of God and That's our great goal and we're just gonna whet your appetite and I hope excite your heart and mind
What it means to contemplate the being and greatness of God and you have handout packets that are basically just quotes many of them all read or read portions of and if You're at all like me when
I'm listening to someone talk and they write down they give some sweet statement I'm Freakishly trying to copy it down.
So this way you don't have to do that you can just have the reference there and if you want to look at other resources and Learn more about those who have thought about God's thoughts before us.
That's a great thing to do We want to begin this evening and thinking about What everybody wants and the one thing
I can guarantee Every single one of us everyone, you know, is that you want to be happy?
Have you ever thought about why that's the universal disposition of every single person you've ever met
They want to be happy. What why is that? It's because the
God who created everything is happy in himself and He made us to be happy in him
Our purpose basically this weekend is very straightforward That the God who is boundless joy in himself
Has created you and I to have our joy now and forever in his boundless joy
God has created us to be happy in him to give us rest in him and to be assured of this we need to think about how
God is perfectly happy in himself and Account for that and think about the other attributes of God that he reveals in his word
That explained to us why we know God is perfectly happy in himself and has created us to have our joy and rest
And happiness in him and this is really the driving motivation of what we call theology
Now most people hear the word theology even Christians. They don't think about happiness, but that's what it's always been about Knowing God has always been a quest for happiness or a quest for joy.
In fact, I have on your handout a list of some older generations and how they describe theology and What the great aim was and you have statements from like William Perkins who said theology is the science of living blessedly or happily forever
That's a great definition that the goal is the knowledge of how to be happy forever. That's that's why we study
God that's why we think about it or Johannes Maccobius theology is a discipline partly theoretical partly practical teaching the way of living well and blessedly or happily
Into eternity so so theology thinking about God studying
God is about how to seek joy in him forever and We see this even in perhaps one of the greatest sentences ever written outside the
Bible by Augustine in the fourth century in his confessions and there he says you move us to delight in praising you
For you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless till they find rest in you
Now at the center of Augustine statement is the most fundamental fact of existence
That God made us for himself We exist for our Creator, but then around it he explains the subjective experience that flows from it
We rejoice to praise God and can only be restless without him We have joy in God and we are restless without him because he made us for himself
God made us to be happy and this is the good of the gospel when you think about the gospel of Christ the good news
What's the good? It's God It's always God word think of the familiar words of Matthew 11 verse 28 where Jesus said come to me all who labor and are heavy laden and I Will give you what?
Rest exactly take my yoke upon you and learn for me for I'm gentle and lowly apart and you will find rest for your souls
What rest is Jesus offering? he explained it actually in the verse right before that verse 27 where Jesus says all things have been handed over to me by my
Father and no one knows the Son except the Father and no one knows the Father except the
Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him So why is there rest in Jesus that he offers?
It's because he has what the father has and knows what the father knows And the only one who knows and has what
God the father has is God So Jesus is God in the flesh and he's come to give us rest in him
Remember Augustine our hearts are restless till we find rest in God and the good news of the gospel is
God Has brought us back to joy in him he is our blessed
God and What I want to consider first is that this evening as our first topic is
God's Blessedness and I want to dance around first Timothy a little bit and you have the benedictions on your handout, but I want to start in first Timothy chapter 1 in the beginning where the
Apostle Paul there Gives what Thomas Cranmer will call in the book of common prayer. One of the comfortable words of our
Lord Jesus Christ And that's in chapter 1 verse 15 Many of us are probably familiar with it.
It's one of the trustworthy statements and In first Timothy 115 Paul says the saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance
That Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the foremost now
Paul here is a basically evangelizing the false teachers in Ephesus and he's just explained how he was a persecutor and he had was
The chief of sinners and he's trying to call back false teachers to show them There's a way back sinners can be rescued in Christ and he explains really the is irreducible
Centrality of the gospel that Christ came to save sinners Now if we work ourselves back though and look at how
Paul introduces the gospel in verse 11 Look at how he names it. He calls it the gospel of the glory of the blessed
God The gospel of the glory of the blessed
God the good news of God's greatness bringing us to himself the
God who is blessed and God's blessedness is a rare and remarkable statement of who
God is in himself So you think about blessedness notice how here in Scripture it defines
God is absolutely blessed Whenever we think of our blessedness, it's always contingent
So like Psalm 1 blessed is the man who there are conditions for us to be blessed
There are circumstances that have to be met or even the Beatitudes blessed are those who but here
God is just blessed Apart from and prior to anything else.
God is blessed. That's who he is He's happy To be blessed is to be a state of happiness or joy or Contentment and God's blessedness as you start to notice.
It is a common description of praise throughout the Bible So when David leads in prayer in 1st
Chronicles 29, for example, he prays this in verse 10 Blessed are you O Lord the
God of Israel our father forever and ever so our worship is
Rooted in the fact that God is Blessed in himself. He is the blessed
God Which that then opens the question. Well, what accounts for that? How is it that God is perfectly happy in himself and in first Timothy?
We have in the doxologies that the Apostle gives an unfolding of some of the attributes of God The God in whom we live and move and have our being and why he's blessed.
So in chapter 1 verse 17 Paul ascribes to God to the king of the ages immortal
Invisible the only God the honor and glory forever and ever. Amen And then at the end of the epistle in chapter 6 beginning in verse 15
He ascribes to God he who is the blessed and only sovereign the king of kings and Lord of Lords Who alone has immortality who dwells in unapproachable light
Whom no one has ever seen or can see to him be honor and eternal dominion.
Amen now what I want to do is just take both of these doxologies for a moment and skip a stone across them and Notice a couple of the attributes here that account for why
God is blessed Notice first off though that most of these are what we call negations
They're mostly describing God by what he is. Not. He is invisible. He is
Immortal we have to negate God because we'll see in the next session. We can't fathom who
God is. He is ultimately incomprehensible in himself So a full positive description of God is far beyond us because he's infinite and we cannot contain that in our own minds
But we do see here. God is invisible He's not composed of matter he has no body now that doesn't make
God an amorphous force, but he's pure spirit He's invisible. He has infinite fullness
Jesus says in John 4 24 God is spirit He's not material.
He's not bound in any way. He has no circumference. He has no boundaries or restriction
So he's blessed. There's no limitations to God He dwells which we're told in chapter 6 verse 16
Paul says God dwells in unapproachable light Human perception and comprehension can't take him in he is beyond our grasp
He's incomprehensible. He's boundless light. We can't see the invisible
God So God we see is immense and invisible Next we notice and this is very significant
Paul says the same thing in chapter 1 is chapter 6 that God is immortal He's not mortal.
He cannot perish What's interesting is he in chapter 1 verse 17?
He says he's immortal but in chapter 6 verse 16 Paul says he alone has immortality
Because if you're in Christ, we have immortality But it's given to us
It's not intrinsic to us It doesn't belong to us And this is another way we describe
God We think of the infinite perfection and the infinite distance between the creature and here
God the Creator God alone has immortality, which means God uniquely possesses life and gives it to others
All that we have is derived God is of himself. He is the very source of life and goodness itself
That's why David will write in Psalm 36 9 that God is the fountain of life the blessed life
So God is immortal. He is the fountain of life and blessedness and Notice we have a lot here about time as well in chapter 1 verse 17
Paul refers to him as the king of the ages and in chapter 6 verse 16.
He has an eternal Dominion Now eternity is not endless time
Eternity is no time Time is not a thing Time is not a realm
Time is a measurement Time is a measurement of the relation of things that change
It's a it's a measurement of motion and change that's been continuing since creation
Time Isaac Watt says in his hymn is like an ever -flowing stream. It bears all its sons away
No man ever steps into the same stream twice Because it's not the same water and he's not the same man.
You're always changing even in perceptible But God is eternal
He transcends the succession of time the succession of change that we're familiar with that. We can't even fathom
Thinking without so if for us time is like a stream that we're in the middle of for God time is like a lake
It's outside of him and he surveys it all in one moment
We know what do we know even in our happiest moments that it's just a moment that this will eventually end
But God is eternally blessed. He's happy Eternally without change without diminution without any
Succession God is blessed now just by these some of these Observations by looking at what
God is not and what he is in perfection Paul can say then in chapter 6 he is the blessed and only sovereign
God is personally perpetually Happy there is no circumference where he ends.
There is no change. He's subject to there's no containment to hold him From everlasting to everlasting
God is blessed. God is joyful and happy Blessedness is
Who God is in himself? If we could put it this way if you've ever wondered if you could ask
God, what is it? Like what's it like to be God? Well, this is what his answer would be.
It's blessed He's happy It's good. He's happy to be God Edward lay on your handout.
He says in himself and of himself God does perfectly enjoy himself and this is his perfect happiness
He lives a most perfect life Abounds with all perfect virtues sets them at work himself in all fullness of perfection and in all this enjoys himself with inconceivable satisfaction
God knows all that he is as God and so he's happy. He has joy in himself
Or Lewis Bailey says from all these attributes that is all the attributes of God arises one
Which is God's sovereign blessedness or perfection? unmeasurable possession of joy and glory
Which God has in himself forever and is the cause of all the bliss and perfection that every creature enjoys in its measure
Notice what Bailey says is that blessedness is comprehensive of all of God's perfections that is when you say all that you can say about God you have to conclude he's blessing and It's the cause of every perfection creatures enjoy
Goodness and joy exist Because that's who the
Creator is That's who God is The reason happiness exists is because God is happy.
He's blessed in himself God's glory Thomas Adams says is never left off and there is no interruption of his blessedness
There's not a moment wherein he is less happy And so we can think of blessedness sometimes as a summary attribute
That is it it it says all that God is because he needs nothing and he has the fullness of perfections in himself
And that's a good way to think of God's blessedness as perfectly knowing He's full of all good and he's free of every evil that God is fully blessed and and all that we say about God and all that we deny and all the
Denying imperfections in him and all that we say in ascribing perfect infinite perfection in him
We're saying that God is blessed and what we're doing as we do that I'm sure you feel as I do you're confronting the radical otherness that God is
He's wholly other from us and this controls everything else We need to think and say about God and so the other perfections of God Must account for and agree with his blessedness
So when scripture gives absolute descriptions of God as being good and loving, of course that flows from his blessedness but when we when we get later tomorrow and we talk about when scripture says things like God is grieved or sorrowed.
We have to understand that in a particular way That must be a figure that must be an image given to us
Communicating about God's relation because God is blessed and we'll talk about that tomorrow
And we'll have to consider also why is it good news that God's blessed or maybe to put it another way
Is it good news to know that God is blessed if you're depressed Or if you're not happy, is it good news to know that God is happy and why and We'll answer that question tomorrow afternoon
You're not ready for it yet You have to come back tomorrow. But what we want to say though is the answer that Modernity is given to that the knee -jerk answer is short -sighted that If we aren't happy, how could
God be happy and How can he be a good God if he's happy when we're not?
But the truth is if God isn't happy then no one will be happy ever
And in fact if God isn't happy then happiness doesn't exist
It's an illusion. It's not real Fred Sanders a theologian put it this way if God's not happy.
Nobody's happy if God's not the fountain of blessedness. Then God doesn't have a blessedness to give us or to bring about You see if God who is the source of all good if he doesn't have blessedness if he isn't blessed and blessedness isn't real and our universal desire for it is
An illusion and we're grasping for something. That's that's never coming And that there's no hope of joy now or forever because joy isn't real
So it's so important to remember that God is blessed Absolutely, and that means the gift of joy that God gives
Is from the sheer gratuity of the fullness of the joy he has in himself.
God is giving his own joy And what I want to do is kind of pull this together and think about that as we think about creation and revelation and redemption and the church
So, let's just think about creation and How we and everything else exists if God is blessed in himself and is always happy Then he didn't need to make anything to be happy.
He didn't create out of need And that means creation is Utterly gratuitous.
It's free and it's to a certain degree mysterious One writer put it this way.
He said the real miracle is not that God exists, but that the world does God cannot but be but that he in whom nothing is lacking should give you existence to us that should stagger our mind
The Puritan Richard Sibbes put it this way God's goodness is a communicative spreading goodness
If God had not a communicating spreading goodness, he would never have created the world
The Father Son and Holy Spirit were happy in themselves and enjoyed one another before the world was
God delights to communicate and spread his goodness and That's it there
God created all things to spread his joy and goodness
God created to spread the joy of his being to his creatures
So that we would be happy and that we would know him We want as a society and as a race of sinners we want happiness without the
God who made us and that just doesn't work and It won't ever God made us for himself.
That's why we delight to praise him and that's why we're restless until we have rest in him because happiness only comes from the happy God and this has very significant ramifications for the debates and discussion that our culture is having right now because what this means for us as people is that who we are as Created beings has inherent goodness and it has inherent meaning because the
God who made all things is happy in himself and made us to be happy in him and there's a there's a
Benevolence to the design of the Creator and all that he's made and this has deep ramifications for how we think about our being our
Creation and every other thing that our society's is going mad rejecting
So it has massive ramifications for creation, but also for revelation for Scripture What if the
Bible exists ultimately as an invitation to have joy in God In Psalm 119 that great acrostic
Psalm That is speaks to the Word of God in the bait stand beginning in verse 9 a familiar text
How can a young man keep his way pure by guarding it according to your word? That is you you walk the path of purity by guarding
God's Word But too often this becomes just sort of a rote Thing you'd want to be holy memorize portions of the
Bible get to know the Bible But the logic of the stanzas far more encompassing of what the
Bible is in verse 12 at the very center of that David writes blessed are you
O Lord? Teach me your statutes That is the God who has perfect joy in himself
Teach me how to have joy in you We're going to God for our happiness.
I want to be happy. I want to know your goodness and The more you grasp of the blessed joy of God The more you want to know how to be happy in him and that is what his word is a true vision of who
God Is returns the Bible to us as what it really is, which is an invitation for joy in God Now, of course, we know there are do's and don'ts throughout the
Word of God But all of those must be understood in the context of this is how to have joy in me
God is communicating himself to us and we should never take for granted the fact that God has spoken to us that we can understand him
And that we can live Unto him according to his word our blessed
God And of course, this is standing on the foundation thirdly of our redemption and of the gospel of Christ A scripture says of our sin in Romans 1 verse 25 that we exchange the truth about God for a lie and Worship and serve the creature rather than the
Creator who is does anybody remember? Blessed forever. Yeah our blessed
God God is blessed forever. And that's what we rejected in rebellion
But God the Son assumed human nature and incarnate as the Christ and he took on the finitude of our nature to become a man of sorrows
That we might have joy through him The Son who is blessed forever in God assumed humanity and he wept and he he lived our sorrows
The God who is blessed assumed humanity to become a curse for us
For cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree and he did that so our sorrow wouldn't be eternal
But that it would be temporary and that he would rescue us to him In salvation
God gives us the greatest joy possible Which is himself? God brings us to himself in Christ so that we can return to commune with the source of joy
Which is God himself? Martin Luther put it this way said when
I possess Christ I surely possess all for he is pure righteousness life and eternal blessedness
In Christ the ultimate good we have is God who is blessed forever
He's brought us to return us to joy a young Jonathan Edwards was put off by God's absolute sovereignty until he was reading first Timothy in 1721 and he made this observation as he came across verse 17 that we had read earlier he said
I thought with myself how excellent a being that was and how happy I should be if I might enjoy that God and be wrapped up to him in heaven and be as it were swallowed up in him forever
And that really is the hope of everyone who calls on Christ How happy we might be if we can enjoy this
God forever. That is the hope of the gospel And that reminds us then finally the mission of the church
The book ends of first Timothy described the greatness of God and at the center of this epistle
Paul reminds the church of Their essential mission in chapter 3 verse 15 as he says if I delay he's writing
So you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God Which is the church of the Living God a pillar and buttress of the truth
Now Paul wrote first Timothy to the Ephesians and one of the seven wonders of the ancient world was the temple to Artemis there in Ephesus It's a brilliant gleaming marble and in this city where people were very familiar with brilliant columns
He says the great pillar and buttress or column and pillar Is the church and it holds up the truth?
And the truth is you are a household of the Living God You've been brought to rest in God in Christ You've been brought to rejoice in God to receive his word and then to hold forth that truth to others to tell the world of his greatness
Peter says a very similar thing in first Peter 2 9 you are a chosen race a royal priesthood a holy nation a people for God's own possession that you may proclaim the
Excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light and that word their excellencies is about as close as we get in the
New Testament to Attributes to the characteristics to the perfections of God Peter says you've been you've been called from darkness to light to proclaim the perfections of God The greatness of God the blessedness of God and what we'll consider more as we move forward
But we want to think particularly this weekend of those as Kofi said those attributes and perfections that often get neglected or misunderstood
Today the things that qualify everything else we say about God and that begins even with his eternal
Blessedness and we'll look next at incomprehensibility Tomorrow we'll look at God's independence and simplicity.
We'll look at his immutability and his impassibility and How all of this works together to show the otherness and the joy and the hope we have in our great
God and Our goal is to really account for this why we have eternal hope and joy in him
Because he is sheer otherness and blessedness Matthew Henry Reflects on this there on your handout and he meditates on this theme he says it should be a constant pleasure to us to think that there is a
God and That he is such a one as scriptures revealed him to be a being infinitely wise and powerful
Holy just and good But this God governs the world and gives laws to all the creatures
That he is our owner and ruler that in his hand our breath is in his hand our times our hearts and all our ways are thus certainly it is and thus it must be and Happy are they
That can please themselves with these thoughts as those must needs be in a constant terror to themselves who could wish it were otherwise they who thus delight in God have always something and something very commanding to to delight in a
Fountain of joy that can never be either exhausted or stopped up and to which they may always have access and that is
God an Unending fountain of joy and eternal blessedness
Amen, let me pray father we thank you for allowing us to meditate on your goodness and glories this weekend and to consider your blessedness
We pray that you would help us meditate further and begin to open and expand our hearts and thoughts and minds to your greatness
Help us in conversation and fellowship to continue to stir up and encourage each other in these truths
We thank you again for your goodness revealing yourself to us in the name of our