Equip 2024: Our Blessed and Boundless God #2 - He Who is: Divine Incomprehensibility | Steve Meister

Redeemer Bible Fellowship

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Why don't we we'll take a look at our our next well, let me make a note to at the end of your

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I Think was the end of the notes on the last one has a recommended reading

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So those are those are books I recommend and there I haven't organized according to diff

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You know from easy to difficult and and Kofi got you a wonderful bundle with the books and resources

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Those are great. So those are great things There's a there'll be a lot of stuff this weekend that if it's new to you will probably go wow

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I need to think about that for like a week And so that's often the case. These would be great resources to to help you do that And we'll move now is sort of introducing.

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God is blessed and think about God is incomprehensible beyond our knowing or saying and We want to know

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God because we love him And if you are Christian, you know

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God and you love him by the Spirit's power, but if we want to Love him and be happy in him.

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We need to know him more and this is basic to really any

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Relationship Augustine said no one can love a thing. That is unknown or even the

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Presbyterian Leader Jay Gresham ation said human affection is really bristling with dogma

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That is when you think about those you love What's beneath that or actually you call them doctrines?

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They're they're truths, you know about people There are things, you know, and that's what brings you to love them

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And so it's no less true for God for us to grow in love and joy in God We need to know him so we can get rid of some of the times that Caricatures that run around the

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Christian world that somehow knowledge of God is is gonna hinder our love and devotion to him

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That's that's silly. We want to know him so we can love him more and we can have greater joy in him

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Augustine again a happy life is joy in the truth for this is joying in the or in you who aren't the truth

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Oh God my light But as for the knowledge of God we know

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We need to think about what we're talking about when we talk about God and the different ways

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We talk about God and our endeavor to and we'll think about this this week in our endeavor for consistency

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So we can think about God rightly according to his word and Charles Hodge in a very helpful comment here on your handout says there's two ways for us to think about God and He he says this in regard to God himself and to all his attributes there is a simple scriptural

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Popular mode of conception which answers all the purposes of piety. So that's that's the first way

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Simple scriptural answers all the purposes of piety. He says there is however another mode not inconsistent with or contradictory the former demanded by the understanding to avoid confusion and Inconsistency so think about what

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Hodge is saying here. He's saying there's two ways to think about God there's a simple mode and There's that answers all the purposes of piety for our praying and our worship for for leading our our families

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You can tell your kids God is everywhere and you don't have to say more than that. God's always there.

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He's everywhere but the second mode he says Consistency demands for understanding and for clarity to have

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Organization in our minds and to think clearly and logically and this is the method of thinking about God that we'll do this weekend

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We start to get into bigger questions. So you tell your kids God is everywhere

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But then that raises other questions. How is God everywhere is God? Present on earth the same as he's present in heaven or is it different?

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Is he present in heaven the same as he's present in judgment in hell, or is that different? So God is everywhere

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But how is God everywhere and then you start having to give longer answers about how God in the fullness of his presence is exactly everywhere and the important thing that Hodge says here is noticing this isn't

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Inconsistent or contradictory with one another but they're necessary for our understanding

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Sometimes when you get into this topic people say well, that's so philosophical everybody's philosophical if you care about consistency and not being contradictory you have a philosophy and The question is whether or not it's scriptural or it's warranted by what

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God has said And so this is what we're thinking to do as we think about God and as we think about God We want to begin in one of the weightiest passages in Scripture and we'll be there this morning or excuse me

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Reverse that we'll be there tonight and tomorrow morning and that's Exodus 3

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And so if you have your Bible turn to Exodus 3 and we think it about this passage here where God reveals his name and we think about how

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God is wholly unlike us and We think about how then God is far beyond our ability to grasp

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So in Exodus 3 We're told in verse 1 that Moses is at Horeb Which is another name for Sinai and this is before God redeems his people

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Before he leads him out of slavery And he speaks to Moses who we know is going to lead

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Humanly that redemption and he tells him not just who he is But God tells him what we what he is

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His whatness or his the fancy word is quiddity for that and what we have reflected here is a very key point that being proceeds doing

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Knowing what proceeds how and why If I say

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I love spending my day off with Hodge Am I referring to reading a 19th century theologian

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Charles Hodge? I love spending my day reading Charles Hodge or am I referring to my 90 -pound

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Pyrrhodor dog? 90 pounds of furries any love You need to know what?

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Before who mate has any meaning Whatness matters the nature of a thing matters and so as Moses here is

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Exploring the reason for God for God's redemption the assurance he can have how

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God can be trusted He needs to know first what God is the nature of who

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God is and and God explains that in Beginning in verse 13. Let's read this significant session of Exodus 3

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Moses said to God if I come to the people of Israel and say to them The God of your fathers has sent me to you and they asked me.

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What is his name? What shall I say to them? God said to Moses. I am who

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I am and He said say this to the people of Israel. I am has sent me to you

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God also said to Moses say this to the people of Israel the Lord the

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God of your fathers The God of Abraham the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob has sent me to you

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This is my name forever. And thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations

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Notices God answers Moses's question. He gives three answers I am who

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I am I am and then the Lord or Yahweh which is a derivative of I am and then the

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God of your fathers and Where God starts is as significant as the meaning of each

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Because before he explains who he explained what he is

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And as I said, well, we'll think about this more tomorrow morning, but we're going to begin this evening is thinking about the incomprehensibility of God's being that he reveals here

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God says I am who I am I am sent me to you and You may have a footnote that says or you could translate this

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I am what I am or I will be what I be I am who I am is probably the best rendering and we don't really need to Bother with the ambiguities of the

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Hebrew here. The point is Significant God gives a subject I am and then he with a pronoun specifies the predicate with the same

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I am It's mysterious It's circular As one writer says it forces your attention back to the subject

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God is He's incomprehensible He's beyond our

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Comprehension that's not saying God's unknowable or that we can't apprehend him

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But we can't contain him or comprehend him with our minds

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So William Ames on your handout says God as he is in himself Cannot be understood by any saint himself

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The only one who fully knows God is God An old resident of Medford could say something like I know every inch of this town

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Because they've lived there their entire lives But the reason why is that possible? Because Medford has boundaries

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It has an extent and if given enough time and attention You could even get to know it that well intimately you could comprehend it

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We can comprehend big things with enough time and focus Even airplanes somewhere have manuals and explain all the parts and you can eventually grasp it

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But God is he has no boundary. He has no limit

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He has no descriptor There's no definable extent where you can go and stand back and say well there all there is of God I can

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I can see all of him. That's it God's free of every limitation of He's Immense and he's free of all the limitations of the creation that he brought into existence

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And so remember we saw in first Timothy. We can't even approach the bright light of God's glory.

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It's unapproachable light Moses later in chapter 33 asked to see

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God's glory and God replies. You cannot see my face and live because what you see you can survey and come to comprehend and understand and You can't see infinity

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No one can see God, but himself Human perception can never take in the infinite eternal omnipresent light an old principle is that the finite can never contain the infinite and God is infinite.

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He is beyond our Comprehension we can't have infinite thoughts and so we can't comprehend an infinite

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God So, how do we ever know God Well, that's the third answer that God gives here to Moses.

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He the third name in verse 15 The God of our fathers your fathers the

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God of Abraham the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob Now we know who they are

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We know their stories in Scripture, we know how God had covenanted and Condescended to promise and to deliver each of these

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Patriarchs and God gave a name Yahweh by which his people can know and call upon him

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So this incomprehensible God can be known by his works in creation as he works to redeem and reveal himself and by his word as he reveals himself and as he covenants himself

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So we can know God in so far as he reveals himself in his works and his word

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But we can never fully comprehend who he is Or to use the analogy of a tree we can put our hand on the tree

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But we'll never get our arms all the way around it. We'll never comprehend God John Calvin on your handout helps us think about this

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He says we we know the most perfect way of seeking God and the most suitable order is not for us to attempt with bold Curiosity to penetrate the investigation of his essence, which we ought more to adore than meticulously to search out

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But for us to contemplate him in his works whereby he renders himself near and familiar to us and in some manner communicates himself

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That is we can never grasp the essence of God But we comprehend him in his works how he comes to us how he communicates to us and how he's spoken in his word and that reminds us that communication between us and God can never be assumed and Taken for granted as a matter, of course

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God in mercy has condescended to speak to us that we could know him that we could understand who he is and he's accommodated himself to us and That is a key point as we think about God speaking in his word in Scripture We're thinking about what we call accommodated revelation

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Or God has stooped down to speak to us or what Christians have referred to the

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Bible for centuries is baby talk Augustine said scripture suits itself like to babes.

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It's baby talk Calvin has a now famous image and he talks about Scripture as a nurse lisping with infants

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He says who is so devoid of intellect as to not understand that God in so speaking that is in his word

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Lisps with us as nurses are want to do with little children such modes of expression do not so much express what kind of being

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God is as Accommodate the knowledge of him to our feebleness in doing so he must of course stoop far below his proper height so in Scripture, which is

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Beyond our ability to grasp in a lifetime. He devotes a lifetime studying in it is

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God stooping down and cooing like a nurse holding an infant

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When my daughter she's now almost 13 when she was a toddler I would pick her up and I would say daddy loves you so much

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But she only caught the last bit of that phrase and so then she started responding by saying much much daddy and So I love you between my daughter and I still to this day is much much

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That was how she heard it Now I wasn't lying to my daughter,

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I'm still not when I hug her and I say much much And I was accommodating her three -year -old mind.

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I love you, and then she would return that But there was far more

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To my paternal love for my daughter than that She could grasp in much much my protection and and all my provision for her as her father

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But she couldn't grasp that or two or three she could grasp much much and so I was accommodating her toddler mind by communicating with her in that way and so God in Scripture is

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Accommodating his infinite mind to our finite ones by communicating himself to us in his

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Word We can't grasp as we've said infinite thoughts of the infinite God So God has to stoop down and accommodate himself to us and that's what he's done in the

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Bible It's God's it's baby talk. It's God cooing to us and It's important that we never reduce the radical

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Incomprehensible otherness of God to how he's accommodated himself to speak to man in Scripture And that brings us to what came up in our conversation in our break is how

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Scripture speaks Analogically of God now, this is really important. So hang in here with this if you get this you'll get a lot else

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When we think of Scripture we think of it as an analogical Communication.

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What do we mean by that? We mean that the same words when they're used of us and of God are similar, but not the same

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I'll give examples here We mean there's similarity and proportion of the same idea and word between us and God but not identity not exactness

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So what it helps to think about this to think about what we're denying. So we're denying that What God we when we talk of God or Scripture speaks of God?

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Univocal Language, so univocal one voice uni voice the same thing

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So if I say I had to put a gallon of gas in the car to go buy a gallon of ice cream

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The word gallon is being used in univocally. It's a unit of measure

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Gallon of gas gallon of ice cream. It's the same thing. It means the same But so that's identical

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Equivocal two voices means entirely different So if I say park your car at the north end of the park

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The word park in that sentence is being used equivocally. It's the same word, but it means two totally different things

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One's a green field you can play in and one is a stopping motion of your car Or if you're from the

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UK you could say even crazy things like you put your football boot in the boot Which actually means your soccer cleats in the trunk?

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But that's that's another thing but that that's an equivocal language two voices

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So when we when we talk about the words we use of God in Scripture It's not univocal which is identical gallon gallon

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It's not equivocal which is entirely different which means that they would not be referring to the same thing at all.

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It's analogical Which means it's similar but not the same Now all of that is sort of just putting

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Language and concepts around what we probably all take for granted and know intuitively So when we speak of God the

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Father or God the Son We know that we're not speaking of fatherhood the way we understand it as humans in Creation the way we experience it.

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I was not always a father. You will know that I was not born a father I was changed into a father after marrying my wife and we had children

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But we know that none of that's true of God God didn't get married and he didn't have become a father by the natural course of procreation

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But neither do we mean it? Equivocally, so we wouldn't say there's no correspondence between the fatherhood of on Creation and the fatherhood of God.

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Otherwise, it would be meaningless. So we think of the relation of origin So God the

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Father has eternally begotten the Sun that is a non -physical non -sequential

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Non -temporal act the father communicates the divine essence to the Sun Or we can think of knowledge.

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I use this illustration we were talking We know and God knows but We only know by learning

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We learn discursively we learn one thing after another in a sequence and we know because things exist

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God knows But things exist because God knows Because he decreed from before time all things that are so he knows all

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Things and God think of this God has never learned a thing ever

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God knows everything in one simple eternal act but God knows and we know

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So it's analogical it's similar But it's not identical But neither is it entirely different or we can think of it all look at this at Redeemer on Sunday love

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God loves and I love But God loves eternally so that he bestows good upon his beloved

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Whereas you and I we respond with love love has to be drawn out of us by the loveliness of our object

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It's analogous, but it's not Identical now this is how God has spoken to us like babies

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Accommodating himself to us. He's not misleading us. He's not speaking falsely He's speaking to us like creatures to raise our thoughts because we can't fully grasp

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The infinitude of the essence of God the incomprehensibility of God And if we're going to take our thoughts one more step

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We remember that God who speaks this way he created all things

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Knowing that he would reveal himself to us in this way so in other words God didn't pick father as a personal property of the first person of the

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Godhead because he knew well humans Understand fatherhood so all so all pick that no no which fatherhood came first God or us

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Well God so the reason fatherhood exists in creation is because that's who

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God is And God intended to reveal himself to his creatures and the same is true with everything.

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God is the archetype and so as we think about Speed the speech of Scripture and the speech of God is analogical.

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This is basic the understanding just the infinite height from which God has stooped to reveal himself to us and how we

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Understand exactly what we're receiving scripture. It's basic for us to understand what scripture is

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So bobbing Herman bobbing our Dutch brother says this scripture is accommodated language

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It's anthropomorphic that is human like through and through God himself is described in human terms via human faculties body parts emotions sensations and actions and That'll be very significant when we think about how the

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Blessed God describes himself as angry later in Scripture It's an anthropopathism.

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We'll say but just hold that for later now now again God's not misleading us This is a miss more any misleading than it that I was trying to mislead my daughter by using much much as a as a synonym for love

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It's God stooping to accommodate himself and speak to us and this will have major ramifications as we think about how we understand

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God is immutable and impassable and what we're really saying now is that God is beyond all that we could think or comprehend and that there's way more to God than even what he's revealed in his word and that we could never fathom the infinite depths of the divine being and That's why there's joy in God And there's implications as we think about divine comprehends incomprehensibility

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Let's think through those together and to be encouraged. The first is assurance

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It assures us It assures us that we're actually talking about God So when we think about divine incomprehensibility, it's a point of assurance that we actually have the right subject

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God It's not a stumbling block. It's an assurance because if you fully understood something you can be sure of one thing

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That's not God Augustine said it we are talking about God. So why be surprised if you cannot grasp it?

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I mean if you could understand it, it wouldn't be God We know it's truly God because we can't grasp him and One of the commonalities of all the false gods in the history of humanity is they're all understandable.

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They're all comprehensible We can have real true knowledge of God, but never comprehension and complete knowledge and If partial knowledge is is not real knowledge.

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Sometimes folks will object. Well, then we don't know anything Because what do we know entirely?

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And you think about even the elements of creation. What what is gravity? We don't know Light how is light a particle in a wave?

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We don't know And yet these basic elements of the created realm

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We still operate on the basis of all throughout existence And so the fact that we can't fully grasp

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God should be a point of assurance and reminder That we're talking about the true God and it ought to provoke in us a right humility

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As we understand who we're approaching and who has spoken to us in his word and we would prize his

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Revelation to us and that's secondly the second implication. So we think about the

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Incomprehensible God it causes us to prize our Lord and his word It's true

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We can't know a person unless they speak to us and that's what Paul effectively says of God in 1st

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Corinthians 2 Verse 11 to 12 who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person which is in him

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So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God Now we have received not the spirit of the world

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But the Spirit is from God that we might understand things freely given us by God God has freely given us who he is to understand in Scripture And the reason there's creation rather than not is because God has spoken that we would understand him and he's acted

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And God has spoken in many portion in his ways and has spoken in his son And he's given us his word that we would know him

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And so it ought to it ought not to again be taken for granted by us that God is so spoken to us

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That we can know him and we can he's revealed himself to us It's a remarkable act of mercy

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Calvin says we see with what ardor everyone pursues his own fancies

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While hardly one in a hundred deigns to spend half an hour in the day in seeking the knowledge of God And there is another evil a false opinion which proceeds from pride that to know

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God is a common thing Where a hundred lives given us this one thing would be sufficient to engage our intention

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The knowledge of God is our prized joy and the reason for our existence

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And so we can be so grateful for God communicating himself to us and thirdly

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This reminds us that what we're engaged in always as we think about God is mystery is mystery

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You've probably heard the expression Don't put God in a box

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And sometimes that's said by Christians out of fear that theology is going to box God God up but really what we're doing even as we think through the difference between Analogical and nivical or equivocal and as we're thinking about divine and comprehensibility is we're actually not putting

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God in a box We're actually reminding ourselves over and over again of the box that we are in that we can't leave that we're creatures and We will never get to the height of infinity in God And so remember mystery is pervaded through all our understanding and knowledge of God And we're seeking to ward off idolatry we're seeking to ward off false thoughts of God and to keep

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God outside of our box and keep confessing that he's an incomprehensible mystery

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Even in what he reveals. He's an incomprehensible mystery Herman Herman bobbing puts it this way and he says in a what's become a very well -known statement

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Mystery is the lifeblood of dogmatics or the doctrine and study of God theology

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And he goes on he says scripture is equally far removed from the idea that believers can grasp the revealed mysteries in a scientific sense in truth the knowledge that God has revealed of himself in nature and Scripture far surpasses human imagination and understanding now

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Notice here what bobbing is saying? He's saying that it's not just he's not just talking about the secret things

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We can never get to because we can't comprehend God. He says revealed mysteries

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That was what God has said in his word. We will never understand in a in a scientific sense

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We won't understand an exact and complete sense Let's take even we were talking about this at the break also, let's take eternity

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God says he's eternal What is that? Yes, he you're the same as me.

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You have no idea what eternity is Neither do I I can't form a single conception of timeless existence

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It's beyond my grasp. And so even when we talk about it, I have to use

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Contradictory improper statements. I have to say eternity past Eternity has no past.

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There's no succession or the moment of creation. There was no moment of creation

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There were no moments till after creation We use this language all the time.

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That's Improper because we can't fathom eternity

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Life without time I have no idea what that's like because I'm subject to change as a creature

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And so even the things that God reveals to us We can distinguish them and we can identify them and we can explain what it is

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But can I fathom the depth of it? Can I understand the fullness of the mystery? Not a chance.

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I'll never understand it as as balding says in a scientific sense or in a full sense

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And so to paraphrase Augustine we describe God not that it may be said but so that it may be not unsaid

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That is we'll never fully exhaust all that who God is But we have to say something and we have to speak in what

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Scripture has says But in the end as we think and talk about God, we're always talking about Indescribable mystery

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Always and there will always be a ceiling to our thoughts where we as Calvin says adore the being of God and we worship him and we rejoice in who he is and That's the that's the last implication that brings us back around to blessedness the implication of incomprehensibility is joy is

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Joy, we rejoice in the bottomless joy of God It's God's incomprehensibility

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That inspires our worship. I Don't know how you remember the old far side

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Comic strip there was an old far side cartoon with a man supposedly being depicted

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With a halo in heaven sitting on a cloud and then the the caption was I wish I'd brought a magazine

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You know this caricature that heaven's gonna be boring. You're just you're just sitting on a cloud all day and Sadly a lot of Christians have bought

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Caricature of eternal glory as something boring something less than even this world and it's even it's even bled in sometimes into indifference in the church and worship and Are seeking the means of grace?

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We always remember what drives our worship and our devotion is

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The unfathomable ineffable God we worship Think of Romans, excuse me,

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Psalm 145 Psalm 145 great is the Lord and highly to be praised and his greatness is

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Unsearchable there's no end to the greatness of God You'll never search it out

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You'll never get to the bottom or what about Romans 1134 who has known the mind of the

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Lord? Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God how Unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out

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Heaven won't be boring because there's no end to God He's boundless God can't get boring because God has no boundaries

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You will never have a final thing that you learn about God Because God never ends he's infinite and He's full of immeasurable riches.

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So we say in in Scripture. We will bless your name forever Your greatness is unsearchable

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There's no ending to God. And so we exalt God now and we do so with anticipation in perfected glory

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Because God never ends He's without boundary. He's without extent.

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He's without limit. We will never be done learning about God Enjoying God and glorifying

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God We exalt God now and we know heaven will never be boring because we'll never get to the end of God He is boundless.

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And so his blessedness and joy Has no bottom either and We'll think about we'll start tomorrow on why this is the case as we think about God's aseity and his simplicity but hopefully this is just enough to wet our appetites to think through the ineffable and incomprehensible being of God and this is something to inspire our worship and Encourage us and with that said let me lead us in prayer father

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We thank you for your kindness and love to us We thank you for encouraging us by your word

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We praise you for revealing yourself to us and accommodating yourself like a nurse

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Lisps to infants you've spoken to us in a word that that we cannot get to the bottom of that Elephants can swim in the depths of your word and yet you here are cooing to us your children

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We pray that we would treasure and prize your word to us and your speech that we might love and adore you and Spend our days meditating upon your goodness until you reveal your glories and your son's return or you bring us home to you forever