The Greatness Of The Godhead

The Problem of Gnostic Claims About Jesus

Father in heaven, we thank you this morning, we thank you for your word, we thank you for the beauty of all that you've given us, even as we think about the transition of fall and just enjoy this absolutely beautiful weather.

Father, we praise you for that. Just praise you for your goodness in providing us a building, a place to worship, and most of all we would thank you for all that you have provided us in Christ. And Father, I just pray that this morning, as we look to your word, you would again just strengthen us, not only in our faith, but in our capacity to love you, that we would love you and honor you in all that we do and say.

And we pray for these things in Christ's name. Amen. Well, this morning, or this week, you may have seen the whole kerfuffle over that little fragment of script, and Pastor Mike sent out an article, but I went to James White's website and I found what he said interesting, a couple other things that he said.

Now, I like to think that I'm pretty much aware of things, but I hadn't even heard of a few of these deals here. How about this? He says, remember the Gospel of Judas a few years ago? Raise your hand if you remember that one.

I don't. He says, yeah, most people don't. It was one of those, one of the last, look at the Gnostics, or look, the Gnostics were a bunch of heretics, let's call them Christians and say Christianity is silly, waves that was sponsored by a major institution with hundreds of thousands of dollars to burn in their never-ending campaign to attack the Christian faith.

I think that summarizes it very nicely. Well, it looks like the 2012 version has arrived courtesy of the queen of Gnostic looniness, Karen King. He says, Karen King makes her money writing books attacking Christianity based upon digging up the same Gnostic myths rejected and refuted long, long ago.

Can anybody think of other people that make their money doing this? What's that? Dan Brown has made a lot of money doing that. I mean, he built on their works. Yep. Anybody heard of a couple books called Lost Gospels or Lost Christianity?

Okay, that would be Ehrman. Elaine Pagel is another one. In fact, he talks about this, but listen to this. He says, some of her real winners include, he's still talking about Karen King, the Gospel of Mary Magdala, colon, Jesus and the First Woman Apostle.

That was in 2003. In 2005, What is Gnosticism? And then in 2007, Reading Judas, the Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity, co-authored with the other queen of Gnostic silliness, Elaine Pagel.

As you can see, she makes her shoe fund money digging the Gnostics out of their graves and propping up their inane stories. But that's what the media craves, and so here we go again. Get ready and be prepared to explain that Gnostics were not Christians.

And that kind of gets lost in all the media hype about what's happened over the last week. You know, they find something from the fourth century and they suddenly, you know, get all twitterpated because it says that Jesus was married.

Can I just tell you something? You know, who would not maybe be shocked by that idea? Call themselves Christians? I'm going to talk a little bit more about my friend and what he said on Facebook tonight, in a way, but the Mormons would not be shocked by this idea that Jesus might be married because a lot of them believe that Jesus was married.

So when they see this, they just go, oh yeah, okay, sure, married. Doesn't bother them at all. But what about Gnostics? What's the difference between them and Christians? And this is just introductory stuff.

We're going to get on to some other things, but what's the difference between Gnosticism and Christianity? Stephen. Okay, they believe that there's a, I mean, the word itself, Gnosis or Gnostic is built on gnosis or knowledge, so they believe that there's a higher level of knowledge that one must attain to get to heaven.

That's true enough. You in the back there. The body's bad, the spirit is good. Now just think about in light of what we just heard about there, or some of us heard, concerning the resurrection and the necessity of a physical resurrection of Jesus.

If the physical body is bad, then the Gnostics would say that Jesus wasn't raised physically and therefore, as Paul would say here this morning, there's no, there's no, they're still in their sins, there's no hope, there's no reason to be joyful.

And if there's one dividing point in Christianity, one thing that you could say absolutely divides between believer, I mean, there's more than one thing, but between believer and heretic, the resurrection is certainly primary, it's major.

What about, what else about Gnostics? Yeah, Joni. Yeah, it's kind of a secret inner knowledge, you know, they've all got the decoder rings, so yeah, that goes along with being a Gnostic. How about this?

You know, we talk about they would deny the physical resurrection of Jesus, well how about denying the physical reality of Jesus, that he wouldn't have come in a physical body, because again, the physical body, as Brian was saying, is bad.

So there is nothing, I mean, we could get right into all the the differences between Gnostics and Christianity, but the bottom line is, it's not even close to Christianity. And this idea, and it crept up in a little conversation I had with a, with an outright pagan this week, I mean, there are pagans and then there are outright pagans, they want to say that the Gnostics were early Christians, and this is, this is the position of Elaine Pagels and Karen King and Bart Ehrman, they want to say that the early Gnostics were Christians too, and that they kind of lost the civil war, that there was a battle for the truth and they lost, you know, the, it was the Republicans against the Democrats and they were voted out forever and ever, kind of thing.

The Gospel of Thomas and Gnostic Misreadings

But the truth is, they denied a lot of spiritual truth, and when we read the Gnostic scriptures, I, my quick challenge, and I, anybody who loves the Gnostics, usually you'll find that they really are not only liberal, but they typically have a feminist bent, so what do I like to come back with them with?

Because I have memorized, I've committed to memory the Gospel of Thomas, which was neither a gospel nor written by Thomas, but it comes in handy in this one occasion because, do you know it, Brian? Yeah, yeah, allegedly, according to the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said that to get to heaven, you, a woman must be made a man, actually, so, you know, and you just go, that pretty much shuts down the, the conversation, they're not too thrilled with Gnosticism after that, because especially, you know, if you're of a feminist mindset, the, the idea that a woman would have to, of course, if you're of a Christian mindset, the idea that a woman will have to become a man to get to heaven is kind of crazy.

So, anyway, they're just, all these things, and, and James White's main point, for those of you who read the email this week, is just that these kind of things are going to keep creeping up. He says, but one thing you won't see is that they won't say that there are documents that predate this little fragment that are virtually identical to what we have in the Bible today, and they won't talk about those things.

You know, if you can go within maybe, I think there are fragments of less than a hundred years after the time of Jesus' death, we have fragments of Bible books, you know, that are identical to what we have today.

They won't talk about those things, because those aren't interesting. You know, what's interesting is things where, you know, Jesus was married. So, anyway, that's just journalism today. So, but that's not what we're going to talk about.

The Greatness of God and Our Tendency to Shrink Him

We're going to talk about, really, the greatness of the Godhead, and, and just thinking today, there's a, I think that there's a real lack of us contemplating, of us thinking about how great God is, and I think we tend to, our tendency is to have wrong ideas of God.

I remember once hearing a message about not having graven images in your home, and I thought, that's a good point. I probably, I mean, not that I did, but it's probably something that people should be concerned about.

And so a woman came up to me, and she said, you know, I've got some paintings of Jesus in my home, you know, what do you think about those? And, you know, I'm mindful now of that, that painting. How many of you have seen the one, the, the one in Spain, right, I think it was, where they, this woman redid it, and she just, like, they showed the before and after.

The before, the before, it had some, like, chips and cracks in it, and stuff like that, and you go, well, I can see why somebody wouldn't want to touch it up. And then you see what she did to it, and you're just like, okay, I can paint better than that, and I haven't even, you know, and now she's wanting to get paid for that, which, yeah.

Anyway, so this, this woman comes to me, and she's, she's concerned, because she has these paintings in her home, and, you know, what should I do? And I don't, I don't really know, you know, I don't know what the right answer is.

I think it's mostly a matter of conscience, but I remember saying something along the lines to her, well, did you ever, like, look at it and think, gee, Lord, talking, thinking to the painting, you know, would you help me out of this jam, or did you ever, when you pray, do you think about that painting?

And I don't know if that's the correct answer, but what I would say is our tendency, I think, is to make God less than he is, to think about him as less than he rightfully deserves to be thought of. And so what I want to do is kind of, some of these concepts that are presented here, this is from Culver, are really kind of mind-blowing.

These are huge pictures of God, and how great he is. And he talks about historic creeds, which the men in, I mean, this just seemed tailor-made, because the men in their discipleship thing are reading it through many of the creeds, and he says, the historic creeds have distilled the scripture statements, and in timeless words, have captured the greatness of God in such a way that even hymns do not match.

And certainly, I can think of a lot of hymns that I don't think rightly catch the greatness of God, but one of the, one of the historic creeds speaks of God as, quote, a spirit infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being.

Oh, let me continue, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. And he says, now these are kind of abstract words of logical analysis, but there is something in those words that we should have some kind of appreciation for, that we should think, we should think of God as greater than our capacity to put into words, because he is.

And he says, nothing is of greater importance to sound faith in life than understanding several of God's attributes of greatness. It is not enough to have a feeling for God, or even a love for God. We need an intellectual apprehension of his characteristics, of his attributes.

God's Self-Existence and the Name I Am

Now, would it be right to say that Israel during the Old Testament was impressed with God's attributes? What do you think? Were they? Sometimes. I think sometimes is the perfect answer, because there were times when, what?

They trembled. They were afraid of God. And then there were times where they just, they weren't really very impressed. They did what was right in their own eyes. Interesting. No, my phone is actually off, I believe.

Unlike our speaker last week. Oh, sorry. Yeah, it's off. I don't know what that was all about. Yeah, I mean, they trembled at God's thundering, his fire at Sinai, but after a few months of camping, what did they do?

Well, they did more than grumble and complain. They built a calf and they worshipped the calf. Why? Why do you suppose, I mean, we can think of a lot of reasons why they worshipped the calf. We might think, well, you know, this was the symbol of fertility or it was a symbol of living large.

But why do you suppose they built any kind of image? Well, they took their focus off what they were supposed to worship. I would agree with that. But I think, isn't it? Why do people carry, and I'm not saying they worship crucifixes, but why do people carry crucifixes or why do they carry rosaries?

Why do they carry all these things? As a means to remind them of whatever they're worshipping. And I think as we think about a golden calf, you just think they wanted, they didn't want some abstract great God that they had to fear and tremble.

They wanted something that they could observe and they could have in their minds that they could understand. Culver writes this, he says, the problem was simply they did not understand who God was or what he was like.

Let's turn to Psalm chapter 8, Psalm 8. Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. You have set your glory above the heavens. Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes to still, that means to quiet, to calm, to deal with the enemy and the avenger.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him? When we think about God like that, when we are in awe of God, what does that do to our lives?

How does that transform, you know, we say this, what we think about God matters. Doctrine matters. Our belief about who he is, what he's like, impacts our behavior. But how does Psalm 8, how does that, the first eight verses there, how does that impact our thinking about God?

If we think about him like that, are we more, or if we had that in our minds at all times, we would be more likely to sin or less likely? I think less likely. Talks about some specific attributes of God, his self-existence, a saiety.

God is the ground of his own existence. And again, you know, when my, here, I'll just tell you what my friend said that I just found so funny. Because I mentioned, somebody asked me, somebody from Australia asked me if, you know, what my religious affiliation is these days, and if I was Mormon or not.

And I said I wasn't, and I told them, you know, where I was now. And one of my Mormon friends wrote back and said, well, you were saved when you were in the Mormon church, you just didn't know it. And I thought, just didn't know it.

I wanted to write back a long, I didn't have the time to do it, but I wanted to write back a long thing. But I just said, you know, I don't like to do that on Facebook, and I'll write him at some point.

And I want to be very careful for a number of reasons, not because I'm afraid of offending him per se, but his wife is on the verge of death with cancer, and I want to walk a fine line with him. But the issue is, when we say, when he says, you know, you were saved, but you didn't know it.

And I just wrote back and I said, you know, it's not the forum or anything like that, but, you know, among the issues, wrong view of God, wrong view of man, wrong view of Christ, wrong view of scripture, you know.

And I just kind of laid it out. I was nicer than it may sound like I was. But there is no salvation in a system that talks of God as if he is our equal, or something that we attain to be. I mean, it's one thing to think of God as supreme, and it's another thing to think, you know, someday I'm going to be supreme too.

And I'm going to look at him, and I'm just going to give him an old whack on the shoulder, because that's what they think. They think God has a physical body. And so, I mean, there are a number of issues there.

But when we think about his self-existence, and this is where I was going, Mormons believe that the God of this world had a God, and so on, and so on, and so forth, so that there's an eternal regression of gods all the way back.

But that's not true. The Bible says very clearly, God is. Why? Where did he come from? You know, kids want to know that. Where did God come from? Who made God? And what's the answer? I am who I am, which is?

But what's the scripture verse? It's not even in my notes. Come on, people. For I am that I am. Exodus 3 .14. I knew you guys would come up with it. It's a key verse. Why? Because he's asked what? You know, who shall I say sent me?

That's my paraphrase of it. Tell him I am sent you. I am that I am. That's my name. That's what I want to be called. He is. He comes from himself. And that, you know, just even that, if you just think about that, if you just think, okay, I can't understand a being who always has been, who never didn't exist, who has no origination.

Good. Because our job isn't to fully comprehend him. Our job is to worship him and to treat him as he is, as he presents himself in scripture. Culver writes this. He says, God is self-existent. God always has been.

Our maker exists in an eternal, self-sustaining, necessary way. Necessary that is in the sense that God does not have it in him to go out of existence just as we do not have it. It is not inherently in us to go on forever.

We are not eternal beings in and of ourselves. We are eternal beings because God will sustain us, our spirit in any event. But God is altogether unlike us. And when we think about him that way, when we worship him that way, when we think about the difference between creator and creature, it's easier for us to keep our thinking in check.

But God's self-existence is a basic truth. I mean, Paul talks about that quite a bit in Athens, and we could go to Acts 17, Mars Hill, but we're not going to do that right now. Let me just read what Packer said in his, I'll just kind of summarize Acts 17 here.

J .I. Packer said this in Concise Theology. He said, The world's creator is not served by human hands as if he needed anything because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. That's part of Acts 17.

Sacrifices offered to idols in today's tribal religions, as in ancient Athens, are thought of as somehow keeping the God going, sustaining him. But the creator needs no such support system. The word aseity, that is again self-existence, means that he has life in himself and draws his unending energy from himself.

This phrase was coined by theologians to express this truth, aseity was, which the Bible makes clear. An endless succession of causes for the world is unacceptable to the human mind. And again, you know, why would anybody think that, why would anybody believe in the Big Bang Theory?

Why would anybody believe in an endless succession of gods that ultimately culminates in the creation of this world? Why would they believe that? They don't want accountability, but I think there's something even more than that.

They don't want to be responsible, Tom. They know the truth and they suppress the truth. That's not quite where I'm going. Yes, it's something that they can deal with. It kind of, you know, even if we can't fully understand where all the stuff came from, if it just kind of existed and then exploded and all that, well at least there are pieces that we can sort of put together and we can reason it out and it makes a little bit of sense to us.

But if we think abstractly about a God who always existed, that's hard. That's hard. And scientifically, you know, that really doesn't register. There's no way to measure that. I was reading this week about, you know, an atheist.

It was interaction between an atheist and a Christian. And the atheist said, well, I would believe in a God if scientifically he could be measured. That's exactly right. And that's what we're talking about.

We're talking about a God who's beyond our created capacity to fully comprehend. And, you know, for the people who want to be kind of limited in an enlightened way, meaning, you know, the enlightenment, we'll only believe what we can see, feel, touch, measure, weigh.

That God is beyond us. When God says, well, he says in plenty of places that his name is the Lord or my name is the Lord, Yahweh, Jehovah. That is God's self-affirmation. It means I am who I am. It's a Hebrew word.

And I've said this before. And it really is. I'll just kind of briefly do this. The Hebrew text, the original Hebrew text has no vowels in it. You say, well, how do they read it? Because they know, they know the consonant patterns.

And so they know the vowel sounds that go in between. Well, what they did hundreds of years after the Bible was written, maybe about, I think it was about five or 600 AD, there's a group called the Masoretes who went back in and they put vowel pointings in the text so that everybody could read it without, without any trouble.

But what they did with Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh, with the four-letter name of God was they put vowels there that would make no sense. So that when Hebrews came up to that word, they would just go, I don't know how to say that because it doesn't make any sense.

And the reason they did is because they didn't want anybody to say that name. That's how special it is. It's called the, those four letters, called the Tetragrammaton, also sometimes known as the quad-literal.

It just means four letters. But listen to this. Augustine said this. He said that God alone is the one of whom it can unequivocally and unconditionally be said, he is. The father has life in himself, John 5 .26.

He is the fountain of living waters, Jeremiah 2 .13, the fountain of life in Psalm 36 .9. Now, what are the practical benefits of that particular doctrine? Well, how about this? In John 5, let's go to John 5, as a matter of fact.

John 5 verses 24 to 26, and if I could read that, or if I could have somebody read that, please. John 5 verses 24 to 26. Go ahead. So what's the benefit of understanding a God who has life, who is life, who is the source of all life, who has no beginning and has no end?

Well, part of that benefit is, if you have eternal life, then what? You can trust in the God who has eternal life, who has no beginning and no end. If he says, if we, if there was a new God, and we'll just call him Phil, and Phil said, well, I can give you eternal life too.

And you said, oh, well, Phil, I like to believe in you. When did you come into being? And he says, Thursday. How do we know that you're going to be around forever? Well, you know, you just have to trust me.

But that's not the God of the Bible. The contrast couldn't be more clear. Any God who has, as the Mormon God does, some beginning must have some end. But a God in whom is life, who is the very source of life, who the Bible would teach never loses any energy.

He sustains everything. He created everything. And yet he never loses energy physically. In other words, in the world of physics, that doesn't make any sense, but that's God. Now let's talk about it in a different way.

The Eternity of God and Our Hope in the Future

The eternity of God. To speak of eternity necessarily involves the concept of time. Concept no one in the history of either philosophy or theology has defined in a manner fully satisfactory. Listen to Augustine again.

Augustine almost gave up. What then is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain to one who asks, I do not know. Nevertheless, I confidently affirm that I know that if nothing passed away, there would not be past time.

And if nothing were coming, there would not be a future time. And if nothing were, there would not be a present time. Time is difficult to explain. But for purposes of the present discussion, our minds can settle for the idea of duration.

This is Culver. He says, there's a certain arbitrariness about this approach for the past no longer exists as such. And the present strictly is only a line through which duration passes to become the future, which does not yet exist.

We only live right here in the present. Since God deals with the world, he has relation with time, yet he cannot be measured by time since he has no beginning or ending. And he himself is the cause of every other existing thing which has duration, which is bound by time.

Thus, it can be said that time is real because it is in God. This is kind of getting metaphysical. He says, another way about speaking to God's relation to time is that he is above time. And this is something I very much appreciate, because if God were in time, then he would be bound by it.

He would be limited by it. But since God is above time, time is his creation. He sees all things not through a corridor, not through a time or a tunnel, but as it were, seeing the entire parade of time all at once.

It's all laid out before him. He says, there's a logical succession in God's thought, but no chronological succession since he's not in time. Now he says, human beings may live above time in a measure by reflecting on remembered things, we are able to live in the past.

We talk about people living in the past. What does that mean? That means that they're just constantly thinking about the past. But now let's think about how we live in the future. And he says, believers are by very definition, past oriented as regards redemption and future oriented as regards the consummation.

In what ways are believers past oriented? How would you say that you are occupied by the past? Okay. Salvation. Brian? Resurrection was in the past, the resurrection of Christ. Okay. John? Dwelling on past mistakes.

You can do that. Here's how I would like to view being a person focused on the past. I would put it this way that when we think of our past and we understand that all the things that we've done, bring us to where we are, what we ought to be thinking is what, how grateful we are.

When I consider the things that I've done, the things that I've thought, the things that I've said. And I just think if I had to, I was listening on the way in, I was listening to a song. If I had to pay, you know, if everything I'd done wrong had a, had an amount set to it and I had to pay that amount, I'll tell you what, it would make the, the, you know, national debt look small.

So in that respect, we can be past thinking people. Why? Because it ought to make us just rejoice. I mean, I, I hope we get out of the idea of thinking of, we ought not to take Sid lightly, but on the other hand, we can become wrongly fixated on the things that we've, where the places where we've sinned, so much so that it becomes what, kind of a, becomes a hindrance.

How do you worship God if all you can think about is all the sins that you've committed? It diminishes the blood of Jesus Christ in that you are forgiven. If you are in Christ, you are forgiven and you need to think about it that way.

I think it's fine to think, because I think the, the psalmist, I think Dana did this a lot, just thinking about how wicked and how sinful he was, and yet God saved him. God forgave him. And what does that do?

That should make us joyful. I mean, I think, you know, let's just put it this way and I'll move on to the future here in just a second, but if I think about the past, I don't cry tears of sorrow. I cry tears of joy, because I just think, I can't believe what God has done on my behalf.

And now what happens if we think about the future? Why would Christians be future-focused? Because that's our home. That's where we're going. That's the hope, right? What's that? What else does it do?

Yeah, I think if we think of our own past, um, and we think about where we're going by the grace of God, then I think it encourages us even now. Why? Because we think of our loved ones. We think of our relatives, our friends, people that we only know via Facebook who contact us from different countries.

And we think, what? There's hope for them. Why? It's not because of, you know, what they've done in the past or anything else. It has to do with the same God. The same God who forgave us can forgive other people.

And that should give us hope, not just in the future, but in the now. Great hope in the now. You know, you've heard of the concept of being so heavily-minded that you're no earthly good. I think if you're heavily-minded enough, you're a lot of earthly good.

Because when you think and when you speak of the glories of heaven, when you just even contemplate them, and then you think, I can't believe I get to go there, then that should excite you now. I mean, you don't just go, I'm going to shut myself up in a room and, you know, wait for God to take me home.

You think, I need to tell people about this great Savior who's given me so much, who has forgiven me so much. A couple of scriptures. Isaiah 57, 15 talks about the one who is high and lifted up, transcendent, who inhabits eternity.

Give us some idea of the timelessness of God. Hebrews 1, 2 talks about Christ is the one by whom God made the ages or through whom he made time. God is also referred to as the King of Ages in 1 Timothy 1, 17.

Practical benefits of the kind of timelessness of God. God is as youthful and strong today as when Abel was born. I mean, there is no lack of energy with God. He's never going to run out. Let's do one more.

The Immensity, Omnipresence, and Incomprehensibility of God

The immensity of God. The immensity of God. God's nature is not extended in space. He is without spatial dimension and yet in him all things consist being himself the creator of space. Now this kind of, it will be readily seen, Culver writes, that as eternity designates God's infinity in relation to time, immensity is God's infinity in relation to space.

And this will kind of overlap where we go into omnipresence. But think about the immensity or spacelessness. It connotes the negation of spatial limitation. When we say that there's no place that God isn't, there's two ways of looking at it.

One is to say that he's omnipresent. The other one is to say that he fills up everything. He's immeasurable. What, you know, how if we think of God as a spirit, those who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth.

You know, where is it that God isn't? He's everywhere. He's omnipresent. He's immense. He's immeasurable. Listen to how Solomon describes him. First Kings 8 .27. And then let's even, let's go to Romans 8.

Familiar passage. Paul writes about the things that cannot separate us from the love of God in Christ. And I'll start there in verse 37. Knowing all these things and all these things that he's described and all these created things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

Well, how is it that the love of God fills all things? And again, what Culver writes here is that he goes, he talks about height and depth being aspects of space. And he says that even those things cannot separate us from the love of God in Christ, no matter how high we are.

You know, imagine if you were on Mars right now, God is there and his love is there. No matter where you go, let's go ahead and do omnipresence too. Omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience, all three of these are aspects of God's immensity too, even though the outline here presents them coordinate, coordinate, delete, never mind, presents them with it.

No division of the attributes can fully separate them one from the other logically and certainly not metaphysically or substantially. Let's talk about the omnipresence of God. A famous Baptist theologian once wrote, in the totality of his essence, without diffusion or expansion, multiplication or diffusion, he penetrates the universe in all its parts.

Let's memorize that. What does that mean? It just means that he is everywhere without separation. There's no more of God here than there is there. Why do people think that, or how do we even talk about it?

You know, there's this idea that surely God was in this place. As you know, I come from a Mormon background, so I'm more familiar with, or I'm very familiar with how they think about things. They have these temples all over the place.

Did you ever wonder why they have them? I can tell you why they have them. I mean, they have them because they think that that's where you need to get married, where they do baptisms for the dead and on and on it goes, but also because they believe that there is a special concentrated presence of God there, and that would not be correct at all.

But the idea that God is that immense, that big, that he's everywhere, it's hard for us to grasp. And again, we come back to this idea of God, and I'll just kind of wrap this up this way. Our thoughts of God need to be worthy of him.

When we think of God and we try to limit him, we are acting like unbelievers. If when we pray, we have a picture of God that, any picture of God, other than as a spirit or a loving father, but if we have a mental picture of what he might look like, then we're thinking like pagans.

We're thinking wrongly. And our thoughts of God, how we view him, how amazed we are by him, the idea that he would condescend to us, what is man that he is mindful of us, those are the things that we should be thinking about.

Because when we think highly of God, it's like Piper says, you know, if you have a high view of God, then what's that? We have a lower view of men, we view ourselves rightly. And if we have a low view of God, then we have a high view of man, a high view of ourselves.