God: A Short Autobiography - Part A

Here's why it's not a worry to follow God or to believe in Him and why it is enjoyable. In our text, in verse 6, God describes Himself, and we'll read it all in just a moment, as merciful, gracious, long-suffering, abounding in goodness and truth. That's the kind of God that we're talking about.

He's enjoyable, and it's not a drag or an encumbrance to follow Him. The world says following God is boring, and it's more fun to live for yourself. But when we give our lives to God, He gives us a purpose, and our life becomes an adventure. Today on Connect with Skip Heising, Skip explores the biography of God, showing you what God has to say about Himself and why it really matters to you. But before we begin, here's a great resource that draws on philosophy and science to help you understand who God is and how you can know Him on a deeper level.

Hey, I want to let you know about my latest book. It's called The Biography of God. Now, the very subject matter of God is the loftiest of all topics and the pinnacle of all human pursuits. As we discover who God is and how aware He is of the human condition, we will be inspired to know Him more each day. But we cannot stop with just gathering information about God. To truly know Him, we must believe and act in the light of that information. I'll share how you can do just that in my newest book, The Biography of God. Here's how to get your copy. The Biography of God is our way to say thank you when you give $35 or more today to help expand this Bible teaching outreach to more people.

Request your copy when you give online securely at connectwithskipp.com slash offer or call 800-922-1888. Okay, we're in Exodus chapter 34 today as we get into the teaching with Skip Heitzig. I was watching one of the news programs recently and they gave a report that there's several bus ads on buses in Washington D.C. that are running from now until Christmas. And they're a little bit unusual. They're sponsored by the American Atheistic Association, or excuse me, the American Humanist Association.

And here's what one of the ads says. Why believe in a God? Just be good for goodness sake. They're lifting a line out of Santa Clauses coming to town. And it's designed to target people at the holiday season. Why believe in a God? Just be good for goodness sake. Well, the spokesman for this group, a man by the name of Fred Edwards, said this.

Our reason for doing it during the holidays is there's an awful lot of agnostics, atheists, and other types of non-theists who feel a little alone during the holidays because of its association with traditional religion. Aww. A similar campaign last month in England by the British Humanist Association on the London buses read, There's probably no God.

Now stop worrying and enjoy your life. Interesting ads. We've never seen something like that before. The statements reveal something.

In fact, they're very revealing. On one hand, they're saying life is lonely without God. The spokesman admitted that. On the other hand, they're saying to believe in God must mean that I can't enjoy life. Now the first statement is true. Life is lonely without God. In fact, God made you that way. The Bible says we were created subject to emptiness.

God put the hole inside so we wonder why it's there. But the second statement is not true. That to follow God, to believe in God means you can enjoy life. In fact, I've discovered people who enjoy life the most are those who love God the most and realize the most that God loves them. The most compelling people I've ever hung around are those who are deeply in love with God to the extent that they believe in Him and they obey Him. And here's why it's not a worry to follow God or to believe in Him and why it is enjoyable. In our text in verse 6, God describes Himself, and we'll read it all in just a moment, as merciful, gracious, long-suffering, abounding in goodness and truth. That's the kind of God that we're talking about.

He's enjoyable, and it's not a drag or an encumbrance to follow Him. An eight-year-old by the name of Danny Dutton from Chula Vista, California, some time back was given an assignment for his third grade class to explain God. Explain God.

How would you like that for an assignment? Explain God. Theologians can't even do that, but listen to Danny Dutton give it his shot. One of God's main jobs is making people. He makes them to replace the ones that die, so there'll be enough people to take care of things on earth.

Pretty good so far. He doesn't make grown-ups, just babies. I think that's because they're smaller and easier to make. That way he doesn't take up his valuable time teaching them to walk and talk. He can just leave that up to mothers and fathers. God's second most important job is listening to prayers. An awful lot of this goes on as some people, like preachers and things, pray at other times besides bedtime. God doesn't have to listen to the radio or TV on account of this, as he hears everything, not only prayers. He must have a terrible lot of noise going into his ears unless he's thought of a way to turn it off. God sees everything and hears everything and is everywhere.

This kid has got some good stuff, which keeps him pretty busy. So you shouldn't go wasting your time by going over your parents' head and asking for something they said you couldn't have. Atheists are people who don't believe in God.

I don't think there are any in Chula Vista. At least there aren't any who come to our church. Well, rather than us writing an essay to explain God, the great thing about this section of Scripture is this is God explaining himself to Moses. This is God's autobiography. It's such an important section of Scripture that it is referred to no less than 12, perhaps even 13 times in the rest of the Scripture, going back to this self-disclosure of God. We'll look at this tonight.

J.I. Packer, someone that I love to read and respect greatly, said, Ignorance of God is the root weakness of the church. I'd agree with that.

I'd agree with that. So if that's the case, if that is even a plausibility, let's see what God says about himself in these verses. It's simple. He gives us his designation, his name, and then his description. Verse 5, Now the LORD descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the LORD. And the LORD passed before him and proclaimed, The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation. This is God talking about himself to Moses in this very special meeting. The first thing is God gives his designation, his name, the LORD, the LORD God. In Hebrew, the probable pronunciation Yahweh, Yahweh.

It's twice used. Now what's usually the first question when you stick out your hand and you meet someone? You say, What is your name?

That's an all-important question to ask. You don't want to call them number something or you're so-and-so. You want to know their name. So you are given the name because the name is the designation of the person.

It identifies the person. Now when I was born, my father's name is Louis Frank Heitzig. And so he wanted to call me his last son. They thought I'd be a girl and I was another boy.

I was a fourth boy. And so he said, Well, we're going to call him my name, Louis. And I was named Louis Frederick Heitzig.

But my mom said, Not so fast. I've always liked the name Skip. Let's call him that. Well, they bantered back and forth as to which name I'd get and I got all of them.

So talk about an identity crisis in school. Nobody knew what to call me. But they often called me Heitzig because at least that was a name that wouldn't change. But in the Bible, a name is more than an identity tag. The name of a person in the Bible denotes character, reputation, even a person's authority. People in Bible times equated a person's name with a person's nature. It was far more important what a child was designated and called perhaps even than in modern times. Names make a difference.

One psychologist studied 15,000 juvenile delinquents. And he discovered that those with odd or embarrassing names were in trouble four times as much as others. Interesting, isn't it?

A couple of examples that he gave. The Turner family, Mr. and Mrs. Turner, called their baby girl Paige. Now, Paige is a great name, but when you put it with Turner, Paige Turner, you know she would get hassled her whole life. Or the Peace family, P-I-E-C-E, Peace, named their son Warren.

So it sounds like the Russian novel by Tolstoy, right? Warren Peace. The Bacon family named their son Chris, middle initial B. Get it? Crispy bacon.

Not a good idea. In Scripture, you find that parents will often give names to their child because they're hoping for some fulfillment of the name they're giving that child. So Judah means praise.

Beautiful name. The parents were hoping this child would grow up to praise the Lord. Samuel means God hears. What a great thought.

I want my son to grow up listening to the voice of God. Others were named after the circumstances of their birth. So we have the twins that were born, Esau and Jacob. And Esau was born first, and he was red, and he was hairy, and so they called him Hairy. That's what Esau means. Esau, hairy.

His twin brother came up after him grabbing the heel, so they called him Heel Catcher, or one who stumbles another, Yaakov, Jacob. And then there were people in the Bible that really got a raw deal, like the wife of Phinehas who named her son Ichabod. That just sounds bad.

And it even means something worse. The glory has departed. How'd you like to live with that your whole life?

You go to school. What's your name? The glory has departed. Now the name of God reveals his character. What's interesting is that in the Scripture you have 300 different names of God. There's not always one name. There's 300 different designations. Sometimes names are in combination with other names or adjectives are given.

But each one of them reveals a certain special facet of his character. So Elohim, Creator God, generally used to mean strong one or faithful one, or the word term Adonai, which means master. But here it's a different word. It's Yahweh, I Am. It was the name that God gave to Moses about himself when at the burning bush Moses was being commissioned to be the deliverer of the children of Israel, and Moses knew that the people would say, Okay, you say God sent you.

What's his name? And so he said, God, what am I going to say? Who am I going to say sent me? And so God gives to Moses, first of all, what his name means, and then the name itself. I'm reading to you now out of Exodus chapter 3. And God said to Moses, I Am who I am.

And he said, Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, I Am has sent me to you. This is my name forever, and this is my memorial to all generations. You say, What kind of a name is that? I Am. Have you ever heard anybody named I Am?

No? What kind of a designation? What does it mean? It's in the first person of a Hebrew word, hahaya, which means to be, to be.

And it's a very important truth to uncover and unpack what that name means. The idea of I Am that I Am means that God is the self-existent one. I want you to think about this. God doesn't depend on anything else or anyone else. He is truly the self-existent one.

He's not contingent. He's self-existent. It means that God doesn't have a creator. It means that God doesn't need a doctor. It means that God doesn't need a helper or a counselor.

No one can ever inform God about anything he doesn't know. He is self-existent. I Am that I Am. That's his name. The words I Am also refer to his eternal nature.

It's in the present tense. He is the one who continually is. He's not the great I was, the great I used to be at one time. He's the great I Am.

He is always that way. And the third thing that the name itself tells us about him is that God is active in his existence. Because in the context of this revelation, God will talk about what he is to these people, gracious, merciful, long-suffering. Obviously, it tells us we're not dealing with a God who's detached and aloof and up in heaven snoring and doesn't care. He's very active in the lives of his people.

Now, just a note. Whenever you in your Bible, most of your Bibles, see the word Lord in the Old Testament and it's all capitals like we have in this verse, capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D, they are translating a Hebrew word of four consonants. We call it the tetragrammaton, four letters. And it is perhaps and most probably pronounced Yahweh.

And that's the idea of I Am that I Am. Now, you probably know that the Israelites thought it best to avoid pronouncing his name. After a period of time, they just didn't pronounce it.

Because they thought better to avoid even mentioning his name than to abuse his name somehow. So what a Jewish person would do and still does today, whenever they come in Scripture to the term L, capital, all capitals, L-O-R-D, Yahweh, they replace it with another Hebrew word, Adonai. Or they simply bow their head and say Hashem, which means the name. So this tetragrammaton of Yahweh is the ineffable name.

It's so high, so holy that they dare not pronounce it. So that's his designation. Now let's look at his description. A list of attributes are given and we just sort of want to marshal our way through this. And I've divided them up in your outline into three sections. First of all, beneficial attributes. This is what God says about himself.

Notice what's first on the list. He's what? Merciful. Come on, isn't that interesting that of all of the ways God could describe him first, it's not holy, it's not sovereign, and it's not loving.

It's merciful. It's the first description that God uses of himself. The Hebrew is rahum. It comes from a root that means a mother's womb.

Isn't that interesting? A mother's womb. And so it's translated often compassionate because the idea is that just as a mother would see that child and feel such compassion and tender love for a child, not just a mother, even a father.

In Psalm 103 verse 13 it says, As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him. I remember how scared I was to be a father. It petrified me. I thought I wasn't up to it.

I couldn't do this. I could never love a little helpless infant until the moment he was born. It was an amazing transformation to have another human being like that in your life, and it was like a magic spell was cast.

After that, it was all over. I doted over that child. I still do, maybe to a fault to some degree. But I remember holding Nate in my arms just last month.

No, I'm just kidding. When he was a baby. He was just so small and so helpless. And we were at a restaurant one time, and he was in a high chair, and he accidentally fell backwards, and we couldn't catch him.

He would arch his back, and he pushed his weight, and his head hit a wood floor, and his eyes rolled back in his head momentarily. And just the emotion that swelled up the tender, merciful compassion of a father and mother was something I'll never forget. And even as children grow from that stage and become teenagers and become rebellious or get into trouble, parents, no matter what, especially mothers, always love their children.

I did some pretty rotten things growing up, things that broke my mother's heart. She never stopped having compassion and loving. God looks on his people like parents look on their own children with the same kind of doting love, compassion. He's merciful. The second thing he says about himself is that he's gracious.

Now, this word comes up 13 times in the Old Testament to refer to God. Here's the idea of gracious. It's somebody stronger helping somebody weaker.

I'm glad, and I'll sign up for that one, because it means I'm the weak one. Loved and helped by God, the stronger one. That's the idea of what gracious means. What this means is that God will treat you and me well, not because we're strong, not because we deserve it, but precisely because we are not strong and because we don't deserve it. Please understand, that's the whole idea of grace in the Old and the New Testaments.

Somebody stronger helping somebody who is weaker. It's perhaps best summed up by Paul in Romans 5, verse 8. God demonstrates his own love toward us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. So right off the bat, God is merciful, God is gracious.

Now, later on, we're going to find it, but we don't find it to the end, the idea that God is just at the same time, at the same time. That balances it out. But you know, there's a huge difference between those three attributes, justice, mercy, and grace. Justice is you getting what you deserve. Mercy is you not getting what you deserve.

And grace is even better than that. It's getting something you don't deserve. Example, if you were pulled over by a police officer for speeding and he wrote you a ticket, that's justice, you deserve it. If he said, well, I'm going to give you a warning, you were going 30 miles over the speed limit, but I'm just going to give you a warning, don't do it anymore, that's mercy. He didn't give you what you deserve, which is the ticket.

This happened to me not too long ago, actually. I wouldn't go in 30 miles over the speed limit, but the police officer told me I was going over the speed limit, and he let me go. Thank you, Jesus. Okay, what would grace be then? Grace would be the officer pulling you over, saying you went over the speed limit, writing you a ticket, giving it to you, taking it back, and say, I'll pay it myself.

That'll never happen, by the way. Just write that out of your wish list. That's getting something you don't deserve, and then maybe he would give you a tip on top of that.

That'd even be more grace. I used to love getting Nate's stuff as a little kid. I loved to go shopping with him and get himself. In fact, my wife had these little fun days called I Love Nathan Days, and it just meant he got to choose what store to go to and what activity to do.

It was all his choice. In fact, there was a time when he and his cousin got into a fight and disobeyed her, and she did something very unusual. She said, get in the car.

Got in the car, took them to the store, and bought them a gift. And Nathan's looking like, when's the other shoe going to drop here? I mean, this isn't right. What, are you going to take it away from me now and spank me here in the store? And she just says, I want you to learn a lesson that the way God treats us is often this way. Not only am I not going to give you what you deserve, even though my heart is broken by what you did, I'm going to give you a gift to show you how good God is to us.

He said, Mom, I'll never forget that. Then look at the third, long suffering. God is long suffering. You may have a translation that says he's slow to anger. What does that mean? Well, you know what that means. He doesn't fly off the handle at you.

Aren't you glad? God doesn't need anger management classes. God is slow to get angry.

Oh, no mistake about it. God will execute his wrath in judgment upon this world, but it sure takes him a long time to get there. That's Skip Heising with a message for you from the series The Biography of God. Right now, here's Skip to tell you how your support helps keep these messages coming your way and connects more people to God's truths. God has revealed who he is through his word, and we want to help friends like you grow in your knowledge of him.

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That's connectwithskip.com slash donate or call 800-922-1888. Again, that's 800-922-1888. Coming up tomorrow, Skip Heising examines several important attributes to help you take your understanding of God to a new level. God makes a promise. It's done. It's engraved.

It's in pen, not in pencil. He can rely on God to keep his promises. Make a connection, make a connection at the foot of the cross. Cast all burdens on his word. Make a connection, a connection. Connect with Skip Heising is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.