God is not in the business of fulfilling evil, selfish, self-indulgent desires. What the gospel does promise is salvation for the guilty. and the fearful and the threatened who have come to grips with their sin and the judgment of God and desperately want deliverance. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson.
In his best-selling book on suffering, Rabbi Harold Kushner argues that God wants good people to experience only happiness, but sometimes, quote, even God can't bring that about. It's too difficult, even for God, to keep cruelty and chaos from claiming their innocent victims.
Well, what do you think? Is God in complete control of everything, or is He lacking something, maybe power or information, or wisdom, something that would help him stop evil? Those are some of the questions John MacArthur is going to answer in his study called Consider This, Addressing Misconceptions of God and His Character. John, the notion of understanding God and His character, that sounds kind of basic, but like so many so-called basic truths, people probably tend to overlook them, and being reminded about these doctrines is important.
So talk about that for a minute. Yeah, the attributes of God are all the characteristics of Christ, aren't they? And to be like Christ is to be like God. That's what godly means. We need to understand.
that there is a direct connection between our knowledge of God's nature God's character. God's will, God's acts. God's Purposes There is a direct connection between those and our spiritual growth. The more you know about God, the more you know what God is like, the more you understand what it is to be like him, This is a series on Consider This, Addressing Misconceptions of God and His Character. And I originally preached these messages at the Masters University in Chapel, and I wanted to address some common misunderstandings about who God is and help the young people understand the truth about God.
There were a thousand young people in the chapel audience, and I wanted to help them be equipped with biblical truth about God so that they would know God. And they would also know. When God is being slandered, Of course, believers of all ages need to know exactly who God is. And that's revealed to us on the pages of Scripture. We also need to know What God is not Like 'Cause he is misrepresented so constantly.
That's the goal of the series. That was the goal in preaching these messages to the young people. To delete the common views of God in the culture, which are far from biblical. Misconceptions about God, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, and to give them a true knowledge about God, the triune God.
so that they would genuinely know him and know how to defend his glory and his honor and proclaim his name. Thanks, John. It's a unique setting for this study and friend, I think you're going to appreciate it.
So let's get to it. Here again is John MacArthur with a look at some deadly misconceptions about God the Father. You know, it's really important for us to be discerning in the world we live in because. We live in a time of tolerance. We live in a time of acceptance.
And most people are deceived and fooled. That cannot be true of us. One of the responsibilities we have in spiritual leadership is to protect the flock. of God. To guard them, and I want to discharge that responsibility with you as well as to teach you the positive things.
I want to warn you about things you need to be warned about. Misconceptions of God abound. They have abounded historically. That is why the Bible is so clear about defining the true God, the true God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Trinity, which, by the way, is a doctrine you rarely, if ever, hear explained. The doctrine of the Trinity, which is the foundation.
of truth and Christianity for certain. Here are some misconceptions about God. Popular ones, that God lacks ultimate power. God lacks ultimate power. I used to have conversations with Larry King before and after we would do Larry King live on CNN Network about the fact that God had to be lacking in power.
Because if God was good and the world was full of bad and God didn't change the bad into good, then He didn't have the power. If you keep telling me, he would say, that God is loving. That God is loving, and all of this is going on in the world. If God is loving, then God is impotent. Because a loving God wouldn't let this happen.
That conversation started when 9-11 happened. First time I was on Larry King, and he was asking me what is going on here. What kind of God allows that to happen? And 3,000 people to lose their lives. In an instant.
So, God, in some people's minds and in his mind, if he was going to allow for a God, he had to allow for a God who was perhaps good, but therefore had to be impotent or there wouldn't be so much bad in the world. Guardian. They say he has good intentions, but he really struggles to see his intentions realized. And Satan gets in his way. God has all these good intentions, but Satan hinders God.
And Satan causes things like crime, and war, and conflict, and disaster, and destruction. And so God has these good desires, and Satan is out there thwarting all these desires.
Now, maybe we need to come up with some kind of a strategy to kind of strip Satan of his power. Maybe we need to chase him away. And then there is another misconception about God: that the real problem isn't that God doesn't have power, it's that God lacks information. That God doesn't really have the knowledge necessary. He has desires for his kingdom, he has desires to accomplish his will, he has desires to bring about salvation, but he doesn't know the future, so he doesn't know what's coming.
And when it shows up with the same kind of surprising reality that it shows up to us, he sort of tries to adjust. But he doesn't have any previous knowledge of the future because there is no future to know until it happens. God has no more control of the future than we do, they say. This is very popular. theory about God taught In seminaries, He has no more control of the future than you have of the future.
And he is reacting to everything exactly the way you are reacting. The future is unknown to him because it can't be known because it hasn't happened.
So God's just trying to figure it out as he goes. And so we get him off the hook. He's not really responsible for what just happened because he didn't even know it was going to happen.
So we save him from being accused of knowing something. bad was coming and letting it happen. and still being a good God. And there are others who say, well, actually, God lacks wisdom. He wants everybody to be saved.
He wants the whole world to be saved. He wants everybody in heaven, but he really couldn't figure out a plan to make it happen.
So hell is kind of the default to God's stupidity. He just He just wished everybody to be saved. He wished everybody to be healed. He wished everybody to be successful, everybody to be wealthy. He wishes everybody to be happy and fulfilled and satisfied.
He has all of these grandiose and glorious and kind and generous plans, but. It doesn't have what it takes to make them happen. And then there are those who say, no, the real issue here is. He just lacks holiness. He's not holy.
He fails to recognize That sin deserves Punishment. And so in the end, he'll just take everybody to heaven. Yeah, he's not as holy as uh As you might think, he is. He's okay with sinners. He pities everybody.
He, you hear this, loves. He loves everybody unconditionally. Yeah, well let's get him off the hook. It doesn't really matter that bad happens, evil happens, people do terrible things. In the end, we all go to heaven because God is so loving, His love.
trumps his holiness. And there are others who say, well, Problem is, he's not in charge. He's not sovereign. doesn't have full authority. He claims to have full authority, but he must not.
If He's a good God and a loving God and a saving God, And you take one look at the world and you realize what a disaster it is. He apparently doesn't have full control. Whatever prerogatives he does exercise, whatever choices he makes, whatever rights he possesses. are in fact, listen to this one, subordinated to you. And me.
If he has any good intention for his creatures, if he has any good purposes and plans, He subjugates those to my choices and yours. Like, mm. I just wish That person would be saved. But it's up to that person. God has far less freedom.
than man does. Because man can choose And make it happen. to receive Salvation. But God can't. Make it happen.
So he's not sovereign. As Pelagianism, Arminianism. and really a kind of paganism.
Now, none of those descriptions I've given you are the God of the Bible. The true God is perfect in power, perfect in knowledge, perfect in wisdom, perfect in holiness, and perfect in sovereign authority. And a kind of blasphemy exists at the level of every one of those redefinitions of God. This is remaking God. In your own image.
Now there's one other thing, and that is the idea that God is Not unique. God is not unique. That is, he is not. really a person transcendent and separate from us. He's not really a person transcendent and separate from us.
He shares our nature. He shares our power. He shares our Presence. He's sort of. Mingle in with us.
And anyone With enough faith. Literally. Puts God into action. This is to say that God is not unique. He's not transcended.
He's not separate. He's not above and outside of us. He's in and around and through us. And we work God by our faith. We are the power of God.
We are the power that activates him. Where does this stuff come from?
Well, apart from the fact that it comes from Satan, the deceiver. He could trace it back to the 1800s to a guy who died in 1866 by the name of Phineas Quimby. In fact, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. He was by his own confession, this is interesting, a mesmerist. There's a lost Career.
A mesmerist, a mysticist, A magnetizer And a clairvoyant. Phineas. Quimby. who at the same time was a medical doctor and a philosopher. He launched The idea that your mind has divine power to create your own world.
He believed that he could see a patient with an illness, not hear a word from the patient, not have any diagnostic technique, but clairvoyantly, by mesmerism, go into that mind and by tapping into that mind from his mind to the patient's mind, through the mind of the patient, heal the body, even though he didn't know what the illness was. He had no interest in God, no interest in religion. His major disciple was Mary Baker Eddy. who promulgated Christian science. But the bottom line with Quimby is by your mind, you can create whatever you want.
And Mary Baker Reddy took it to the next level and said, Illness doesn't really exist at all. It's just a mental state, and you can dismiss it as a reality altogether. Faith in what you believe becomes the powerful personal force of supernatural energy that can overcome all restriction, all restraint, and give you the world you want. Quimbu went around supposedly healing people, but I read some of the records of this around 1860. It was very interesting that people claimed to be healed, but no one ever knew what they were healed from.
Because his technique was that he wanted to heal them without knowing what was wrong with them. Pretty hard to verify that. But the bottom line is you can have whatever you desire. And what do you think they desire? Wealth, health, prosperity, success, fulfillment, satisfaction?
The wish list never is like this. Humility, brokenness. Holiness sacrifice, unselfishness, Love. Not so much. Not so much.
Not about virtue. It's always health, wealth, success, all temporal, all material. That's the prosperity gospel.
Now if all that sounds familiar. It's probably because you have a television and you've been exposed To this philosophy, which in reality isn't nearly as philosophical as it is material. It's a Ponzi scheme to make the person. proclaiming it rich at the expense of everybody else who's duped. It's a scheme that people in the word faith movement, prosperity, gospel, name it, and claim it movement, use to get money.
They all claim that every so-called Christian has the personal divine power to recreate life's realities into exactly what he or she wants. It's all theirs. And you use the name of Jesus, the genie. You rub the magic lamp, and Jesus, the genie, pops out. Just waiting to be activated.
By the power of sovereign faith, in a person to give That person what he or she wants by the power of attraction. All this in the name of Jesus Christ. Is not just a lie, it's a lie that. Um Basically, preys on those who are desperate. It's a predatory lie.
It's it's for predators. who want to become rich at the expense of disappointed troubled people. Why are all these false teachers so successful? Because they're in line with Satan, who's the God of this world, Prince of the power of the air, who rules in the sons of disobedience. This is going to be successful because the fallen world will embrace it.
This is false Christianity from hell. No biblical understanding of God, no biblical understanding of man, no biblical understanding of sin, no recognition of total depravity, man's universal inability to do anything in the flesh that pleases God, let alone think himself to be God who can speak into existence something that he desires. Let me tell you something: God does not give the unregenerate man what he naturally longs for. God doesn't fulfill the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. And when you say that it is God giving you what you in your natural fallen longings want, you are calling God Satan.
That's what you're doing. I'll say it again: God does not give the unregenerate person what in his natural longings he desires. That's the love of the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life. God is not in the business of fulfilling evil, selfish, self-indulgent desires. What the gospel does promise is salvation for the broken and the shattered.
And the heart sick. And the guilty and the fearful and the threatened Who have come to grips with their sin and the judgment of God. and desperately want Deliverance. We have to know The true God, it's just such a grief to me. I I grieve.
When God is misrepresented. That is very difficult for me. I'm not. I'm not comfortable with that. I don't like to see him.
Dishonored. We'll look for a minute at Acts 17. And at this point, we can kind of pick up with Paul. Verse 16. Acts 17.
Paul is in Athens and he's waiting for Silas and Timothy to catch up to him. But notice verse 16. The spirit was being provoked. within him as he was observing the city. Full of idols.
Yeah, you know. A bricklayer. in Athens would see the bricks. A street cleaner. would see the dirty streets.
A preacher sees the spiritual condition. Paul saw religion. His spirit was Provoked, stirred up. The pain was so great, it drove him in verse 17 into open public discourse.
So he was reasoning in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Gentiles and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be present. He could not stand Christ to be so dishonored. The pain drove him. into public discourse. He ran into the Epicureans.
From Epicurus. Way back in 342 BC, famous philosopher of Athens believe that everything happened by chance. Death. Was the absolute end of existence, no afterlife? No accountability, no judgment, just went out of existence.
And so Epicureans lived it up because, hey, death is the end. And then he ran into the Stoics. Launched by a man named Zeno. um called Stoics because they launched their philosophy standing on a stoa, which is a kind of porch in Athens. Then they believed in pantheism.
And everything was God, and God was everything, and everybody was God, and everybody was the master of his own. Destiny, this was uh William Henley's famous Invictus came out of that kind of philosophy. And he's just disturbed to the core.
So he's conversing with them. confronting them. For the glory of God. And some were saying, what would this idle babbler wish to say? This idol Babbler.
That actually is a term seed picker. Yeah. Idol babbler, seed picker. It's a term of derision. It came to refer, started really to refer to a poor person.
Who would scour the streets and Pick up garbage.
Sort of a human parasite who lived at the lowest level of human wits.
So they they derided him with the idea that He was just picking up. Seeds of ideas like scraps. An uneducated seed picker. trying to converse. with the philosophical elites of his day.
and winding up doing nothing but proclaiming Strange. deities. Strange because they never heard of the true God and they never heard of his true son. And what was he preaching? I love it.
He was preaching Jesus. and the resurrection. For them, it was something strange to their ears.
Something strange. But Paul was undaunted, and you know the rest of the story. He Introduced them to the true God, didn't he? Who is the true God? Verse 24: The God who made the world, all things in it, the Lord of heaven, Lord of earth, doesn't dwell in temples made with hands, he is transcendent.
He is knowable because I'm going to tell you about the unknown God. He is spirit. He is transcendent. He isn't served by human hands, doesn't need anything. Since he himself gives to all people life and breath in all things, he is the creator.
He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation. He is the. Author of Human Nationality and Human History. And he's, while being transcendent, also near. He's not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and exist.
He is transcendent, but near. He's not in us. This isn't pantheism, but he is not far away. Even your own poets have said we're also his children. Children.
You can find a couple of the ancient poets that said that in ancient Greece, one named Erratus. Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the divine name is like gold or silver or stone or image formed by the art and thought of man. You can't worship a God that you've invented for your own purposes. And oh, by the way. You're not going to get away with it.
God has Overlook the times of ignorance. It doesn't mean that God let sin go by. We know better than that. Read the Old Testament. But final judgment has been withheld.
Final judgment has been withheld. God is declaring all people everywhere to repent. Repent of what? Repent of failure to worship the true God. And He has fixed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness through a man whom he has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising him from the dead, and he's back to the resurrection of Christ, which is the divine authentication of his identity.
Mixed response, when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some began to sneer. Others said We'll hear you again concerning this.
So Paul went out of their midst. But some men joined him and believed. It's always going to be that way, isn't it? You're going to get the indifferent. I don't know.
I'll listen again maybe. You're going to get the rejectors. But there will be a holy seed there. And some will believe. You can meet them here.
Dionysius the Areopagite.
Somebody attached to that very Areopagus and a woman named Demaris And others with them.
So we go into the world and we preach the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is the validation of Christ. Identity and work. That is why it says in Romans 10, 9, and 10, if you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead and confess Jesus as Lord, you shall be saved.
So this is the world you live in. This is a world that feels comfortable if somebody talks about God. Or even if they use the word Jesus.
Now I understand it's not. Many idols or many gods. They all think they're speaking of the same God, but they're not. They're not.
So false gods, whether purposely identified, Or not. are still false gods. That's John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, looking at some misunderstandings about God's character in his study here on Grace to You called Consider This.
Now, friend, if you're wondering how much practical value there is in studying the character of God, know that having a right understanding of God has countless implications for your life. And a great way to let those truths sink in is to listen to John's study called Consider This at your own pace. You can download it free when you get in touch. The title of this study, again, Consider This. You'll find it at gty.org and all five messages from this series, along with more than 3,600 of John's other sermons, all of it free of charge in MP3 and transcript format at gty.org.
And while you're there at gty.org, make sure you take some time to enjoy the thousands of Bible-related resources that are available free of charge. You can read articles on a wide range of issues at the Grace2 blog. You can catch episodes of this broadcast that you may have missed. And again, you can download any of John's 3,600 sermons. And as we've been mentioning, today's lesson was originally preached at the Masters University, where John serves as Chancellor.
For information about the university, you can find a link to the school's website at gty.org.
Now for John MacArthur and our staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for starting your week with Grace to You and join us again tomorrow as John clears up misconceptions about the Holy Spirit. Helping you know the benefits of a right understanding of the Spirit. And John will continue his study called Consider This with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's Truth one verse at a time. on Race to You.
