1630. God Wants Us To Be Like Him

Welcome to The Daily Platform from Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina.

The school was founded in 1927 by the evangelist Dr. Bob Jones, Sr. His intent was to make a school where Christ would be the center of everything so he established daily chapel services. Today, that tradition continues with fervent biblical preaching from The University Chapel platform. Today on The Daily Platform, we're continuing a series called Our Great God. Today's message will be preached by Bible professor Dr. Ted Miller. The scripture passage is from 1 Peter chapter 2 and the title of his sermon is God Wants Us to be Like Him. Take your Bibles and either turn to or write down 1 Peter 1, 1 Chronicles 16 and Hebrews 5.

If you forget those, I'll mention them again, but those are several of the passages they'll be looking at today. The title for last week's message on attributes that belong to God alone was The God Who I Cannot Fully Understand. The title that's been announced for this week regarding the attributes that God does share with his creatures is not the opposite of that title, The God Who I Can Understand, but rather today's title is The God Who Wants Me to be Like Him.

Now, we could have made the title perhaps, The God Who Made Me to be Like Him or The God Who Saved Me to be Like Him. The scripture certainly affirms the accuracy of both those statements, but the idea that God wants something, wants something at all, something from us or something about us to be true, it does raise sort of an interesting question. If God wants something from us, did he create us because he lacked something, some deficiency that we could somehow fulfill?

It attempts to answer this kind of question predictably veer very quickly into something either ridiculous or probably blasphemous. After all, what deficiency could a finite creature provide to an infinite and perfect God? I mean, by very definition, such a God would have no deficiency, but this difficulty fades at least somewhat when you start to read God's own descriptions of himself in the Bible. In the Bible, we find a God quite different from the God of philosophers, quite different from the God of armchair speculators who build some God from justly reasoned suppositions and we end up with a God who's little more than a conglomeration of attributes, just enough to function as a source of existence or as some basis of order. But the God who reveals himself in this book, reveals himself as a person to persons, of a divine person to human persons. And this connection may help us to understand what can or should be meant by the idea that God wants us, you and me, to be like him.

The beginning of Genesis, God makes Adam and Eve in his image. He sets them over his creation and he visits with them. At the end of Revelation, the spirit and the bride proclaim an invitation to a great celebration hosted in a great city ruled by a great God. And the blessed who inhabit that city in Revelation 21 are said that they shall see his face.

Now to meet a sovereign face to face, that kind of access comes only by invitation, permission and approval. And there's our great problem. From Genesis 3 until Revelation 21, we find this great shadow, a great stain, a great curse that's been placed over all of mankind and everything that's under his dominion. Psalm 24 says that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, all the people that dwell therein. But then it says or asks, who shall approach the hill of the Lord? Who gets to have access to his holy place?

The answer is very clear, but a little discouraging. You must have clean hands and a pure heart. Okay, then, how do I become clean and pure?

Well, here's a challenge. Everything about you and me inside and out is dirty. Everything around us, everybody around us is dirty. To make ourselves morally clean would be like being caked in mud.

Take a shower and dripping sludge and try to wipe it all down with some tattered and mildewed rag. No son of Adam, no daughter of Eve, partakers of this curse will ever have access to God because we are not like God. You've never had the ability to make yourself pure. And when faced with the fact of our sins, it would actually just be easier if we decided, well, maybe there's no God at all. I mean, for some people, the intellectual journey to atheism feels like an intellectual journey, but we've got to admit at the outset that there's an ethical, personal appeal to atheism.

Do what you want, right? But even those who affirm the idea that maybe it'd be convenient if there's no God, they still find something very troubling about their own desires. Now, if we decide in fact that we're going to usher God or let him into this universe, despite what difficulties that may introduce, but let's say we decide that nothing can be known about him except through the natural world as deists do. At that point, we would know little about what God is like beyond perhaps his existence and his power and maybe something about his knowledge. But that God would still be quite a distant God. Now, if we open the Old Testament and go a step further and we decide, okay, God has in fact revealed himself, but that revelation ended with the Old Covenant.

At that point, our understanding of our access to God would be limited by the law that God gave through Moses. But what if God had a plan, a plan that involved revealing himself and far more, that involved some great twists, the kind of plot twists that nobody could expect, a great mystery, but that John talks about in John 1, that the Word, the eternal Word, who is God, would be made flesh and he would dwell among us. And as John says, we beheld his glory, the glory is of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth, and of this fullness have we all received. In his incarnation, the Lord Jesus is the perfect revelation of God, but his work also demonstrates the incredible and utmost importance that God places on his creatures being like him. In similar language, Peter says that we've been given exceeding great and precious promises that we might be, this is a phrase that blows my mind, partakers of the divine nature. Paul says it, I can't tell you the burden I had that Christ would be formed in you. See, Christ's finished work of turning the wrath of God from us and our sin is the means not only for making us able to have access to God, it's the means for an ongoing amazing work in our daily life. The Holy Ghost, at salvation, takes up complete ownership of you. And he causes you, as a newly born child of God, to desire, to want the very thing that God desires and wants.

That we might be as much like the infinite and eternal Father as a finite creature can be. Now when we think about the kinds of things that God says that we must be like him as, it's difficult to ignore the holiness of God. It's quite frankly difficult to know whether to start with his holiness or make holiness the finale or just make everything that matters about our lives fit under one overall umbrella term of the holiness of God. Of course, holiness can refer to God's absolute separateness, as Dr. McGonigal discussed last week, which would move us to awe and wonder. It's something that we can never fully understand. But holiness can also refer to God's absolute moral purity. Now you and I have never actually encountered in real time, in real life, outside of perhaps our own prayer life, an encounter with an absolutely morally perfect being.

To describe such an experience as unsettling and disturbing would be an understatement. This is the very kind of thing that Isaiah experiences when he cries out, I'm a man of unclean lips. I dwell with the people of unclean lips.

It's what Peter is feeling when he realizes who he's standing before. He says, depart from me. I'm a sinful man.

So here's our dreadful dilemma. Our own sin prompts us to cry out to holy God, depart from me. And if the holy God were to grant this request, what hope would we have?

We would never be with him. But instead of departing from us, God pursues you. He puts you in a family and he calls you then to be just like the head of this family. If you look at 1 Peter 1 verse 14, it says, as obedient children, members of his family, not fashion yourselves according to the former lust and your ignorance, but as he which has called you is holy, so be holy in all manner of conversation. Because it is written, this didn't start in the New Testament either. Be holy as I am holy. God desires and commands that we be like him in his moral purity. And Christ's incarnation models this holiness perfectly. He was separate from sinners. He fulfilled the law.

He always did those things which pleased his father. And yet as you watch Christ in his moral purity work through the Gospels, we find that his life is also highlighted by yet another divine attribute that we are called to be like. He was indeed separate from sinners. And yet he sought them diligently.

He ate with them. He fulfilled the law and yet he was merciful beyond measure to those trapped in sin. We find that the working out of God's plan for us to share his holiness could not be possible without another divine attribute, also for which we are called to imitate. And that is God's mercy and his loving kindness. There's something really interesting about the mercy of God in the Old Testament. When we find Israel just being rescued from Egypt, under God's commands through Moses to construct the tabernacle, we end up with a very sparsely populated or furnished mobile extensive tent in the center of which was the least accessible room of all time. And inside that room, the Ark of the Covenant, covered by a lid, and that lid had a name. It was called in Exodus 25, the mercy seat. Two cherubim facing one another, wings outstretched, hovering over an empty space portraying the access that we cannot have with our sin, but that we must have to be right with God, to approach the eternal and invisible God on his terms with great seriousness. We find out that in spite of the inaccessibility of the access to the temple or the tabernacle, the lid of the Ark of the Covenant is called the mercy seat. God has a stance of welcoming. Centuries later, after a fatal lesson learned by moving the Ark on his own, David brings the new Ark to Jerusalem, the Ark to a newly constructed tabernacle in Jerusalem.

I'd like you to look at 1 Chronicles, chapter 16. This is where he starts praying and thanking God for what has happened. He writes, oh, give thanks to the Lord. Call upon his name. He's making a public prayer before all of Israel.

He's going to recite a lot of Israel's history. Make known his deeds among the people. Sing unto him. Sing psalms unto him.

Talk you of all his wondrous works. And for many verses, he actually does recount wondrous works of God on behalf of Israel. And if you scan down then to verse 33, then shall the trees of the wood sing out at the presence of the Lord, because he cometh to judge the earth. Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. For his mercy endures forever. If that phrase sounds familiar, his mercy endures forever, it may be because Psalm 136, an entire psalm dedicated to the recounting of God's goodness to Israel, closes each verse with, for his mercy endures forever. God's enduring mercies, favoring his people with his presence and forgiveness as they come to him.

You know, that kind of thing is wonderful to celebrate when you're the recipient. It does get a little tougher, however, when his loving kindness is going to be shown toward those that we don't care much for, or that we're called to show it ourselves. This kind of struggle over imitating God's mercy is what we find in the extended conversation in Jonah, ending with a question from God. Really, what objection could Jonah rightly have to God's granting mercy to Nineveh? I mean, why is the prophet's heart so hard? Why does he not join and imitate this loving sovereign who's showing mercy, amazing loving kindness?

After these questions, the book ends with silence. We find such hardness is not limited to Jonah. When God condemns Israel into exile, both Israel and Judah, a recurring theme is the hardness of the hearts of the people, shown toward people who needed loving kindness, the orphan, the widow, the day laborer whose wages were withheld, went to bed hungry, the stranger who had no natural protector.

Why would your hearts be so hard? On the converse, when Christ comes to the incarnation, he exhibits not just perfect holiness, he exhibits perfect loving kindness. When he gets challenged for why he's eating with tax collectors and sinners, he answers in Luke 15 with back to back to back parables, all of which have a similar theme and a similar ending. The first two parables end with a celebration after the lost coin and the lost sheep are found. But there's a coda in the third one that extends past the celebration and is marred by the older brother's response, which demonstrates, by the way, that proximity does not by itself produce likeness. You know, why is Jonah's heart so hard at the end of Jonah 4?

Why is the older brother's heart so hard at the end of the story of the prodigal son? You know, with all this mercy that God is willing and ready to show, we need not portray God as morally soft or less than holy. He does hate sin. He will not stand with those who commit iniquity. He hates those, it says in Psalm 5-5. But God also loves to forgive.

He's pained by hardness. He's pained by the hardness that prevents people from repenting and he's pained by the hardness that will not imitate his loving kindness when repentance occurs. One particularly pointed parable, Jesus tells of a servant, himself forgiven of a great, unpayable son, but then turns around and imprisons a fellow for not paying him back. There are times I really wonder if this kind of love and this kind of forgiveness really is one of the unique marks of those who are the children of God. I mean, Jesus calls those out who pride themselves on loving those who are like themselves and Jesus says, you know, anybody can do that. If you want to be the children of your father which is in heaven, you need to love like your father loves.

You love those who even revile against you. So God wants me to be as holy as he is holy. God wants me to be as merciful as he is merciful.

And I've only covered the first two of many communicable attributes. And I guarantee you, I can't do this. There's absolutely no way I can be holy like God is holy. There's absolutely no way I'm going to be as merciful as God is merciful. And realizing this, I believe, is a key piece of becoming like God because Christ in his ministry, the perfect God-man, gives us another thing that we're here to imitate. I don't know that I would call this a communicable divine attribute but it is something true about the God-man that he models for our imitation. When the eternal Son of God became incarnate, he did so in accordance and in alignment with a great divine plan of God. It says in Hebrews 10, verse 5, Wherefore, when he, the Son, cometh into the world, he says, Sacrifice an offering that wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared for me. And burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin that had no pleasure, then said I, Lo, I come.

In the volume of the book, it's written of me. What Christ did when he came was simply in perfect submission to alignment with and imitation of God. And those words I could have easily used other words. Maybe just say perfect obedience and absolute yielding, full agreement. The just shall live by faith. There was never a time that the perfectly just Son of God was not living his life in full and perfect trust and obedience in the Heavenly Father. Of course, it's easy to trust God and depend on him when everything's going well. When you're being glorified by your Father and the lame are healed and the blind see and crowds are gathering and the hungry eat. And God is obviously glorifying his Son and the Son is glorifying him.

But when the tides turn, it sure gets harder. God seems almost silent as the enemies of Christ amass their strength, as they plot against his life, as they bribe one of his own to turn on him. False witnesses. Where's the Father? When Jesus spat on and kicked and mocked and Jesus finally hanging on the cross says, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And yet through all this, the author of Hebrews tells us something fascinating about the Son. In Hebrews chapter 5, verse 7, it says, Who in the days of his flesh when he'd offered up prayers and supplication with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death, it was heard that he feared, though he were a son, yet he learned obedience by the things which he suffered.

I confess the inability to understand what's fully going on in the garden. When Christ prays, not my will but thine be done. I don't understand it. But oddly enough, I find in my heart, a deep desire to imitate it, to be like it. And there's no way that this desire to imitate Christ and his dependence to God makes any real sense, especially when your dependence on God ends up with you dying.

Is it any wonder that the ancient Greeks looked at the gospel and said, wait a second, the center of your message is that God's Son was crucified? This is nonsense. Because once you lose your life, there's no redo. There's no details after that to work out. It's it.

It's over. And yet Christ, it says, committed himself to him who is able to judge righteously because his desire was to be in total and full alignment with God. You say, well, he was God. But as the son, he learned obedience, even through that which he suffered. You know, God makes children.

So the most natural thing they do is to imitate. And is it any wonder that he would place in his spiritual children a copy of his great desire? He wants you to be like him.

And if you're his child, he has put in you in some form that cannot be explained by any natural means. A copy of that desire that you want to be like him. This is something similar to what we find in the clothes, or in 1 John 3, where it says that when we see him, we should be like him for we shall see him as he is. And everyone who has this hope in him, purifies himself.

The theological and the practical marry perfectly. This hope of having your highest desire fulfilled is met with a practical daily task of imitating the Lord Jesus, who is a perfect copy of imitating his Heavenly Father. This desire expressed in John Wesley in Wesley's hymn finished then thy new creation true and spotless let us be. Let us see thy great salvation perfectly restored in the change from glory into glory till in heaven we take our place to cast our crowds before thee. Lost in wonder, love and praise. Love divine, all loves excelling, joy of heaven to earth come down. Fix in us thy humble dwelling of thy faithful mercy's crown.

Jesus, thou art all compassion, pure unbounded love thou art. Visit us with thy salvation. Enter every trembling heart.

Breathe, O breathe, thy loving spirit into every troubled breast. Let us all in thee inherit. Let us find the promised rest. Take away our dangerous sinning of an omega-b and of faith as its beginning.

Set our hearts at liberty. Come, Almighty to deliver. Let us all thy grace receive. Suddenly return and never, nevermore thy temples leave. Change from glory into glory till in heaven we take our place to cast our crowds before thee. Lost in wonder, love and praise. You were listening to the Charles Wesley hymn that Dr. Ted Miller referenced at the end of his sermon, Love Divine, All Loves Excelling. It was performed by BJU alumni and arranged by retired BJU music professor, Joan Pinkston.

My name is Wyatt Smith. I'm a senior here at Bob Jones University studying multimedia journalism, and I want to tell you a little about my experience here at BJU. I've been here a little over three years, and I truly cannot say enough about the community here at BJU. Whether it has been in the halls of the dorms, in my incredible society, or even in the classroom, I have always felt a very strong sense of community around me that has aided in my growth as a person and as a Christian. BJU's commitment to academic excellence has also pushed me to discover and refine the skills and talents needed to succeed in life after school, such as communication, critical thinking and problem solving. If you or someone you know is interested in an experience such as mine, I would encourage you to check us out online at our website, bju.edu, and follow us on Facebook and Instagram at bju.edu. For any further information, please feel free to give us a call at 800-252-6363. Thanks for listening to our program today, and listen again next week as we continue the series called Our Great God on The Daily Platform.