Welcome to The Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Hello, I'm Bill Wright. Thanks for joining us as we continue teaching God's people God's Word. Don begins a new message today, so without further delay, let's join him right now in The Truth Pulpit. We're back to resume our study of systematic theology this morning, and I'm glad that you all can join us on a brisk Saturday morning. Last time in our first session, we studied the basis of authority and scriptural revelation, and that's the starting point. You have to know what your basis, what your authority is for understanding God's revelation. And now what we come to this morning is, is what does that revelation tell us about God? Now that you've established that you've got revelation in place, the question becomes, what does it say to us about God and what he is like?
And that's what we're going to study today. And there's a really key verse that I want you to turn to, to kind of set the key for things in Psalm, Psalm 145. I think this is a really important place to begin in your study of God because it sets the expectations in a way that prepares your mind for everything else that follows. Psalm 145 verse 3 says, great is the Lord and highly to be praised and his greatness is unsearchable. The greatness of God cannot be explored. It cannot be exhausted.
It cannot be defined in ways that are stated and then there is nothing left to be said. It is always a matter of infinite study. And so what that means is, is that when you come, oh, this is so very important.
This is so important. It means that when you come to study the character of God, you should come with an expectation that there are going to be things that transcend your understanding, that go beyond what you can fully put your mind around and what you can fully grasp because his greatness is unsearchable. And what that means is, is that when we come to study the character of God, we should come and we should expect to find things that are different than what we're accustomed to because his greatness is beyond us. And secondly, we should come and realize that we cannot judge the character of God by everything that is reasonable according to the human mind. It's always going to be consistent and understandable according to Scripture, but there are going to be those things that just go beyond us. And that is the place where we begin. We're not going to look at the doctrine of the Trinity here this morning.
We'll save that for later in a few weeks. But when it comes to the Trinity, people say, well, that's not reasonable. I don't, you know, that doesn't make sense to me. And the whole point of introducing the subject this way is to say, but see, that's the wrong standard. Your mind cannot be the final standard of things. We have to go to God's word and see what it says and let God's word lead us to what God's character is rather than pre-imposing what's going to be reasonable to us. That just leads us into idolatry and makes God after our own image. So God's greatness is unsearchable. We expect to find things that transcend our understanding when we come to Him.
And that's certainly going to be the case this morning. This morning's topic I've titled The Nature of God. The Nature of God is the subject for this first session.
And you'll see that what I mean by that as we go along. When you study the nature of God, when you study the being of God, in other words, you study His attributes. His attributes are, that's a way of referring to what His characteristics are. What is God like? In the language of Berkhoff, whose book we're using, God's essence has, quote, infinite perfections, close quote, by which we can know Him. God's attributes are the infinite perfections of His essence. So God is an infinite being and whatever He is like is perfect, and it is infinitely perfect. Everything about God is infinitely perfect. And when we study His attributes, we are studying His infinite perfections. And our human minds benefit when we have a way to kind of classify and organize things so that we can understand them and think through them.
And that's what we're going to do here this morning. Many theologians will distinguish God's attributes between those attributes which are incommunicable and those which are communicable. Those are $5 terms that I'll try to oversimplify. When we talk about God's incommunicable and His communicable attributes, we're simply trying to classify His characteristics for analytical purposes so that we can have categories of thought to think systematically about God in a way that makes sense. And we use these terms, they're imperfect terms, a lot of theologians, some theologians don't even like them and reject the use of them altogether. Robert Raymond is a Reformed theologian who does not like to use these classifications, and we respect that.
But we're just using them here for basic analysis. God's incommunicable attributes are those attributes which are not shared, generally speaking, with His creation or with man. They are things that belong uniquely to Him alone and therefore they cannot be communicated to someone else, they cannot be shared, communicated in the sense of sharing, not in the sense of being spoken about. His communicable attributes are those that are in part in measure shared by humanity.
So let me illustrate. God's incommunicable attributes, for example, would include His infinity. You and I are finite beings. God is infinite, He has no limits, He has no bounds, and therefore that infinity is not shared with us.
We are confined to space and time, God is not like that. His communicable attributes would be, for example, for illustrated, like in His truth or in His love. These are characteristics which can be modeled in humanity, that we can be truthful, we can be loving, and those moral characteristics are something that can be replicated in human character, let's say. And so infinity, incommunicable attribute, love and truth, a communicable attribute.
That's kind of the idea here. And in this session, I am excited about this. In this session, we are going to focus on God's incommunicable attributes, the very nature of God. And what we're going to find is this. Some of these things, I've taught on most of these things, some of them are things that I've never taught on before, just because I've never done a thorough study of the attributes of God.
I've never taught a series that deals with it in this way. But here's what we're going to find. You may find things in what we discuss here today that you've never heard or thought about. And it's going to strain your thinking, maybe, for some of you. And for a select few of you, it may even give you a headache.
That's okay. That's what happens when we study the attributes of God. We're doing something where we're pouring infinity into your finite mind. And just like a cup overflows and spills out, your finite mind expands to a point and then you say this, I realize that I'm dealing with things that are beyond me. Don't resist that and don't turn away from it. Just recognize, ah, the way that this is stretching my mind is giving me a sense of the unsearchable greatness of God as I study these things.
That headache is a reflection of the unsearchable greatness of God. Now, the way that this works out with these attributes and the way that we're going to teach them here this morning is this. First of all, what we're saying here, we intend to align perfectly with traditional classic Reformed theology and that we want to align ourselves with the men that have gone before us.
We're not trying to be new or creative here in what we say. God's attributes have been well defined by good men and we stand on their shoulders as we study here together today. And so we want to be mindful of that. The way that we've put this together, the way that we're going to study these things, at the same time, I want it to be something that benefits you in a way that is easy for you to recall as we're studying these great attributes of God to do it in a way that you are able to remember it one, two, three, four in a way that comes to mind very quickly. And so I'm kind of combining traditional theology here and trying to do it in a way that allows easy recall for your spiritual growth. That's the idea.
That's the ultimate goal here. And so some things are simplified and there we go. So what we're going to look at is we consider the nature of God. We're going to look at four of his incommunicable attributes here today in this session and each one of them begins with the letter I.
The letter I. I like doing it this way because you can just remember this and then you can rehearse it and soon your heart is drawn into worship as you remember these things. Let me give you the four as we begin and then we will unpack them as we go along with Scripture. First of all, God is invisible. God is invisible.
That's point number one. Secondly, God is independent. God is independent.
So God is invisible. God is independent. Thirdly, God is infinite. God is infinite. And fourthly, God is immutable. God is immutable. He is invisible.
He is independent. He is infinite and he is immutable. All of these things in a way that are not true of us. Here's the thing. We're looking at that which uniquely characterizes God, that God uniquely is in a way that we are not like him. You know, as we study these things, one of the key things that I would want you to take away from this session in particular is this.
This one simple point leads into all four. God is not like you. You are not like God. He is qualitatively different than you are.
As one theologian put it in some of my reading, illustrating it like this. God is more different than you than the ocean is to a glass of water. God is more different than you than the sun is from a candle. God is distinct. He is in a separate realm. He is in a category all of his own. He is unique and exalted and lofty above every conceivable human realm. And so when we come to God, when we come to study his character, we must realize and start from the premise that we are dealing with someone who is completely different from us as we look at these incommunicable attributes. And so let's dive into them.
I'm going to keep this to 50 minutes in keeping with what we're trying to do with this series. First of all, let's look at the first point. God is invisible. God is invisible. And in this point, what I'm intending to communicate here is that God is spirit. God is an immaterial being. He has no substance which we see. He is not made up of physical matter.
He is a purely immaterial being. Jesus said to the woman at the well in John chapter 4, verse 24, God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth. That's a familiar text, one of the standard texts when you're considering this. Look also in your Bibles in 1 Timothy as we open God's Word together now. 1 Timothy chapter 1. 1 Timothy chapter 1 in verse 17 makes this very, very clear. Paul gives this doxology after declaring himself to have been the chief of sinners that Christ came into the world to save and giving praise to Christ for his patience for those who would believe in him for eternal life. He says in verse 17, here gathering up so much of the incommunicable attributes of God, now to the king eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever.
Amen. He is invisible. He is immortal.
He is not like us. And if you look over at chapter 6, verse 15, chapter 6, verse 15 of that same book, you can see that Paul is... This is on his mind from beginning to end. Early on in the book, he speaks about this nature of God. At the end of the book, he is concluding on this and everything in between is flowing from this great nature of God. And so let's begin at verse 14. Actually, let's go back to verse 13.
He says, I charge you in the presence of God who gives life to all things and of Christ Jesus who testified the good confession before Pontius Pilate that you keep the commandment without stain or reproach until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ which he will bring about at the proper time. He who is the blessed and only sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords. Notice there, he is the only sovereign. He is unique. He is different.
He is in a category all by himself that no one else shares. Verse 16, who alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light whom no man has seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion.
Amen. And so when we think about God, we need to realize that we're thinking about someone who is different, who is invisible, that we're approaching someone who cannot be seen. And so we receive these things on faith. God has revealed himself as a spirit, as an invisible spirit of such lofty, immaterial status that no one can see him. Now, as you go along, as you read, especially in the Old Testament, you might find certain texts of scripture that seem to contradict that assertion about the invisibility of God, that he is an immaterial spirit. So scripture speaks of God having feet in Exodus chapter 24, hands in Joshua chapter 4, speaks of his mouth in Exodus chapter 12.
How are we to understand these things? Well, those texts are using a literary device called an anthropomorphism. That's a very long $5 word, an anthropomorphism. The Greek word anthropos means man.
The Greek word morphe means form. It speaks of God in the form of a man. Now, it's not suggesting that God literally has a mouth, that God literally has feet that can be seen. Rather, what the writers of scripture are doing is this.
Remember something important that we started out with. Remember that we said that God is so totally distinct from us. He has a different kind of essence. He exists in a realm that we cannot penetrate.
And so the question is, how are we going to understand someone who is utterly other to us? Well, in the wisdom of God, in the condescension of God, in the kindness of God, he speaks about himself in a way that uses human terms to describe a certain aspect of what he is doing. It speaks about his mouth referring to his revelatory activity, the way in which he communicates. We use our mouths to communicate. God has no literal mouth, but he communicates. And therefore, we can understand that. We use our feet to move, and God moves as it were.
He acts, but not with literal body parts. But if the writers of scripture use feet and mouths, we have a faint idea that helps us to understand. So scripture is using metaphor. It is using human features to help us understand God when that happens.
But don't let a literary device cause you to think wrongly. God is an invisible spirit, and so scriptures are using this to help us understand God without saying that he literally has physical features like this. He's invisible. Those things can't be seen. And so God, we shouldn't think about God as a glorified version of a Greek god, of a Greek Hercules or something like that with big muscles throwing lightning bolts down on the earth.
It's not like that. He is a spirit. He is invisible. Now, as we say that, one other aspect of this we're including under the umbrella that God is invisible. We want to emphasize that God is also a personal being.
He's a personal spirit. God is not a force like gravity, or he's not the laws of physics or electricity or energy or anything like that. God, what can we say? God is an intelligent, seeing, hearing, moral being who knows and interacts with his creation. And so God is an invisible spirit, and yet he knows what's happening. He hears us when we pray. He has a mind, an intelligent, rational mind, and ultimately he's revealed himself in the Lord Jesus Christ, the perfect revelation of God in Christ. Jesus said that he who has seen me has seen the Father. And so as Christ moves about on the earth, seeing, hearing, interacting, displaying his power, you're seeing what God is like.
And so God is invisible, and yet that does not mean that he is simply a force. He is a personal spirit. Now, let me say this. We're covering four points in 50 minutes.
I can't tell you how... It's a blessed privilege to be able to teach these things. No man is worthy to speak of the character of God, and that's certainly true of your speaker here this morning.
But let me just say this. We're talking about great things that cannot be given full justice in 10 or 15 minutes as we go along. We could do a series of messages on the invisibility of God, God being a spirit, and not even begin to scratch the surface of what we're doing. And so we realize that as we're speaking on these things, we're giving little brief summaries, we're given just a couple of texts to think about, but it's just in the nature of things that we have to start somewhere, and so that's what we're doing, and we're trying to gather this up in a way that makes sense. Now, at the end of this session, I'm going to talk about the Lord Jesus Christ and how He interacts with these attributes and how these attributes play into our understanding that in Christ we see God in human flesh. I'm going to address that at the end, so if you have questions like that, you know, let's hold them off. It's easier to deal with them all at once at the end, and so that's how we're going to do it.
God is invisible, by which we mean He is a personal spirit. That's our first point here this morning. Well, my friend, thank you for joining us here on today's broadcast of The Truth Pulpit, where we love to be teaching God's people God's Word. And I just want to send a special invitation to you. If you're ever in the Midwest area, come to see us at Truth Community Church. We're on the east side of Cincinnati, Ohio.
We're easy to find, easy to get to. We have services at 9 a.m. on Sunday and 7 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday evening for our midweek study. You can also find us on our livestream at thetruthpulpit.com, that's thetruthpulpit.com, but we would love to see you. And if you do happen to be able to visit us in person, do this if you would. Come and introduce yourself to me personally. Fight your way through the people and tell me that you listen on The Truth Pulpit and that you're here visiting. I would love to give you a word of personal greeting. So hopefully we'll see you one day in person at Truth Community Church.
You can find our location and service times at thetruthpulpit.com. That's Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Thank you so much for listening to The Truth Pulpit. Join us next time for more as we continue teaching God's people God's Word.
Whisper: medium.en / 2025-01-22 04:06:37 / 2025-01-22 04:15:18 / 9