“Now to Him” (Part 1 of 2)

What has the greatest influence on your worship?

Is it the pastor who is preaching, the music being sung, the crowd, the amount of sleep voices that ring around in our heads when even we're silent for a moment or two? Come, Lord, and meet with us, we pray. For Jesus' sake. Amen. Well, I've had a number of cards in the last ten days or so thanking me for ending Jude, and I find myself saying out loud at my desk, Oh, not so fast! We're not there yet.

But we are here this morning. This is our eleventh and final study in this important letter, a letter which began with Jude praying for those to whom he writes, and it ends with a hymn that Jude invites those to whom he writes to join in in singing, at least in adding their amen. Now, it is not our purpose to rehearse the entire letter, but we need to make sure that we understand that Jude has alerted the church to whom he writes, alerted them to the infiltrators who had established themselves in the context of the congregation. And the warning that he sounds is a warning that was relevant in his day, and as you read church history right up to the present time, it remains supremely relevant.

Just because people talk about God in a compelling way or introduce intriguing notions or share their dreams and do all of that with an air of spirituality, we must constantly be vigilant, we must be on our guard. And that is exactly what Jude has done throughout the letter. He has urged his readers—we, his readers—to contend for the faith, to keep yourselves in the love of God. And as he draws it to a close, he reminds them that in their exercise of building themselves up in their most holy faith, God is keeping them.

In Pauline terms, he's essentially saying to them, as Philippians 1, he—that is, God—who has begun a good work in you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ. And so here we are with the final phrases of the letter. To the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time and now and forever. Amen. So we end by considering that what we believe about God—that's theology—informs how we worship God—that is, doxology—and directs how and why we share the gospel of God—that is, missiology.

And those are our headings. First of all, the theology which runs through his entire letter. You will notice that he returns to what he began with in the opening phrase of verse 25, to the only God.

To the only God. The Jews understood monotheism. They did not understand mediatorship, the fact that God was one and God was three without division, and yet without a cohesion that mingled the members of the Trinity. But he's establishing the fact that in the sounds and sights that would have surrounded the people in Jude's day, there is only one God.

Now, that, of course, was a challenge to many of them, and frankly, it is a challenge to many of us. If people have any notion of God at all, they will probably say to you, Well, of course, I do believe in God, but I believe in lots of gods. Or I believe in the God that I choose out of a selection. Now, when Paul writes to the Corinthians, he says this to them, Although there may be so-called gods, small g, in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods, and many lords in inverted commas, yet for us there is one God, the Father from whom are all things, and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and through whom we exist. And this only God is the Savior, coming to us in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ in order to save us—that what God the Father has planned, Christ the Son has procured, and God the Holy Spirit then applies to the lives of those who trust in him. And this is the faith that Jude is very, very concerned that his readers will pay attention to—that they will be prepared to contend for the faith, not simply for faith. In similar terms, when Paul writes to Timothy, he says to him, Timothy, I want you to follow the pattern of sound words.

I want you to guard the good deposit. And it is this theology, this knowledge of God—the way in which he has revealed himself in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—that is going to give rise to this conclusion. It's almost as Jude comes to the end of this, that he is saying to those to whom he writes, Do you realize how great is our God?

Let the Amen sound from his people again. And in order to help us in that, he provides four words which convey the splendor and the sovereignty of God. First of all, to the only God be glory.

What is glory? Well, it comes all over the Bible, but it is essentially this. It is the public, visible, acclaimed presence of God. It is the establishing of the presence of God in a moment of time and amongst his people.

If you have a concordance and you have the interest, you can do your own homework on this. Let me just give you three cross-references and read them briefly to establish this in our minds. Exodus chapter 24 and verse 15, Then Moses went up on the mountain—this is at Sinai—and the cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the LORD dwelt on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days. And on the seventh day he called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud. Now the appearance of the glory of the LORD was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel.

And Moses entered into the cloud and went up onto the mountain, and Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights. Fascinatingly, when you go on just a few chapters to Exodus chapter 33, the Lord said to Moses, verse 17, This very thing that you have spoken I will do for you, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name. And Moses said, Please show me your glory. And God said, I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you my name the LORD. And I will be gracious to those to whom I will be gracious, and I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.

But he said, You cannot see my face and live. If you follow from my last one, you get to 1 Kings and chapter 8, a chapter that holds great fascination with the ark of the covenant being brought into the temple. And in our studies in 1 and 2 Samuel, remember that the presence of the ark and the presence of God and his glory was manifested. You may remember our sermon on Ichabod, where they said, The glory now has departed. The glory having departed from God's people in some measure in the exile. But here now, in 1 Kings 8 and, what is it, verse 10, And the priests came out of the holy place. And when they did, a cloud filled the house of the LORD, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud, for the glory of the LORD filled the house of the LORD.

I'd like to be present for one occasion like that—just one—where suddenly the service stopped, because God manifested his presence, declared his glory, shifted all thinking entirely in his direction. Of course, when we go on into the New Testament and we begin to read the Gospel of John, we have this amazing statement that is repeated again as you go through and listen to the disciples and listen to Peter as he writes his letters. And this is the fourth cross-reference.

I said there was only three. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory. That's what John says.

We've seen it now. Glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. Jude says, I want you to sing out the glory of God.

We'll come to that in a minute. His glory, his majesty—in other words, there are no rivals to his dignity. There are no rivals to his splendor.

There is no one that can jump up in a moment in time and take on the challenge of the living God. Remember that the opening hymn of the funeral of Queen Elizabeth the Second contained the verse, So be it, Lord, thy throne shall never, like earth's proud empires, pass away. Thy kingdom stands and grows forever, Till all thy creatures own thy sway. She was the longest-serving monarch, but in her death she reminded us. She said to God, Your Majesty.

He was the only one that she had occasion to address in that way. You see what Jude is doing here? Glory, majesty, dominion—dominion over all the earth.

You say, well, it doesn't look much like it now. It doesn't always seem so that the Lord God omnipotent reigns. But the Bible says it is so, and we trust his Word. And authority—the authority to do whatever he wills in heaven and on earth. His authority over all creation.

His authority in the exercise, as Paul puts it in Ephesians 1, in the eternal counsel of his will, so that for those who love him the things unfold according to his plan. And you will notice that all of this is unbounded by time. Before all time, and now, and forever.

This can be true of no one and can be true of nothing else. Let this thought settle for a moment, if you can. I sat at my desk, and I said to myself, This is truly amazing, because philosophy, mathematics, science, logic, language itself, if you think about all of these things, with the progress of time, they are all inevitably superseded. People once thought of the world in a certain way. That is long in the past.

They've moved on, they say. And part of the problem is that they want to apply that same logic to the eternal God in all of his glory and to his majesty and in his dominion and his authority. But God, you see, the Creator, is completely independent of his creation. That's the fallacy of our contemporary preoccupation, which is pantheistic, with the earth, that somehow or another God and his creation are mingled together. Therefore, our care of the earth is a care of God.

Nothing could be further from the truth. God stands outside of time and stands independent of his creation. He shapes it.

It does not shape him. And it is our knowledge of him that then shapes our praise—which is our second word, doxology. Doxa is Greek for glory.

Hence, doxology. And hymn writers have often been able to encapsulate for us large areas of truth, not least of all about God and his glory and power and so on, and done so often in a way that allows children to learn it in their smallness. It's no surprise to any of you that hymns have underpinned so much of my understanding of God since I was small. And Horatius Bonner taught Sunday school, and when he taught Sunday school, he wrote hymns, because he decided that some of the tunes might be better and the words might be clearer. He wrote some six hundred hymns, one of which really challenges the way many of us come to the opportunity of praise.

How do we come? Well, thinking about ourselves, perhaps preoccupied with ourselves, wondering just what this is going to mean to me, the hymn begins, Not what I am, O LORD, but what Thou art. Tis what I know of thee, my Lord and God, That fills my soul with praise, my lips with song.

There's a direct correlation, as we learned last Sunday, that what engages our minds then stirs our hearts and challenges our wills. And so the hymn writer says, Let's start where we need to start. It is about you, Almighty God, your glory, your majesty, and so on.

Not about me. And so help me in this regard. Now, of course, in the Bible, God has given us our own hymnbook. And we have a hundred and fifty of those songs in the Psalms.

Psalm 29 begins in the heavenlies—begins in the heavenlies, where David says, Ascribe to the LORD, O heavenly beings! Ascribe to the LORD, glory and strength! Ascribe to the LORD, the glory due his name!

This is quite amazing, isn't it? Heaven is a place of worship. Ascribing glory to God is essentially acknowledging this aspect of God in his essence. Because, really, in essence, God is glory. And so the psalmist says, Okay, heavenly ones, okay, angels, ascribe to the LORD, heavenly beings. Somebody asked me a question two weeks ago about the hymn Love Divine, All Loves Excelling, and particularly the line which reads, Angels help us to adore him, ye behold him face to face. I think that that line, but I can't say, probably came from Psalm 29, because that is exactly what David is saying.

He calls on the angelic beings to ascribe glory to the Lord. And we need help in that. And who better to help us?

Now, let's be very clear. We cannot add to the divine glory. We cannot increase in any sense the inherent glory of his being. But that's why that verb is really good, isn't it? It's better even than give.

I mean, it means essentially give, but it's better than give. Ascribe. Ascribe to the Lord. We're not giving him glory. He is glory. We are ascribing glory.

We're saying, You are glory. Now, he goes on—and we're not going to expound the psalm, you'll be delighted to know—but he goes on in verses 3–9 to make the point that God's glory is not only on display in the heavens, it's on display on the earth. On the earth. In the brightness of the heavens.

In starlight or in sunlight. The heavens declare the glory of God. In the heavens, we see something of God's invisible qualities. Remember Romans 1? His invisible qualities, his eternal power. These things have been understood, says Paul, from the beginning.

How could they be understood from the beginning? Because he manifests his glory in his creation. And you will notice the repetition of the voice of the Lord.

That's why I read it as I did. Now, what is he doing here? Well, either in real time or in reflection, David has experienced, if you like, one of these great thunderstorms that has come out of the Mediterranean. And as it has come surging out of the Mediterranean and moving across Lebanon, and all the proud cedars of Lebanon standing there as created by God, he breaks them!

He breaks them! And so the psalmist says, On earth as it is in heaven, your glory is being displayed. I don't know about you, but I thought about it a great deal yesterday afternoon, depending on where you were, when those thunderclaps began. And boy, were they loud! And I said to myself, There you go again! There you go again! You say, What an idiot!

Don't you understand science? Of course I understand it a wee bit, but the reality is God made the world in such a way that the thunders made that sound, that the lightning shone like that. And this is simply a magnificent picture of its reality. That's why the psalmist is so helpful. John Oxenham, the poet and the writer, wrote a little piece on the hidden years of Jesus.

I just discovered this. On the hidden years of Jesus. Of course, that means between the age of twelve and the age of thirty, where people read the Bible and they say, So what was going on between the age of twelve and thirty? And of course, it is pure conjecture. And this is conjecture too.

But I thought it was good. And since I did, you're hearing about it. When he writes on the hidden years of Jesus' life, he pictures a younger lad telling of a hike in the country with the carpenter's son—i.e., Jesus. So you've got Jesus and a friend on a hike. On the way home to Nazareth, the younger lad, who is the voice now, said, I saw a great black cloud sweeping in from the west and darkening all the sky. The thunder was clapping all about us long before we began to climb the hill. But the boy seemed actually to like it, for he began singing at the top of his voice, It is the glory of God that thundereth, Eloi, Eloi, Eloi. With his arms thrown upwards towards the terrible black sky, he sang amid the thunderclaps, and his voice was steady as a trumpet.

And he knew no fear. That's conjecture, but it's good. You're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. Of course, we trust every day that you learn from what you hear on Truth for Life. We also love recommending to you resources that can help you continue to grow in your faith. I want to recommend a newly released book titled Future Proof, How to Live for Jesus in a Culture That Keeps Changing. This is a book that takes a look at the rapid pace of change taking place in our world, and specifically the rapid movement away from biblical Christianity. The author draws a correlation between a godless worldview and the rise we see in cultural anxiety. He points to the anxiety epidemic, particularly among young people, and encourages us as believers not to withdraw from dialogue, but to engage with our overly anxious friends and neighbors so we can be a source of gospel truth and hope. Here's a book that suggests while it looks like the culture is increasingly lost, we have a greater opportunity to offer the solution, the hope and peace found in Jesus.

The book Future Proof is a book that Alistair highly recommends. His response after reading it was, this is a really good and profoundly helpful book. I hope you'll request your copy when you make a donation today. Keep in mind your financial support helps distribute solid Bible teaching around the world through radio, satellite, podcasts, various other online channels. You can give a one-time gift at truthforlife.org slash donate, or you can arrange to set up an automatic monthly donation when you visit truthforlife.org slash truth partner, or call us at 888-588-7884. And if you'd rather mail your donation along with your request for the book, write to Truth for Life at post office box 398000 Cleveland, Ohio 44139.

I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for studying God's Word with us today. Tomorrow we'll find out why every living person is either a missionary or a mission field. Which one are you? I hope you can join us to find out. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.