In case you're wondering, I've got a copy
of the Toronto Star here, well-supplied with
extracurricular reading material.
This is my own consumption, not yours.
Now, I'm delighted to have the opportunity of
teeing off this particular term of adult Bible
curriculum, and I'm delighted that a systematic approach
to the doctrine of God is what is
on the menu for the next several weeks,
indeed, the next several months.
It's of extreme importance that we have a
proper concept of God, because that affects our
view of life, it affects our view of
conduct and ethics, it affects our view of
death and beyond.
What we think of God is of the
utmost importance, it's basic to everything else in
our faith and in our life.
If there's any one passage that is basic
to this whole matter of the doctrine of
God, it is the one found in the
Old Testament book of Exodus, chapter 3.
The third chapter of Exodus, and I'll be
reading the first 15 verses.
Exodus 3, beginning to read at verse 1.
And if in the course of what I'm
saying, questions arise in your mind, don't feel
intimidated.
There will be an opportunity for you to
ask questions, and I'll make some attempt, however
feeble, at answering them.
So there will be a question and answer
opportunity at the close of today's session.
Exodus 3, beginning to read at verse 1.
Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro,
his father-in-law, the priest of Midian,
and he led the flock to the far
side of the desert and came to Horeb,
the mountain of God.
There the angel of the Lord appeared to
him in flames of fire from within a
bush.
Moses saw that though the bush was on
fire, it did not burn up.
So Moses thought, I will go over and
see this strange sight.
Why the bush does not burn up?
When the Lord saw that he had gone
over to look, God called to him from
within the bush, Moses, Moses.
Moses said, here I am.
Do not come any closer, God said.
Take off your sandals, for the place where
you are standing is holy ground.
Then he said, I am the God of
your father, the God of Abraham, the God
of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.
At this, Moses hid his face because he
was afraid to look at God.
The Lord said, I have indeed seen the
misery of my people in Egypt, and I
have heard them crying out because of their
slave drivers, and I am concerned about their
suffering.
So I have come down to rescue them
from the hand of the Egyptians and to
bring them out of the land into a
good and spacious land, a land flowing with
milk and honey, the home of the Canaanites,
Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hittites, and Jebusites.
And now the cry of the Israelites has
reached me, and I have seen the way
the Egyptians are oppressing them.
So now go, I am sending you to
Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out
of Egypt.
But Moses said to God, who am I
that I should go to Pharaoh and bring
the Israelites out of Egypt?
And God said, I will be with you,
and this will be the sign to you
that it is I who have sent you.
When you have brought the people out of
Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain.
Moses said to God, suppose I go to
the Israelites and say to them, the God
of your fathers has sent me to you,
and they ask me, what is his name?
Then what shall I tell them?
God said to Moses, I am who I
am.
This is what you were to say to
the Israelites.
I am has sent me to you.
God also said to Moses, say to the
Israelites, the Lord, the God of your fathers,
the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac
and the God of Jacob has sent me
to you.
This is my name forever.
The name by which I am to be
remembered from generation to generation.
Here we have a basic passage on the
revelation of God.
God makes himself known to us.
It is not we who imagine.
It is not we who have intuition.
It is not we who grope and grasp.
It is God who makes himself known to
us.
And immediately, this passage stands counter to all
sorts of views and philosophies of another sort.
Over against atheism, which says there is no
God.
Here is a God who reveals himself.
Over against agnosticism, which says there may be
or there may not be, I can't be
sure.
Here is a God who comes into dynamic
encounter with a man named Moses.
In contrast to those who followed the philosophy
of deism, which was very popular during the
French Revolution, that God in the beginning made
the world, wound it up, and then left
it to run down entirely on its own,
looking at it from a great distance.
Here we have a God who is involved
in the human predicament.
A God who knows the plight of his
people.
A God who is concerned for the liberation
of his people.
Not remote, but involved.
In contrast to the Shirley MacLaine kind of
new age pantheism, that God is everywhere, and
I am one with God, and I am
God because God is all over the universe.
We have a God who is a person
distinct from the creation that he has made,
and yet involved in it and concerned over
the plight of his people.
Over against those who follow polytheism, a multiplicity
of gods.
For example, in the Hindu religion, at the
last census, as reliable or unreliable as it
might be, there were supposed to be some
300 million gods and goddesses.
Here we have the one true and living
God over against polytheism.
One God who will reveal himself ultimately in
three persons, father, son, and Holy Spirit.
In this passage, God describes himself as I
am.
He did not come into being, he is
there from the beginning.
He will never fade into non-existence.
He continues to be there right through.
He is the I am.
The God without past.
The God who is not limited by the
future.
The God who everlastingly is.
There's a man by the name of Thomas
Oliver, who in 1770 was so gripped by
this concept, that he wrote one of our
best loved hymns.
It begins, the God of Abraham praise who
reigns enthroned above.
Ancient of everlasting days and God of love.
Jehovah, great I am.
By earth and heaven confessed.
I bow and bless the sacred name.
Forever blessed.
God making himself known.
Apart from his creation, sovereign, unique in his
being, and yet involved in the work of
his hands, and concerned over the plight of
his people.
Now we're going to be majoring on theology.
Theology proper, the doctrine of God.
Theology, of course, has a great many aspects
to it.
For example, there's the aspect which we call
anthropology.
The biblical doctrine of man.
And that, of course, includes women.
So I need not, in order to use
inclusive language, say his, her, he, she, you
understand what I'm talking about.
When I speak of man, that includes woman.
Grammatically, at least man embraces woman.
And we just take that for granted.
The Bible has a doctrine of man.
The Bible has an anthropology all its own.
That God made man, that God made male
and female in his image.
But God gave them the task of developing
the earth for their good and for his
glory.
The doctrine of anthropology is stated in scripture
in very clear terms.
Not only is man created in God's image,
not only is sexuality, the difference between male
and female, a gift of God, but man
and woman are given a task of work.
Work is not something that entered the human
scene after the fall into sin as part
of God's curse on humanity.
Work was part of God's intention for man
from the very beginning.
What sin added was the dimension of frustration.
Labor management tangles of which we have seen
something in our day.
That is how sin affects and infects the
world of work.
But work in the beginning was part of
God's intention for man that the earth might
be developed and the human potential might be
expressed in the process.
The Bible not only has a doctrine of
anthropology, the doctrine of man, who we are,
the fact that we're made in God's image
and for fellowship with him, but the Bible
also has a doctrine of soteriology.
It comes from the Greek word soter, which
means savior.
And therefore the doctrine of soteriology has to
do with God's plan of salvation.
A salvation that became necessary because of our
fall into sin.
A salvation that is worked at from two
aspects.
The work of Christ for us in dealing
with the penalty and power of sin and
the work of the Holy Spirit in us,
regenerating us and helping us in the process
of our sanctification.
So you've got anthropology, the doctrine of man,
and you've got soteriology, the doctrine of salvation.
Then you've got ecclesiology, and you've guessed it.
It has to do with the doctrine of
the church, because we're all acquainted with things
that are ecclesiastical, things that have to do
with the church as a visible body and
entity upon the earth.
And this, of course, relates to the matter
of the body of Christ, over which he
is the head and of which we are
members.
It has to do with the matter of
Christian communion and community.
It has to do with the sacraments of
baptism and the Lord's Supper.
It has to do with the matter of
worship and Christian education and the expansion of
the gospel through world mission, the nature and
mission of the church.
Ecclesiology is another branch of theology.
And then, of course, you've got eschatology, that
which deals with the eschaton or the end,
that which deals with the last things, the
Christian view of death, the Christian hope of
the Lord's return, the resurrection of the dead,
the final judgment, the final state.
All of these things are involved in the
doctrine of eschatology.
But anthropology, the doctrine of man, soteriology, the
doctrine of salvation, ecclesiology, the doctrine of the
church, and eschatology, the doctrine of the end,
all of these depend on theology, on our
view of God.
And therefore, the study on which we embark
beginning today and continuing through the autumn is
basic to everything else that can be built
up on it.
If we have a defective theology, a defective
view of God, then our anthropology is going
to be out of whack, our soteriology will
be distorted, our ecclesiology will go haywire, and
our eschatology will take paths unknown.
So it's very important to have a proper
view of God.
And I'm delighted that this is the subject
of study this term.
Now, how many of you have ever heard
of Stephen Charnock?
One.
Is that all?
Two.
No, he does not play for the Blue
Jays.
He's not one of the late summer call
-ups in view of the possibility of playoffs.
Stephen Charnock lived from 1628 to 1680.
He was a Puritan.
He served as a pastor.
He was a great writer.
He was also a man who was afflicted
with what is known in history as the
Great Ejection.
Now, that immediately conjures up a supersonic jet
and the pilot ejecting, bailing out, and the
thing going hurtling into space.
By the Great Ejection, theologically speaking, we mean
what happened in England after the restoration of
Charles II when many Puritan pastors, many Congregationalists
and Presbyterians were ejected from their parishes, put
out on the street, because they believed that
Christ alone and not the King of England
was the head of the church.
Well, Stephen Charnock was one of these who
was ejected from his pastorate and put out
on the street because of his religious convictions.
Charnock ministered at Oxford and at Dublin for
most of his ministry.
But he is best known today, by at
least two people, for his work called Discourse
on the Existence and Attributes of God.
And he takes 802 closely packed pages to
deal with that subject.
It's a marvelous illustration of the fact that
the Puritans not only exhausted their subject but
exhausted the reader in the process.
What does he say in this work that
can be an overview for the balance of
this course?
Well, for one thing, he stresses that God
is knowable.
God can be known and God wants to
make himself known to us.
It's customary in theology to speak of natural
revelation and supernatural revelation.
By natural revelation, we mean God revealing himself
in the world that he has made.
By supernatural revelation, we mean God revealing himself
in the word that he has given.
Natural revelation is accessible to all mankind.
People see the changing seasons of seed time
and harvest and should conclude that there is
a creator God who providentially governs his universe.
Supernatural revelation is only accessible to those who
exercise their faith.
God has revealed himself supernaturally in his scriptures
and in his Son, Jesus Christ.
And so God has made himself known in
his work of creation and providence in the
world that he has made.
God has made himself known in biblical revelation
written down in the scriptures and in a
personal way embodied in his Son, Jesus Christ.
That's why Jesus could say, he who has
seen me with eyes of faith and understanding
has actually seen the invisible God.
So we have a God who is knowable
because he has revealed himself to us.
Now there are things that he has not
revealed to us such as the year, the
month, the day, the hour of his Son's
return.
There are some prophetic preachers who feel that
they have gotten beyond the curtain of secrecy
and they have penetrated into the inner shrine
of the deity and they can tell you
that before the end of this year something
like that is going to happen.
Well, he that sitteth in the heavens shall
laugh and send their timetables into oblivion.
He's done it time after time.
The time of the end, the time of
the return of the Messiah is something that
God has not revealed to us.
But he has made himself known to us.
Now how can we who are finite really
know him who is infinite?
How can a bucket of one liter contain
an ocean?
Well, the answer is that it can't.
Our knowledge of God is not comprehensive.
He is incomprehensible.
The infinite cannot be contained by the finite.
And yet, that one bucket can scoop up
of the vastness of the ocean and it
is truly seawater.
So we are finite and our knowledge of
God is not unlimited, but it is an
accurate and true knowledge of God because he
makes himself known to us in ways that
we can trust.
We get clues as to the reality of
God and the nature of God when we
think of some of the names of God.
God has given us his name and we
must remember that according to the Hebrew way
of thinking, a name is more than a
label of identification.
A name is something that describes the character
of the individual.
The relationships that he has to others are
made known by his name.
For example, he is called Jehovah, the God
who is self-existent.
We depend on him for our existence.
He depends on no one for his existence.
He is self-existent.
He is the fountain of life and the
giver of life, but he draws life from
no one else.
That's why the kids question, well, who made
God is utterly irrelevant because God is unmakeable.
He is the maker of all else.
He is self-existent.
He is known as El Shaddai, God omnipotent.
He is known as El Elyon, for example,
God most high.
He is revealed as Adonai in the Old
Testament, the Lord, the ruler, to whom we
ought to be subject and willingly obedient.
He is known as Abba, dear daddy, to
those who are on speaking terms with him.
And so we have among the names of
God in scripture clues as to his character,
clues as to the relationship that he would
sustain to each of us.
When we come to consider the attributes of
God, and I know that this will be
given to you in considerably more detail than
one can do in a brief introductory overview.
We find that some of the attributes of
God are communicable and some are incommunicable.
We usually hear that word communicable in connection
with the Center for Communicable Diseases in Atlanta,
Georgia, telling us what latest strain of Asian
flu is going to strike us senior citizens.
Well, that word communicable with reference to the
attributes of God means characteristics and qualities of
God which we ought to manifest on our
creaturely level.
The incommunicable attributes of God are the qualities
of the nature and being of God which
belong to him and to him alone and
to which we ought never aspire.
For example, there is the self-existence of
God, the independence of God.
We depend on him for our life.
He depends on no one for his continued
existence.
He is self-existent.
Or think of the eternity of God.
Before time came into being, God is.
And our Lord Jesus takes that phrase and
applies it to himself.
Before Abraham was, I am.
And incidentally, we ought to see the statements
of Jesus descriptive of himself in the light
of the Old Testament name of God, the
self-existent one who describes himself as the
I am.
Think, for example, of that statement in John
chapter 6.
I am the bread of God, the bread
of life, the bread of heaven.
Or in John 8, I am the light
of the world.
He who follows me does not walk in
darkness but has the light of life.
Or, I am the resurrection and the life.
Or, I am the way, the truth and
the life.
Or, I am the true vine.
Or, I am alpha and omega, the beginning
and the end.
No stronger statement in support of the divinity
of Jesus Christ could come from any other
passage of the Bible than the I am
statements of Jesus on the background of God's
revelation of himself to Moses as the great
I am, the self-existent one.
Also, a characteristic of God, the self-existent
and eternal one, is the characteristic of immutability.
He is a God who does not change.
He is not in the process of becoming
wiser.
He is not in the process of becoming
holier.
He is not in the process of becoming
mightier.
What he was, he is, and ever shall
be, the immutability of God.
We have a God who does not change.
And Jesus Christ partakes of that immutability for
we read of him in Hebrews 13, verse
8, Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and
forever.
The immutability of God.
And yet some people say, didn't he threaten
to wipe the Ninevites off the face of
the earth if they continued on in their
godless ways?
And how come he let them off the
hook?
How come he forgave them?
God changed his mind.
Therefore, God is mutable.
Not at all.
God showed himself to be utterly consistent.
If you continue in your ways of perversity,
you will be punished.
If instead with contrite and broken hearts you
repent, I will forgive your sins.
God responds to our changes.
He remains utterly consistent with himself in his
promises and in his warnings.
The immutability of God.
And the unity of God.
That great statement in Deuteronomy chapter 6, Hear,
O Israel, the Lord our God is one
Lord.
We do not have a multiplicity of gods.
We have one God, but revealed in three
persons.
The Trinity.
And this, of course, will come up for
further study and discussion.
And I know that it will be profitable.
Another incommunicable attribute of God is his omnipresence.
He is everywhere.
In a way that you and I cannot
be and shouldn't even try to be.
Although I know some ministers who make a
desperate effort at that.
There is the omniscience of God, who knows
not only of our actions, but of our
attitudes.
Who weighs not only the deeds that we
do, but the motives behind them, which are
not always known to others.
We cannot aspire to omniscience.
That's an incommunicable attribute of God.
But then you've got the wisdom of God.
A God who wisely plans for our good
and for his glory.
And this is an attribute toward which we
should strive that we might be wise.
The fear of the Lord being the beginning
of real human wisdom.
Or the holiness of God.
And this is the only legitimate use of
the word apartheid.
God's separateness.
God's otherness when compared to the sinfulness of
our race.
God who is in a class by himself.
His moral majesty.
His spotless purity.
His matchless holiness.
But that also happens to be a communicable
attribute.
For we are told to be holy as
he is holy.
Then you've got the attribute of his righteousness.
The justice of God.
In our days we speak of remedial justice.
Reformative justice.
Justice in terms of restitution.
But the Bible gives a further dimension which
is sadly lacking in the justice system of
our day.
And that is justice in terms of retribution.
And the God of the Bible is a
God of righteousness and of justice.
He's also a God of goodness.
His compassion.
His mercy.
His grace.
His love.
This is an aspect of God that we
should mirror.
It's a communicable attribute that should also be
found in us in our dealings with one
another.
Or take the attribute of veracity.
The truthfulness of God.
God is omnipotent but he can't lie.
And he doesn't lie.
Because he is true in all that he
reveals himself to us.
And this is a communicable attribute.
We are to be men and women who
speak the truth.
We speak it in love but we must
speak the truth.
And then there's the incommunicable attribute of sovereignty.
A God who works all things after the
counsel of his will and brings his plan
to fulfillment.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism sums up what I've
been trying to say.
In a very straightforward answer to the question.
What is God?
Here's the answer they came up with in
the 1640s.
And it really hasn't been improved on in
our day.
God is a spirit.
Infinite.
Eternal.
Unchangeable.
In his being.
Wisdom.
Power.
Holiness.
Justice.
Goodness.
And truth.
His eternity.
Omniscience and omnipresence.
His omnipotence and self-sufficiency.
Immutability and sovereignty.
Are not communicable.
But his spirituality and wisdom.
His knowledge.
Holiness and righteousness.
His goodness and truthfulness.
Ought to be seen in us and will
be seen in us.
As his Holy Spirit recreates his likeness in
your life and mine.
This by way of introduction and overview.
To what will be discussed in greater detail
during the weeks to come.