God is the Great I AM – Eternal and Unchangeable

Posted by Dan C. on

What is God Like? – Part 3

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“I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’ ” – (Exodus 3:13,14).

God is eternal, meaning He had no beginning and that His existence will never end. He is immortal, infinite (Deuteronomy 33:27; Psalm 90:2; 1 Timothy 1:17). God is immutable, meaning He is unchangeable; this means that God is absolutely reliable and trustworthy (Malachi 3:6; Numbers 23:19; Psalm 102:26,27).

God’s life does not change.

Created things have a beginning and an end, however their creator is from everlasting to everlasting.

“In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment. Like clothing you will change them and they will be discarded. But you remain the same, and your years will never end.”  – (Psalm 120:25-27)

A small child will often ask, “Who made God?” Our answer is simple. He was always there. Children accept that answer more easily than adults, with the childlike faith that Jesus reminded His followers we all need. When Mom told this little 5-year old God was always there, that settled it – Moms don’t lie.

God’s Character does not change.

The God of the Old Testament is the God of the New Testament. Listening to sermons in many of today’s churches, one might come away with the idea that the God who destroyed His enemies, the enemies of His Chosen people, and those among people who would dishonor His Name, has somehow changed into a kindly grandfather who waits for us to jump in His lap for a hug and a bit of candy. While God is certainly the giver of all good things to His children His moral character is changeless, as James reminded dispersed followers undergoing trials and temptations (James 1:12-17 NKJV).

God’s truth does not change.

How many times has any of us had to eat our words because of something that was said was not what was really meant, or something we thought was truth turned out to be not so true after all. God’s word, however, spoken but once, stands as truth for all eternity (Isaiah 40:6-8).

God’s ways do not change.

The wages of sin is death, so Romans 6:23 tells us. It will always be so. This verse also tells us that God offers eternal life through His Son. It will always be so. God discriminates between sinners, causing some to hear the gospel message, while others hear the words but not the message (Acts 16:13-15). To some he grants the gift of repentance and faith, while others He leaves in their sin, demonstrating that he owes mercy to no one and that it is entirely an act of His grace that any are saved (Romans 9:15).

God’s purposes do not change.

“One of two things causes a man to change his mind and reverse his plans: want of foresight to anticipate everything, or lack of foresight to execute them. But is God is both omnipotent and omnipresent there is never any need for Him to reverse His decrees.” (A.W. Pink)

The plans of God stand firm forever (Psalm 33:11). Whatever God does in time He planned from eternity, and whatever He planned in eternity WILL be carried out in time.

God’s Son does not change.

“Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8) Jesus is able to, and will save all who come to Him – all that the Father gives Him (John 6:37-40). This fact is the strong consolation and assurance for all God’s people.

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To be continued. . .

Part 1

Part 2

Part 4

Part 5

Meat not Milk

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Recovering the Christian Mind

“We cannot afford to carry into adult life a Christian consciousness so under-nourished and anemic that we slide into accepting faddish convenience recipes for worldly well being as our daily diet. The evidence is that when the time comes for getting to grips with the Christian faith as adults and not as children, many of our contemporaries abandon their faith. They were spoon-fed on the milk of the word, but in adulthood they discard the nourishment as babyish, and assume that there is no more to be said. Meanwhile, professing believers, men and women who perhaps make great steps forward in other spheres of life, all too often succumb to the epidemic of “anorexoria religiosa” which destroys all appetite for progress in Christian understanding and commitment.

. . .full-blooded Christian teaching will bring under judgment much that is taken for granted by people reared on protein-free Gospel or no Gospel at all. We have to learn to set life’s manifestations of evil and suffering, as well as of goodness and joy, in the context of the divine and human drama which is Christianity’s account of what we men and women are here involved in. The Christian worldview is the only integrative counterpoise to a secularism that is decomposing our civilization. No thoughtful Christian can contemplate and analyze the tensions all about us in both public and private life without sensing the eternal momentousness of the current struggle for the human mind between Christian teaching and materialistic secularism. – Harry Blamires, Recovering the Christian Mind, 1988, InterVarsity Press, Introductory material.”

One might rightly suppose that the above is a defense of studying the great doctrines of Scripture. I would agree with that supposition, and can only add that I find it nearly unfathomable that so many of us who profess to believe in Christ choose NOT to do so.

How Can We Know What God is Like?

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What is God Like? – Part 2

When you think about it, the most we can know about other people is what they reveal to us. The extent and quality of our knowledge of them depends more on them than on us. Knowing God is no different. Only what God has chosen of Himself to be revealed can be known, and that which God has chosen to reveal to us can be found in Holy Scripture.

Our quest to know God begins by understanding that God is our Creator and that we are a part of His creation (Genesis 1:1 Psalm 24:1). God said that man is created in His image. Man is above the rest of creation and was given dominion over it (Genesis 1:26-28). Creation is marred by the ‘fall (‘Genesis 3:17-18) but still offers a glimpse of His works (Romans 1:19-20). This glimpse of God that we do have is available to all men – we are all born with the knowledge that God IS. By considering creation’s vastness, complexity, beauty, and order we can have a sense of the awesomeness of God. However, considering how often and how lightly we use the term “awesome” in today’s culture, I don’t think it’s nearly a “big enough”  word to begin describing our God.

clip_image002I remember when I was just a wee lad and we would visit my grandparents’ farm in Wisconsin. There weren’t any street lights and I remember looking up at the night sky and all the stars with a feeling of “WOW, God made that!” filling my little heart with wonder at how BIG God is. That was awesome.

I also remember a church, nestled in tall pine trees across the road from Grandma’s house. I found an old photo of that church, dated back to around 1955. As if it was yesterday, I can still hear the hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy” resounding through the pines as we walked to church. That was awesome.

I can’t even describe just how “BIG” God was to this 5 year old – from just looking at the night sky and hearing a hymn. As we grow older and begin to read scripture our sense of God’s greatness looms even larger, or at least it should.

Face it; we don’t much care for hearing God when He speaks to us about our sin, our guilt, our helplessness, our weakness, our blindness, and spiritual “deadness”. We would rather hear just the “good stuff” He would tell us about ourselves. Nevertheless, knowing God first involves listening to His Word, receiving it as the Holy Spirit interprets it as it applies to us and to the character of God. When we see our “true selves” in the blinding light of Scripture, we can ‘know” God more fully, and even might have something to boast about.

“This is what the LORD says: “Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth,for in these I delight,” declares the LORD.” – Jeremiah 9:23-24

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To be continued. . .

Part 1

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

A Passionate Answer to President Obama

Posted by Dan C. on

If this does not speak to heart of the President, as a father – not to his position, I wonder what/who could? John Piper speaks to that also.

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What are the attributes of God? What is God like?

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“And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

(John 17:3)

This is an introduction to, and the first in a series of posts offering answers from scripture to the above questions. To say that they are important questions, questions that deserves serious consideration, is a huge understatement!

I first learned something about God’s glorious attributes years ago from two main sources: Lutheran Catechism and reading the Bible for an “Advanced” English course as a senior in high school. Catechism provided sound doctrine (and large words) to describe characteristics of God found in the Bible. In reading the Bible for itself, I found out that what it said about God matched the big words I learned in Catechism. (As odd as it might sound in today’s scholastic environment, in those days it was permissible to write a paper about The Bible as Literature, my chosen subject.)

In addition to Scripture itself, a source of information for these posts is J.I. Packer’s book, Knowing God.  Scripture references, unless otherwise noted,  are from the NIV and linked to their context in an online Bible. Please read them, read the context around them, and let scripture speak to you. There are of course other, more exhaustive treatments of the attributes of God; one of the most notable being Arthur W. Pink’s work, available online here.

These posts can really only provide a short glimpse into the awesome character of God and will hopefully whet your appetite to learn even more about the Creator of the universe and the One who sent His own Son to die so that you might live. The reason for these posts is two-fold. First, there seems to exist today, in American Christianity, a deplorable lack knowledge concerning what God has revealed about Himself in scripture. Most of what we hear from pulpits stages across the country speaks only of God’s love, and even that, for the most part, is described  according to our concept/definition of love, not His.

The second reason is from Scripture itself. John 17:3 tells us that “eternal life is knowing God“.  That can be a bit difficult to get our heads wrapped around, but it speaks of our eternal life has a  “right here”, “right now” aspect. How do we explain that in more practical, understandable terms? What effect does knowing God have on a person? J.I. Packer suggests four great effects:

1. Those who know God have great energy for God.

2. Those who know God have great thoughts of God.

3. Those who know God have great boldness for God.

4. Those who know God have great contentment in God.

We must ask ourselves, do we desire such knowledge of God?  While you ask yourself this question, remember that it’s not a matter of knowing God so we can “become” great for God, it’s simply that really “knowing” leads to “having”.

And lest I forget, when God sees knowledge of Himself in his children, It gives Him pleasure. 

” For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.” – Hosea 6:6 (KJV)

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To be continued. . .

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Carpe diem, preacherdude!

Posted by Dan C. on

That’s actually the title of a Dan Phillips post over at Pyromaniacs that begins with this:

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat in an assembly and thought this, in the past 35+ years since my conversion: Dude, this critical moment, with these assembled people, on this your one shot — and you do THAT with it?” (Emphasis mine)

Dan Phillip’s blog focused on the Apostle Paul’s charge to young Timothy. . .

“I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom. . . 

. . .PREACH THE WORD!”

(2 Tim 4:1-2a)

. . .and the lack of the Word in much of today’s preaching.

I had a similar moment this last Sunday morning visiting a small church in my neighborhood. The preacher however, didn’t use irrelevant humor, just have a chat, tell stories, or “weave a blurry tapestry of vague, gauzy religious sentiments”, as described in Dan’s blog. In fact he delivered a sermon based solely on scripture, a genuine exposition (rare these days) of a passage in Colossians.

My “you did WHAT” moment came near the very end of the service. After a soundly scriptural sermon, after telling us that God sent His Son to die for our sins, the preacher told us that all we need to do is “fall in love and say I Do”. At the most critical moment of the morning service, an invitation to receive come to Christ, the preacher told “these assembled people” that ALL they need to do is “. . .fall in love and say “I DO”?

I wasn’t just sad that I had just heard a lie, I just sat there, absolutely crushed. It wasn’t my place to address the Pastor, so all I could do was pick my heart up off the carpet and leave.

But this post isn’t about what was wrong with the preacher’s invitation – it’s about the solemn charge to “PREACH THE WORD!”. That’ the charge to pastors, preachers, teachers, and ordinary folks like you and me, even here in Blogland. In other words, if it’s NOT the revealed written Word, or if it’s not directly supported by the revealed written word, don’t go there!

I’m not bashing opinions here – opinions are great and they’re the meat some really great discussions. But they don’t amount to lot to God, in fact I remember a couple of passages that say man’s wisdom is pretty much foolishness to God.

Those of us who would dare call ourselves ‘teachers’ of sorts, especially if there is a genuine gifting to teach, had best heed the charge to “PREACH THE WORD!”, for we will be judged even more severely. We need to be about what has been written and revealed in scripture, not personal opinion, or fanciful ideas unsupportable by what has already been written.

We are to interpret and teach Scripture in the immediate and larger contexts in which it was written, not develop and ‘share’ our own ‘”new/fresh insights” (vain imaginings) that serve no practical purpose other than to build “self-exalting structures”. In fact, we are be about the business of “casting down everything that would exalt itself above the knowledge of God” (1 Cor 10:5).

Does what I say/write/teach point people to me and my ‘coolness’ or to Christ and His Word. If it’s the former I need to shut up and shut down this blog.

As Dan Phillips fitly concluded in his post:

“Once again: it is a crucial moment. Vast ages of eternity hold their breath.

What do you do with it?

Preacherdude: best to ask yourself that question now, before it is asked of you on that Day.”

Carpe Diem!

Worshiping the Human Mind

Posted by Dan C. on

In an excellent interview between John MacArthur and Phil Johnson here we find this from Dr. MacArthur:

“Modernism was a bad philosophy. Post-modernism is another bad philosophy. But in both cases, they assault the Scripture. Modernism made reason, human reason, the king. Reason was supreme in modernism. Thomas Payne, The Age of Reason, The Enlightenment, all of those things, the Renaissance. Out of that came the worship of the human mind and the mind trumps God. Now mystery trumps the Bible. The human mind trumps the Bible in modernism, mystery trumps the Bible in post-modernism. It is at the foundation an unwillingness to accept the clear teaching of Scripture.” (Online source) (Emphasis mine.)

The interview was about the dangers of the Emergent church, but contains a valuable warning for normal Bible-believing evangelicals as well. While we might not have succumbed to the “certainty of uncertainty” or embraced Emergentville’s  New Age mysticism (now termed New Spirituality), we still have “mental problems”. Possible symptoms:

  • Spending more time in “what does this verse mean to me” private opinion sessions than we do actually studying the Bible for what it says.
  • Assuming that every little whisper in our heads is The Holy Spirit speaking to us, because as believers “we have the mind of Christ”.
  • Searching for ‘deeper’ meanings in Scripture that are not found on clearly its pages, or in its context.
  • Inventing, out of our imaginations, allegories, metaphors, and fanciful sounding teachings that tickle itching ears but have absolutely no value for Christian growth and maturity.

This a very short list of a few ways we “worship” our own minds. You might think that too strong a word, or even completely uncalled for. I don’t. I’ve been there and back – all of the above. What, if not worshiping our minds, is it?

And that my friends, simply speaking, is Idolatry.

Think about it. . .