I believe in God.lecture

I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth

How can we know God?

If someone came and asked you, how can you know there is a God? Why do you believe God exists?

I had to fly through this a little Sunday. This is important, even for apologetics.

1. General Revelation

God is the source of life. God is the creator of life itself and all creation points to God. General revelation is the smallness you feel on the edge of the Grand Canyon, or the emotion evoked in Colorado during perfect weather. General revelation is about beauty and creativity.

My kid’s Xray book. Amazed at the body.

Or my dad’s surgery

2. Revelation in history of Israel

God has become especially and conspicuously known through a particular history, the history of Israel. In order for God to reveal himself, God had to come at a time and a place.

The “scandal of particularity:” A certain people. To make them a nation to the nations. God coming in the flesh to a single family at a specific time and place. God coming in Jesus is the culmination of the whole history of Israel.

and within the revelation of history of Israel, the revelation of scripture. This tell the story of us.

This is us.

3. Revelation of Jesus

The word of God. The word God had for the world is Jesus. Paul: the full revelation of God. Or the fullness of God.

Hidden behind the back of Jesus is not an unknown God.

God of Justice: Jesus hung out with the poor, the destitute, the sick

God of love: Jesus spent time with friends, even down to his death

God of mercy: Jesus comes back to his disciples that abandoned him

God of wisdom: even in humanness, Jesus knew himself and knew how to follow the way of the father

God of compassion: Jesus weeping at the tomb of lazarus

Jesus is the God-man, who reveals to us God and man.

This God can be known.

The Christian God and the gods

There was a god for everything. Fate was a huge deal. Gods were manipulating/controlling, and could be manipulated.

“The notion that there is one true and transcendent God, and that this God loves the world/humanity, may have become subsequently so much a familiar notion, whether or not it is actively affirmed, that we cannot easily realize how utterly strange, even ridiculous, it was in the Roman era.” -Larry Hurtado

Modern gods

What do we put in the place of God today?

idolatry

atheism

the self

I believe in God the Father

First, The triune, 3 in one God, comes into play here with creation. But the first person of the trinity, God the Father is the central actor here. And the first statement is one of relationship.

Jesus of course tells us to think of this relationship

John 20:17 NIV

17 Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ ”

But not just Jesus, the Spirit also:

Romans 8:15–16 NIV

15 The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” 16 The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.

The Apostles’ Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism “In God the Father”

That is what it means to be baptized into the Triune God. By the Spirit we are immersed into the life of Jesus so that we come to share in his position before God.

We speak to God, and God listens to us, as if we were Jesus. Jesus is God’s child by nature, and we become God’s children by grace. Jesus is born of God; we are adopted. So when we confess that God is “Father,” it is not a theological idea but a confession of the defining relationship of our lives. We call God “Father” because that is what Jesus calls God, and because Jesus has invited us to relate to God in the same way. In other words, we call God “Father” because of revelation.

Today many Christians are uneasy about this word. Why do you think?

This might seem like modern problems, but that is not the case. The early writers were very careful and making clear that Father was not about gender in any connotation. In fact this is another thing that distinguished Christian belief from the cast of Greek and Roman gods who most were male and female.

The Apostles’ Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism “In God the Father”

We use the words “Father” and “Son,” Gregory says, “in a more elevated sense.” We “accept the realities without being put off by the names.” Ordinary family connotations cannot be applied to God, much less connotations of gender. “Do you take it,” Gregory asks his congregation, “that our God is a male because of the masculine nouns ‘God’ and ‘Father’? Is the ‘Godhead’ a female because in Greek the word is feminine?” Such crude biological thinking would be pagan, not Christian.

What does the word Father mean?

Again Gregory is helpful:

The Apostles’ Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism “In God the Father”

‘Father’ designates neither the substance nor the activity, but the relationship, the manner of being, which holds good between the Father and the Son.”

There is also a reminder of our own identity here, Tertullian:

The Apostles’ Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism “In God the Father”

“Father makes son, and son makes father.… A father must have a son to be a father, and a son must have a father to be a son.” When we confess that God is eternally Father, we always have in mind as well the eternal reality of the Son.

I believe in God the Father Almighty

What does it mean that God is almighty?

God is infinite in power, wisdom, justice, goodness, and love.

Romans 11:33–36 NIV

33 Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! 34 “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?” 35 “Who has ever given to God, that God should repay them?” 36 For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.

Again, this is not the power of the pagan gods to intervene from time to time. God’s power is everywhere present in creation. God is not just a solution in this world. God’s power is the reason there is a world at all.

God’s power is not controlling.

Controlling behaviour is a sign of weakness and insecurity. True power is the ability to love and enable without reserve.

I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth

Ok a lot we can say about God as creator. Genesis 1-2 are beautiful and radical as they describe the God who created all things.

But what I want to talk about was the fight against Gnosticism in the early centuries, the way Christians distinguished themselves and also how gnosticism is alive and well:

This is a declaration that the world is good.

The Apostles’ Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism “Maker of Heaven and Earth”

Marcion, a charismatic teacher of the second century, had said that the material universe was created by a wicked and incompetent god. Marcion was especially disgusted by the human body, “flesh stuffed with dung” as he called it. Like some of the gnostic teachers of the same period, he was horrified by sex. He viewed procreation as a monstrous evil. Marcion’s followers had to adapt their lives to an austere renunciation of sex, marriage, and childrearing. Natural bonds were dissolved; only spiritual bonds were of any value.

Marcion’s doctrine was not the only challenge to the emerging Christian movement. The second century witnessed the proliferation of spiritual sects whose adherents were known as gnostics (literally “knowers”). Gnostic teachers claimed to have secret knowledge about the cosmos and the soul. They taught that the physical world was created by an inferior deity and that salvation consisted in escaping from the material world by means of esoteric wisdom. Such teachings were very diverse, but what they had in common was a dualism that divided the (bad) creator from the (good) redeemer and the (bad) world of flesh from the (good) human spirit.

The Christians (and Jews) are going to be clear about their countercultural ideas that the world is good:

Genesis 1:1 NIV

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

John 1:1–3 NIV

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

In the baptismal confession, they make claims like this one that the world is a good place.

Whenever we talk about gnosticism in the early history, I think we can struggle to accept how huge it was and how believable it was....

Gnosticism was a response to the problem of evil in the world. Creation is deficient. Even your own body can fail you. Of course, we can look at that and think, yeah.

This special knowledge or pursuit was a way of dealing with and responding to the evil experience.

The Apostles’ Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism “Maker of Heaven and Earth”

Though many evil things happen in this world, Christians confess that we are still living in God’s good creation. It is a sick world that needs healing, not an evil world that needs destruction. That is the difference between Christianity and Gnosticism.

So to acknowledge that God created all things here, and call Him good, Father, almighty, it is to affirm creation is good.

Modern day gnosticism:

According to theologian N.T. Wright, ancient Gnosticism has surged to become a ‘controlling myth’ of our age…[I]n the Gnostic worldview, the material world is essentially evil…As a result, all the so-called ‘natural’ distinctions in the world—for example the difference between male and female, or the notion of there being a natural order to human sexual relations—are at best illusory and at worst corrupted deceptions. All the belongs to the ‘outer’ world of society and religion, indeed the outer world of your own body. It’s all irrelevant and deceptive.’ [1]

Freedom is found by escaping any “natural order”

Freedom is found by looking “within”

Being a fulfilled human being means obeying your inner feelings

Being human means creating your own identity

Ok, land the plane.... God is infinitely powerful and intensely personal.