The Nature of God

Scripture: John 17:3; John 4:21-24; Isaiah 41:11-13; Isaiah 55:8-9; Exodus 3:13-15; Psalm 90:1-2; Deuteronomy 6:4; Philippians 1:2; Titus 2:13; 1 Corinthians 2:10-12; Exodus 34:6-7a.

Good morning. (Worship thoughts). We are working our way up through the foundations of what we, as the Church of God, as individuals, as a congregation, as a family, believe. If you look at your bulletin, there is a panel there that describes who we are: (SLIDE) We are: Followers of Jesus Christ and part of the Movement of the Church of God in Anderson Indiana, who base all our teachings on the inspired Word of God, the Bible, and believe in the Unity of, and Fellowship with, all believers in Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior.

Everything we do, or maybe I should say that everything we should do here in this congregation, whether it’s Sunday mornings or any other day of the week flows from the Word of God and the command to make disciples of all nations. (SLIDE) Right there in the bulletin, however it was developed long before I got here: Our Mission…To love God completely, to love people compassionately, to teach and encourage others to become fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ through the Unity of the Body of Christ working together.

These are critical, and by critical I mean important, statements. I said last week that there were scriptures that are foundational to what we believe, that will tend at times to repeat themselves regularly as we grow, regardless of our age, to improve being able to share the hope, the joy, the love of Christ that is within us, overflowing to a dying world. Flowing from the movement of the Church of God in Anderson, what we believe, what I share on Sundays leading us up to Easter and beyond, of course stems from God’s word, the Bible. But we all know how easy it is for us as human beings, to misinterpret God’s word. Or to twist it into something we want, instead of relying on the Holy Spirit to teach us what the Lord wants.

So if you’re looking for additional things to read beyond the bible to increase your understanding, that’s wise, but you have to be careful. As I mentioned last week, there are many who got some of their theology, what they believe about God, Jesus, the bible and the end times from the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. I read them all cover to cover when each came out. I’ve seen several movies, but theologically, biblically, they’re not accurate. They are works of fiction. (SLIDE) You can find any number of books that originally came from Warner Press about the Church of God. Authors like F. G. Smith, Mark Jackson, Barry Callen, Merle Strege. And you can visit the Church of God (Anderson) website. Jesus is the Subject dot Org. There are readily available a whole series of documents and statements about what we believe as The Church of God. It’s important not just for reaching out to others and sharing the good news. It’s important for our own individual growth in our relationship and understanding of the Lord. The more we know the word, the more time we spend in prayer, listening to the Holy Spirit, more than telling, or asking God what we think we need, the easier it becomes to allow the Holy Spirit to move through us in ways that help heal others, to share the gospel, to grow disciples. Holiness is a lifelong journey that begins with salvation and repentance, but grows when spending time in the word, time with other Christians, and time alone with the Lord in prayer.

(SLIDE) We began this series with the understanding, even scientifically, that there must be a God. A creator of the universe, all that has been, all that is, and all that ever will be. You can’t get something, particularly as beautiful, and wonderful, and amazing as this universe, this planet, as beautiful as you, and all that is within us, from nothing. Nothing from nothing, leaves nothing.

We discussed, that, of course, we believe the Bible from beginning to end, to be the inspired word of God. As clearly defined at the Church of God website. Jesus is the Subject.org which states: the Old and New Testaments, are supernaturally inspired, preserved across time, cultures, and continents, delivered to us, is useful for reproof and instruction, for righteousness. The Scripture is our backstop, the ultimate field of inquiry and judgment, the measure of conduct, faith, and practice. Whatever the question, whatever the test, whatever comes before us, in the end, it is the Scripture, above all other disciplines, that informs and defines us. We are not wrestling with whether or not the Bible is authoritative, without peer, or supreme; all other sources of knowledge fall beneath its shadow. It is a non-negotiable. It defines us. It is who we are.

And we talked about the Kingdom of God last week. That the Kingdom of God has existed since the beginning of time and creation, as the King of Kings, Lord of Lords created, again, the universe and everything within it. Yet because God gave us free-will, and we, as a species choose to rebel against His authority beginning in the garden of Eden and through our history. All have sinned fallen short of the glory of God. There is none righteous, no not one (Romans 3:10). And so God sent His one and only begotten son, Jesus, not to condemn the world, but to save the world. Through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit we have the ability to overcome sin and death. To increasingly walk in the Holiness that God intended from the beginning.

(SLIDE) So today, let’s have a conversation about the nature of God. And when I say “the Nature of God” I’m not talking about stars, planets, trees, flowers, people, or the study of the physical sciences or life sciences. A dictionary might define nature as the fundamental qualities of a person or thing. It’s identity or essential character. For example we might have a conversation, and we will in a few weeks about human nature. In the sense of all humanity. Gratefully, God’s nature is so much higher than, better than, purer than, holier than, human nature. Don’t you agree. Your life will take on the nature of what you believe God is like. Does that make sense. Based on what we believe about God directly impacts how we live our lives, how we behave, how we think, how we treat God’s creation, the earth, and the humanity, His children. Understanding that the Lord wants everyone to come to a knowledge of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior right? We are all His children, though some will reject their heavenly father.

(SLIDE) In the early years of the Church of God movement, Frederick George Smith was born in 1880 near Grand Junction here in Michigan. F.G. Smith became one of the publishers of the Gospel Trumpet in 1914. He wrote a number of books including What the Bible Teaches, published by Warner Press 1945 which includes this sentence “By the term “God” we mean the perfect, intelligent, conscious, moral Being existing from eternity, the Cause of all created things.” – By the way, the capitalization there is his, not mine. Similarly for me when I’m writing I will capitalize God, and Lord, and even words like He, Him, His when I’m writing about God. It’s a small way to recognize, that He’s the big God, and I’m a little human being.

Have you ever had anyone try to tell you who you are? Maybe because they heard someone say something from someone who heard someone else telling that they heard from somebody you dated or worked with, or ran into at some even in 1967, or 1983 or 2004, whatever they thought you did. Right? So but often, that’s what we try to do in describing God. We want to put God in human terms, based on something we read, or heard, or felt at some point in our lives. But if we have little pieces of understanding from here and there about what God is like, then it’s impossible for us to serve in His Kingdom accordingly because we don’t have a complete picture. Our faith is fragile, our walk is treacherous, and we fall, and when I say fall, I mean we hurt other people as well as ourselves because we’re not walking according to the calling of the nature of God.

So to really understand the nature of God let’s start with John 17. Just one verse. In John 17 Jesus is praying at the Garden of Gethsemane, before his arrest, trial, torture and crucifixion. Homework maybe for you this week. Read the entire Chapter of John 17 and let it really sink into you heart. The entire prayer. (SLIDE) But let’s just look at verse 3. 3 And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. God sent Jesus to reveal his nature to us, because prior to Christ, the gentiles worshiped everything as a deity or nothing at all in reality because it wasn’t Yahweh, Jehovah, the most high God. And the Israelites had mistaken blood and money sacrifices for the true mercy among their fellow human beings that God desired for all His children.

Let me ask. How was your relationship with your earthly father? Author Kia Stephens, whose father was a Baptist pastor but her parents divorced at a young age and he became absent in her life, she writes.

As the granddaughter of a Baptist pastor, I never questioned the stories of the Bible. No matter how far-fetched they may have seemed, I believed them. The challenge began when I had to apply my child-like faith to adult problems. I had more faith in God parting the red sea than His ability to intimately know and love me. Like climbing a steep mountain with no equipment, I struggled well into adulthood. It took more than a decade to realize my perspective was in part a byproduct of growing up without my earthly dad.

By design, the relationship with our biological dad should prepare us for a relationship with our heavenly father. A daddy’s nature provides a window through which we can experience the heart of God. (SLIDE) “Sociologists say it’s common for people to perceive that God is like the fatherly figures in their lives. If dad is caring, patient and concerned, then children will believe God has those same characteristics. And the opposite holds true when a father is harsh, judgmental or absent.”

Most often when fathers are tender, loving and compassionate, it lends itself to believing God is this way too. Likewise, if the father was abusive, absent physically or emotionally, the adult child may believe that is God’s nature as well; I did.”

(SLIDE) I can tell you that for me it’s actually the opposite. My parents were divorced when I was around 6 and for 10 years it was weekend visits only to the best of my recollection. But within a few years I had confessed Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, and so transferred the characteristic of our heavenly father, into what my father must be like or is like. How unfair to my dad is that, right because well, he’s human, and we didn’t even live in the same communities. So my human father, though he loves the Lord, is not God. And in later years, my dad disciplined me as at times the Lord our God disciplines us when we’re wandering away from His precepts and commands for our lives.

So considering that Jesus reveals God’s nature to us, let’s look at the woman at the well, from John 4:21-24. And let’s remember that Jesus is walking ahead of the disciples, outside of a Samaritan village, talking with a woman, alone. Even though the Samaritans are descendants of Jacob, Hebrews didn’t talk to Samaritans and a Rabbi, certainly wouldn’t be talking for a moment to a woman alone. But as He does today, Jesus takes human religious traditions and turns them upside down. (SLIDE)

21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25 The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” 26 Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.””

(SLIDE) God is not a physical being in his eternal state, He is a spirit. So we must relate to him Spiritually. And He is eternal. From everlasting to everlasting He is God. We previously talked about the first cause. The theistic world view, our world view is that God has always existed. He is greater than all his creation. In the beginning was God, and the God who exists in personhood. (SLIDE) Meaning, He thinks, He has emotions, He feels, He rejoices when even one comes to salvation. God gets disappointed, and God gets angry which happened often in the Old Testament. I mean if our mental and spiritual picture of God ties to Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Israelites in slavery, and then continually being at war, as they are still are today, being attacked, being sent into exile, the very bloody nature that is across not only the historically accurate Old Testament, but the history of humanity that does not respect the Lord and His creation, the fact that we are all made in His image. The fact that we are all His children. Well that’s an incomplete picture of God’s nature isn’t it. Because that picture doesn’t include the New Testament that comes when the Most High God sent His one and only son, Jesus Christ here to demonstrate His forgiveness, His compassion, and His love for his creation. For you. (SLIDE) As Isaiah predicted 41:11-13 “He will tend his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms; he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young. 12 Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance? 13 Who has measured the Spirit of the Lord, or what man shows him his counsel?”

(SLIDE) God is consciousness at an infinite level at some point beyond our comprehension. Understand He makes choices. God gave us free will, we can make choices. We have self-consciousness. He is conscious at an infinite level. Yet, we can talk to him as father, as Jesus taught us in the Lord’s prayer that we discussed last week, right? Our father, who art in heaven. God is transcendent. He sits outside of time and space. Genesis - In the beginning, God . . . So God exists outside of time. God existed before the beginning of time and space. (SLIDE) Again from Isaiah 55:8-9 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. 9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. The distance between our abilities and His, aren’t even worth considering, but that doesn’t mean that God is far away and unconcerned about our lives. Every detail of our lives. Good and bad.

(SLIDE) God is imminent, meaning He is up close and involved in his creation. He is there, and here at the same time. Let’s look at Exodus 3:13-15

(SLIDE) 13 Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” 14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I am has sent me to you.’” 15 God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘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, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.

The word “God” is not a name. But Israel would not have had a nameless deity—especially since Genesis says that from the very beginning people were making proclamation of the personal name of Yahweh which appears over 6500 times in the Old Testament. The first time in these verses God tells Moses that I am He uses “Ehyeh asher Ehyeh,” which translates into I will be as I will be. You may have heard “El Shaddai” which means “God almighty” is used very little: 5 times in Genesis, once in Exodus and once in Ezekial. When God tells Moses to say that is saying “I am” to Moses and when the Hebrews, or we, used the name Yahweh, it means “He is”. I am is an eternal present tense.

We have a past. God has no past. He is. I am is always going to be present tense. We have yesterdays and we often spend too much time thinking about either yesterday or worrying about tomorrow, but God is always in the present. In the here and now. What is it that He wants to be accomplishing today. This hour. This minute. This very second in our hearts and minds?

(SLIDE) Moses wrote in Psalm 90 . . . and some of us might be, I thought David wrote the Psalms. Many, but not all. Psalm 90 from Moses, who was forgiven of the sin of murder, and was called by God to free the Israelites from slavery in Egypt wrote in Psalm 90:1-2: Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. 2 Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

(SLIDE) God is omnipresent. He can see not only all that is happening in the universe He created, but He can move anything, by His will, anywhere within this universe to accomplish His purposes. So when God talks about the future, that’s for us, because He can see across all time and space.

(SLIDE) The trinity can be confusing for some, because the Father, son and Holy Spirit is one of the things that separates Christianity from all other religions. We can’t say it’s the only thing that separates Christianity from other religions, because Jesus is not the Christ in other religions, right? Christ being not his name, his is Jesus, in his time referred to as Jesus of Nazareth because Jesus, like John might be today, was a fairly common name among men of a certain age. Christ is a title. Jesus is the Christ. And last week when we were talking about the kingdom of God and the scribe who was close to the kingdom, wasn’t in it, but he was close asked Jesus what the greatest commandment was, straight out of (SLIDE) Deuteronomy 6, verse 4. 4 “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.[b] 5 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

We talked two weeks ago about how we can have the confidence that God exists. You can’t have a universe that was created instantly in the “Big Bang” if you will, without a creator. Buildings don’t get built without a builder. Sculptures created or paintings painted without a sculptor or a painter, right? The Triune God is one in essence, but three in person. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist eternally as distinct persons sharing essential sameness. They are simultaneously and eternally three and one. We won’t find the word Triune in the bible, that’s our description. The Bible speaks of the (SLIDE) Father as God (Phil. 1:2), (SLIDE) Jesus as God (Titus 2:13), and the (SLIDE) Holy Spirit as God (1 Corin 2:10-12).

(SLIDE) So as a review, God is Spirit, God exists in Personhood, God is Infinite Consciousness, God is Transcendent, God is Imminent, God is Omnipresent, God is Triune. But let’s really bring this home to today. Because those of us who have a personal relationship with the Lord through Jesus Christ and listen to the Holy Spirit, at times that quiet whisper in the wind speaking us, God’s nature isn’t something using large theological terms. He’s personal. He’s intimate. And He loves you. He loves all of us more than we can every fully comprehend. But Moses said it well. (SLIDE)

6 The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 7 keeping steadfast love for thousands,[a] forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, (Ex. 34:6–7a).

(ISThe Hebrew word often translated “love”, Hesed, is “wrapping up in itself all the positive attributes of God: love, covenant faithfulness, mercy, grace, kindness, loyalty–in short, acts of devotion and loving-kindness that go beyond the requirements of duty,” the love in action that surrounds us when we receive love we don’t deserve. The Hebrew word for mercy (L(SThe Hebrew word often translated “love”, Hesed, is “wrapping up in itself all the positive attributes of God: love, covenant faithfulness, mercy, grace, kindness, loyalty–in short, acts of devotion and loving-kindness that go beyond the requirements of duty,” the love in action that surrounds us when we receive love we don’t deserve. The Hebrew word for mercy (רחם, racham, רחום, rachum) shares the same three-letter root for “womb” (רחם; rechem) meaning that God’s divine protection of us is as a baby in the mother’s womb.רחם, racham, רחום, rachum) shares the same three-letter root for “womb” (רחם; rechem) meaning that God’s divine protection of us is as a baby in the mother’s womb.

I completely understand why someone might be confused by the concept of the Trinity: The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That is, until that moment in time when they fully accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior. It is not difficult to imagine or even understand God the Father. The creator of all the universe which even science knows came about in an instant. It is unfortunate that all of us don’t have wonderful examples of a father in our lives who helped create us, loved us, provided for us, taught us, and raised us to be God-fearing servants of the Most High. That is not the example, I believe, for much of humanity which makes it harder for us to understand our Father in heaven. It is much easier to see though, that the fallenness of the world, the inhumanity of mankind to one another on many levels for thousands of years, would lead a loving Father to send His son to first try and reach us by his presence and teaching that could be documented for generations to come. Then to use the power of creation God has, to raise Christ Jesus from the dead that we might have eternal life with Him.

We are of course, still a stubborn and rebellious people, regardless of where we were born and raised in this world. Thus, we logically and emotionally can see a need in this world for the Holy Spirit to help us gain understanding in our studies. To quietly prompt us when we’re going astray. To help grant us access to His presence in the heavenly realms that He might truly heal us and lead us into the full knowledge of His grace, mercy, and love for us. We are not fully whole, until in accepting Christ as Lord, and allow the Holy Spirit to move our hearts and minds, we can come into the presence of the Most High God. Creator of all that is and will ever be. It is the moment that we begin to fully understand how much God loves us. To understand how and why the Trinity makes perfect sense. Then to begin the journey to a greater understanding of all that God desires for us to join Him in sharing the knowledge, wisdom, love, grace, and mercy He desires for all mankind.