Knollwood London
March 7, 2021

      • Psalms 67.1-4ESV

      • Psalms 67.5ESV

  • The Lion And The Lamb
  • The Word of God

      • Jeremiah 3.25ESV

      • Zechariah 3.4ESV

  • Come Behold The Wondrous Mystery
  • Nothing But The Blood

      • Ephesians 2.8-9ESV

  • Introduction

    If someone where to come up to you and ask: What is God? How would you answer that question?
    We live in a world that defines God in whatever way they want, but as we saw last week, the Bible describes itself as the very Word of God which means that we don’t have to guess about who God is and what he has said, we can know.
    “’What is God like?’ If by that question we mean ‘What is God like in Himself?’ there is no answer. If we mean ‘What has God disclosed about Himself that the reverent reason can comprehend?’ there is, I believe, an answer both full and satisfying.”
    Job 11:7-8
    Job 11:7–8 ESV
    “Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty? It is higher than heaven—what can you do? Deeper than Sheol—what can you know?
    Tozer is right when we read this from Job. You can’t know what God is with respect to himself. Job declared that. But we can know what he has said about himself.
    Another question: How do we know we can trust God who created all of this?
    Would you walk up to a strangers house and ask them to watch your kids? Would you trust a person the very first time ou met them or would it take a little bit of time? Before I trust someone with my kids, they would need to prove themselves, right? Seems reasonable.
    How can you trust Him if you don’t really know what He is like?
    Transition: With all of that said, we can ask what God has revealed about himself in his Word and in creation that as as Tozer said, can give be a “reverent reason.” So if the Bible is the Word of God, then what does it say about who God is?

    Who is God?

    When Moses was directed by God to go to the Egyptian Pharaoh and demand the release of the Israelites, Moses asked God, “Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I will say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you.’ Now they may say to me, ‘What is His name?’ What shall I say to them?” (Exodus 3:13). The answer God gave Moses was simple, yet very revealing: “God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM’; and He said, ‘Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, “I AM has sent me to you”’” (Exodus 3:14). The Hebrew text in verse 14 literally says, “I be that I be.” This name speaks to the fact that God is pure existence, or what some call pure actuality. Pure actuality is that which IS with no possibility to not exist. Put another way, many things can have existence (e.g., human beings, animals, plants), but only one thing can be existence. Other things have “being” but only God is Being. The fact that God alone is Being leads to at least five truths about what God is – what type of being God is.

    Self-Existing

    Question: “Who made God?”
    The simplest answer is that God never needed to be made, because he was always there. We exist as his creation depenednt on him
    First, God alone is a self-existent being and the first cause of everything else that exists.
    What we mean by that is
    John 5:26 ESV
    For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.
    God has no beginning and no ending. He can’t die. He can’t end. God has always existed and always will exist. No one has given God life and no one can take away His life. God needs nothing outside of Himself to exist. He is self-existing. He is self-sufficient.
    Psalm 90:1–2 ESV
    Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.
    He is everlasting.
    What does that mean?
    There’s two types of being. God is the only one that his necessary. We mean that all things are contingent beings which means that they could not exist without God.
    Job 34:14–15 ESV
    If he should set his heart to it and gather to himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust.
    if God did not exist, then neither would anything else. He alone is the necessary being by which everything else currently exists – That’s what Job is talking about.

    He is Creator

    Imagine with me that you had a spaceship that could travel at the speed of light, which is 670,616, 629 mph. If you could go that fast, you could travel around the earth 7 times in one second.
    Start on earth on a journey out to space, you would pass…the Moon in 2 seconds (It takes about 3 days to do that now)
    Mars in 4 Minutes (Takes about 6-8 months to do that now)
    Pluto in 5 Hours (New Horizone took 9.5 years.)
    That’s just the edge of our solar system. If I wanted to get to the closest star I would need to set aside 4.3 years. And that’s still going the speed of light. The Milky Way would take 10,000 years to cross from side to side. And at the speed of light it would take 2 million years to get to the next galaxy. That would be just the beginning. They say there’s somewhere like 100 Billion galaxies.
    What does that mean?
    Someone would say to me, why would God create all of this? Well, what does creation tell us about who God is?
    Every known thing in the universe has a cause. The universe itself must also have a cause, and the cause of such a great universe can only be God.
    Jeremiah 9:23–25 ESV
    23 Thus says the Lord: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, 24 but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord.” 25 “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will punish all those who are circumcised merely in the flesh—
    Let us boast in knowing and understanding who God is who is also personal.

    God is Personal

    When you think about personal, what do you think about?
    What I think about when someone says, “that person has a lot of personality.” I think funny, or outgoing. Things like that.
    But when it comes to God, it is talking about having intent. God is a purposeful being who has a will, creates, and directs events to suit Him. The prophet Isaiah wrote,
    Isaiah 49:9–10 ESV
    saying to the prisoners, ‘Come out,’ to those who are in darkness, ‘Appear.’ They shall feed along the ways; on all bare heights shall be their pasture; they shall not hunger or thirst, neither scorching wind nor sun shall strike them, for he who has pity on them will lead them, and by springs of water will guide them.

    God is Triune

    This is a mystery. I’ve heard of different ways of trying to describe this. The whole Bible talks about it, so remember, if the Bible is the Word of God and the Bible is what God is using to specifically show himself to us, then to deny it would be to deny God.
    But the Bible also says that there is a plurality to God.
    Flip over to Matthew 28:19 with me
    One of the clearest ways we see that is Before Jesus ascended to heaven, He commanded His disciples:
    Matthew 28:19 ESV
    Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
    Did you notice the word “name”?
    Here in the english and the original language, it’s singular. It says “name”; it does not say “names.” If it said “names” it would be talking about three gods. There is one name belonging to the three Persons who make up the Godhead.
    There are three distinct persons, who are coequal and coeternal. So if were to say something like, “The trinity is best described as there are three roles played by the same person, like in a play. That would be Modalism, which is a heresy. But maybe its more like trying to describe it as three gods in a cluster, well, that would be a heresy known as tritheism. God is triune, there is one God (HE) who is also, and equally, “they,” and “They” are always together and always cooperating, with the Father initiating, the Son complying, and the Spirit executing the will of both, which is his will also.
    The Bible talks about this in a few areas when it calls the Father God, Jesus God, and the Holy Spirit God.
    Think about John 1:3-4 that talks about Jesus being the first cause of everything. Or in Colossians 1:17 that says Jesus is a necessary being.
    Transition: What is God? God is the only one who can say, “I be that I be.” God is pure existence, self-existent, and the source of everything else that possesses existence. He is the only necessary being, is purposeful/personal, and possesses both unity and diversity. Knowing that God created the world around us, and ourselves as part of it, is basic to true religion. God is to be praised as Creator, by reason of the marvelous order, variety, and beauty of his works. Psalms such as Psalm 104 model this praise. God is to be trusted as the sovereign LORD, with an eternal plan covering all events and destinies without exception, and with power to redeem, re-create and renew; such trust becomes rational when we remember that it is the almighty Creator that we are trusting. Realizing our moment-by-moment dependence on God the Creator for our very existence makes it appropriate to live lives of devotion, commitment, gratitude, and loyalty toward him. It would be wrong not to, and is wrong. Godliness starts here, with God the sovereign Creator as the first focus of our thoughts.
    With all of who he is, what is he like?

    What is God Like?

    God is Holy

    I love Isaiah 6:3
    Isaiah 6:3 ESV
    And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!”
    What does that word “holy” mean?
    To be holy means to be completely different from everything else. It means to be set apart from all His creation.
    There is no one like God, he is one of a kind. He can’t do anything bad. He loves us perfectly. He doesn’t lie or break His promise. He is completely perfect and without sin.

    God is a loving

    1 John 4:8 ESV
    Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
    In the same way that many things can exist but only one thing can be existence, people and other living things can possess and experience love, but only one thing can be love. First John 4:8 makes the simple ontological statement, “God is love.”
    God is also love. He invites you to seek Him and discover the love He has for you in His Word and in the life of His Son Jesus Christ, the one who died for your sins and made a way for you to live with Him for eternity.

    God is Righteous

    God is perfect and pure, but he also just and fair in everything that He says and does.
    Habakkuk 1:13 ESV
    You who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong, why do you idly look at traitors and remain silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he?
    This is important for us to remember, because we are often told that God can’t be just and fair when there’s so much suffering in our world. Or maybe you’ve been told how God can’t love people because he sends them to hell.
    Exodus 34:7 says that God “does not leave the guilty unpunished.”
    GOSPEL MOVE
    God is holy. We are not. We have sinned. Sin is rebellion against God, disobedience. He doesn’t take it lightly because he is holy. Sin must be paid for. We are all sinners and because of that sin we desire eternal punishment which is hell. That’s why Exodus 34:7a says what it says. But God being rich in mercy steps down from his thrown to pay the price for all those who are resting in him. Who confess that Jesus Christ is Lord and Saviour who died for our sins and three days later rose again.
    But as verse 6 says of Exodus 34:6-7a
    Exodus 34:6–7a ESV
    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, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”
    We are all sinners. And our God is holy, righteous,

    What do we do with this?

    The body of Christ needs a refresher. We need an understanding of the attributes of God as he shows himself in his word. This is who we will get to know him more.
    BI: As we know God more, we will see that he can be trusted, loved, and followed.
    How do we know we can trust God who created all of this?
    Just as you wouldn’t trust someone you don’t know to watch your children, we can’t trust God unless we know him. But as we saw last week, we don’t have to guess, we can know what God said, but more than that, we can know God. He is infinte which means we will never know all of who he is, b ut he can also be known and has chosen to show himself in his Word, the Bible.
    How can you trust Him if you don’t really know what He is like?
    Would you walk up to a strangers house and ask them to watch your kids? Would you trust a person the very first time ou met them or would it take a little bit of time? Before I trust someone with my kids, they would need to prove themselves, right? Seems reasonable.
    BI: As we know God more, we will see that he can be trusted, loved, and followed.
    BOOKS YOU CAN READ:
    KNOWING GOD by JI PACKER
    CONSISE THEOLOGY by JI PACKER
    GOD: IS HE OUT THERE by MEX MCCONNELL
    None Like Him: 10 Ways God Is Different from Us (and Why That's a Good Thing) and In His Image: 10 Ways God Calls Us to Reflect His Character JEN WILKENS

      • Job 11:7–8ESV

      • Jeremiah 9:24ESV

      • John 5:26ESV

      • Psalm 90:1–2ESV

      • Job 34:14–15ESV

      • Genesis 1:1ESV

      • Daniel 4:34ESV

      • Matthew 28:19ESV

      • Isaiah 6:3ESV

      • 1 John 4:8ESV

      • Habakkuk 1:13ESV

      • Exodus 34:6–7aESV

  • Awaken The Wonder
Knollwood London
hello@knollwood.ca
5194552090
http://knollwood.ca
6 members • 10 followers