Okay, so tonight we talk about how do we know about God? I don't know if you've ever thought about this or not. You just sort of thought, oh, if you come to Sunday school or something, it's like, oh, of course there's God. So you don't have to worry about, it's like, maybe you haven't really thought about that. But how do we know? That's all right, that's all right. You don't have to be upset. How do we know about God? Okay, this is my whole lesson, so I'm looking for a quick little answer to that. I know you probably know some good answers to this. There's actually three different answers that I'm going to look at tonight. All right, so go to the next slide. Anybody ever played any Scrabble before? You've seen this game? Yeah, so now if you saw this on the table and you walked into a room and this was on the table, you might If you squint your eyes real hard, and you might figure out some, maybe you could figure out some words on there, like, you're like, bad, or, I don't know, yeah, us, yeah, so there's a couple of different words, maybe they're just on there. Would you look at that pile and think, somebody has made some words for me? Would you think that? Or you would just think they were spilled out randomly? But, what about if you saw this? If you saw this on your table, and you came in, what would you think? What would you think? Oh, these have randomly spilled out of the box, just like this. No. No, I'll take that back. So why do we not think about that? They're the same letters, pretty much. So why do we think this one's random, and this one's not? Because we can't understand it. So you can't really understand this one too much. Although I made a few words out of it. It's very similar. Because it's not more important than the other one. It's telling you a specific statement. It is communicating something, isn't it? Girls. It's communicating something. This one's not really communicating anything, is it? But you get the idea that this one, you get the idea that there's some important message being conveyed, right? Especially if you're like putting your shoes on and everybody was already in the car. That would be, like, maybe a cause for concern almost. I don't know. I'm not sure exactly what to set up for that. I'm just letting you know what's happening. So it's conveying some information, right? So the question is, what about this? Did God leave us any kind of messages like this? Well, that's what we're going to talk about. Yeah, well, okay, so that's what we're gonna talk about. All right, we'll go ahead and go to the next one. So the first way that we know about God is creation. You can see I've got several different pictures there of different parts of creation. This is what Paul says in Romans. He says, for what can be known about God is plain to them, it's obvious, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, or clearly thought about, clearly seen, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So, we already talked about God being invisible, right? God does not have a body, he's a spirit. And so that makes it really hard to know about God. He doesn't have a body and we can't see him. But Paul says we can know about God because of creation. You can see all around you the handiwork of God. Now some people look at this and they see the Scrabble tiles just sort of spilled out everywhere. They think, well, you know, there's trees here, some animals there. It doesn't really tell me. I don't really feel like somebody's trying to tell me something. But how many of you know what this is? What is that? DNA. Sounds very scientific. Anybody studied this in science yet? DNA. Do you know what it actually stands for? Oh, yeah. It's something. Anyway, these things, the way this is made, this is the thing that determines what you look like. It determines everything about you. So every cell in your body has DNA. So this is the code that sort of makes you. By the way, everything else does too. Like pandas have it, and fish have it, and plants have it. They have all this code inside of them that tells that tells how to make all your stuff. So it's like what color your eyes are, and what your hair looks like, and how big your arms are supposed to be. All that stuff is encoded in here. And what they do, each one of these is sort of almost like a little letter. And scientists have actually mapped the whole human genome. So they knew every letter inside a human being. Not that we can do all that much with it. Sometimes we can do a little bit. Yeah, so that's the thing. So really, if you start thinking about that, it's starting to look a lot more and more like these scrabble tiles that are kind of put together in a specific order. Because if you mix these things up and you just make your DNA any kind of letters you want, you don't get pandas or fish or anything. You just get goo or something. It doesn't work. But if you do it in just this right order then you get Plants and animals and people and all kinds of stuff like that. So you'd have to that's that's information That's that's so one of the wonders of creation But really just looking at how beautiful everything is should tell us. Hey, there's something really important going on here Well, anyway, that's one way we can know about God. It doesn't exactly tell us everything about God, but it tells us something All right, you can go to the next one. All right, the next way we can know about God is the Bible. I mean, if you're absolutely shocked that this is up here, right? No, right, you probably expected this one to be first even, right? The Bible is how we know about God. That sort of makes sense, doesn't it? Here we come, we study the Bible. We study the Bible at church and maybe at different times. Here is what Peter says about the Bible, about what we believe about things. He says, for we do not follow cleverly devised myths when we made to know to you the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. So right there, Peter is saying, hey, some people think we're just making all this stuff up. But back then when Peter was writing, some of them had seen Jesus. They had been with Jesus. Peter was one of his disciples. He watched Jesus, his whole ministry. So he knew the miracles and all the things that Jesus said. And he saw him, most importantly, he saw him rise from the dead and be alive again after he died. And so he's saying, look, this is not some kind of story. This is a real thing. Real people saw this and a lot of them are still alive even when I'm writing this. And he says this. For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and a voice was born to him by the majestic glory, this is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. We ourselves heard this very voice, born from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain." They're talking about this time when they heard the voice of God say, this is my Son. They actually heard the voice of God, Peter did. And this is what he says, we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed. confirmed to which you will do well to pay attention, as to a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all that no prophecy of the scripture comes from anyone's own interpretation, for no prophecy has ever been produced by the will of men, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." So he's talking about the Old Testament, So when Peter and Jesus were around, they didn't really have the New Testament yet, it was still being written. But they had the Old Testament, and that's the Hebrew Bible. And we believe it also says a lot about Jesus in it. There's a lot of prophecies in the Bible. Do you have any idea what prophecies are? Yes, Shelby? Yeah, things that haven't happened yet. So there's quite a few in the Old Testament things that haven't happened yet or hadn't happened yet until Jesus came. And then all of a sudden when Jesus came, a lot of those things that they had predicted came true. So nobody would normally be able to do any of those things except God revealed it to them. So that sort of proves that this is a word from God that we have in the Bible. And Peter's saying, it's not just somebody making up all this stuff, but it's God actually speaking to these people. God actually talking to people like Abraham and Moses and people like that, and actually telling them some things and then writing it down. And then later on, The Holy Spirit helping people to write what God would have them to write, and like all the writers of the New Testament, that's how the Bible was put together. People were writing what the Holy Spirit wanted them to write, and helping them to write things that would be God's Word. So we have the Bible, God's Word. This is probably the most important thing we have, Well, almost the most important thing, because maybe there's one more thing even more important than the Bible that we have that reveals God. All right, go to the next one. All right, the last one is Jesus Christ himself. So Jesus tells us about God. That's kind of interesting. Remember I said God doesn't have a body, right? We've been talking about that. He is a spirit. And how in the world do you know about God, what would he even look like? He'd be invisible. In fact, we're going to read those verses where that song we sang came from. But at one time when Jesus was with his disciples, they were saying, Jesus, show us what the Father looks like. Show us the Father. And you know what he said? He said, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father. I look just like him. Wow. Not like I just look just like him. I am him. Jesus is God. And so if they've seen Jesus, everything Jesus would do, God would do. Everything God does, Jesus does. So that's what he told them. Here's the way Paul writes it. And see if you can, see if these words are familiar with that song we've sung many times when we sang tonight. He is the image of the invisible God. the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him. So right at the beginning there it says, he is the image of the invisible God. So it's like, how can you take a picture of something that's invisible? Anybody got a good picture of like, what, air? Pretty hard, right? I mean, yeah, you could take a picture of it, but you wouldn't be able to really see it. But you could see, like, maybe the wind blowing the trees or something. I guess you could see, like, electricity, if, like, it's lightning or something. But it's pretty hard to take pictures of invisible things. But Jesus says, I'm like a picture of the invisible God. I'm the image. He's the image of God. Because he has a body. So you can see him. And it says, he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent, or first. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. All the fullness of God, all the power of God, all the glory of God was dwelling inside Jesus Christ. and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. He makes peace by the blood of his cross. You know that part? Peace between him, peace between us and God. And so Jesus reveals to us what the Father is like, what God is like. That's one of the main reasons that he came is to show us and to demonstrate this is what God's like. This is what my kingdom looks like. This is the way people are supposed to act in my kingdom. And then he accomplished this making a peace between us and God so that we could be part of his kingdom instead of being God's enemies. Because we're sinners, we have sin in our hearts, we're the enemies of God. But Jesus came to forgive our sins and to make peace between us. Which is good, because if you fight God, guess who's gonna win? God, not you. Because God is much more powerful. But if you're at peace with God, that's a good thing. Because then you're on the same side with God. That's where you wanna be. So God has spoken to us through nature itself, through the Bible, through the revelation of prophecy, and the word that He's spoken to people. And then God has been revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ. So that's some of the ways that we can know about God.