We're going to continue tonight in the Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 2. Chapter 2, and our confession is of God and the Holy Trinity. In our last Bible study, we began to consider the teaching of this chapter, but I reminded you that our attitude as we approach the subject of God himself is a topic, theological topic for study. that our attitude cannot be the same as if you were studying the carburetor of a car or any mundane subject. God is properly an object of study, but all the more he's an object of our worship and praise, and that has to be the spirit with which we approach this chapter. I have pointed out that the Puritans did not feel the need to prove God's existence before they talked about the character of God. It is taken for granted that God exists and that this is a biblical attitude as well. The Bible says what is obvious is that God exists. If anybody needs an argument, it's the atheist. It's the fool who says in his heart there is no God that needs to offer some kind of reason for that kind of thinking because the most natural or obvious thing in the world should be that there is a creator of heaven and earth and that he has made his character known to us. By way of summary, I told you last time that God is an absolute person, that we should remember that the primary reality is a personal reality. God is free, He is sovereign, He is moral, He interacts with us. He's a personal God and an absolute person because there are no limitations and no competition for His position. and then we turned to the confession itself and began looking at a number of the attributes of God. Let's, by way of review, read the first section and then we'll go back to where we left off. There is but one only living and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, hearts, or passions, immutable immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute, working all things according to the counsel of His own immutable and most righteous will, for His own glory, most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin, the rewarder of them that diligently seek him, and with all, most just and terrible in his judgments, hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty. Every one of these attributes that's mentioned, by the way, should give us pause. I mean, I hate to read over them. I want to pause with each one and just contemplate and reflect and meditate upon who God is. You might do that for yourself sometime. Just open the confession and spend a half hour looking at each one of these and just meditate on them and praise God for this aspect of his being and character. We've already looked at the fact that God is the only God, that he's a living God, the true God, that he's infinite in being and perfection, and that he's a spirit. When we talk about God having hands and feet and eyes and ears and so forth, that's an anthropomorphism to help us understand God, but he doesn't literally have bodily parts. He is invisible. Last week I said, sovereignly so, because he can make himself visible when he chooses to, and where he chooses to, and the way that he chooses to. But he's invisible without body parts or passions, and I think the last thing we discussed was what this means that he's without passions. Someone help me here. What does it mean that he's without passions? Anyone? Not so much. We're getting close. Bodily parts. Well it does say without body parts. Attributes of a body. Yeah, passions in Old English is used for the attributes of a body. And so since God doesn't have a body or parts, he doesn't have passions, the attributes of a body either. So let's move on from there. Next, the confession teaches us that God is immutable. Is that a word that we use often? Someone tell me what immutable means. Unchangeable. Say it again. Unchanging. Okay, not changing or unchanging. God does not change. And the proof text offered There are two. James 1.17 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of Lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. This expression, shadow of turning, has been a matter for the commentators to work over. There are different ways of approaching it. But it seems to me that that is best understood as the shadow that is cast by a body that turns, so that when the sun, say, is low in the sky in the late afternoon and you see these long shadows, and then you turn your body or anything, you see the effect in the shadow. And God is so unchanging that he doesn't even have anything like that. He, as the King James says, with whom is no variables, neither shadow of turning. It's not just that God doesn't turn, there's not even the slightest indication, the shadow of turning that you find in God. And then Malachi 3 verse 6, for I am the Lord, I change not, therefore you sons of Jacob are not consumed. And so God's immutability, his unchanging character, is seen in two ways in the proof text, and I think it's good for us when we praise him to remember this. In the first place, God himself never changes. God doesn't mutate. He is immutable. We see changes over the ages in certain forms of biological life. There are mutations. and alterations and variations. But God's not that kind of God. You don't have to worry that the God you worship today is somehow a different kind of being than Abraham or Paul worshipped. God is the same. He's always like that. His character never changes. Moreover, God never needs to change because, think about this, Why do we need to change? Why do you change your mind? I mean, well, there's fluctuating emotions, you know. I thought I wanted a taco salad, but no, I guess I really want a burrito. Okay, so there are fluctuating feelings or emotions or desires in us. But, you know, when I change, it's always an embarrassment when someone hears me say something on a tape from many years ago, and then I cover the same subject, and they'll say, well, you changed your mind. You don't hold the same position. I hope that doesn't happen often, but I'm sure it does. And when it does, why did I need to change? Because I made a mistake. Right? Sometimes I make plans and I have to change my plans. Like I had planned to teach at one house tonight, and I had to change my plans. Why is that? Well, because I made a mistake. If you are prone to error, you are naturally going to have to change. But God's immutable. Not only does he not mutate in the sense that he's a different kind of being from one age to another, but God never makes any mistakes that call for him to alter his plans. That's one of the things that I think is most distressing about the dispensational presentation of God and his ways with men, is that God had one type of character and plan for mankind, and when that didn't work, then I realize they don't put it this way, but to be crass, God goes to plan B. And when plan B doesn't work, he goes to plan C. But God doesn't need to do that. He never makes mistakes. He's unchanging. And the proof texts here tell us both that there is nothing in God that changes, no variable or shadow cast by turning. And then the second text, Malachi, says that God is so faithful that he never changes his mind or his attitude. And he says, that's why you sons of Jacob are not consumed. You deserve to die. But the only thing you should have going for you is that I am faithful. And I won't change. You've changed, but I won't. It's good for us to remember that if you have the feeling at some points in your life that God is distant from you, And I'm sure we all know what that is like to say, I just don't feel very close to God anymore. It's been a long time since I really felt, you know, like I have an intimate walk with the Lord. But you can be very sure that you're the one who changed, not him. Okay, so God is immutable. Before we go on to the next attribute, there's a problem though, isn't there? The Bible says God is immutable. The confession is correct about that. That is a biblical thing. But there are verses in the Bible that tell us that God repents, that he turns around. How do we reconcile this? How do we bring together those few texts that tell us God turned around or repented of what he was going to do, and the biblical teaching that God never changes? Who can help me here? Joe? His principles do not change. When we're unfaithful, when we change our conduct toward him, then there is a provisional change, so to speak. When we break his law, then we fall afoul of his principles to reward righteousness or to curse disobedience. Well, God doesn't change in his holy character, and let's say God threatens a city with judgment because of their wickedness. Or he says, I'll wipe out Israel because of their wickedness. But then God repents. Why does God repent? Well, because in the first place, man repents. So his people turn from their wicked ways and God says, well then I will spare you. Now let's ask ourselves, would God have actually judged his people? this city or whatever the object is, would God's wrath have come upon an unrepentant person or group of people? Yes. He hasn't changed his character. They've changed their ways and so the response of God is different, but yet God declared that he would judge, and now he's not going to judge. So how do we bring together the fact that God never changes and yet now he changes in terms of what he's going to do? He's not ultimately changing what he's going to do because he's predetermined what in fact would happen all along. That's right. So in a sense we have to remember there's two levels at which we think of God. Eternally he has predestined not only that this city would become wicked and come very close to being under judgment and have to be threatened, but he also eternally predestined that they would repent so that that judgment would not need to come. And so when God says, I will judge you for your sins, that's very true, but it's a conditioned thing. I will judge you implicitly unless you repent. And then we know from all eternity, God predestined that they would repent and that he would not end up judging. those people. So behind the apparent change in God, or the change in terms of our relationship to him, or what we see of our relationship to him, behind that change is nevertheless the unchanging plan of God that it would all work out that way. Okay, everyone with me? Alright, now the confession tells us that God is immense. Who knows what immense means? Immense is like omnipresent. It's not quite the same. Most theologians distinguish between the two, but they are very closely related. Let's look at the proof text and see if we learn anything about the character of God as immense. 1 Kings 8.27 But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee, how much less this house that I have built. And so is God really going to dwell in the temple? Of course not, because God is so immense that the heaven of heavens could not contain him. So the immensity of God stresses his sovereignty over space. His sovereignty or transcendence over space. Nothing can contain God. If you had only physical or created instruments, or even a created mentality, and you tried to draw a circle around God, you'd never be able to do it. Nothing can contain God. He's too immense. He's sovereign over space, transcending over space. Jeremiah 23, 23. Am I a God at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar off? Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him, saith the Lord? Do not I fill heaven and earth, saith the Lord? Now this verse stresses, if we're going to draw the distinction, not so much the immensity of God that he transcends space and nothing can encompass him, but stresses the fact that God fills space. And that's what we usually call omnipresence. He's present everywhere, or sometimes we'd say he's everywhere present, at every place. So the one attribute shows his transcendence with respect to space, the other shows his eminence with respect to space. By eminence here I don't mean immense, but his being near at hand. And so is there any place that you can go where God would not find you? So that's the silly thing about Jonah's behavior, right? Jonah decided he wasn't going to preach in the way that God said, and he was going to take off and get away from God, right? Where can you flee? Who's got a Bible who can look up Psalm 139, 7 and 8 for me? Rachel, would you read that for me? Psalm 139, verses 7 and 8. Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I flee from heaven to hell below, can I take the wings of the morning and flee to the outermost parts of the earth? Behold, even there I find your spirit. So God is omnipresent. He fills all of space. Now we do have some younger ones with us and I always direct this at the young people because adults would never make this mistake. But sometimes we think of the omnipresence of God as kind of like God's an ether or the air that kind of fills everything. He comes right up, you know, against the edge of this chair and then goes around it like that and so forth. You know very well, you've wondered, what does the omnipresence of God mean? He doesn't fill space like that, kind of like He's the filler around all these solid objects. The point is, God is sovereignly present at every point in space so that there's nothing that is not under His direct control. So He's sovereign over space, transcendent, immense, nothing in the world could ever contain Him. and he fills space in the sense that he sovereignly is present at every point to directly carry out his will. Any questions about immensity and omnipresence? Next we're told that God is eternal. Psalm 90 verse 2, Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hast formed the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting thou art God. So how long did God exist before the mountains came into being? He's from everlasting. By the way, can you imagine that? In your finite mind, can you imagine an infinite duration backwards in time? No. Yeah, I know. There are philosophers who play with this idea, but the fact of the matter is we always think because of our experience of things having a beginning. And the best we can do, I think, is we just keep putting it off and putting it off and putting it off and say, God, well, he didn't begin 2,000 years ago, but he didn't begin 200,000 years ago, and he didn't begin 2 million years ago, and you just keep pushing back, back, back. But we still tend to think in terms of a beginning. And, I mean, that's, I think, part of our creaturehood, and I'm not getting down on anybody for that. But the Bible tells us, from everlasting, he was God. There was never a time when God was not. Never! Never a time when God was only potential. Never a time when God was just a thought, or God was just in the process of development. From everlasting, he was God. And then how long will he be gone? How far into the future do you project? From everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. And that too is hard for us to fathom. I mean, we have a little bit of help in the created order, but it's minimal. Any of you who've been to the giant redwood trees, you find the oldest, at least organic, things on planet Earth, as far as we know. And you think about these trees that have been here for all these years, or the mountains. You look at the mountains and you say, well, if a bird came by and sharpened its beak on this mountain, how many years would it take to wear down that mountain? These things just have the image of stability for us. But the mountains will pass away. And so will the redwood trees. And when they do, you won't have even touched the beginning of God's everlastingness. This should just humble us before God and say He's so far beyond us. There's nothing in our experience like that. I was going to say, do you think we'll even understand that when we get to that? No, I'm glad you brought that up. It's not just with this attribute, with others as well. So let's address this now. Will the wonder we feel and the awesomeness and the mystery of God's character go away once we get to heaven? I don't think so. I do think that there will be certain things that we understand better, but I don't think we're ever going to get to the place where when we contemplate God we aren't just totally slain with wonder. Because we're always going to be creatures and he's always going to be the creator. And even though he has given us eternal life, I wonder if you'd ever stop to think about this. Man does not exist eternally by nature. It's a very big mistake, although it's fairly common, I think, in unreflective Christian circles. But it's a very big mistake, theologically, to assume that once God created man, he had to have him around forever. Now, he may not have to have him around in his presence in heaven, he may send him to hell, but man automatically is immortal. That isn't true. Our being everlasting is an act of God. Only God inherently is everlasting. And our everlasting, of course, is only, by his endowment, future everlasting. We don't have the past everlasting that God does. First Timothy 1.17, Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen. To the King eternal. When we look at the problems that the President of the United States is undergoing, which makes you begin to wonder, will this guy even last one term of office? We've had presidents that have had to resign after all, or some who have died in office or sadly been assassinated. But even presidents who make it full term don't always get re-elected, and those who do are still only on the stage of world history for a short time. Pagan kings often had the goal of being, if you will, intermediaries between heaven and earth. They wanted their dominion to be an everlasting dominion. in some sense, and that's why a dynastic succession among pagan kings was so important because when a king would finally get to a place where he knew biologically I'm not going to be around forever, still my rule can be around forever and that my son and my son's son and my son's son's son will rule after me. So it was kind of a political grasping for eternality and so forth. And so if you know that background, it is all the more to stand and wonder when Paul says now unto the King Eternal, the truly Eternal King, whose dominion knows no end. So God is Immense with respect to space, eternal with respect to time. Any questions about either one of these attributes? Glenn? I just had a comment about the eternal, and I guess it also applies to the immense. A little louder? The comment about the eternality of God, it also applies to the immensity. It's hard to imagine you know, things going on forever, past or present for us, because we haven't been around that long. It's a wonder, but in a way it's harder to imagine a beginning for me, because I would think, well, what was before that? It's like, it's easier to think, okay, God is the one eternal thing, because there always has to be something before that, Yeah, I don't imagine anybody would disagree. If anybody does, go ahead and speak up. But it probably is a bit easier to think about God going on and on and on and on with that end than to think of God having absolutely no beginning. But in both cases, I would maintain what we are doing is we are just adding and adding and adding and adding to our own experience, you know. So we know what it is. When one person dies and another person lives on for ten years, we know what it is to go on. And what we think about God is, okay, so God doesn't die when this person dies, and God doesn't die when that person dies, and it goes on and on. In fact, God wouldn't die if the whole universe passed away at that. But it's hard for us to imagine anything that has no beginning to work the other direction. Everything we know has a beginning somewhere. What was the first name of 1 Timothy? 1 Timothy 1.17. Did I say it wrong before? The nice thing about this edition of the Confession is that all the verses are written out for us as well, easy to find them. Next, incomprehensibility. Now some of you are probably worrying because you know that a couple of summers ago I took an entire summer of lectures just on the incomprehensibility of God from Isaiah 55. So you may be thinking, oh no, is he going to try to summarize all of that? We'll never get out of here tonight. Then it really will be incomprehensible. We'll never have comprehended it all because we'll never get away. And then if we leave early, we won't understand it, so it'll be incomprehensible. Now what I'm doing here is I'm playing with you about two different meanings for the word incomprehensible. Incomprehensible And some of you who've worked hard all day are looking at me and saying, why are you acting like that? Sometimes things are incomprehensible because they're gibberish. They're nonsense, right? We say, that's incomprehensible by which we mean there's no way to understand that it's inapprehensible. I can't apprehend any meaning in what you're saying at all. people on drugs sometimes come in and will say, well that person was wandering around saying incomprehensible sentences. Okay, now that's not a compliment is it? Now do you imagine though that the Puritans intended to compliment God by saying it was incomprehensible? Yeah, so what's the other meaning of the term? Not comprehendedness, just use the metaphor of a hand. It's like comprehending that paper. This paper is comprehensible. I could put my hand on it and manipulate it and, in a sense, control it. But God is incomprehensible in that we can know part of it. It doesn't deny that we can know any part of it, but we just can't know everything about Him to His full depth and in full quality and fullness. Sure. We can apprehend things about God. We can know God on the basis of what He has told us. And we can know God infallibly. on the basis of what he's told us. But you should never have the idea that once you've mastered everything he's told us, of course none of us ever do, but even if, hypothetically, you've mastered everything he's told us, you've mastered God. Because you can't comprehend God. Mike's image was that of a hand with a piece of paper, the hand comprehends the paper and that all of it's within the hand Or a herd of cattle is not comprehended if you can't get a fence all the way around them. That's how you comprehend the cow. And you can't put a lasso around God. Obviously physically you can't, but you can't mentally either. God is beyond us. And so the praise that we have for God can never encompass him. And so, when you've spent your most intense time of intimate and pure prayer, praising God, think about maybe periods the longest that you've prayed. When you get done, you haven't even scratched the surface. You cannot comprehend God. By the way, He needs to be praised for that fact. We need to praise Him for the fact that His greatness His goodness is so incomprehensible that there's no way that I could ever say enough to adequately express what you are and how great you are. But incomprehensibility has taken on another, not another meaning, but there's another aspect of God's incomprehensibility, especially in the 20th century because of certain debates that took place, especially in our denomination. surrounding the work of Gordon Clark and Cornelius Van Til. This debate didn't all of a sudden generate this, but it did bring to a focus and distill elements and different ways of thinking about God that had been in Reformed and Evangelical circles previously. The incomprehensibility of God is not just that he knows more and is bigger than we can ever get our minds around. but it's also that God is inscrutable. Here I'm going to use a different image, in fact it's the very opposite image, but we can speak of God being unfathomable. You know what it is to fathom something? When do you fathom a lake? When you find the bottom, right? You finally fathom till you get to the bottom of the lake. Now to say that something is unfathomable, I still didn't do it right, I can't even say the word, It means that you go down, down, down, down, down, down as deep as you can get and you're still not to the bottom. And God is like that in terms of his own thinking. As much as we know about God, it's not simply that we can't have the breadth of knowledge that encompasses all that God knows. We can never know in the way that God knows. He's inscrutable. Or as The prophet Isaiah puts it in Isaiah 55, my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my thoughts higher than your thoughts. God says we exist and think on two different levels. And so because you're made in my image, because God has made us somewhat like him, then he can communicate to us and we can understand, but he always has to communicate John Calvin put it this way, God must always lisp his praise to us. God has to talk baby talk to us. And that's not to insult the Bible, my dear, we don't mean baby talk just on the human plane, but for God, what he has told us doesn't come anywhere close to fathoming his intelligence and the way he knows things. God knows things in the original sense, that because he knows things, they are what they are. My thinking is never like that. I never know anything in the originating sense of knowing it. I always approach things after the fact. I remember Dr. Van Til used this illustration very homely When I was with him once in his front room, we were talking about this, he said, if I want to know how many pairs of socks I have in my drawer upstairs, I have to go look. For me, all knowledge is in a sense discovery knowledge. It's always, I have to go look and see and find out. But God knows how many socks are in my drawer. Not just because he has x-ray vision from heaven and can look into my dresser, but because God's knowledge makes the situation, what it is. God thinks things, and that's what brings it about. And so God is always knowing as the originator knower, and I'm always the receiver knower. Moreover, because God's knowledge is original, God's knowledge turns out to be the standard for anybody else knowing things. But my thinking never has that character about it. Even if I knew everything, and the breadth sense of everything there was to know that human beings could know, my knowledge would never be the criterion for what is right or wrong or true. Can you understand what I'm getting at? If someone were to, let's say that I have some doctrine worked out correctly, let's take one that's somewhat controversial, let's say theonomic ethics, and we'll take a major thesis out of theonomic ethics And for argument purposes, let's say that I've got that absolutely right. I mean, no mistake. Right on target with that one. The fact is that no one should say that what Dr. Bonson has said is the standard for believing this or that in this area. Even when I'm absolutely right, my thinking is not the standard. When I'm right, I'm always right because I've, what, reflected what God says. And it's never the other way around. So you see, God is incomprehensible. He has a kind of quality to his knowledge that mine will never have. And then one other quick illustration that I like to use with people. I have the experience from time to time of people expressing, to my embarrassment and awkwardness socially, expressing this kind of awe and wonder about how smart Dr. Bonson is. Of course, they don't know that he goes to the wrong place for Bible study and so forth, but nevertheless they think, this Dr. Bonson, he knows so much. What happens though when I teach these people and they learn a lot of what I know? What happens when they come to know me better and I'm not just like this distant professorial figure, but they find out that You know, I like barbecued chicken and rock and roll music and so forth. Do they still stand in awe and wonder of me? Well, I'd like to believe they still have some kind of respect, but, I mean, not that they lose it altogether. What is it? Because it's not country and western music, Dave? Is that the problem here? This is my illustration, so don't rain on it. No, even when people continue to hold you in a positive I see you in a positive light and hold you in regard, by regard. The fact is, the more they learn of what I know, that diminishes the sense of awe and wonder about who Dr. Bonson is as a scholar. So the more you learn of what I know, the distance between us is diminished and I don't stand in that awesome light. I use that illustration because you know with God it's exactly the opposite. I mean it, exactly the opposite. the more we learn of what God learns, we don't get more chummy with God, we get more slain with the awesomeness of who He is. And so as our knowledge grows, if you will, to fill the area of what God already knows, rather than God becoming closer to us, we all the more say, what a God this is! So there's a quality of God's knowledge that we can't reproduce there. There's this inverse relationship The more you learn of God's mind, the more you hold him in regard, rather than the less, as it is with human beings. Anyway, so that's what we mean by saying God is incomprehensible. Now please don't laugh at me, but I actually thought we were going to get through section one and two by the end of tonight, and this is obviously not going to happen, but we'll go on for a few more minutes and then I'll let you go. God is incomprehensible. What are the verses that are given for the incomprehensibility of God? I didn't read them. Psalm 145.3 Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised and his greatness is unsearchable. You cannot fathom the greatness of God. And then some other verses. Psalm 139.6 Psalm 139, could you read verse 6 for us now, Rachel? Psalm 139, 6 says, His knowledge is too wonderful for me, for it is high and I cannot attain it. Yeah, like that. His knowledge of God is too high for me. I can't attain it. Okay, Romans 11, 33. Patty, would you read that for us? And while she's looking that up, Just a reminder of Isaiah 55 verses 8 and 9. Harriet, would you read that for us? Romans 11, 33 next. Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God, how unsearchable are his judgments and unfathomable his ways. You can say that word. That time I did. Every time I'm going to call on you to say it then instead of me. You see, the depth of God's wisdom that his ways are beyond searching out, they're unfathomable, or something like that. Isaiah 55 verses 8 and 9. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, to praise the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. God's thoughts are higher than our thoughts, even as the heavens are higher than the earth. we cannot fathom them. Or as we read in Psalm 139, it is high I cannot attain it. That's worth a whole morning of reflection and meditation in itself, the incomprehensibility of God. The next attribute mentioned by the Confession is that He is Almighty. What is the fancy word for Almighty? Omnipotent, right. He has all potency. Omni, meaning all, and potent, power. He is all-powerful, or Almighty. Genesis 17-1, And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God. Walk before me, and be thou perfect. Now God's going to go on and tell Abram something. He's going to say, you're going to have a son. How old is he? 99? He's going to have a son, and his wife, who's also old by the way, she's not some little teenager that he ran off with, she's an old lady and barren. And God says you're going to have a son. How would you have responded to this? I don't mean to be disrespectful, but in all honesty, if someone, I mean if it weren't for the reverence for God, the speaker, If someone were to come to you when you're 99 years old and you have a barren 90-year-old wife and say, you're going to have a child next year, you'd say, yeah, right. But who's speaking? The Almighty. God the Almighty. And if God says it, it can happen. Because as God tells Abraham, is any word, there's a wonderful pun intended in the Hebrew, is any word. Devar is the Hebrew expression and Devar means thing or word in Hebrew. So is any thing or any utterance of God too hard? Not at all. He is the Almighty God. Revelation 4.8 And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him, and they were full of eyes within, and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God the Almighty, which was and is, and is to come. Lord God Almighty. Okay. We'll end with this conundrum. Does that mean God can do anything? No. God is omnipotent. He has all power. He's almighty. Does this mean God can do anything? No. Well, we have some heretics saying God can't do things. No, they're actually orthodox. That's the correct answer. I have to bring this out because we have what I think are really cheap shots made against Christianity by its opponents, who think they're very intellectually sophisticated. God can do anything, if that's your belief, then God should be able to make a stone so large or heavy that even God can't lift it. But if God makes a stone so heavy that he can't lift it, then there's something he can't do. But if he can't make a stone so heavy that he can't lift it, then there's something he can't do. So either way, there's something God can't do. I actually know intelligent men who pose that as a problem for Christian theology. God can't be omnipotent, therefore. Well, the biblical doctrine may be summarized in an unsophisticated, quick way as God can do anything. But that's technically not the teaching of scripture. Scripture teaches that God can do all his holy will. Does that sound familiar to those of you who learned the children's catechism? God can do all his holy will. And that may be a child's answer, but boy, it's theologically as straight as an arrow. That's exactly right. God can do anything he wishes to do. God doesn't wish to put himself out of the business of being God. If he made a rock so heavy that he couldn't lift it, he would no longer be God. The rock would be more, you know, powerful, if you will, than him. It would have sovereignty over him. And so God would then cease being God if he made such a rock. You know what the Bible teaches us? There are things God can't do, and among them is he cannot deny himself. And although the critics try to present God's inability to do things as a weakness, if you stop and think about it, when the Bible says God can't do certain things, it's always presented as a strength. One of the greatnesses of God, one of the things that shows how powerful He is, is that He can't stop being Godly. He can't deny Himself. Not only that, God cannot lie. I can lie. And you know what? It's not a virtue. That's not something that commends me to you or to others or to myself that I'm able to do that. But God can't lie. I can deny myself. People deny themselves. They commit suicide. They change their character. They're inconsistent. They're all these other problems. Those are defects when you're able to do those sorts of things. God is not able to do those defective sorts of things. He's all powerful and that means He can do all of His holy will. Well, it's going to take a while to get through these attributes, I guess. I'll have to be more realistic about it. When we come back next week, we'll continue in Section 1 and maybe we'll get into Section 2. I hope so. Any questions before we end tonight, Vicki? God isn't everywhere? Why do you suggest that? There are people who have that idea. As I'm explaining to our kids, you know, the answer's God is everywhere. And they point, oh you mean the hole in the tree that's in our closet? That's what I'm getting at. And the answer to that is, no, God doesn't fill space like a physical object fills space, like air, you know, fills the hole or, you know, whatever they're referring to as their example. You don't have to worry that if you ever put your arm out like this you're going to accidentally slap God or something, you know. But if that's your idea of God's omnipresence, then that would make sense to have that concern. God's omnipresence means that he is present too in the sense that he is able to sovereignly govern every detail of space. Where is God? He's in the heaven of heavens, right? But being in the heaven of heavens, God also is in the outermost parts of the earth, he's in your prayer closet, he's even in that place that your kids were thinking about in the sense that he controls what takes place there. We don't ever have to worry. I worry when I go away on a trip that something will happen in my home. and I'm so far away I can't help my boys if there's an emergency. You know, the earthquake recently. You know, I call home, and what can I do? You know, I'm in Philadelphia and they're so far away. But God's not like that. My Heavenly Father, no matter where He is, however you conceive of His presence, He is right there able to control the situation wherever I may be. He's omnipresent. Anything else? Are God's attributes innumerable? I think the answer is yes. That God's attributes are innumerable. Because he has told us only a portion of who he is. And if God were to even theoretically describe himself completely, it would be infinite. So it seems to me we'd have to say they are innumerable. One of the things that we were going to talk about when we got to section two, but I'll tie into this question here. We say that God is simple, meaning he's not made up of parts. God is not a composite being. And yet we're in a section of the confession that just seems like part after part after part or attribute after attribute after attribute is being enumerated. If God is simple, he's not a composite being, then how can we go through all these individual, discrete attributes? Well, the answer is that the simplicity of God, or the non-composite nature of God, means that though we think in terms of these separate attributes, we mustn't think of them as somehow separate from each other. They are distinct in our way of thinking, but they're not separate from each other in the way that you could have some of them and not others of them. Last week I said God is not a Mr. Potato Head, where you could kind of, okay, we'll have a God that is sovereign but he doesn't know everything, or have these different attributes stuck into the potato and that's your idea of God. The God that is all-knowing is nothing less than the God who is all-loving, who is nothing less than the God who is all-holy, nothing less than the God who is omnipotent, and all these attributes to use a colloquial expression. They're a package deal. And you can't change the package. You can't take one away or add something to it. God is who he is and it's not a composite as though you could have it otherwise. All these attributes have to be remembered. And then what Doug has reminded us is that when we've studied everything the Bible tells us and summarized it even if we could perfectly and completely, we still wouldn't know everything about the attributes of God. Okay, well, Barbara? There are a lot of ways in which businesses deal with that, the infinity of the universe, and we don't want to get into all that. But when you talk about the number line going on and on, and also backwards in terms of negative numbers, that confirms what I was saying, that our concept of eternality or everlastingness is always an additive concept. You can always add another number, push the line out, push the line out, push the line out. But God's everlastingness is not just that it goes beyond the longest number line you've ever imagined. I want you to remember after we've studied all these attributes, about all you really can do, not giving up the rational side of our theology, is finally just stand to the praise of God. You are really beyond all comprehension in human description. You see a beautiful passage in one of his books. I think it was the second one of the Narnia Chronicles. A little girl Lucy saw Ashland. She saw him before the first one and she saw him again and she said, have you gotten bigger since I saw you last? And he said, no, but you have. That's a great way of illustrating history. So the more you know about God or the bigger you get, the bigger God seems to be to you. That's right. One of the things that is helpful for me in just getting a sense of how much I don't know about God is I think about not only the fact that God knows about everything and knows about it in its most intimate detail. He knows about all of the relations that all of these various things sustain to each other. And he knows about all of the relations of the relations that these things sustain to each other. Yeah, I can go you a step further as a philosopher. Not only does God know all the details and all the relationships and interrelationships and the relations of the relationships, God also knows all the possibilities for relationship. Which, I mean, when you think about that, he knows every conceivable combination in relationship, even the ones that don't turn out to be actually the case. Well, let's end with a word of prayer here. Lord, we do adore you. And we do stand in wonder and awe. We wish we had the words to express your greatness. And we know that we do not. We thank you that you have given us words by which we can speak of you and know you. We confess that you are not so mysterious that nothing can be known, nor do we believe that our theology is just incomprehensible gibberish. We thank you that we can apprehend you because you've made us to know you, and that in fact is our deepest character and purpose, is to know you. And yet we confess that we could never know you completely. We thank you for the little bit that we're allowed to see and to understand. We thank you that we've had this night to spend together coming to know you better. We ask that you would help us to grow in our knowledge of you so that you might grow in our apprehension as well. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.