say we can't trust what it says. Now what is the standard? And the answer should be obvious just as it was in the case of Adam and Eve. The standard is yourself. What you like or what you don't like, what you think sounds reasonable or what you think might be unreasonable, the kinds of morals and ethics that you agree with and perhaps those that you strongly disagree with. Things that might get in the way of you living the way you want to. That's a problem because now if we admit to the possibility that there's even one error in scripture and that it can no longer serve as the perfect standard for what's true, we're in trouble because now we don't have a standard at all. Think about what it would be like even if there were one mistake in the scripture. How would we know it? And if it were the case that we said there's one mistake somewhere in scripture but we don't know where it is, then what would our attitude be about the rest of it? How could we know that we could rely on what it says? And it's fitting to ask that kind of question with regard to the book of Genesis. Because if we say, well, Genesis 1 is mythology, we know it didn't really happen that way, science tells us something different, then we're undermining the truth of Scripture from the very first verse. So it was important for us in that first session to establish the necessity of truth and reason before we come to the Word of God to see what it says, starting from the first verse. so that we know that we can make sense out of it and that we can receive it as we ought to, which is as the Word of God, with authority. So what we're going to cover in this session, this is certainly not a comprehensive overview of the attributes of God. What I've intended to do here is draw some inferences. One of the things that our Confession says is that we believe what scripture says and what it reveals as well as what we can determine from what's called necessary consequence. If we read a verse that says this person called God created the heavens and the earth and the necessary consequence of that is that this must be a very powerful person. It's that kind of an idea. So the question is as we begin to look at the first chapter of Genesis What kinds of things can we already begin to see about the nature of this God who is the Creator? So I've picked out five, and it's somewhat coincidental or happenstance, you might say, that I ended up alliterating these five. It just happened. I really wasn't trying to do that. The five that I'd like to think about in this session are, first of all, the pre-existence of God, the power of God, the purpose of God, the personality of God, and before you jump to the wrong conclusion about what I mean about personality, I'm not talking about whether he's got a sense of humor or not, you know, what his favorite color is or that kind of thing. I'm talking about the person the personhood of God, that he is a personal God. In fact, we're going to see that he's more than personal. He ends up being what we call tri-personal in the three persons of the Trinity. So personality, and then lastly, promises. We're already starting to see very early on that God relates to man through promises, or what we call covenants. I once attended a church named Covenant." Oh, that was this one. So covenants are an important idea from the very beginning of Scripture. And lastly, as we close this session, we'll talk about a confrontation that took place on Mars Hill between Paul and the Greeks. And I selected that particular passage to conclude this session because we're going to see an illustration of how Paul appeals to God as the creator, the creator and the sustainer of all things. And as we think about the importance of Genesis and we think about the controversy over creation, it's not a small thing that God so often is described as the creator. It's as if, as if, the scriptures reminding us that this God that we're talking about is the one who created everything and it should bring to mind these kinds of attributes that we're going to spend a little time thinking about in this session. So we start with the first one, pre-existence. It's one of those philosophical ideas. And we can see that from the very first verse. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Well, what does that mean? There was a beginning to the heavens and the earth, and the beginning was brought about by a God who was already there. And how long has He been there? And the answer is, He's always been there. And that's what we mean by the idea of pre-existence. We talk about God being eternal. Now, eternal can have a couple of different meanings. If I say, for example, how long is your soul going to live? You'll say, well, it's eternal. It's going to live forever. That's true, but it had a beginning. It may not have an end to its existence, but it had a beginning. And part of the distinction with God is that he had no beginning. Now, if you're trying to describe the eternality of God in human language, when virtually everything we know and understand is what we say temporal or even temporary, that it has a time, it has a beginning and an end. And we think in terms of when something starts and when it ends and how it moves from one time to another, a chronology. and we start talking about eternity and it's a much more difficult concept. How do you measure eternity with a clock? And the answer is you can't. One of my favorite lines from the Chronicles of Narnia is at the end of one of the episodes where Aslan is saying goodbye to Lucy on the beach, I think it's next to Kerr Parabel, And Lucy says, well, when am I going to see you again? And Aslan says, soon. And Lucy says, well, when is soon? And Aslan says, for me, all times are soon. How do you describe one who inhabits eternity, who knows all things in all times and all places? comprehensively from beginning to end. We could say, for example, that it wasn't necessary for God to wait until a part of history had unfolded, until somebody named Moses came along and he began to reveal himself through his written word to a guy named Moses several thousand years after creation, because he's waiting to see how things are going. If things are going according to plan, if it's safe for him to start writing these things down, You understand, certainly, that God could have just as easily revealed the whole of Scripture from beginning to end to Adam. In fact, Scripture is described as being God's eternal Word, written in the heavens. So God inhabits eternity. He doesn't just determine history, He controls all of it. He doesn't just know it, but He has written it, literally, from the beginning, from before the beginning. So there's this idea of God's pre-existence. It's captured in a couple of different ways. Let's take a look first of all in Psalm 90. I'm just going to read the first two verses, very short. but very powerful in terms of what it says. And this happens to be, by the way, the psalm that Moses wrote in the wilderness. Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, the beginning of creation, wherever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. And how is it that this God describes himself when Moses asks him, when I go to Pharaoh, what do I say? Who's sending me? And God's answer is, I am who I am. I am. the eternal one, the everlasting one, without beginning or end. We also see this idea captured in several different ways in the book of Revelation, and I'll direct your attention to a few short passages. Take a look at verse 17 and following. We're in chapter 1 of Revelation. John says, When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, Fear not. And this is Christ speaking, the risen Christ who is appearing to John on the island of Patmos. Fear not. I am the first and the last and the living one. I died and behold I am alive forevermore and I have the keys of death and Hades." We see also in verse 8, I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. And we'll see how In Genesis, God reveals himself as the Almighty. You often see that word, which is the translation of El Shaddai, the Almighty One. And here's where I'm going to take a little swipe at the translation. I am the Alpha and the Omega. Well, what does that mean? Well, those are the first and the last letters of the Greek alphabet. The English translation might say, I am the A and the Z, the beginning and the end. He's trying to express this idea that from whatever span that you can try to describe, whether it's in terms of time or whether it's in terms of knowledge, using the alphabet here as an example. that he covers the whole spectrum from beginning to end. There was never a time when God was not. Now there's some satisfying scientific consequences about that. There's something in the world of science called the Law of Causality. And the Law of Causality is not everything has a cause. The Law of Causality is every effect has a cause. And there was a time not too long ago when the scientific community understood that something had to be eternal. If you go back 100 years or so, the cosmological paradigm was that the universe has existed eternally. And that was a better answer than the answer that we have today, because now that we have shifted the paradigm into what's called Big Bang cosmology, The idea that there was a beginning, then the obvious question is, what happened before the beginning? Where did the stuff come from if there was a beginning to the universe? And in typical irrational and dishonest fashion, the scientist is going to look you in the eye and say, it came from nothing. The universe created itself from nothing. That really is the answer that you get. Even someone like Stephen Hawking believed in this idea of self-creation, which is a logical absurdity because nothing can create itself. As Sproul used to say, if there was ever a time when there was nothing, then what would you have now? Nothing. Because nothing creates nothing. Now I'm not a fan of Big Bang cosmology. I'll explain a little more about that later when we get further down the road. I would warn you as a way of preview that as a Christian you shouldn't latch on to whatever science said yesterday or today because tomorrow it's probably going to change. Science is highly fallible and it is never immutable, because it never really proves anything. It makes observations and draws conclusions. The conclusions are often wrong, but they may stand for some time until we come up with a better idea. Logically, though, the necessary existence of an eternal creator is looming there. We can't escape it. And so we have this idea of God being preexistent or everlasting, eternal, as we would say. Let me direct you to one or two other verses while we're here in Revelation. We also see, for example, in verse 8 of chapter 2, where he says, unto the angel of the church in Smyrna write the words of the first and the last. So again we have this recurring idea of God being the first and last and we can see that again over in the very last chapter of Revelation if you'd like to flip over there. Jesus says, Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay everyone for what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. And with those kinds of expressions, we virtually exhaust what human language can do to explain what it means for God to be eternal. Let me point you also, flip back to 1st Timothy, chapter 1. In verse 17, Paul engages in a little doxology here when he says, "...to the king of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen." And so over and over scripture affirms this idea that God is eternal and immortal. We begin to see that from the very first verse of Genesis. And what about His power? How much power does it take to create the universe? I thought about doing a little calculation, but I didn't follow through on that. But I imagine taking just a small rock that weighs perhaps just a few ounces and saying, what would happen if we could take this rock, which is completely nondescript, and in an instant convert it into pure energy? If we could take all, just a little bit of mass in a small rock and convert it into pure energy, what would happen? I'm pretty sure it would wipe out most of the country because of that relationship that Einstein famously delivered to us, E equals mc squared. The energy that's contained in even a rock is the mass of the rock multiplied by the speed of light squared, which the speed of light is already a pretty big number. and you take a really big number and you square it and it's a really, really big number. So just reflect on this idea for a moment. How much energy does God have to expend even to create a little rock that you can hold in your hands? I think there is in that idea, this connection between mass and energy, that God is so powerful that he can expend all the energy that's necessary to create all the mass of the known universe, trillions and trillions and trillions of tons of mass, and all virtually in an instant. And oh, by the way, it didn't make him tired when he did that. He was not the least bit spent in terms of his own energy when he did that, because his power is infinite. We can't comprehend this, and yet we begin to see the hints of it even in the very first verse of Genesis where God creates the heavens and the earth. Of course, Genesis goes on to unfold the rest of creation as God continues to finish out the work, so to speak. And we'll later see, as Genesis unfolds, that He's not just creating rocks, not just creating an earth or a sea or a sky, but that the point of his creation is to bring life into this world. That he is not just powerful, but that he is the source of all life. He's first of all, we would say that first of all he is the source of all being because there would be nothing here if there weren't God. But he's also the source of life because nothing that is would have life if God did not give it life. And that's an entirely different kind of creation. It's the kind of thing that science really doesn't even try to explain because it can't. we could put it this way, that there is no natural law that explains how life comes out of something that's inanimate. And yet God does this over and over again as He fills out the creation in this first chapter of Genesis. And what does it take for Him to do that, by the way? What is the recurring theme? What do we see in verse 3? And God said, let there be light. And there was light. All it takes is the power of the Word for God to create all things, and that's a remarkable thing. So as we talk about the power of this God, I'm going to point you to another passage in Genesis 18, and I'd like to look at verses 9 through 15 of Genesis 18. It's a familiar story. Abraham and Sarah are old. God appears to Abraham and says to him, about this time next year you're going to have a child. And of course Sarah overhears that conversation and her response is, Laughter, Yishak, and that becomes his name. And there's somebody here whose son is named Isaac. He might have taken more jesting in school if you had named him Laughter. But that is precisely his name, Laughter. Because why? It seems absurd that a woman who's 90 years old and a man who's 100 years old could conceive a child. And yet, as God is describing this to Abraham, what does he say? Referring to the angels that came to visit him, they said to him, Abraham, where is Sarah your wife? I'm in verse 9. And he said, she is in the tent. The Lord said, I will surely return to you about this time next year and Sarah your wife shall have a son. And Sarah was listening at the tent door behind him. Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years. The way of women had ceased to be with Sarah. So Sarah laughed to herself saying, after I'm worn out and my Lord is old, shall I have pleasure? The Lord said to Abraham, why did Sarah laugh and say, shall I indeed bear a child now that I am old? Verse 14. This is the rhetorical question. Is anything too hard for the Lord? at the appointed time I'll return to you about this time next year and Sarah shall have a son." But Sarah denied it saying, I didn't laugh for she was afraid and he said, no, but you did laugh. Sarah laughs again at the birth of Isaac And we probably would be inclined to think that that time that it was a laughter of joy at the birth of her child, even though it's a laughter of a little scorn at this time, thinking, how could I possibly have a child at this age? And yet the Lord simply says, by way of a question, is there anything that I can't do? And what's the answer? We don't need the answer, do we, because The answer for the One who is Almighty is that He can do anything. He can do whatever He chooses to do. I'd also like you to turn over to the book of Daniel. We'll look at a passage from there as well. And this is an interesting passage for a couple of reasons. You'll recall that Daniel 4, you'll recall that a king named Nebuchadnezzar was warned about his pride. He was given a somber warning that if he didn't check his pride that the Lord was going to humble him. And sometime afterward the Lord did humble him. And how did the Lord humble him on that occasion? He made him insane. He basically made him behave as if he were a cow, crawling around on all fours, growing long hair and fingernails, acting like a beast, losing his sensibility, literally. And so where we pick up this narrative, as at the end of that, let me go back just a couple of verses here. Let me go back to verse 33 where it says, "...immediately the word was fulfilled against Nebuchadnezzar. He was driven from among men and ate grass like an ox, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven till his hair grew as long as eagles' feathers and his nails were like birds' claws." This is not a pretty picture, but this insanity of Nebuchadnezzar is a judgment, and it's a judgment against his pridefulness for thinking that he was great. What was it that prompted this? We don't have to go back very far to see this. Take a look at verse 30. Is not this great Babylon which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence for the glory of my majesty? So here it comes. He spends seven years acting like a beast and God restores his senses and restores his kingdom. And the evidence seems to suggest that not only he was restored, but that when he came back to his senses, he was a true believer and the God of Israel. Verse 34, At the end of days I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven, and my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most High and praised and honored Him who lives forever. For his dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation. All the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and he does according to his will among the hosts of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth. And none can stay his hand or say to him, what have you done?" What does that tell us about the power of God, the omnipotence of God as we describe it? that he has the power to do whatever he purposes to do. And that raises one of those interesting theological questions, such as, can God make a rock that's so big he can't move it? And the answer is no. I would put it like this, that God, by virtue of what he does, he cannot handcuff himself. If he makes creation a certain way, to operate a certain way, according to what we call natural laws, does that constrain him from acting against it or acting with it? And the answer is no. He can do as he pleases, just as Nebuchadnezzar observed. So this power of God first appears to us in His creation, simply bringing everything into existence. There's another Latin word for that, ex nihilo, that refers to bringing creation into existence out of nothing. In other words, it's not like a potter who sits down at the potter's wheel and grabs a lump of clay and starts to shape it. God didn't have a chair. He didn't have a potter's wheel. He didn't have clay. He had to make all of those things first. So he starts creating out of nothing. And again, that gives us just a glimpse into the power of this God who creates. Now, what about His purpose? God has a purpose in everything that He does. It wouldn't make sense to say, here's this almighty, all-wise, all-powerful God who just acts arbitrarily. Or He starts to do something, but He doesn't really know what He's going to do as time goes by. We may do that. We may start a project and say, I'm not sure where this is going to go or when I'm going to finish or how it's going to turn out, but I'm going to go ahead and start it anyway. God never does that. He can't do that. Whatever He does, He must do with the plan and the purpose in mind ahead of time. Again, the idea that He inhabits eternity. He knows the end that He's designed for His creation. And He has the power to direct everything towards that end. whether acting with the creation, what we call providence, or whether acting against it, which is what we call a miracle. We see the drama of redemption already starting to unfold even at the very beginning of Genesis, though by the time we get to end of chapter 2 everything looks pretty good. God says it's all very good. Nothing is intruded into this perfect creation yet. It's about to, and the story is going to take what we might call a dark turn in chapter 3, but again is God surprised by what happens in the fall? And the answer is no. He's already provided for that. He's already planned for that. And that's going to be what begins to expose, to reveal His redemptive plans. what we see in part from the order of creation, and again this is completely contrary to what science would tell us, is that he begins with the heavens and the earth and then he starts to give it shape and form, separating land from water, and then he begins to bring life into it, little by little. He begins to add, you might say, the icing on the cake It's interesting if you're a fan of cosmology or astrology, that it simply says on day four, and he created the stars also. Billions and billions of stars. Just created the stars also. But the best is yet to come. Because at the end of day six, what's he going to do? The culminating achievement of this creative work is to make man and to make man in his image and to make man in such a way that man will be in relationship with God. There's not a relationship per se between plants and animals and God except that they are part of his creation. But now we're talking about again the idea that God has personality, that he not only has personality within himself but he has personality that can relate personally to his creatures. Now, don't we already see some hints of the Trinity in chapter 1 of Genesis? In the very opening verses, in fact, it's almost as if I selected those first three verses with that point in mind. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light. And there was light. Well, we have the Spirit described very explicitly, separately from God, seemingly. We have God, by the way, You may know that Hebrew word Elohim is a plural form of the word El, which refers to God. We're already getting a hint that there's more than one person in what we will call the Godhead. So we have the Spirit of God, and then God said, let there be light. Now this is kind of a twofer, if I wanted to be a little cheeky about it. Because what is God's Word? Or should I say, who is God's Word? And interestingly, as we look at the parallel between those opening verses and the opening verses in the Gospel of John, we kind of suspect that there's a connection there, don't we? When John says, in the beginning was the Word and the word was with God and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. And then verse 3, all things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. We see God, we see Spirit, we see the Word and the Light, and the reference back to Genesis 1 is unmistakable. John often refers to Jesus as the Light that has come into the world, and the Word, what's called the Logos. And it's an interesting little detail that in the Greek Septuagint at the beginning of Genesis, the translation is Logos, that there is that connection with God and His Word and His Spirit. So we're already seeing very early in the book of Genesis and if we continue on we have a couple of other hints. What's another hint there in chapter 1 that there's more to this God than what we would call Unitarianism? Look at verse 26. Then God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness. Once again, a hint that there is something more to God than just a single personality. I thought about it like this. This gives you an idea of how I think. I sit at home and talk to myself all the time. Maybe I shouldn't tell you that. In fact, lately I've been sitting at home thinking about what I was going to say and doing a little practice, you might say, of what I would say when I came to you. So was I really talking to you if I were sitting at my desk and trying to picture this group in front of me? No, because you weren't there. Was I talking to myself? It raises an interesting question. Can I talk to myself? And the answer is no, not really. Because I don't have a self to talk to. If I'm talking, then I'm not listening. If I'm listening, I'm not talking. There's only one of me. And yet, does it make more sense when God says, let us make man in our image after our likeness? There's this idea of an inter-Trinitarian conversation. Can God talk to himself? And the answer is, well, yes he can. I've got an even better one than that. Can God love himself? Where is God's love most perfectly expressed? but in the Trinity, between the members of the Trinity. And so you could make this argument that there's this necessity of God having more than a single personal nature for him to be able to, first of all, talk to himself, but also to be able to relate to a creature. So it's remarkable that we begin to see by hints, but unmistakable hints, in the opening chapter of Genesis, that there's something more to this God than just a single personality. Next we can think in terms of His promises, and here I'd like to quote briefly again from the Westminster Confession. this time from Chapter 7 of the Confession. I'm going to start at the beginning of Chapter 7 in the Westminster Confession, and this is the chapter of God's covenant with man. The distance between God and the creature is so great that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience to him, unto him as their creator, yet they could never have any fruition of him as their blessedness and reward, but by some voluntary condescension on God's part, which he has been pleased to express by way of a covenant. The first covenant made with man was a covenant of works. wherein life was promised to Adam and in him to his posterity upon condition of perfect and personal obedience. And then as we'll see a little later, man by his fall, having made himself incapable of life by that covenant, the Lord was pleased to make a second, commonly called the covenant of grace, wherein He freely offers unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ, requiring of them faith in Him, that they may be saved, and promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto eternal life His Holy Spirit, to make them willing and able to believe." It's remarkable that we see from the very beginning God establishing a covenant, a relationship with His creatures, and that through His promises. One of the things is we'll see when we start to talk a little more about the image of God in man is that we see already that there's a very special relationship between God and this creature called man. And this covenant or this promise is what begins to make that possible. Now as we bring this session to a close, I'd like to turn your attention to the book of Acts again, this time in chapter 17. So this is Paul giving his testimony at the Areopagus. Verse 22, So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said, Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the object of your worship, it was a city full of idols, I found also an altar with the inscription, To the unknown God. That becomes his point of contact and his point of launching into the gospel. What therefore you worship is unknown, this I proclaim to you, the God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath, and everything. He made from one man, Adam, every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own poets have said, for we are indeed his offspring." Paul is starting where he's at, so to speak, in witnessing to the Athenians. And the first thing that he does is he demolishes their idols by pointing them to whom? the God who created the heavens and the earth in the beginning, the one who gives life, the one who sustains life. If it's the case that God is the Creator, if it's the case that He is the only true God, then to Him all allegiance is owed. All the other gods are gods of wood and stone, and you can dress them up any way you want them, you can call them whatever you want to, but they are mute. They cannot speak, they cannot hear, they cannot see. They have no power to do anything, not even to get themselves from one part of the room to the other. And so Paul is using that as the point of departure to tell them about this Creator God. The One that you say that you don't know, let me tell you who He is." Let me read on a little further. starting in verse 29. Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and the imagination of men. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed. And of this he has given assurance to us all by raising him from the dead. Now there's so much that we could unpack in that. But it serves as both an offer and a warning. We have often lived in times of ignorance, ignorant unbelief, following after gods of wood and stone, following after our own desires. And here Paul is saying there's one who is appointed to judge the whole world. and He's also appointed to be the Savior of mankind. And the manner in which we approach this Jesus will determine what the end is for us, whether an end of joy in heaven or whether an end of judgment in hell. John Calvin has this to say regarding scripture, we owe to scripture the same reverence that we owe to God because it is preceded from Him alone and has nothing belonging to man mixed with it. Over and over again the scripture describes, it says of itself that it is pure, it is clean, it is perfect, and we are to turn to that for the knowledge that's required to lay hold of salvation through Christ. Amen.