Good morning again. Please turn with me to John chapter 5 in your copy of the scriptures. We are going to be wading through some very deep waters because as we unpack our Lord's words, there's depth here and there's things that frankly, we don't have the capacity to comprehend. They're beyond our ability to comprehend, but By faith, we can apprehend them because they are God's own truth. So, you're in John 5. Our focus this morning will be verses 16-20. Hear the word of the Lord. For this reason, the Jews persecuted Jesus and sought to kill Him because He had done these things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, my father has been working until now, and I have been working. Therefore the Jews sought all the more to kill him because he not only broke the Sabbath, but also said that God was his father, making himself equal with God. Then Jesus answered and said to them, most assuredly I say to you, the son can do nothing of himself, but what he sees the father do. For whatever he does, the son also does in like manner. Let's pray. Father, we ask that the Holy Spirit would give us clarity of thought Lord, we just confess that this is going to require sustained concentration in our minds and we need your spirit to guide us and lead us because these are not secondary issues. These are primary issues, issues about who your son is, issues about who God is and who it is we worship. So we pray that your spirit will lead us and give us illumination that we might apprehend by faith the things that are in this text. And we ask it in Jesus name. Amen. All of us at various points in our lives have probably asked ourselves some pretty deep philosophical questions. Questions about our existence. Why am I here? What is the meaning of life? Why do I exist? What's my purpose for living? What part am I meant to play, insignificant as admittedly I am, But what part do I play in the unfolding drama of human history? If human history is a song, then is there a verse I'm supposed to contribute to it? What is my ultimate destiny? I suspect we've all, in one way, shape or form, asked those kinds of questions of ourselves many, many times. But if I may simplify these questions, if I can boil them down to their essence, I would suggest to you that we can reduce all these questions to two primary questions, that if you get these two answers correct to these questions, it's going to lead you to know how to answer all the rest of them. The number one question that you need to be able to answer is this. What must you do to be saved? That is, you've sinned against and offended your creator more times than you can remember or count. You've offended him, provoked him to wrath, and how can you find mercy from him? Is it possible to be forgiven for all your sins? Is it possible to be reconciled to God, to have peace with this God? And of course, you know what the answer of the Bible is. Yes, it is. But how? What is it you must do to be saved? That's the first and most important question. But the second question isn't any less important. And as a matter of fact, the second question is what hang, everything hangs upon this question and the right answer to this question. If you get this question wrong, you can't be saved. And that is, who do you say that Jesus Christ is? That is what Jesus said to Peter. Who do you say that I am? And that is the most important question for you to answer, because to get that wrong is to miss eternity. Who is Jesus? And not just who do you say outwardly, who do you believe truly in your heart of hearts that Jesus Christ truly is? Because there's only one way to be saved. There are not multiple ways, there's one. You must be saved by God's grace alone. That is His unmerited favor. It's favor you don't deserve. It's favor you cannot earn. Grace alone through faith alone. And that faith has to be rested in Jesus Christ alone. Jesus Christ is the exclusive object of saving faith. If it's Jesus plus anything else, again, you've missed eternity. You're gonna go to hell. If it's Jesus plus your works, Jesus plus your baptism, Jesus plus the sacraments, Jesus plus your morality, Jesus plus your patriotism, Jesus plus your good intentions, it's Jesus alone that you must rest in. And so since Jesus is the sole object of saving faith, you must be certain that the Jesus you're trusting in is the same historical Jesus who is set forth in the pages of Holy Scripture, who is risen from the dead, who is right now sitting at the right hand of God the Father. But this, apprehending this true Jesus is harder than you may think, because Satan is a master of deception. And Satan is constantly raising up false prophets and false teachers in every single age who promote counterfeit Christs. That is these teachers, they sound so much like us. They call upon you to believe on Jesus and you say, hey, that's what our pastors say too. Believe on Jesus and you'll be saved. But the problem is the Jesus they're telling you to trust in is a different Jesus than the one in the Bible. In other words, they misrepresent the true Jesus. They distort aspects of his nature and his character. These false prophets, they promise you deliverance, but the Jesus they preach is a fake Jesus who is powerless to save anyone because he is not real. These false Christs are figments of the devil's imagination. whom he sets up as decoys to keep you from finding and entering in through the narrow gate that leads to life. And this is not a new problem. This has plagued the church for 2,000 years. Even before his death, burial, and resurrection, the real Jesus said to his apostles, beware a false Christ who will rise up to deceive, if possible, even the elect. Even God's people can be deceived by this. So he warned them and said, look, I've told you beforehand that you're not to follow them or believe them. The apostle Paul, greatest missionary to ever live, planted the church in Corinth during his second missionary journey. Who doubts that they were well instructed in who Jesus was by the apostle Paul and yet He had to write to them in his second epistle, 2 Corinthians 11, and he said this, quote, I fear lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. For if he who comes preaches another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if you receive a different spirit, which you have not received, or a different gospel, which you have not accepted, you may well put up with it. You may embrace it. The Apostle John ministered to the churches in Asia Minor. The first one, Ephesus, was planted by Paul in his third missionary journey. John would later come on and preach to these various churches and minister among them. And yet false teachers crept into their midst. And what's really terrifying is these false teachers affirmed the deity of Jesus Christ. If they were sitting here among us and they heard us talking about Jesus being very God of very God, they would say a hearty amen. And so you think to yourself, oh, they're sound, they're orthodox, right? No, they weren't. They were heretics. Because though they affirmed Jesus as God, they denied that he came in the flesh. They denied he became a man. They denied his incarnation. And so John has to write in his first epistle and say, if anyone denies that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, he is not of God. As a matter of fact, not only is he not of God, they're lowercase a antichrists. Don't listen to them. And these heresies continue to spread throughout the early church. In fact, in the first four to five centuries, the single most intense battle that the church had to engage in was the question of who do you say Jesus Christ is? You see, a group known as the Docetists rose up, the spiritual descendants of the false teachers that John had to fight in the first century AD. And they said, Jesus is indeed Almighty God, but he was never truly a man. Oh, granted, he walked among us and he looked like a man. He looked solid, but if you touched him, your hand would pass through him. He was just a phantom that looked real, but he didn't really have a body. And the church had to search the scriptures. And they said, no, you're wrong. That's false, you are Antichrist. The early church had to fight for the humanity of Jesus Christ. But no sooner did they get through that battle, what happens? The pendulum swings the other direction. Men like Arius rise up. And they say, Jesus Christ is a man. And we say, amen, but he's just a man, a great man, a wonderful man, even a perfect man, a man you should imitate, but just a man, he's man, but he's not God. And so the church, once again, like the noble Bereans had to go to the scriptures and say, wait a minute, Is that what the Bible teaches? I mean, like Augustine and Athanasius and others, they rose up and said, no, that's wrong. Jesus is a man, but he's also almighty God. What the church concluded was that Jesus Christ is both God and man. He's not 50% God and 50% man. He's 100% God and 100% man, yet one Christ, one person. That is what the church confirmed. Well, as they wrestled with the identity of who Jesus is, the church found that they had to articulate a mind-blowing truth from the scriptures, something that cannot be comprehended so much that they literally used the word incomprehensible to describe it. You see, here's the question. How can you and I confess with the Bible that there's only one God, Yahweh? And then, with our next breath, also confess the Bible's teaching that there are three persons who have the right to be called God. The Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. How do you remain a monotheist, someone who believes there's only one God, and yet insist that the Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Spirit is God, and yet there are not three gods, but one God? That's incomprehensible. And of course, what they articulated was that God is triune, that there's one God who exists in three persons. If you claim that the three persons of the Godhead have three distinct natures, then you've denied the monotheism of the Bible. Now you have three gods, right? Even if their natures are identical to one another, then if you have three distinct natures, you have three distinct deities. In other words, we've become polytheists, we've become idolaters. But if on the other hand, you deny the distinction between these persons, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are distinct persons, then what you're gonna do is say there's one God, the Father, and Jesus and the Spirit are not God. You're gonna deny their deity. And so as the church wrestled through these things, they put pen to paper and they wrote down their findings and creeds known as the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed and the Chalcedonian Creed. And then if you read carefully our confession of faith, our Baptist confession of faith, you'll find the language and the ideas behind those creeds are very clearly contained in our confession. Now, brothers and sisters, ladies and gentlemen, I know you're sitting here and thinking, wow, this is pretty high octane stuff, particularly for a Sunday morning. This is a lot to think through. It's gonna get deeper, I promise, before the day's over, all right? But I want you to understand something. This is not a secondary issue. This is not something for advanced Christians someday to go to a university and learn about. This is primary. This is fundamental. I wanna say so, in other words, it's not just something to be debated about a bunch of theologians in some ivory-towered university somewhere. Certainly, they should be talking about it too, but I wanna be clear, these are truths that must be taught to ordinary men and women sitting in our pews. This is theology that should be taught so frequently and so often inside the local church that the children who grow up here should never know a day when they didn't know that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These are things that, this is truth that's given for young farm boys riding on their father's tractors, plowing up their father's fields. It's rich doctrine that must be embraced by blue collar mechanics while they're using their socket wrenches to tighten the bolts underneath the chassis of a car. I'm not kidding when I say it's meant to be sweet theology given to carpenters to make their hearts glow and their lips sing the praises of Jesus while they swing their hammers to build a house. That's what this truth is meant to do. You see, it's as high as it is, as transcendent as these truths are, it's also eminently practical. It's a shoe leather theology that's meant to stir up faith in Christ, it's meant to stir up holy affections for God and his word and his people, and it's meant to radically change the way you live. That's what this truth is. Indeed, believing in these truths from the heart hear me, is the difference between pure worship and idolatry. And it's literally the difference between heaven and hell. It's the difference between heaven and hell. Do you know the Athanasian Creed begins and ends when it's talking about the triune nature of God by saying, unless someone believes this, he cannot be saved. He will be eternally condemned. You say, why? Because if you get the Trinity wrong, you get Jesus wrong. That's the problem. And if you're putting your faith in any Jesus, but the Jesus of Holy Scripture, then you're gonna be lost for all eternity. So this is important for you to hear. This is practical stuff that you need to think about. Our Baptist Confession of Faith summarizes it like this, in this divine and infinite being, there are three subsistences, or we would say the word persons, there are three persons, the Father, the Word or Son, and the Holy Spirit. of one substance, power, and eternity, each having the whole divine essence, yet the essence undivided. The Father is of none, neither begotten nor proceeding." Listen to the next phrase. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father. That is exactly what Jesus is teaching in John 5, right there, that He's eternally begotten of the Father. The Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son, all infinite, without beginning, therefore but one God, who is not to be divided in nature and being, but distinguished by several peculiar relative properties and personal relations, which doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of all our communion with God and comfortable dependence on Him." That's quite the statement. That is quite the statement. Now, what in the world does all this have to do with the text in front of us? Well, besides everything, nothing. It has everything to do with the text in front of us. As our forefathers in the faith grappled with the question of who Jesus Christ is, and as they articulated the biblical truth of the Trinity, they found a lot of help in the pages of John's gospel. I've been overwhelmed by how much these truths are taught here in a peculiar manner so that constantly people are referring to them. Augustine himself said that John chapter five was the most profound chapter in all the scripture when it comes to understanding Jesus as the only begotten Son of the Father. Let's remember why John wrote this book in the first place. He tells us his purpose, John 20 verse 31, but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name." It's not just cerebral. I want you to know who he is, and then I want you to rest your faith upon him actively so that you can receive eternal life. He wants you to recognize who Jesus is so that you're brought to the point that you can make the same exact confession that Peter did. You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. That's where he's trying to bring you. In the passage I've just read to you this morning, Jesus had just healed a man who had been suffering from some sort of paralysis for 38 long years. He was sitting beside the pool of Bethesda near the temple, and Jesus had healed him. He said, take up your mat and walk, and he did. But Jesus made the mistake, and Jesus makes no mistakes, I'm putting that in parentheses. Jesus made the mistake, according to the Pharisees, of performing this mighty miracle on the Sabbath day. Come on the other six days of the week if you want to be healed, but not on this day. So they criticize this man. The Sabbath police come in and they see this man carrying his mat around on the Sabbath day and they rebuke him. And he says, well, the man who healed me told me to do this. Well, they don't care that the man's healed. They want to find out who's this man. And so the clues all lead him to Jesus. And it was the day on which Jesus did this mighty work that had them all in a tizzy. And they're ready to take up stones and stone him to death because he had healed somebody on the Sabbath. And so they interrogate him. And as they do so, Jesus deliberately jumps out of the frying pan straight into the fire. It makes it even worse, as it were. Because what he says is this, basically. When God rested on the seventh day and declared the Sabbath day holy, he only rested from one specific kind of work. He rested from works of creation, but he continued his works of providence. That is, he continues to cause the sun to shine and the rain to fall upon the just and the unjust. He provides food for us. He saves sinners on the Lord's day. Believe it or not, he does all these mighty works. In other words, there are some works that are lawful and right, even on the Sabbath. And then what Jesus says is, I'm doing the same works that God does. And oh, by the way, God's my father. And they understood what that meant. If they were infuriated that he had healed somebody on the Sabbath, now they're really mad. They're mad because now he's claimed God as his father and they understood he's claiming he's equal with God. Here's the thing, they were right. That's exactly what he was claiming. And what he's gonna do now for the rest of John 5, and it's gonna take us at least three sermons to get through the rest of it, is he's expounding to them what he means when he says, I am the only begotten son of the Father. He's expounding the truth that he's the second person of the Godhead in the flesh. And so we're gonna focus upon this for several weeks, God willing. I wanna preach to you the text that we've just read under three simple headings. Jesus is claiming equality with God. As a matter of fact, what we're gonna see as we keep on going through the text is this. He actually says to them, you must honor me with the same honor you give God the Father. Think about that, what a claim. If any mere mortal said that, what would he be doing? He'd be blaspheming. But he says, I am worthy of the same glory as the Father, because I'm of one essence with him. That's what he's gonna say to us. So how is he equal? Well, first point is gonna be equality in nature. Secondly, equality in works. Third, equality in knowledge. And as I preach this, I need to go ahead and acknowledge my indebtedness to Pastor Kurt Smith. He preached a sermon on this very text a couple of years ago in our association. It was masterful. And I went back and re-listened to it again in preparing for this sermon. So I just wanna note, acknowledge my friend. I'm not gonna preach to you his sermon, but I have cannibalized his sermon and I've digested it and I'm gonna preach it to you in that way. So the first thing is equality in nature. Now, put your thinking caps on. I'm just going to tell you, you're going to have to get some concentration this morning, but it's going to be good for you if you'll do it. Okay? So ask the Spirit of God to help you think and help you to concentrate on these very lofty truths that I'm going to go and tell you. You can't understand them and neither can I, but you got to apprehend them by faith. All right. Look at verses 16 and 18. For this reason, the Jews persecuted Jesus and sought to kill him because he had done these things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, my father has been working until now and I have been working. Therefore, the Jews sought all the more to kill him because he not only broke the Sabbath, but also said that God was his father making himself equal with God. Deeply ingrained in the Jewish mind is a saying that's known as the Shema. Do you know what the Shema is? It's found in Deuteronomy 6, 4. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. There are two things being said by that statement. First is this, there is only one God. It's a declaration of monotheism. There are no other gods. All other gods are false gods, invented by the minds of men. There's only one true and living God. But secondly, it's saying something about the unity of God's divine nature. That is, it's affirming that God is simple. God is simple. He does not possess attributes as qualities. We speak of the attributes of God, but these aren't things he has or possesses as qualities. When we speak of the perfections of God, what we're talking about is what God is in his very nature. That is, God doesn't possess love. God is love. God doesn't have light. God is light. God doesn't possess grace, God is gracious. And God is all that he is all the time. In other words, he's not a composite being made up of a bunch of parts so that he's 5% love and 7% just and 9% gracious and that kind of thing. You and I, we're made up of all kinds of parts. We have two basic parts. We have a body, a physical body, and then an immaterial spirit, right? But then even think about our bodies themselves. How many parts are our bodies made of? We have millions of cells in our body. We have all kinds of internal organs and they're all dependent upon one another to continue functioning in a healthy manner. My kidneys are not my heart, but if my kidneys fail, what happens to my heart? It stops beating because they're all dependent upon one another. We're complex beings and our parts depend upon one another for us to function. But God is not a composite being. God's essence is one. His nature is single. It's unitary. In one sense, God doesn't have multiple attributes. He has one attribute. You know what that one attribute is? He's always himself. That's it. What did he say to Moses? Who should I say is sending me? I am. Tell him I am sent you. Not I am becoming, not I used to be, I am. Any point in history, he's the same. He does not change. He cannot change. He can't be changed by the devil. He can't be changed by angels. He can't be changed by men. He can't change himself. And when we describe as his attributes are God just being himself. and it's describing different facets of what does that mean that God is always himself. So here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Well, when Jesus said, God is my Father, he was claiming to have been begotten by God in such a way that he shares his same exact nature. D.A. Carson, according to him, says this, that the Jews interpreted his statement to mean, I am a second God who is identical in nature to the God of the Hebrews. In other words, to their minds, when they heard him say, God is my father, what he was suggesting was, I am a second identical God to the God spoken of in the Old Testament. In other words, it was a denial of the Shema, that God is one. Well, to correct their misunderstanding, Jesus is here teaching them, no, I'm not a second God, who's identical in nature to the first God. I am God. But I'm not a separate God. I'm not a second deity that has a perfectly identical nature to the first God who rules the universe. No, I am of the same nature and substance of the Father. And yet I'm a different person from Him, because I'm eternally begotten of Him. So let me pause here and remind you of some things I introduced to you two weeks ago. When I got to do the expository scripture reading on Proverbs chapter eight, I was so excited because I got to do a primer. I knew I was coming here. And so I was giving it to you so you could begin digesting it then. Spoon feed it to you, and now I'm gonna come back and revisit it, all right? So listen carefully. Now, again, put your thinking cap on. This is complicated, I know it is. But brothers and sisters, what I'm telling you is very important. It's absolutely essential. It's fundamental to the Christian faith. My very favorite. of the ancient creeds is the Athanasian Creed. God willing, I hope to teach through it on Wednesday nights this coming summer. Looking forward to it. But the creed does not delude us into thinking that we can comprehend the triune nature of God. No man can comprehend it because it's an incomprehensible mystery. but we can apprehend the Trinity by faith. So what the Creed does is it doesn't try to explain the Trinity to you in such a way as you can understand it. What it does is it fences the mystery, it guards the mystery, it puts two guardrails on either side of this mystery so that you don't fall off into a cliff, a cliff either on the one hand of idolatry or of heresy on the other. And here's what it says. We worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in unity. Listen to it, here come the guardrails. Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance. For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit is all one. The glory equal, the majesty co-eternal. Do you hear the two fences? You must not confound the persons. That means you must not confuse the persons with one another. The Father is not the Son and He's not the Holy Spirit. The Son is not the Father and He's not the Spirit. And the Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son. They are distinct persons. But that being said, you must, here's the second guardrail, you must also not divide the substance. The three persons do not have three different essences. three different natures. Nor do they share the same nature and divide it into three equal parts like three pieces of a pie. So that the Father has one third and the Son has one third and the Spirit has one third. No, that would make each one of them one third of a God. Each of them has the entirety of the essence. In other words, the nature of the Father is the nature of the Son, is the nature of the Holy Spirit. Three persons, one God. Remember what Paul says about Jesus, Colossians 2 verse 9, in him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. How much of God's nature does he have? All of it, every bit of it. In other words, there's only one true and living God who exists in three distinct persons. He's not three gods, he's one God who has one nature, one divine will. Not three wills, one will, because he has one nature. All the perfections of the Father are the perfections of the Son are the perfections of the Holy Spirit. The three persons are not three identical twins or three identical deities. Each of the three shares the fullness of the one undivided and indivisible essence. Now, what is it then that distinguishes the Father from the Son from the Spirit? Two things. Again, stay with me. The payoff is going to be rich. Stay with me. It's the divine processions and the divine missions. The divine processions are internal to God. The divine missions are external to God. So listen, the divine processions. God the Father is uncreated, amen? God the Father is self-existent. He's neither begotten nor does he proceed from anyone. God the Son is also uncreated, just like his Father. Just like his Father, God the Son is also self-existent. Amen? Okay, amen? I'm asking for your response for a reason. But here's the thing. Unlike the Father, the Son is eternally begotten of the Father. Listen to me carefully. The Son finds his origin in the Father. He is begotten of the Father. The Father is the eternal source of the Son, even though the Son is uncreated and self-existent. This is the same language that Moses uses in Genesis 5, 3. And Adam lived 130 years and begot a son, hear that word, begot a son in his own likeness after his image and named him Seth. Seth's nature was a carbon copy of his father Adam's nature, even though he was a different person. He didn't share Adam's same nature, but he had an identical nature to his father, because he was creating God's image. But he was like Adam because he was begotten of Adam. So a son or a daughter is begotten when a man marries a woman, knows his wife intimately, causing her to conceive a child, The child comes into existence at the moment of conception, but the child did not exist before that time, right? Didn't live before that time. It was the moment he was conceived that he came into existence. The baby then gestates in his mother's womb for approximately 40 weeks, and then is born into this world. And so we use the language, after that child is born, he was begotten of his father. Peter Spears is begotten of Pastor Matt Spears. Luke Slate is begotten of Pastor Jerry Slate Jr. That's the language we use. And this is the same language that the Bible uses to describe who Jesus is. But in using this language, we're not speaking of someone being begotten by a mere man, but someone who is begotten by the eternal God. So there's not a one-to-one correspondence here between us beginning someone as humans versus God beginning his son. So again, follow me carefully here. To say that Jesus is begotten of God does not mean that he has an exact replica of his father's nature. He shares his father's nature. It's the same nature. And saying that Jesus is begotten of the father does not mean that God married a woman and had relations with her so that she conceived a son. That's not what we mean. Nor does it mean that there was an extended period of time in eternity past when God the Father lived in isolation until trillions of years had passed, as we would think of it, and then suddenly God the Son came into existence. That's not what we mean. God the Father is self-existent. God the Son is self-existent. God the Holy Spirit is self-existent. There has never been a time in all of eternity when the Father, Son, and Spirit did not exist. Again, to use the language of the Athanasian Creed, there are not three uncreateds, but one uncreated God. It also does not mean that there was a time when God the Father was God, but not a father. In other words, for the first 30 years of my life or so, I was not a father. But when my firstborn son came into the world, I became something I wasn't. Something changed. I became a father, and I had not been a father before. But God the Father, there was never a time when he changed, because first of all, he can't change, but he has always been the Father, and Jesus has always been the Son, and the Spirit has always been the Spirit. In other words, when we say he's begotten of the Father, we don't mean he was begotten in time, we mean he's been begotten from all eternity. That's why this truth is known as the eternal generation of the Son. Now, if anybody understands that, please raise your hand because I want you to come up here and explain it to me. But that's what the Bible's teaching. That's what you have to apprehend by faith. So in speaking of God the Son having an origin, or that the Father is the source of the Son. We do not mean that there was a time when He did not exist, that is, when God the Son didn't exist, and then came into existence at some point in time. No, He is eternally, from all eternity, generated by the Father, and the Spirit is from eternity proceeding from both the Father and the Son. Those are eternal relations of origin. These are called the divine processions, which leads us then into the divine missions, and the missions reflect the processions. The father who begot the son, that's procession, sent the son into the world. That's the mission. The son who is begotten of the father, procession, was sent by the father into the world. That's mission. The spirit who proceeds from both father and son, that's procession. He's spirated from the father and the son is the language. He was sent by the father in the name of the son on the day of Pentecost. That's the mission. But see how the mission reflects the procession. Now, all this rich theology and admittedly hard to follow theology, is gonna be important now as we examine Jesus' words. The first thing we've seen then is that there's equality in nature between the Father and the Son. Let's move on then to equality in works. Look again at verse 19. Then Jesus answered and said to them, most assuredly I say to you, the Son can do nothing of himself but what he sees the Father do. For whatever he does, that is whatever the Father does, the Son also does in like manner. I'm begotten of the Son, excuse me, I'm begotten of the Father, and my mission comes from the Father. That's what he's telling us. All right, so when we say that the Father, Son, and Spirit have three distinct missions, let's also recognize something else. No one person of the Godhead ever acts independently of the other two. This is called the doctrine of inseparable operations, that the Father and the Son and the Spirit, whatever God does, He always does it as a triune God. That's the point. The Father never does anything isolated from the Son or the Spirit. So think about it, even election. The Father chose us in Christ, in the Son, and the Spirit applies that redemption to us. But think about it. The Bible attributes the creation of the world to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, not just to the Father. You find hints of it there at the end of Genesis 1, don't you? Let us create man in our image, after our likeness. There's this plurality of persons, and then it says, and so God made man in His singular image. One God, three persons. Well, John 1, 1 through 3, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were created through Him. And apart from Him, nothing was made that was made. The Father created all things through the Son. Paul says the same thing, Colossians 1. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him, all things were created that are in heaven, that are on earth. visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers, all things were created through him and for him. When you kiss your baby's face, you're kissing the creation of Christ because nothing was created apart from Christ. That's the point. Hebrews 1, verses 1 to 3, God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in pastime to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by his Son, whom he has appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds. And then he says, being the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person. shares the same nature as the Father. And the Father, through the Son, created the world, upholding all things by the word of his power. So creation, the inseparable operation of the Trinity, led to creation. The conception of Jesus Christ in the womb of the Virgin Mary was Trinitarian. The Father fashioned a body for whom? For the Son, in the womb of the Virgin Mary, as the Holy Spirit overshadowed her. The active obedience of Jesus, that is his perfect obedience to the law, was Trinitarian. The son, as a man, depended upon the father for fresh supplies of the Holy Spirit so he could perfectly keep God's law. The passive obedience of Jesus was Trinitarian. Did the father die for you? No, did the Spirit die for you? No, I've heard people say things before communion, they'll be praying and they'll say, Father, thank you for dying for us. That's technically not proper. It should be, Father, thank you for sending your Son to die for us. That's the proper language. The Father wasn't incarnate. The Father did not become a man. The father didn't actively obey the law as a man, nor did the father die upon a cross, nor was he raised from the dead, but the son was. That being said, the Bible tells us that the son, when he was dying upon the cross, offered himself to whom? To the father, and do you remember the language? Through the eternal spirit. Trinitarian. The resurrection of Jesus was Trinitarian. The father raised the son. This Jesus, whom you crucified, God has raised up, and it's referring to God the Father. But what about God the Holy Spirit? Did He also raise the Son? Paul says in Romans 1, 4, that this Jesus, who is the seed of David according to the flesh, has been declared to be the Son of God with power by the Holy Spirit by raising Him from the dead. It's the Spirit shouting, this is God's Son. But this'll blow your mind. If the Father raised the Son and the Spirit raised the Son, what about the Son? Did the son raise the son? And the answer is, yes, he did. John chapter two, tear down this temple, meaning the temple of my body, and who will raise it up again? I will raise it up again. John 10, know what takes my life from me. I have power to lay it down and I have power to take it up again. This command I've received from my father. Think about this. The humanity of Jesus was raised by the deity of Jesus. It's a marvelous thing to think about. So that's exactly what Jesus is saying here in verse 19. Most assuredly, I say to you, the son can do nothing of himself, but what he sees the father do, for whatever he does, the son does in like manner. So we've seen equality in nature, equality in works, third, equality in knowledge. Now again, you're gonna have to put your thinking cap on. Fair warning, all right? This is complicated, but you're smart. You can get this. Look at verse 20. For the father loves the son and shows him all things that he himself does. How many things does the father do? Can you count them? It's an infinite number. How many of those things that he does does he show the son? All of them. and he will show him greater works than these that you may marvel. So how many things does the father show the son? All things. And the father imparts to his only begotten son the knowledge of everything that he does. God is always doing an infinite number of things and yet the Bible says he shows all those things to his son. Could the father show all that to us? Would our minds have the capacity to contain it? The answer is no. Okay, so think about the difference between knowledge as it exists in God and knowledge as it exists in us as creatures. Okay, knowledge as it exists in God is called archetypal knowledge. That's the fancy word for it. I know what you're thinking. You're going to seminary saying, throw these $20 words out of us, right? No, I'm not. It's called archetypal knowledge. Knowledge in the creature is called ectypal knowledge. But here's the thing. What is archetypal knowledge? Again, don't let the language intimidate you. God is all-knowing. God is omniscient. He knows everything that can be known about himself as God. And he knows everything there is to know about all the things that he's created. That is, he knows everything inside of himself and everything outside of himself. So he knows everything, right? God did not acquire that knowledge over long periods of time by careful and patient study because God neither acquires knowledge nor does he lose knowledge. He cannot learn anything new and he can't forget anything old. God knows everything about everything simultaneously. He always has, and He always will. So put it this way, God's knowledge is eternal. It's always existed. It always will exist. God's knowledge is infinite. It has no boundaries or limitations. He knows everything. God's knowledge is immutable. It can't change. He can't learn more. He can't forget anything. That's what we mean when we say that God is omniscient, that God is all knowing. You realize even in heaven, we're not going to have that kind of knowledge. We can't, this is something in God that cannot be transferred to us. But then when we talk about creatures, this ectypal knowledge, what does knowledge look like in a creature? I know this may be hard to believe, but you do not know everything there is to know about God, nor do you know everything about this created universe. God has revealed many things about himself in his creation and in his Bible, and let's go ahead and confess it short circuits our brains. What little he's shown us overwhelms us. You and I can only acquire knowledge through observation, experience, and literally thousands of man hours of careful study. But the problem is we can also gain and lose knowledge, and we do frequently probably lose more than we gain. God's knowledge is eternal, our knowledge is temporal. God's knowledge is infinite, ours is finite. Remember what Paul said? We see through a mirror dimly. God's knowledge is immutable. Our knowledge is extremely mutable. God's knowledge is perfect, and ours is very imperfect. God can't be surprised or startled by anything. No angel can run in with a scroll, make God's heart anxious because he didn't know what's already in it. He knew what was in it before it was even written. You and I, we battle a lot of anxiety throughout this present age because we're fearful of what's gonna happen tomorrow. Because we don't know until it gets here, right? But then there's two different kinds of knowledge inside of creatures. The kind of knowledge we have in this present age is pilgrim knowledge. Knowledge as pilgrims. We can only know what God's revealed to us as we apprehend it and study it. But then there's also knowledge of vision. And that's the kind of knowledge we're gonna have in the age to come. When we see Jesus face to face. What's the Bible say? Now we know in part, but then we shall know fully, even as we are fully known, that when we see Jesus, we're gonna be given knowledge that's just incrementally larger than any knowledge we can have here. It's the knowledge of vision because we're literally gonna see God. Remember what the Bible says, 1 John 3, now we are children of God and has not yet been revealed what we shall be. We know that when we see him, we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is. It's the knowledge of vision. Now, what does all this have to do with what Jesus says when he says the Father shows the Son all things? Because I'm trying to make a point here. The Father loves the Son and shows him all things that he himself does. When we compare and contrast the kind of knowledge that exists in God and the kind of knowledge that exists in men, here we go, what kind of knowledge resides in Jesus Christ? Think about that. Both kinds. Archetypal and ectypal, why? Because he's God and he's man. And because he's both, both kinds of knowledge exist in him and therefore he can take this infinite knowledge and mediate it to you so that you know it. Not that you know everything that God knows, but he mediates and tells you what God is like. And isn't this exactly what John is telling us? Remember what he says in John 1? No one has seen God, that is, God the Father, at any time. The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, He has expounded Him. He has come and made Him known. You can only know God through Jesus Christ, and you can't know Him apart from Him. He's the one who gives us the knowledge of God, and He's the one enables us to go to God through Christ. So even our knowledge of God is given to us by Christ. No one knows the Father except the one to whom the Son wills to reveal Him, so that even our knowledge of God comes through the Son. And before we leave this, and I'm gonna make some applications, I'm gonna show you why does this all matter. Verse 20, notice the end of verse 20. And he, that is the father, will show him, the son, greater works than these. Why? That you, you plural, may marvel. Who was Jesus speaking to? His worst enemies. He's speaking to the Pharisees. And he says, the Father's gonna show even greater works so that you are caused to marvel. Do you understand what Jesus is doing here? He's doing, he's going to come back to it in verse 24 when he says, most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears my word and believes in him who sent me has everlasting life and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life. His worst sworn enemies on the earth were right in front of him. He's telling him all this complex stuff and you realize what he's doing. He's giving them an invitation. Believe on me and you will be forgiven. He's offering mercy to his worst enemies, the men who would conspire to kill him. And he's saying, the Father's gonna be showing me greater things so that you will be caused to marvel. And here's the invitation, if you believe in me, you self-righteous Pharisees, you'll be forgiven. You'll have eternal life. What a Savior we have who is so full of mercy like that. Now let me try to bring this home and explain why is all this matter? Why is it important? First, I have two applications. First, I know this morning I have taken you through some deep waters. My preaching has required you to really concentrate even more than normal, but I make no apology for that because they're not my words that I'm having to explain. They're Jesus words I'm having to explain. and they're important. J.C. Rowell says it well. He has a great summary of this entire text. This is what he says. These verses begin one of the most deep and solemn passages in the four gospels. They show us the Lord Jesus asserting his own divine nature, his unity with God the Father and the high dignity of his office. Nowhere does the Lord dwell so fully on these subjects as in the chapter before us. And nowhere, we must confess, do we find out so thoroughly the weakness of man's understanding. There is much we must all feel that is far beyond our comprehension in our Lord's account of himself. Such knowledge in short is too wonderful for us. It is high, we cannot attain it. How often men say that they want clear explanations of such doctrines as the Trinity. Yet here we have our Lord handling the subject of his own person and behold, we cannot follow him. We seem only to touch his meaning with the tip of our fingers. And that's true. That's exactly true. But again, I make no apology for preaching these truths to you this morning. Dr. Michael Haken is an acquaintance of mine. He was kind enough to write an endorsement of our book on reforming world missions, and he and I had the privilege of co-authoring a book on Samuel Pierce together some years ago. Dr. Haken serves as professor of church history at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. His primary area of expertise is in the church fathers, men like Athanasius and Augustine, the generation of church fathers who produced the Nicene Creed. In other words, the Trinitarianism of the early church. He teaches a course on the Patristic Fathers, dealing with the Nicene Creed, at Southern Seminary. And each year when he teaches that class, he has around 100 students in his class. Now, you need to understand who these students are. They all grew up in Baptist churches. Most of them grew up in conservative Bible-believing Southern Baptist churches. They're from the ages of 18 to 22. On the first day of class every single year, Dr. Haken asked the same question of these students and it gets the same basic response. He says, you all grew up in church. I want to ask you a question. How many of you during your lifetime in church, so generation, entire generation, how many of you have heard one sermon preached on the Trinity? Just one. He says a large class is when five students raise their hand. Five students. I want you to think about that. The Trinity is a truth the church had to fight for, for the first five centuries of our existence. It's a truth that men have spilled their blood for. They've confessed this truth at the expense of their very lives. It's a truth that according to the Athanasian Creed, without which you cannot be saved. It's a truth that's, if the truth is that important and the modern church doesn't even teach it, Not even one sermon on the subject ever preached in a generation? Do we just assume that when we speak about God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, all of our hearers know what we're talking about? If so, that's a very fatal and dangerous assumption. It's a very bad assumption. Why? Because it leaves vulnerable souls as open prey to the pseudo-Christian cults. who are gonna come to you and deny the Trinity, and deny that Jesus is God, or deny that He's man, and it leaves all of us vulnerable to the sin of idolatry, because it will cause us to worship God as something other than what He is. I wanna make it just absolutely clear, every Lord's Day, we start off and talk about, we have gathered to worship God. I want you to understand who it is that Pastor Matt and I mean when we say that. The object of our worship is God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. All three persons co-equal, co-majestic, worthy of the same glory. Three persons in one God. That's who we come to worship. So I wanna go ahead and make an application of this for you as a church before we get to our second application. Will you please join me in singing the doxology, including the amen at the end, okay? ♪ Praise God from whom all blessings flow ♪ ♪ Praise him all creatures here below ♪ Praise him above, ye heavenly hosts. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen. My second application. Let's end where we began. Who do you say that Jesus Christ is? That's the central point, isn't it? There are myriads of people today who love to claim that Jesus was a kindly moral teacher, misunderstood by the masses, tragically martyred by them, a pacifist teacher who only spoke about love and therefore condoned the sinful lifestyles of the people around him, a good man worthy of your imitation and mine. Well, C.S. Lewis confronted that in his own day and listened to what he had to say. Quote, either this man was and is the son of God or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him or kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come to him with any patronizing nonsense about him being a great human teacher. He has not left that option open to us He did not intend to, end of quote. I'm sure you've all heard it before, but we must either regard Jesus as a liar or a lunatic, or you're gonna have to call him Lord. Briefly, let's consider all three options. Maybe Jesus was a liar. Maybe he made grandiose claims about himself, claiming to be God, and he knew that this was just a pack of lies. But because he loved popularity and wanted people to love him and think highly of him, he went around deluding people by making these sort of claims. Well, look at him. Look at his words. You don't preach about hell more than all the Old Testament and all the rest of the New Testament combined, and call sin, sin, and call people to repent if you want to win friends and influence people. You don't find Jesus looking for the praises of men. Matter of fact, even his enemies looked at him and said, we know you don't care about the opinion of men. This was not a man who was lying because he wanted to be popular. He wasn't a liar. Well, then maybe he was a lunatic. In other words, was Jesus self-deceived? Was he certifiably insane? That he really did believe this stuff that he was claiming, even though it obviously wasn't true. And so he taught these things to the multitude because really he just was crazy. But when you read his words and you read about him in the scriptures, do you find he's someone who's rash or do you find someone very calm, quite sane, very deliberate in the way he talks to people? Well, Jesus is not a liar or a lunatic. There's only one other possibility. He is who He said He was. In other words, Jesus Christ is Lord. And that's exactly who He is. Jesus Christ is Lord. Our confession has a wonderful answer to the question, who do you say Jesus is? Here we go. The Son of God, the second person in the Holy Trinity, being very and eternal God, the brightness of the Father's glory, of one substance and equal with Him who made the world, who upholds and governs all things He has made, did, when the fullness of time was complete, take upon Him man's nature and all the essential properties and common infirmities of it, yet without sin. being conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, the Holy Spirit coming down upon her, and the power of the Most High overshadowing her. And so was made of a woman of the tribe of Judah, of the seed of Abraham and David, according to the Scriptures, listen to it, so that two whole, perfect, and distinct natures were inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion. which person is very God and very man, yet one Christ, the only mediator between God and men. That's who Jesus is. That's who Jesus is. That's the Jesus of the Bible. That is the Jesus in whom you must place your trust, in whom you must depend if you're going to be saved. His promise is given to every last one of you in this room. Most assuredly, I say to you, He who hears my word and believes in him who sent me has everlasting life and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life. Let's pray. Father, I ask that anyone here who's outside of Christ, I pray your spirit will drive home the truths we've seen from the word this morning, and they will be fixed upon Christ and lay all their comfortable dependence for eternity upon him. And Lord, for us who are in Christ, help us not to take these truths for granted because everything depends upon them. Our worship, our lives, our eternal destiny. So Lord, help us to apprehend them by faith and to be on guard lest someone should come and try to snatch these truths away from us because there are many false prophets who have gone out into the world. So help us to test the spirits and hold fast to that which is true and good from your word. We ask that in Jesus' name, amen.