Please turn with me in your Bibles to Mark chapter 12. Mark chapter 12, our sermon text for this evening is from verse 28 through verse 34. Please give your careful attention to the reading of God's holy word. One of the scribes came and heard them arguing, and recognizing that he had answered them well, asked him, what commandment is the foremost of all? Jesus answered, the foremost is, hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these. The scribe said to him. Writes teacher, you have truly stated that he is one and there is no one else besides him. And to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength and to love one's neighbor as himself is much more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices. When Jesus saw that he had answered intelligently, he said to him, you are not far from the kingdom of God. After that, no one would venture to ask him any more questions. thus far the reading of God's holy word. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. A fundamental statement in the life of Israel under the Old Testament that was properly basic to their understanding of who God was, that there is only one God, and that God is the Lord who had revealed himself to them and who had delivered them from Egypt. And this has been fundamental to the Christian faith as well, which is the true successor to the Jewish faith, that we have confessed from the early church that we believe in one God. In fact, this is how the Nicene Creed begins. I believe in one God. And as it proceeds, it states belief in one God, the Father, but also in Jesus Christ, who is of one substance with the Father, and in the Holy Spirit, who is together worshipped and glorified together with the Father and Son. So we believe in a triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and yet these are not three separate gods. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God, yet these are one undivided deity, one undivided Godhead. As we continue in our sermon series, we are picking texts based on the doctrines as they are set forth in our shorter catechism. This evening, the occasion for this sermon text is the question, are there more gods than one? And the answer is, quite simply, there is but one only. the living and true God. This is a basic statement that we accept and believe as Christians, that there is but one only, the living and true God. And yet this is a statement that is under attack, called into question by so many of our neighbors around us. I find it somewhat interesting that the manner in which the question is stated is asking, are there more than one? Is there more than one God? Yet for many of our neighbors, perhaps the question would be, is there any God at all? And so from one direction comes the attack, or at least the question, is there any God at all that exists? Yet from other directions, there come the statements such as the following, that there are many gods, that all of the religions are basically the same, that there are multiple valid ways to reach God, whether you try to approach him through Islam, if you believe in Allah or whether you believe in the Christian God or whether you believe in a sort of world spirit as in some of the pantheistic religions. This most fundamental tenet of our faith is something that we need to hold onto to preserve and to continue confessing even when it's not popular. even when all around us our neighbors are saying one way or the other that this is not the case. We must hold forth the Christian faith, as part of that Christian faith is the confession that we believe in one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So this evening we will consider that statement that there is but one God only, the living and true God, and then we'll look at a couple of implications that flow from that doctrine. So first consider that there is a God. There is but one only, but there is. This provides an answer to those who are questioning or doubting the existence of a God at all. the most developed view philosophically would be atheism. Atheism which would assert that the non-existence of God. Our age is one in which what we would call metaphysical atheism. Atheism that denies the metaphysical existence of God has gained a great deal of traction and seems to many people to be quite plausible. Even if they haven't been persuaded intellectually, they relate to the world in such a way that sometimes even Christians struggle with this question, is there a God? And if so, why don't I feel? Why is it not immediately obvious to me that God exists? Why do I have to sort of talk myself into belief sometimes? Richard Dawkins has written this statement, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. That is to say, Mr. Dawkins would look at Christians and say, well, you deny the Norse deities, you deny the Greek deities, you deny all of the other deities that people have worshipped throughout all of history. I'm just going one step further. I'm just taking to the logical conclusion what you've already begun and already done 99% of. So how might we respond to a question like this? We have for us Jesus' statement. Here, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord, drawing from the Old Testament, Deuteronomy chapter six, reasserting that most basic teaching, that God's people must confess the unique identity of the Lord as the living and true God. And as we are called to love him with all of our minds, we are also equipped to respond to challenges to the oneness and existence of God. And so we might, for example, recognize that Mr. Dawkins' statement is not logically consistent. The conclusion doesn't flow from the premises. It would be as if I were to say, Well, you deny the existence of East Virginia, I just go one step further and deny the existence of a West Virginia. Or it would be to say that you deny the existence of unicorns, I just go one step further and deny the existence of narwhals. You deny life on other planets in our solar system, I just go one step further and deny that there's any life on Earth. You cannot conclude from the non-existence of a being that does not exist and move to the conclusion that the living and true God does not exist. You cannot conclude that Tom Sawyer as a fictional character disproves the existence of any particular red-haired boy living in Missouri in the 1840s. In other words, we can recognize that the Christian faith, while we hold to this confession that the Lord is one on faith, is also, we have a faith that is intellectually robust and capable of addressing unbelief when we encounter it. And so we are called to use our minds and intellect in the service of our God. Now, in saying that we believe in one God, I do want to make clear that this does not mean we deny the existence of other supernatural created beings. Paul, writing in one of his epistles to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians, deals with the question of idols and food sacrifice to idols. And he says that there are demons behind those idols. And yet we would recognize that in, speaking of these demons, we recognize that these are created beings. These are not beings who exist alongside of God as uncreated, omnipotent, or eternal beings, but rather that they fall well on this side of the line of the creator-creature distinction. And so we, in confessing the existence of one living and true God, we also recognize that there is a spiritual realm inhabited by principalities and powers, and that the so-called gods of the pagan nations really do have behind them demonic entities that might exert an influence upon humans. So that's one direction that this doctrine might be challenged. Another direction, though, is in some ways from the opposite end, which would be pluralism, this idea that there are many gods and it's all basically the same. I believe that all religions lead to God, one might say. Don't all the paths when you go hiking lead to the same mountain peak? It's just that some follows the trail by switchbacks and the other one goes straight up to the top. But don't we all arrive at the same place in the end? Someone might say, can't we just as well be Muslim or Christian or Buddhist or Hindu or neo-pagan or atheist? And don't we all arrive at the same place in the end? Of course, confession of the Christian faith requires us to say no, that there is but one way to the living and true God through his son, Jesus Christ, that we have GPSs in our cars for a reason and on our phones because we know that not all roads lead to the same destination, that there is a specific road that we need to take to get to where we want to go. And the road that leads us to the living and true God, the road that leads us to what we were made for, the road that leads us into the kingdom of God, is Jesus Christ himself, who has come to be the savior of sinners, to die for sinners, and to give them access to the Father. Again, in our country, this sort of pluralism makes this sort of belief in multiple ways to God seem plausible to a lot of people. In the public sphere, all religions are given equal footing, equal opportunity to be expressed and propagated, and no matter how pagan, and no matter how contrary to true religion, And so we must recognize that we are going to encounter neighbors who are going to want to challenge us on this, who are going to want to challenge that there is but one only. And yet this is, when Jesus is asked, what is the greatest commandment? He doesn't just first give the commandment, but he gives a statement which grounds that commandment. There is only one God, there is the Lord, who is the Lord of Israel. Now finally, there is a third danger that, or a third way that belief in the one and only God might be challenged. And that is to confess that there's one God, and perhaps only one God, but to substitute for that one God, not the living and true God, but a generic or vague or unknown God. Again, this is something that we see so much around us on our money. We have written, in God we trust. And often we might hear politicians say, God, bless America. But how likely do you think it is that we would ever hear a politician say, may the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the living and true God, bless America. We are perhaps comfortable within the civic sphere of expressing a belief in a generic deity. But the question is, who is this God? Is this the unknown God that we saw last week? This God that is so nondescript that we might predicate, we might say that he is the God of any or all religion. Or is this specifically the Christian God who has made himself known in Jesus Christ? So this is our calling to confess one God and one God only, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And this confession gives us a foundation for our Trinitarianism as we understand the scriptures, that there is the Son and the Holy Spirit, and we find that the scriptures speak of the Son and Spirit as fully divine, and how do we reconcile this with the monotheism of the rest of the scriptures? And it leads us to the doctrine of the Trinity, which will be developed next week in next week's sermon. But at this point, rather than developing further the doctrine of the Trinity, I would like to stick with our text here and look at some of the implications of the fact that there is but one God only. The scribe has come to Jesus and he has asked him what is the greatest commandment, and Jesus has led off his answer by stating that, Here, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. And then he gets into the commandment itself, the commandment proper. And so rooting this commandment is the oneness of God, but the implication of that is that we are called to love God with the totality of our being. With all of our heart, with all of our soul, with all of our mind, and with all of our strength. And furthermore, that we are to love our neighbor as ourself. and that this moral law that is here expressed has its root and its foundation in the fact that there is one living and true God. And if you take away belief in one God, the living and true God, you also take away what flows from that, morality, love of God and love of neighbor. So, for example, the atheist finds himself bearing a terrible burden. There was one French philosopher of the 20th century who recognized the implication of atheism. He said that men are condemned to be free. Men are condemned to be free if you take away belief in God. And what's meant by that is that there's no longer any objective meaning. That you are not a man who is created in the image of God or a woman who is created in the image of God. You do not have a purpose in life. There is no end towards which you are journeying or striving. And what you are is totally self-constructed. It is totally up to you to make meaning of your life because it lacks any intrinsic meaning of itself. And what a terrible burden that those who reject belief in the one true God must bear. That I have no meaning in everything that I do I must construct by myself. That they have denied and rejected or not found man's chief end to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. That we do have a purpose that's given to us already. and that God has made a way for us to reach this blessed end. And instead, the center is lost. And those who would reject the one true and living God must turn in on themselves and engage in a burdensome process of self-constructed identity. But likewise, in pluralism, we also see that this duty of loving God and neighbor also falls apart, there's no guidance. It leads to doing whatever you feel like doing. Even if there is overlap in some of the moral teachings of various religions, it takes away from the first and greatest commandment to love the Lord, to love the living and true God. And so any religion which might teach you to do right by your neighbor, but which also teaches you to worship a false deity, is one which necessarily violates the first and greatest commandment. So again, belief in the true God as living and true and as the only God provides us a foundation for our ethics and moral teaching. But there is finally a further implication of the one living and true God that our text shows to us, and that's this, that belief in one God as such and belief in a love and an agreement with loving that God with all one's heart, soul, mind, and strength is insufficient for entering the kingdom of God. That monotheism, nakedly speaking, bare monotheism just by itself, in agreement and affirmation, that monotheism requires of us that we should love God with all of our being and to love our neighbor as itself, is not sufficient to enter the kingdom of God. that it may bring us close, that we may not be far from entering, but there is something still further that is needed. The scribe agrees with Jesus' answer, and Jesus sees the scribe and sees that he answers intelligently, and he tells him in verse 34, you are not far from the kingdom of God. The scribe answers that to love God and neighbor is more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices. By this he distinguishes himself from the other scribes and Pharisees who are so attached to the temple that it will lead them to reject Jesus. And this scribe understands that no, there's something more that is entailed with the true worship of God, the true love of God, than just the outward practice of these sacrifices. And so it may seem that he will not stumble over Jesus, and yet simply assenting to these truths doesn't quite bring him all the way home. It doesn't quite bring him into the kingdom. something more is needed. And that is faith in the living and true God as he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. That to love God and to love neighbor, if it is to be what brings us into the kingdom of God as the condition or the requirement for us, is also burdensome. Who can enter the kingdom of God if the prerequisite is that you must have first loved God perfectly with all of your heart, with all of your soul, with all of your mind, with all of your strength, every moment of every day perfectly, and to have loved your neighbor as yourself in every instance? If these things are the condition by which we may enter into the kingdom of God, we might find ourselves close to entering the kingdom, but of itself, those commands do not have the strength to carry us in to the kingdom. Something more, someone more is needed. The someone more that is needed is none other than that one living and true God of whom we have been speaking. Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, come in human flesh to fulfill these very commands. Who in his life loved his father perfectly with the totality of his being. Who with his life loved his neighbor as himself, who loved you as himself, giving his life for you. Perfectly fulfilling all righteousness. so that we might have entrance into the kingdom of God. And so as we vigorously maintain our Christian confession, as we vigorously maintain the Nicene Creed, that we believe in one God, we must not forget the totality of what is essential to the Christian faith, that the one God has revealed himself in his son. and that it is through that son that we come to a true and right knowledge of the father. And it's through that son that we have entrance into the kingdom of God. And so this leaves us in a position where we are able to engage our neighbors, even as they question or deny belief in the one true and living God. We may hold forth to them that God as he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. We may hold forth to them that that life which is obtained in the kingdom of God as a free gift through faith in God's Son. And so let us continue to hold fast to all that we confess as Christians. Belief in the one true and living God and belief Specifically, in Jesus Christ, the Savior, who is of one substance, with the Father and with the Holy Spirit, one God, blessed forever. Amen. Let's pray together. Our God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we do confess you the living and true God, and besides you there is no other. We pray that if there are ever moments of doubt which would overcome the minds of people here, that we would turn again to the scriptures, to you as you have revealed yourself, that we would behold Jesus Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life, the one through whom alone we are able to come to the Father. We pray that you would strengthen our faith. Jesus has called us to believe in God and also to believe in himself. So, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we ask, strengthen our faith, we pray. Help our unbelief. In Jesus' name we ask, amen.