Dr. Dolezal, I was going to ask you if you could answer the next question before I asked it because you just did that. Now, I'll ask the next question. You touched on it for a moment. Here's another one kind of in the pastoral category. You touched on it in your answer just a moment ago. Can something with a beginning become eternal? Is it possible for us as humans to be eternal since we have a start? Will we ever be truly eternal at all? I think you touched on it, but I think there's another pastoral question here. I'll just be quick. I don't want to say eternal in the way that God is. In other words, even in what we call the eternal state, there will, I want to argue, still be movement between the before and the after, so in that strict sense. Meaning, I was talking with a friend, Doug, the other day, and I said, in the resurrected state, do you plan to blink your eyes? Doug doesn't know me a while, so he's used to questions like that. Do you plan to? I plan to. And then in which case, then you could measure the movement between eyes open, eyes closed, eyes open again. In which case, then, there's still something, there's still a chronological movement in my existence in that state, in the outer man at least. But there is a comparative immutability, comparative meaning by a gift of grace, my flesh is going to be raised up incorruptible, not naturally, but by a gift of grace, supernaturally elevated so as not to undergo death again. And my soul also will be raised up in beatitude so that right now virtues come and go and are somewhat Shifty, there I will be given every virtue by grace raised up to the highest level that it can in a creature, and it will remain that way. As I move from grace to glory, that glorious state will have a kind of constancy about it that will, as much as a creature might, begin to approach eternality in the sense of unchangeableness, but not in the absolute, underrived, pure act sense that God is. My friends here are smarter than me. And on the way here this morning, my children started quizzing me on Dr. Dalzell's terms that he's been giving us here to make sure I knew them as well. So you've given me some homework, actually. But with this question, just one thing to add is I think sometimes I hear believers in a popular way saying we enter into eternity. And they begin describing this as though we will be outside of time. We're never outside of time for a simple reason. We still have a birthday. In other words, we came into being at some particular place, some particular time. We say God is eternal. God is outside of time or God's relationship to time is qualitatively different than ours, not just in terms of quantity. And I support everything that Dr. Dahl has all said in terms of our perfect happiness and approaching something that's imitating God in that way, but we never break the divide between creator and creature. Another question for Drs. McGraw and Sanders, or maybe you both want to speak to it. Is it appropriate to pray or to praise one member of the Trinity without reference to the others? Or ought our prayers and praises be directed always to all three members, inclusive?" You don't have a heavenly directory to…? You can get to that. Yeah, this is a great question, and we don't want to be more Trinitarian than the Bible is, is sort of one way to put this rule, right? Like, if you're reading Paul's prayers and you get out your red pen to mark him wrong for not mentioning the Holy Spirit, you realize, okay. Something's gone off track here. So using the biblical pattern of prayer, not just the form of the words, but also all that is taught in scripture. I guest teach in a lot of churches, and I used to really want to sort of obey the Hippocratic oath of theologians and first do no harm when I'm speaking somewhere. I didn't want to do like drive-by theology and mess up people's prayer lives. So I was very cautious, and I would emphasize Trinitarian encouragements to prayer, you know, the listening Father, the interceding Son, and Spirit. And I wouldn't address this question of who should I direct my prayer to, because I didn't want to mess people up. But then one day I decided, like, you know, I'm pretty sure it's just more biblical to pray to the Father in the name of the Son and the power of the Holy Spirit. I'm going to start teaching that in everybody's churches. And if that messes people up, then the pastors can do the sort of triage after I leave. So I'm like, I don't know who that guy was, And I've really embraced that, that if you want your prayer life to reflect biblical patterns most fully, prayer to the Father in the name of the Son is the most appropriate way. Christian prayer is a mediated prayer. communion with God. And so every time you pray in the name of the Son, that is, not in your own name, but in his name, you're rehearsing or reenacting the sort of mediated character of prayer. In one of my books I call that praying with the grain, right? You can pet a cat with the grain or against the grain. Both are fun. Against the grain is like pushing against the direction it's naturally going. All Christian prayer has this mediated character to it. And to pray to the Father in the name of the Son and the power of the Spirit is to go with that grain. Now, you can pray to the Son, of course, but even when you're praying to the Son, notice that you're secretly doing it in Jesus's name, because he is just as holy, and you don't approach the Son of God in your own authority, right? So similarly, lots could be said here. I would just say that in general, you're trying to make your prayer life take on the proportions of biblical prayer. Yeah, and the only thing I would add to that is, I think sometimes we're asking the question in terms of which person do I address, how does that relate to the whole Trinity and worshipping each as God. But I think an aspect here also is in terms of the Trinity itself, you do have an order of subsistence. You have God of none, God of the Father, God of the Father and the Son. And often the Bible teaches us better theology in our devotion than we know. So we learn to understand later what we're actually practicing. So if we're praying to the Father through the Son by the Spirit, we're actually worshiping and depending upon all three by praying that way, because we're depending on the appropriate works of each divine person. I'd say one other thing about prayer. If you spend time in a lot of different kinds of churches, you'll hear a lot of different kinds of prayers. And I often hear the prayer, you've probably been around this at some point, that starts, Father, thank you for loving us so much that you died on the cross for us. I'm like, ah, I need an air horn or something. I hate to interrupt your prayer, but stop it. Or you'll hear like, Jesus, thank you so much that you sent your son to die for us. Like, OK. Now, I will get out my red pen and mark that wrong, that's just an incorrect prayer. But I can also recognize that what's happening there, not what's being said, I can never defend those sentences, but what's happening is actually that person praying is entering into fellowship with God and their mind is going on a kind of a journey, they're on like spiritual itinerary that begins with the Father and moves to the Son and moves to the Holy Spirit. They just didn't update their sentence. Right? They started thinking about the Father, and then the work of the Son occurred to them, and it all came out. But they didn't restart the sentence, so they said horrible things that get an F-minus on the theology test, and are not correct. You know? Thank you, Jesus, for sending your Son. That's just not right, ever. But the actual act of prayer that's going on, I can squint and say like, yeah, that's a Christian praying. Now, how do you get your prayers back into shape? You know, some formal, being around good prayers helps. Some formal instruction in how to pray helps, so that you can pour out your heart naturally and say the things that are occurring to your mind as you commune with God, and that they would also come out, you know, grammatically correct and theologically right. A related question from the stack is this one. How much of the doctrine of the Trinity ought a Christian to know, or maybe more narrowly, does a Christian need to know, maybe even to be a Christian? I think the doctrine of the Trinity functions to identify what and who we mean by God. And so in terms of its function as a critical principle in Christian life, you've got to understand enough of it in biblical terminology directly to know who you mean by what you say when you say God. So Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God. You can get a long way without ever raising important questions about the status of the divine being or the divine essence. You can say a lot of things without that ever coming up. You're always kind of on the hook to be able to answer the sort of question you can pose to yourself in a certain sense. So like, if it never occurs to you to wonder if the Son is of the same essence with the Father, Great, I'm not sure that ever occurred to Irenaeus of Lyon either. But once the question comes up, you've got to get it right. And so you can kind of obligate yourself to higher levels of understanding by the amount of curiosity and interest you have. But the main point is to be able to identify God from false gods. Yeah, and also with that, I think it's important for us to remember a couple of things. One, with a question like this, sometimes we're asking, what's the bare minimum that I need to know and still be a Christian? And I know we need to ask that question at some level. It's not a great question from that standpoint for us as Christians, because which of us wants to be satisfied at that level? We want to know God as well as we can know him. I think another aspect, though, is that the gospel is not a list of benefits that we get from God. but it's the triune God who saves us and whom we know and who offers himself to us. Just recently I was doing a communicates class in our church, mostly children somewhere between 10 to 14 and in that range. and basically appealed to baptism and said, well, what does baptism teach us? God needs to be our Father, Jesus needs to be our Savior, and the Spirit dwell in our hearts. And we sort of start there and then start trying to unravel who is this God. and we understand more deeply what we believe. So the Trinity is absolutely vital because God is vital to the gospel, and the gospel is about God, but we should always be deepening in our understanding of God as well. Another question. The Westminster Shorter Catechism states that the believer after death, their body still united to Christ, does rest in the grave until the resurrection, yet we know the believer's body is subject to corruption. Can you comment on the difference between the believer's sojourn in the grave and that of Christ? And in light of the difference, can you comment on the apparent difference between the believer's resurrection and Christ's resurrection? Yeah, I'm not sure how much I can say about that. If you start thinking through the sort of details of what physical resurrection for each of us is going to involve, then you do have to take into account decay and a completed state of corruption. And that poses some sort of scenarios that, you know, I guess it's worth thinking through, though in a kind of speculative way. I want to say that the fact that the incarnate son Dying but not seeing corruption in his physical body is something that God seems to have appointed as a fitting way for salvation by incarnation and atonement to happen. Fitting rather than necessary. There's a set of things that happen in the incarnation that you're tempted to say, it had to be that way. It had to be on a cross. It had to happen on the, you know, in such and such a timeline. And a lot of theologians have said, well, we don't want to say have to, it's more that it was appropriate that God attached means and ends in such a way that this is a good display of both the full experience of death on the part of the incarnate son and his preservation and integrity that somehow is appropriate to show who he is. And I think that's what we're dealing with, Jesus rising on the third day as opposed to us rising on the last day. The only other thing I'd say here is some fun reading sometime is Augustine's City of God. It's a whale of a book. It's 1,500 pages. But towards the end, in the last three or four books, he decides to just let himself ask every possible question you could think of about the resurrection. It's as if he's six years old, but incredibly brilliant. Because he just asked like, okay, let's say someone's a Christian. They die and are eaten by a cannibal who then becomes a Christian and dies. They're both buried. On judgment day, who gets the meat? Or people die at sea and their bodies are thoroughly lost and dissolved and eaten by fishies. How does God regather that? And he just is unafraid of going, well, I'm not sure, but let's talk about that. Eight pages later, you're like, huh, I guess that's how it could be. So it's actually kind of refreshing. You read dozens and dozens of pages of this sort of hypothetical speculative, like, there's a lot of bodies to account for. How are we going to do that? And that's the same, he'll just pose all these questions like, well, let's say people die at lots of different ages. Do they rise from the dead at lots of different ages? Are there like risen two-year-olds and 90-year-olds? And are the 90-year-olds trapped in their 90-year-old resurrected body from now on? Like, how's that work? And he talks it over for another 10 pages and goes, I bet we're all 30. Next question. Dr. Cook, in light of the impassibility of God, what effect did the cross have upon God? So as we look at the cross, we see in particularly the person of Christ two natures. And Christ, with respect to his human nature, was undergoing all the sufferings of the physical turmoil, the psychological turmoil, the spiritual turmoil. And as confession says, that's one of the reasons why the mediator had to be both God and man, because only the divine nature could uphold the human nature in going through that in the one person of Christ. But with regard to the divine nature, What we know from scripture is that God does not change, that he is completely outside of time. And so I think we have to affirm there for theological orthodoxy that when the cross was occurring, God in his divine nature, the three persons in the divine essence, were not undergoing suffering, and it was not moving them in any way that would imply change. And the mysterious thing is you start to work out the metaphysics of divine eternity and the cross is that we think about the cross from the standpoint of before, during, and after because all of our thought as human beings is temporally indexed. But for God, in the punctum stans, the eternality of his being, one cannot think of how God interacts with the cross from the standpoint of before, during, and after, because that does not apply to his being. And so this is pushing me all irrevocably and quickly towards one central word, mystery. It's not to invoke that and just say, so there's no answer. When Christ gave the cry of dereliction, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? We can say that Christ was suffering in his human nature, but the full import of what that might mean or not mean, I think we have come to the edge of the ability of the human mind to be able to comprehend And rather than trying to give full answers, I think we should in turn move to doxology and praising God rather than trying to work all the details out. But I think we do say for orthodoxy, when the cross was going on in God's divine nature, there was no change, there was no time, and there was no suffering. But praise be that the second person of the Godhead without change assumed a human nature so that he could suffer on our behalf, so that God was both not suffering, but also the suffering to the second person of the Trinity was happening in the human nature. I'll just footnote on that, fully agreed. I think we need to be aware of kind of the Jürgen Moltmann approach that the cross somehow shattered or disrupted the Trinity as such. And I think that sounds bad on the face of it because it's as bad as it sounds. But it sometimes does play out sermonically a little more opaquely, it'll sound something like, From all eternity, so immediately we're into the eternal triune relations. From all eternity, the Father and the Son have been in perfect unbroken fellowship. And then the fateful word, until. And then the until is Good Friday, and it's intruding itself into the eternal relationship of the prostantheon, the Word was God and the Word was with God, and whatever the mystery of that eternal triune union of persons is, somehow something in history on a hill intruded itself to disrupt that. And I want to be careful not to say that. In the cry of dereliction, he is still the son of the Father's love, eternally generated of the Father in that moment, and that what's happening in his human nature is not intruding itself in any way into or disrupting those triune relations. That's the mystery, though, of the Incarnation, and you're right, that's the word for it. I think we have a hard time thinking of the Son subsisting in two natures. In fact, the early church struggled with whether to say from two natures or into natures. And it's in two natures. Chalcedon was right to say it that way, but it gets difficult for us because the temptation is to think, well, He's one person, so He can only do one thing at a time. So if He's one person and He's suffering, that's got to affect Somehow everything that he's doing, it's a kind of operational monophysitism. It really is, I know, you're like, you knew it, you knew that's what it was, that he can only operate according to one nature at a time. So if he's dying, that's it. And if he's sustaining all things by the word of his power, that's it. And I've said this in other context before, it's not like Christ being one person has to choose whether to wear the God trousers or the man trousers. I may have said that here a couple of years ago, and that He's operating according to one nature at a time. As He dies on the cross, He upholds all things by the word of His power in unbroken love with His Father at that self-same moment. Therein lies that mystery. But we would want to be careful not to let the cross intrude itself into the eternal ontological trinity. It's because we're not far from Good Friday and Easter. I could just, one clue or kind of a tip, and you can kind of think this out for yourself. What Jesus says from the cross is, my God, why have you forsaken me? Of course, he's making his own and really crying out the protest of David in Psalm 22. Notice that when preachers kind of get carried away and want to do this Moltmann sort of version of it, they'll take out the My God language and replace it with Father-Son language. And it's just worth asking, why are you going explicitly Trinitarian there at a passage which is all about the God-human relation? My God, why have you forsaken me? If you keep yourself from bringing in the Trinitarian language and putting it sort of, as if Jesus cried, Father, why have you forsaken me? Which is not what he said. What you're doing is obscuring the fact that there's a divine human encounter happening on the cross. And that's what we already knew, right? It's not the story of how the Trinity broke and then patched things up. It's the story of how the one God broke sin, operating together as Father, Son, and Spirit. It's just as soon as you slip away from that my God, my God language, you're kind of on this trail and being magnetized towards that. A new question. How does God's anger fit within the coalescing doctrine of his blessedness or happiness? And I had another question that also asked about wrath as I think Watson called it God's alien. work, the idea of God's wrath and his blessedness, how do these come together? Yeah, that's worth asking. The Baptist theologian John Gill, I mentioned, treats the doctrine of blessedness as kind of a control on other doctrines. Like he's so convinced of the importance of this concept of divine blessedness. that he'll actually look through other biblical statements and say, these divine statements, these self-revelations, are to be understood as more literal or more metaphorical based on whether they violate the idea of divine blessedness. So he'll get to something like wrath and say, if you're tempted to read the wrath of God as an excitement or agitation of anger by which he lashes out, having been provoked into a state of that, you should know, I understand there are sentences in the Bible that you could take that way, but since we know that blessedness is true, we know that that must be being stated more analogically or more metaphorically, I guess I should say. So that's one, basically what I'm saying is John Gill recommends using blessedness as a kind of a control filter on your interpretation of some of the other attributes. That's one thing I would want to say. On the language about the strange work of God, is that, am I getting that right? Is that, yeah. I'd actually like to hear about how that fits in the 10 attributes. You know, whether those are kind of on an equal playing field there. Obviously they're all true and true to the depths of God. But you'd notice a difference there. how God describes his mercy and forgiveness, and how God describes his wrath. I'm as risky for me to speak as I'll confess. Dr. Sanders ruined me, and I'm trying to hold it together after his Augustine paraphrases. So Fred Sanders' next book will be The Message of the City of God. And so I eagerly anticipate it. Yeah, in terms of the wrath of God, maybe one thing To piggyback on here in light of what Dr. Sanders just said and other speakers have said, God is simple, meaning God is his attributes and is not composed of parts, doesn't become better or worse or add things or subtract from what he is. But older theologians have also spoken about God's attributes as absolute and relative, among other things. There's different ways of classifying the attributes. Everybody that comes up with a system of classifying the attributes gives the qualifiers that none of this works perfectly, and it breaks down somewhere. But there is a sense in which we could say, for instance, God's Goodness and righteousness are absolute in the sense that whether or not there's creation or outward manifestation of these attributes in any way, shape, or form, that just describes God absolutely in and of himself. Something like wrath is relative and not in the sense that God somehow takes on a new attribute. but who and well really what God is in this case expresses itself differently in relationship to sinners deserving wrath than it does if we just consider God an abstraction in and of himself. So I've thought at least that distinction of absolute and relative is helpful to an extent with this kind of question. I think that's a great summary of relative and absolute, and I think we should say with that that God's wrath is actually a manifestation of God's love. that it is because of God's love of his own holiness that he opposes that which opposes his holiness. And so the manifestation of wrath or divine wrath is not something else than divine love. It's actually divine love manifested in negative mode, if I can say it like that. This is because of his super-abundant perfect love for himself and his own holiness that he manifests himself in opposition against that which opposes his loveliness and holiness. So in that respect, then you don't get into a kind of schizophrenic, you know, love-hate, kind of in an Empedocles sort of what makes the world go round, love and hate, these opposite forces pulling each other, and that's really what gets God worked up is the love and hate is really the the little bit of chaos at the heart of God, which I've heard said before, not by anyone on this panel, just so we're clear, but that in fact the wrath of God isn't something else. It's actually the same thing. It is the love of God being manifested in holy opposition to that which opposes what is righteous and good and lovely. A pastoral question. Someone must have quoted some Puritans. Puritans definitely have a reputation, which you'll hear in this question. I sometimes don't even feel saved when I read writers like the Puritans. because they push me to bemoan and bewail and live in constant sorrow for sin. I do repent when I know I sin, but shouldn't I live rejoicing that Christ forgave my sins? I feel like Luther in the confessional. I'm tempted to phone a friend and call Dr. Beeky out of the audience, because he is here now. But as you're saying that, A couple of comments or thoughts come to my mind. I remember years ago, a friend of mine said he had been reading the Puritans for years and had almost the same kind of reaction of a very negative approach to sin and what we often call morbid introspection, that type of thing. And then he stopped reading them for a while. The Lord did work in his life. He went back and read the same authors again later. And in his case, he said, I think there was something wrong with me because now I read them differently. And I'm not saying if you struggle with the Puritans, there's something wrong with you. That's not my point. But I think sometimes we can read the same thing two different ways depending on, for example, How do we view our mortification of sin in relation to our union with Christ? Do we start from the standpoint that I have died to sin? I am alive in Jesus Christ. The spirit of Christ is in my heart, making me like the image of God's son. And in that sense, I'm not afraid of the conviction of sin because the Lord is using that to shape me after the image of Christ. But if we lose that Christological focus, then I think, I hate to use the abused term legalism, but we lapse into something like that in this case. The other thing to keep in mind is that sometimes I think we tend to treat the Puritans as some sort of monolithic group and they're all clones of each other and they all had exactly the same ideas and emphases and things like that. Remember that as much as the Lord may bless us through older authors like this, They're real people in a real time. One author gets obsessed with antinomianism in his region, and everything he talks about is anti-antinomianism. You know, another author goes the other direction and only talks about justification. And, you know, for those of us who are in presbyteries and multiple ministers and elders together, I mean, I think I just have to say, sound familiar. You know, you talk to people with the same confession, same views, and we just have different emphases because of what affects us and we're real people. I think the Puritans are that way too. So read them as you would other authors, charitably and prayerfully, seeking to benefit. Is it not in some degree foolish to ask to see God's glory when we cannot approach or contain the majesty of His holiness? If Moses could not see it, how could we? Okay, I'll read it again. Is it not in some degree foolish to ask to see God's glory when we cannot approach or contain the majesty of His holiness? If Moses could not see it, how could we? Well, I would say it's never foolish to do what we see in God's Word. And so Moses makes this request and God honors that request. by responding to it. He wants us to know him and he wants us to grow in the knowledge and grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. So we're never to be content with where we are. Will we ever know God fully? Will we ever understand his glory fully? Absolutely not. But we should never be content with where we are. We should always want to know more and pursue that with all our strength. I think this is where... I believe in one of Dr. Sanders' talks, the issue of the beatific vision comes in as well, that now we walk by faith and not by sight. So if what the question entails is should we desire to see God's glory fully in this life and in some visible manifestation? No, but we do read things like 1 Peter 1 that Christ whom we've not seen, we love and we rejoice with joy and expressible and full of glory. We also have the hope in 1 John 3 that when we do see him in heaven, we will be like him for we'll see him as he is. And in a sense, if we're talking about show me your glory in that way, we can never get enough. In fact, that's the main reason we want to go to heaven, is we want to be free of sin. We want to be like Christ. We want to know God and enjoy God as fully as we possibly can with resurrected bodies, fullness of strength and vigor. And so in that sense, the Christian's prayer is always, show me your glory. Show me more of your glory in the face of your son now. and let this give way to the full sight of your glory in heaven. So that is a desire that should impel us, and I think that was a large part of what we heard in the sermon today. I think there's a little, the second part of the question, if Moses could not see it, how could we? I don't know if we've maybe fully got to that. Dr. Dalzell. I wasn't going to go for that part of it, now I feel like I'm on the hook for it. The ministry of the Spirit is with more glory than even the law. The law was given by angels, let me just put a word in for them again, to Moses. He was on the mountain in the assembly of God's holy entourage and was given the law and it was with glory and it shone so brightly. in the afterglow on his face, that when he came down, they dropped a veil upon his face, because to see the afterglow of what, it's interesting, the law is good, but Paul calls it a ministry of death in 2 Corinthians 3, and he says the ministry of death, which was good, by the way, to drive you unto Christ, that the ministry of death was with glory, how much more? And so there is a real sense in which in Christ Jesus, in the word incarnated, The very glorious God himself tabernacled among us in the flesh and opens up a way of approach for us that is, and let's just use the language of Hebrews, better than the law, better than the law. And the one...now I get it. I think that's how I would handle the second half of that question. But let me circle to the thing I was going to say. Also, the word comprehension was used. And in neither case did Moses comprehend, nor will we. And so if you read theologies of the beatific vision, even the most superlative accounts and speculative accounts of the beatific vision, like something you might find in Thomas Aquinas, and maybe you wouldn't agree with everything he argues is entailed in the beatific vision, but he also is quite emphatic that whatever that is, it isn't comprehension. He'll ask questions like, do the angels in heaven comprehend God, though they see him immediately before his throne? And his answer is always no. And it's not because they need more grace, it's because the infinite or the finite cannot contain the infinite. And so there is even, there will always be this infinite beyondness, even when we see him face to face. And I think the challenge to our hearts is, do I think of that as a source of frustration or a source of wonder and awe and adoration? I commend you the second response. Okay, a new question. A new topic. How are we to understand the concept of ex nihilo creation as it relates to the essence and character of God? Is the creation something organically new with no root in prior substance of God, or is it something of an extension of God in Him we live, move, and have our being? I want to say not an extension of God, only because of the panentheistic overtones of that. But that is a great question, Act 1728, in Him we live, move, and have our being. I think the idea is not that there is an ontological identity of us with God, but that He is the immediate source of all of our movement and all of our action, and even more deeply, of our existence. The Christian doctrine of creation is actually not a doctrine of mediated creation. That's what you find in schemes like Neoplatonism, where the source of all things isn't actually immediately related to the world. Whereas in the Christian doctrine, God is the immediate cause of the existence of all things. And I think that that text is really getting at the fact that God, like how interior is God to you? I would like to say, well, how interior is your being to you? pretty interior, like all the way down. And so the idea is God is near to you in the fullness of his being as your very existence, not as a continuation of his existence, but as his immediate and proper effect, given that his name is I Am, making you to be as the effect most proper to his nature, and also establishes the immediateness of his presence, but without an ontological blending of nature, so to speak. Yeah, and I think it's important in light of what Dr. Zalazal is saying that there's a one-way relationship here. What I mean is God fills heaven and earth. Heaven and earth do not fill God. So in other words, God is a creator of all things. God is inescapably present in all things because he's beyond all things as well as omnipresent. And yet at the same time, we are dependent upon God. God's being is not in any way dependent on us. One thing about the Christian doctrine of creation, ex nihilo or from nothing, is it's a negative construction, right? If you ask, what did God make everything out of? You could answer, well, he made it out of pre-existing material that he found laying around. from nothing says, no, that's not how that works, because that doesn't make any sense. He didn't make it out of anything. Another answer you could give is he made it out of himself. The doctrine of ex nihilo says, no, also that doesn't count. He didn't take some God stuff and outsource it. So in one sense, the doctrine of creation from nothing starts by not saying anything very substantive or constructive. It's like just not out of pre-existing material, not out of himself. If you start treating nothing as like the something from which God made everything, then you're going to have a problem, right? Because then you're going to pose yourself the question like, how did God get a hold of the nothing and transform it into a something? But like that's, you know, you're doing math with zero and you've got to be careful how you handle the signifier zero. It's nothing. Have you seen the Oxford shorter guide to nothing? I like the Oxford shorter guides. How short is it? So, well, that's interesting because it's 160 pages. And there are words on the pages. So I think this is one of those equivocations where when we say nothing, we really mean actually nothing, not a weird, rarefied something. Yeah, I once put on a test the question, when God made everything out of nothing, where did he get the nothing? Students did not appreciate the question. If God's eternality is true, being outside of time and having the fullness of his blessed life ever before him without succession of moments, how is it that God can begin to act in time in a meaningful way? I'll say things till you're ready to give the right answer. Well, you were late, and so I thought you had a penalty question coming your way. I do apologize for being late. I'm just kidding. No, that's just on my conscience now. Yeah, so it certainly seems like I'm going to take a step back from the incarnation and just talk about maybe the second most important thing God ever did, the exodus from Egypt. You know, it's a crucial event by which God identifies himself narratively later on, like which God am I? The God who brought you out of Egypt. It just seems it seems self-evident to us that it must be the case that God had a time before he brought Israel out of Egypt, then he brought Israel out of Egypt, then after that, he was the God who had brought Israel out of Egypt, and that this was a major event in his timeline. That presupposition just sort of seems to be built into our understanding of talking about the living God carrying out a powerful act in history. But the more you tease it out, the more you think, well, that just doesn't make any sense at all, that God had this like pre-Exodus self, and then he said, well, I remember back before I did the Exodus, I was a younger God then. Just like the more you spell it out, the more you realize it can't be true. This can't be a reversible relationship whereby God is sort of in his own time and dips into our own time. I'm just saying that that model can't be right. Somehow the eternal God has to also be the living God who acts in history, but not in, I'm missing some key language here from the scholastics, but not in a way that the relation is equally binding in both directions. It's an incommensurable relation between eternity and time. And I would want to say in divine action, the newness does not lie in God the actor, it lies in the effect acted upon or the result. So the newness lies in the realm of the effect. Can there be time and newness in the effects without there being a corresponding newness in the effector? That is to say, let me say it very technically and then see if I can work my way out of it. The agent, is the agent necessarily changed when the agent produces newness outside itself? And I think there's an unwritten assumption sometimes that if God creates something new, there's got to be a corresponding newness of creating in himself. What I want to say is that God's action in himself is a timeless act of agency. The time frame actually shows up in that which is acted upon or produced by it. There is an underlying, though, supposition, which is that every agent as an agent is necessarily changed in itself when it produces change outside itself. And I want to say that before that makes theological mischief, it's actually a philosophical mistake. Agents qua agent, for those of you who paid the extra, I'll just give you this. The agent qua agent, the agent as an agent is not changed by its acts of agency. When I do new things, it's not because I'm a doer that I'm changed, it's because I wasn't a doer before. It's actually not because I'm an agent, it's because I'm a patient that I'm changing. So that agents aren't changed because they change things, they're changed because they're incomplete agents who have to become the agents they weren't before. If God isn't incomplete in any way, isn't lacking in the actuality of being, then there's nothing about his producing changes that requires a corresponding change in him, the producer. I'll stop there, though. I won't do more than that. One more question, and then we're going to close with prayer, and I think it's right at time. What is the beatific vision, and why is it important to the Christian? I introduced it, so just a definition. Vision in the sense of a sight, something that you see, and beatific has that word blessed in it, and making. So it's a sight of something so blessed that it makes you blessed. theological term describing the encounter with or knowledge of God that brings about a transformation in us as knowers. As pilgrims on the way, we have little moments where we see something like that, where we learn something about God that transforms who we are, where we have a a life-changing encounter with God and say, now that I know this experientially about who God is and what God is, I have been made different by that knowledge. Heaven is that, but to the ultimate degree that it is possible for creatures. A sight of something as directly as possible and as deeply as possible that is transforming of the one who sees. I wonder, Fred, would you distinguish between the beatific vision as seen with the resurrected body and the beatific vision as seen by the soul? Because I think sometimes we think, beatific vision, how am I going to see God because God doesn't have a surface for me to look at? So would you make that distinction? Yes, and I want to preface this by saying you've almost certainly thought more about this doctrine than I have. I haven't really gotten around to spending a lot of time on it, but yeah, there's something better about... final eschatology, like cosmic eschatology, when the whole world gets to where it's going, as opposed to personal eschatology and the intermediate state. To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, so when a Christian dies, they are in the presence of Christ. They are having, I don't know the terms for this, but they're having a beatific vision. But they're having a non-embodied encounter with the presence of God, which is glorifying in some way. But we're still, that's the intermediate state. It's between your personal exit from your biographical timeline as an embodied person until you're re-embodied. So that resurrection encounter with God about which I don't know much more to say, like what do we see? How does that work? I could do some more guessing if you want, but I do think that that has to be greater, because that's the actual goal. Intermediate state, we do exist in a disembodied way in the presence of God upon death, but that's not the final plan. That's an intermediate state. Since I'm one of the few people up here that hasn't cited Aquinas yet, this seems like a good time. I do like Aquinas' idea that we are body-soul creatures, and the soul basically knows and sees through the instrumentality of the body, and the soul being the form of the body. we can't fully enjoy God without resurrection. So, you know, in a sense, putting it in a more popular way, it's like the saints in heaven see more than you do, but they sell blurred vision. So they see better than we can now, but they can't see as well as a human being can with a body and a soul. And so with resurrection only, we're fully restored. We fully enjoy God as much as a creature can. I think that's helpful, at least holding body and soul together. I think it also goes to the issue of what will the outer man resurrected in heaven see as far as a body with a surface? I want to say the resurrected Christ in whatever supersedes his transfiguration, which was probably just a foretaste of coming attractions. That's what the outer man will see with the flesh and maybe the eyes of the heart contemplate the triune God with a new clarity. and immediateness never approaching comprehension, and that those things sync up together, and that that's the complete beatific vision beatifying us inner and outer, that would be a way to come at it. Okay, well, thank you to all of our speakers for answering those questions. I've been asked to let you know, well, first of all, it's the end of the Q&A, dinner's ready, so you can go straight from here to there. And what we're going to do now is give thanks to God for his good provision and then go on to continue fellowship in our meal together. Let's pray. Lord, our gracious God, we pray that you would be pleased to help us by your word and spirit to think rightly about you. We pray that you would show us your ways, O Lord, and teach us your paths, that you would lead us in your truth and teach us. For you are the God of our salvation, and on you we wait all the day. Lord, we pray for your blessing on our continued gathering, the preaching of your word tonight, that you'd feed us with the bread of heaven, our Lord Jesus Christ. We ask that you'd also satisfy us with the good gifts of food and drink around these tables in fellowship in Christ. Lord, as we think on you, we think on our own sins, and we ask for forgiveness and mercy, for blessing, and we offer our thanks, all in Jesus' name, amen.