esteemed members of Emanuel Baptist Church, friends and visitors, seminarians, professors and pastors listening by radio in Burma. Before I begin this evening's address I must tell you how honored I feel to have been asked by the ministerial staff of this church to bring this short series of addresses on the attributes of God that I understand to be ascriptions to God that God's self-revelation in Holy Scripture declares are true of Him. I want to express my appreciation publicly for the invitation particularly to speak to the Men's Conference Because I think for some years now the Church of Jesus Christ has been undergoing a process of feminization that is not healthy. Just before I was ordained to the gospel ministry in 1957, my mother gave me wise counsel. Son, she said, build your ministry around men. Make your appeal to them. Don't cater to the women. Get the men and their wives and children will come with them. And I have done that or tried to do that to this very day. In my opinion, however, too many pastors have not. The typical U.S. congregation draws an adult crowd that is 61% female and 39% male. On any given Sunday, 13 million more adult women are in attendance than men. On any given Sunday, 25% of married, church-going women will be worshiping without their husbands. Midweek activities draw 70 to 80% women. Only one-third of American men attend church, many just to please their wives or mothers or girlfriends. Too many of them fail to see any value in church attendance. As many as 90% of the boys being raised in church today will abandon the church by their 20th birthday, many never to return. So the church must do more in its outreach to men. And this men's conference I see as a step in that direction. But I challenge the leadership of the church to strategize about how you may reach even more men than you have. And I have some suggestions to make to the pastors if they're interested in doing so. Now I want to ask you all to pray for me and to trust God with me that by this series of addresses he will bless his word about himself above all that we could ask or think. and that as his word goes forth it will not return to him empty without accomplishing what he desires. To him then will go all the glory and that is as it should be. So let us pray together. Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, I thank you for your precious and fallible word revelation to us of your divine nature and perfections. Grant us ears truly to hear that revelation this evening and tomorrow morning on Lord's Day morning. Remove the scales from our eyes that we may behold wondrous things out of your law. Open our hearts to believe and to love your truth. Enable me as one who professes to be a scribe in the kingdom of God to bring forth treasures both new and old from your word. For the enduring blessing of these your people and for the infinitely worthy cause of Jesus Christ. And may these men be so captivated by the beauty and glory of the God who has revealed himself in Christ that they will feel that theirs will be a life of woe if they do not know him better and proclaim him and tell others about him. And I pray all of this for the glory of Jesus and in his name. Amen. Let's begin with a short introduction to the series itself. As I begin this series of addresses on the attributes of God, the God of Holy Scripture, that I'm entitling, Behold Your God, based upon Isaiah's prophetic injunction to preachers of the gospel to make Him known, let me first take a few minutes and give you what, in my opinion, is the primary reason such a topic is absolutely essential for pastors, for seminarians, and for men of the Church. All of you are giving your lives in one way or another for the gospel ministry. All of you are asking your wives and families to make sacrifices in order that you may be involved in a ministry acceptable to God and that will bring everlasting glory to Him. You seminarians here have, I imagine, the confident expectation that you will be successful ministers and teachers of the gospel. That's fine, and that too is as it should be. But the Bible has a lot to say about the ingredients that go into making a church and a man approved of God. Leaving aside at this time the regenerating, justifying, adopting, sanctifying, and glorifying work that only God himself can do in bringing one to faith in Christ and nurturing one in his spiritual growth, works incidentally that he does for all believers, not just for the men of the church, not just for pastors. There are additional measures that men who are preparing for the ministry and ministers and lay elders and so on must take in order to have a fruitful ministry that will know the blessing of God. And one of these measures, if not the primary one, is the acquisition of a true, deep, and systematic knowledge of the God of Holy Scripture. In his article, The Indispensableness of Systematic Theology to the Preacher, Benjamin Warfield relates that Professor Flynn of Edinburgh, in closing his opening lecture to his class now many years ago, took the occasion to warn his students of what he perceived to be an imminent danger. There was a growing tendency, Professor Flint said, to deem it of primary importance that they should enter upon the ministry accomplished preachers, and of only secondary importance that they should be scholars, or thinkers, or theologians. It is not so, he is reported as saying, that great or even good preachers are formed. They form themselves before they form their style of preaching. Substance with them precedes appearance instead of appearance being a substitute for substance. They learn to know the truth before they think of presenting it. They acquire a solid base for the manifestation of their love of souls through a loving, comprehensive, absorbing study of the truth which saves souls. In these winged words, is outlined the case for the indispensableness of systematic theology for the preachers and for the men of the Church. It is summed up in the proposition that it is through the truth that souls are saved, that it is accordingly the primary business of the preacher to present this truth to men, and that it is consequently his fundamental duty to become himself possessed of this truth. You see, my brothers, both Scripture as well as all human experience declare that a person's behavior in the long run corresponds with his beliefs, and humanly speaking is determined by them. Paul realized this as evidenced by the fact that in all of his letters, his summons to Christians to a high and holy walk are preceded by and grounded in the proclamation of sound doctrine that logically inspires and compels that walk. This points up the necessity for every man who would become an expert builder in the church to impart sound doctrine to those whose souls are under his care. But then how equally necessary it is in order to do this that the one who would indoctrinate others with the given body of truth should acquire a mastery of that same body of truth himself. For it will never be true that a mutilated gospel produces mutilated lives. And mutilated lives are positive evils. Whatever the preacher may do, his hearers will not do without a system of belief. And in their attempt to frame one for the government of their lives out of the fragments of truth which the indifferent preacher will grant them, is it any wonder if they should go fatally astray? It is not given to one who stands in the pulpit to decide whether or no he shall teach. Whether or no he shall communicate to others a system of belief which will form lives and determine destinies, it is in his power only to determine what he shall teach, what system of doctrine he shall press upon the acceptance of men, by what body of tenets he will seek to mold their lives and to inform their devotions. And this is but another way of saying that the systematic study of divine truth is the most indispensable preparation for the pulpit ministry and for all of the ministries of the Church. Only as the several truths to be presented are known in their relations can they be proclaimed in their right proportions and so taught as to produce their right effects on the soul's life and growth. As you preachers preach from your pulpits and as you men teach from your classroom lecterns as the months and years go by, you are not just to give your people pieces of the puzzle that make up the meta-narrative or big picture on the puzzle box of Holy Scripture. You know what I mean. You have all known preachers who preach a sermon one Sunday on Zacchaeus, a sermon the following Sunday on the Genesis flood, the third sermon the following Sunday on circumcision, and so on, whatever catches their fancy. And never do they make any effort to show how these biblical puzzle pieces contribute to the meta-narrative or big picture of Scripture. But you are called by God to give your people and your classes, over time, the big picture. You are not to preach or teach haphazardly with no rhyme or reason, week in or week out on the biblical topics that you happen to like or that just tickle your fancy. You should preach and teach with a plan and have it as your goal to make the people of your congregations, each and every one of them, systematic theologians. And the surest way to do that is by preaching sermon series on great biblical and doctrinal themes and by expository teaching on the whole counsel of God through whole books of scripture and relating what you say expositionally to the Bible's big picture. Occasionally I have reminded the congregations I pastor that historically, Presbyterian congregations, unwilling to suffer theologically foolish preaching lightly, have rarely called ignorant pastors to their pulpits. And that is right and proper. But then I pointed out to them that a theologically literate ministry will never tolerate an ignorant laity either. I expected them through my pulpit ministry to grow in their knowledge of God so that they could in turn correctly minister to others. In sum, I expected them to become systematic theologians. And in this present context, this is just to say that the foundation of all true knowledge of God must be a clear mental apprehension of God's perfections as revealed in Holy Scripture. I would even contend that more than any other topic in these times, pastors need to introduce their congregations to the one living and true God of Holy Scripture because nothing is more needful for God's people in this day of rampant theological illiteracy than to know what their God is really like. For all of our problems and the respective solutions to them are ultimately theological. Therefore, a true knowledge of God is indispensable to our soul's eternal health and to a sound philosophy of life here and now. So I am praying that we will all grow spiritually as we think about the God who is really there, the God who has spoken to us his word from another world and who after all is truly the ultimate who's who. So pastors and pastors-to-be and laymen, covenant with God to learn all you can about him from his inscripturated revelation through this series of addresses and then resolve to preach and to teach what you learn for the improvement of the health and the equipping of his children, for those good works that God himself has foreordained that they should do. And while it will ever be the case that it is God alone who gives the increase, bathe your entire labor for him in your fervent prayer to him, that you may be used both to plant his word and to water it in the souls of needy people. When you do that, your sermons and your classroom teachings will become arrows shot from the tense bowstring of conviction, and they will hit the mark every time. Now above me and behind me is the fourth question of the shorter catechism, what is God? And the answer to that question is God is of spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. We will begin tonight with that God is a Spirit phrase. So would you turn in your Bibles to John 4, 23 through 25. John 4, 23 through 25. There we read, the hour is coming, Jesus declared, and now is when the true worshipers, which implies that there are false worshipers, that when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. For the Father is seeking such ones to worship Him. God is spirit and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and truth. Before I get into the body of this address, I want to issue one You will soon notice that unlike the schoolmen of the late Middle Ages who give the impression at times that they knew so much about God that they even knew what he had for breakfast last Sunday morning, I make no such claim. I will simply attempt to make clear what I think the Bible teaches about God on selected topics. I will attempt to go as far as the Bible goes, and where it stops, there I will stop. In my opinion, this is the safest way to approach the several subjects of the series. So with this understanding between us, let us begin with the following basic assertion. The Christian faith is a monotheistic faith. Its monotheism is expressly declared and everywhere assumed by the Old and New Testaments. Let me just read some scripture passages. Now, I'm not going to bother you with the references. If you want to know what the references are, you may come to me afterwards and I'll be happy to provide them. But just listen to God's Word. The Lord is God. There is no one else beside Him. Yahweh is the God in heaven above and upon the earth beneath. There is no other. See now that I myself am He. There is no God besides Me. I put to death, and I bring to life. I have wounded, and I will heal, and no one can deliver out of my hand. I am the Lord, and there is no other apart from me. There is no God. The Lord is the true God. He is the living God, the everlasting King. There is one God, and there is no other beside Him. There is one God. We know that an idol is nothing at all in the world, and that there is no God except one. There is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. You believe that there is one God? Good. Even the demons, however, believe that and shudder. This God, according to Holy Scripture, needs nothing outside himself in order to be fully God. He is self-existent, sometimes referred to in the theological literature as his aseity, because he eternally exists ase, the Latin from himself, which means that God eternally exists necessarily. He is self-existent, I say, self-contained, self-sustaining, self-sufficient, and self-revealing, whose self-revelation is self-attesting, self-authenticating, and self-validating. Before he created the universe, when he, the triune God, existed all alone, his understanding, his energies, and his love found their proper object within the persons of the Godhead to his own perfect satisfaction and happiness. Holy Scripture teaches us that this one living and true God did not create the universe out of an ontological need to complete or to complement himself. For he was ontologically exactly the same after his creative activity as before. He was under no constraint from outside himself, no obligation from outside himself, no necessity save to himself to create. That he chose to do so was purely a sovereign act on his part caused by nothing outside himself. That is to say, he created this universe solely because he willed to do so and for the purpose of glorifying himself by the redemptive activity that he would work out on the stage of this small planet. In these addresses, I will intend by the word God, this one living and true God of the Bible. It is the existence of this God alone that I confess. With reference to the claimed existence of any other God as a true God, I am not simply an agnostic. I am a convinced atheist. I deny that any other gods exist save as idolatrous creations in the minds of sinful men who have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and who worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator, who is forever praised. Amen. Now, the Westminster Shorter Catechism begins its instruction about this one living and true God in its response to the question, what is God, by declaring, God is a spirit. So this is where I will begin tonight. This four-word English statement is based upon the three-word statement of Jesus in the Greek text of John 4.24. Pneuma hatheos, literally, spirit is the God. And what we need to do first is to determine the meaning of Jesus' inarthorus, that is, without the article, his use of the noun pneuma, without the article. Jesus makes this statement, you will recall, in the context of his discussion with the woman at the well of Samaria. She turned the discussion to the question of the location where people should worship God, whether in Samaria or in Jerusalem. Jesus responded by telling her that the worship of God does not require that one be present in either place. This is because true worship has to do, not with a geographic location, but with the nature of the being of God and the worshipper's inner spiritual condition. So I concur with Leon Mars' wise suggestion that we should omit the indefinite article in our English translation. In other words, God is spirit rather than God is a spirit. Apparently, it was not Jesus' intent to teach here that God is a spirit in the sense that he is one spirit among many, though that is true enough. Rather, he intended to underscore the truth that God's being is of the nature of spirit and is therefore in no way restricted to spatial location. And while it is true that in this particular context Jesus has specifically the Father in mind, that is to say God the Father is Spirit, this statement is equally true of God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, which is just to say all three persons of the Godhead are essentially one undivided Spirit. But what do we mean when we say that God is Spirit? I would suggest that the word spirit is simply theological shorthand for two other attributes of God. First, to say that the triune God is spirit is to say that God is personal. You see, according to the scriptural use of the word spirit, there is no such thing as an impersonal spirit. To be spirit is to be personal, and the Bible's anthropomorphisms are metaphors designed in light of God's spiritual essence to drive home this truth that God is indeed personal. And what does it mean to be personal? To be personal is to be, unlike the impersonal stone or inert clay, it's to be self-conscious, self-determining, living and active. And the triune God of the Bible is all of these things and more. Self-conscious, self-determining, living, active, intelligent, and affectionate. He is anything but inert impersonalness. He is the living and active creator and architect of the universe. He is the beneficent provider of his creature's needs, the lawgiver and just judge of mankind, the advocate of the poor and the oppressed. an empathetic counselor, the suffering servant, and the triumphant deliverer of his people. He is a man of war, a dragon slayer, a bridegroom, a husband, a king, a builder and maker, a shepherd, a physician, and much, much more. And as personal spirit, God relates to us in an I-you way, not in an I-it way. We are not things to him, and he is not to be a non-personal thing to us. But right here I must issue a caution. God's personalness should not be taken to mean that God is one person. For while it is true that God generally refers at the literary convention to speak in his revelation to his people as an I, see for example his I Am of Exodus 3.14, only rarely speaking as a plural subject employing the first person plural we or us, yet in the depths of his being he does speak within himself and sometimes to us as a plural subject. One of the many evidences in scripture that the biblical God is actually tri-personal. For example, in Genesis 1.26, God says, let us make man in our image after our likeness. In Genesis 3.22, God says, the man and the woman have become like one of us, knowing good and evil. In Genesis 11.7, God says, let us go down and give men different languages. In Isaiah 6.8, God says, Whom shall I send and who will go for us? In John 14.23, Jesus says, If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him. And the plural verb, we will come to him. The plural verb, and we will make our home with him. Therefore, in view of the fact that there are three persons in the Godhead, it is better to say that our God is personal than to say that he is a person. The God of Scripture, I repeat, is not a person. He is tripersonal. In the depth of the divine being of the Godhead exist eternally three persons who stand in an I, you, he, essential and personal relation of love with each other. And for any pastor to say from the pulpit that God is a person, is actually to graze the rim of, if not to cross over into, the modalistic heresy. I offer no apology for mentioning here in our discussion of the attributes of God, the truth of the triune character of the Christian God. For in a very real sense, although we do not normally use the term to describe it, God's triunity is another of his distinctive attributes or marks. I will be mentioning his triunity right along as we move through our addresses on God's attributes. For I take seriously John Calvin's insight, listen to Calvin now, God designates himself in addition to his spiritual essence by another special mark to distinguish himself more precisely from idols. For he so proclaims himself the soul God as to offer himself at the same time to be contemplated in three persons. Unless we grasp these, Calvin writes, now heed Calvin's next words carefully, unless we grasp these, only the bare and empty name of God flits about in our brain to the exclusion of the true God. Note Calvin's last words, to the exclusion of the true God. I hope you got Calvin's point. Calvin had apprehended that the tri-personality of God is not an idea that is to be added to one's already complete idea of God, but is a truth that enters into the very idea of the one living and true God, without which he cannot be conceived in the truth of his being. In other words, since the only God who is there is, in point of fact, a trinity, If we think and talk about God and his attributes as if he were simply an undifferentiated, divine monad, we are, as a matter of fact, thinking of a God that has no existence. We are thinking of, how does Calvin put it? We are thinking of the bare and empty name of God that is not the true God at all. What this father of the magisterial reformation of the 16th century is saying is this. If we do not give due regard to God's triunity as we reflect upon him, we have created for ourselves and are talking about an idol. Gregory of Nazianzus captures my point here well when he states, I cannot think on the one without quickly being encircled by the splendor of the three, nor can I discern the three without being straightway carried back to the one. This is the main reason that Judaism and Islam, while both are monotheistic faiths are nonetheless both idolatrous faiths. Neither of their gods is the true God. Their gods are idols because among other reasons they are not triune. So we must never think or talk about the God of Christianity unless at the same time we recognize that we are thinking and talking about the triune God. To talk first about God per se giving no thought to his Trinity according to Calvin, is to talk about an idol. And in our present text, Jesus illustrates for us this, for which Calvin is contending, for though he says with no apparent specification, God is spirit, the context makes it clear that he is thinking triunely and intends God the Father, the first person of the holy triune Godhead. We would urge first, then, that God is spirit is personal, or more accurately, tri-personal. The second thing that God is Spirit means is that He is non-corporeal. A statement of negation rather than of affirmation, I admit. But this way of talking about God, designated by the Church Fathers as the via negationis, the way of negation, that identifies what God is by declaring what He is not by means of negating attributes of the finite order is true of Him. A way, incidentally, that Louis Burckhoff does not think is the proper method of dogmatic theology because he says it takes its starting point in man. But it is a way the Apostle Paul himself endorsed when describing God by his use of many privative alpha verbs or nouns. You know what I mean by the privative alpha in Greek? In Greek, a noun is taken, and to make it a negative noun, you put the alpha in front of it. The alpha privative. He talks this way. He says that God is immortal. What is immortal? He's not mortal. He's immortal. He's unsearchable. He's incomprehensible. He is indescribable. These are all statements from Scripture. He is invisible. He is unapproachable. He is unchangeable. And before Paul, David had declared that God neither slumbers nor sleeps. That is, he is relentless or ceaseless in his guarding and protection of his own. And David teaches that God's greatness or majesty is unfathomable, that is, beyond our comprehension. That his understanding is immeasurable. And God himself employs expressions of negation as self-descriptions, declaring, for example, that he does not grow tired, that he does not grow weary, that his understanding is unsearchable, and that he does not change. Hence, God's non-corporeality means that he is without body, body parts, or bodily passions, such as hunger for food, or the desire to satisfy a sexual drive. Our God is pure and unqualifiedly non-corporeal being. We know this is the meaning of spirit from Luke 24, 36 through 43, where in response to the disciples' assessment that the risen Lord was a spirit, Jesus said, Look at my hands and my feet, it is I myself. Touch me and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and blood, as you see I have. So when we say that God is spirit, we should mean not only that he is tripersonal, but also that no property of created matter may properly be ascribed to his being. And this means that he has no extension in space, neither as a vast solid, nor as a measureless ocean of liquid, nor has an immense volume of gas expanded beyond limit. Extension in all these forms is a property wholly irrelevant to and inappropriately attributed to God as the Divine Spirit. He has no material size or dimensions, even infinite ones. That is to say, we should not think of God as being infinitely large materially, for it is not a part of God, but all of God who is in every place in the universe. Nor should we think of him as in any sense small materially, for no place in the universe can surround him or contain him. Indeed, the heaven of heavens cannot contain him. He has no material weight, no material mass, no material bulk, no material parts, no material form, no material taste, and no material smell. He is not like atomic or cosmic energy or vapor or steam or air, all of which are created things. He is not even like our spirits, for our spirits are created spirits that can and do exist in only one finite place at a time, namely within us. We must simply say that God is spirit. And that whatever else this may mean, it means at the very least that his being as tri-personal, non-corporeal spirit is unlike any being about which we know in this material creation. His being as tri-personal, non-corporeal spirit is uncreated being. Ours is created being. We cannot picture his non-material being. We cannot imagine his non-material essence, and he forbids us to try, particularly when he informs us, as we shall see in later addresses, that he is omnipresent, never had a beginning, is infinite, eternal, and immutable in all of his attributes, and that he is triune. In short, his tri-personal, non-corporeal nature as spirit is simply incomprehensible to us. And I find it both intriguing and highly instructive that in Ezekiel 1, the nearer the prophet approached God, the more his descriptive words of God reflect God's incomprehensibility. Listen to Ezekiel. There came a voice from above the expanse over the living creature's heads as they stood with lowered wings. Above the expanse over their heads was what looked like a sapphire stone that had the appearance of a throne, And high above the appearance of the throne was an appearance like that of a man. I saw that what appeared to be his waist looked like glowing metal, like the appearance of fire, and that from there down was like the appearance of fire, and brilliant light surrounded him. Like the appearance of a rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day, so was the appearance around him. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. Note that while Ezekiel's record itself is comprehensible to us, what Ezekiel saw he described by employing a number of similes. Something looked like a sapphire stone that had the appearance of a throne. Then the light about that likeness had the appearance like that of a rainbow. And the one who appeared high above it was like a man, which man-like figure, Ezekiel then informs us, was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. Note that this figure he described was not the Lord as such, not the glory of the Lord, not the likeness of the glory of the Lord, but the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And beholding that, he fell upon his face. And we too are lost here in adoring wonder. Quite properly then, Blaise Pascal, French mathematician and philosopher, said, Man must not see nothing at all when he contemplates the being of God. Nor must he see enough to think that he possesses God, but he must see enough to know that he is lost, that is, he cannot fully comprehend Him. As Robert Louis Dabney, the Southern Presbyterian theologian, declares, God in revealing Himself only reveals the fact of His being and properties or attributes. His substance remains as invisible as ever. Look back to that whole knowledge of God which ye have acquired, and you will see that it is nothing but a knowledge of attributes. Of the substance to which these properties are referred, we have only learned that it is. What it is remains impenetrable to us. We have named it spirit, but is this after all more than a name and the affirmation of an unknown fact to our understanding? For when we proceed to examine our own conception of spirit, We find that it is a negation of material attributes only. Our very attempt to conceive of it in its substance are still obstructed by an inability to get out of the materialistic circle of notions. We can only say that as a non-corporeal being, he is invisible to physical sight. He lives in light so brilliant that no human can approach him. No one has ever seen him, nor ever will. That as non-corporeal being, as one who within his being is without material parts, he is also indivisible, what some theologians refer to as his simplicity, using this term in the sense of not composed of parts. Well, so much for the theology inherent within Jesus' statement. Let's relate all of this to us in a practical way. It is this fact of God's being a spirit that underlies the second commandment, that prohibits every attempt to fashion an image of God. God says in Exodus 24 and 5, do not make graven, that is carved or sculpted, images of me of any kind, or any painted likeness of me, or anything that is in heaven above. that is the heavenly bodies, clouds, lightning, or birds, or that is in the earth beneath, that is man, animals, trees, stones, or that is in the water under the earth, that is fish, coral reefs, etc. You must never worship or bow down to them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, who will not share your affection with any other God. That is to say, any such image or likeness of God is not God, it is another God. And Moses reminded the second generation of the nation of Israel that came out of Egypt, you saw no form of any kind the day the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire. Therefore, watch yourselves very carefully so that you do not become corrupt and make for yourself an idol, an image of any shape. To think of God's being in terms of anything in the created universe is to misrepresent him, to limit him, to think of him as lesser other than he really is. This is the reason God's jealousy is given as the reason for the prohibition against making image of him. He is jealous to protect his glory. He will not share it with anyone or anything else. He eagerly seeks worshipers who think of him as he is, as tri-personal, non-corporeal spirit, and who worship him as such. For to worship anything else is idolatry. and he is angered when his glory is diminished by men falsely misrepresenting him by a likeness to anything in this created universe. The Roman Catholic Church lives daily with the prime example of a violation of the Second Commandment in its highly acclaimed Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. And it delights to display it, for there in the chapel ceiling, Michelangelo has painted God the Father as a bearded, white-haired elderly man reaching out with his outstretched hand and finger to touch Adam in order to give him life. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel may display great art, but it also exhibits great disobedience to the law of God. The result of this and every other similar effort is to fashion an image that is a distortion of God and is thus blasphemous and idolatrous. Pope Gregory I declared that such images are the books of the uneducated. But John Calvin asserted bodily images are unworthy of God's majesty because they diminish the fear of him and men and increase error. They are not necessary, Calvin continued, if the church will do its job of preaching and teaching. Those in authority in the church turned over to idols the office of teaching for no other reason than that they themselves were mute. Paul testifies that by the true preaching of the gospel, Christ is depicted before our eyes as crucified. From this one fact, the uneducated could have learned more than a thousand crosses of wood or stone." God, and specifically God the Father, gentlemen, is not a white-haired, elderly man. God the Father is Spirit. And they who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth, that is to say, in spiritual worship that is according to truth. The Christian must be ever solicitous, never even to think of God as having any material characteristics. So if you ask me what God looks like, I will not just say I'm not sure or I don't know. I will say he has no looks in the sense you intend by your question. And I will insist that you give up every attempt to conceive of his being beyond what is implied in the word spirit, namely his tri-personal non-corporeality. But I can and will say this to you, and I rejoice with an inexpressible joy when I say it, and this is the second application that I want to make before the break, that he who hungers and thirsts by divine grace to know God and what he is like can know him through saving faith in Jesus Christ. For he who by faith knows God's incarnate Son knows the Father. He who has seen Christ with the eyes of faith has seen the Father. For Christ became and is the visible image of the invisible God. He is the Word who existed as God's Son with God the Father before God made anything at all. He is the one who is supreme over all, who sits today at the Father's right hand, that is, who occupies the place of highest honor in the heavens. The one through whom God the Father created everything in heaven and earth. The one who made the things we can see and the things that we cannot see. The one who holds all creation together, which means that the so-called laws of atomic physics are actually the sustaining and hearing work of the Son of God. the one in whom it pleased God that in him all the fullness of deity should dwell bodily, that is, incarnationally, and the one who had reconciled his fallen world to God, making peace by means of the blood of his cross, and the one in whom were hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, all which means that the only God who is, the God who revealed himself redemptively in history, is therefore Christ-like, and in him there is no un-Christ-likeness at all. All which means, in turn, that the triune God has invested the entire salvific enterprise in the person and messianic work of His Son, Jesus Christ, who is the beginning, the center, and the end of all God's will, ways, and works. And as I bring this address to a close, I must ask, in light of God's incomprehensible being as uncreated spirit, whose tri-personal, non-corporeal existence is inconceivable to us, Can you now understand better why it is that we are to resist every attempt to fashion an image of God's being with our hands or with our minds? Why it is that the world, beginning with itself, cannot and will never find God through the ratiocination, through the reasoning processes of its wisdom? Why it is that mankind was ever to know anything truly about him? that God had to reveal himself redemptively and incarnationally in Christ and propositionally in his word, the Holy Scriptures. Which inscripturated word must never be separated from the incarnate word? Why it is, since no one has ever seen or ever will be able to see God, that his one and only Son, himself God, who is in the bosom of the Father, he is the one who had to exegete or make the Father known to us. Why it is, since no one knows the Father comprehensively except the Son, and He to whom the Son wills to reveal Him, why it is that you and I must come to the Son as the revealer of the Father, and in that knowledge receive eternal life. Why it is that Christ alone, who as the Word was with God in the beginning, and who is Himself God, who became incarnate and lived here on earth among us, why it is, I say, that He is the only way to the Father. I'm often asked, do I believe that Jesus is the only way to God? And I might surprise you. I say, well, no. Every religion, every man's religion will take him to God. Every man's religion will take him to God. But only one religion will take him to God as Father, and that's what Jesus said. Why it is that true worshipers must worship God in spirit and truth, that is to say, as He truly is. Before I conclude, I must say this, and as I have been addressing you, if the Spirit of God has convicted you that you are not one of those true worshipers whom the Father seeks to worship Him, if the Spirit has quickened in you, my beloved, the realization that you have imagined that you know God, when in reality you have sought your knowledge of the glory of God, in things other than in the face of Jesus Christ, I implore you, as Christ's ambassador, to submit immediately to His gracious invitation to seek His forgiveness for your idolatry. Place your trust in the only Savior of men, who is the only exegete capable of making the Father known to us. May God help all of us to examine ourselves now to know whether we are in the true faith. And let us now pray. Our loving God, this evening we have been reflecting on your being as incomprehensible, triune, personal spirit. We confess that we are far too lackadaisical about reflecting seriously on who and what you are. We stand before you with great shamefacedness, confessing that there are large times in our lives when we don't think much about you at all, because we are proud, self-sufficient, and presumptuous and all too often when we do think about you our thoughts are so shallow and trite that we actually think that we can fully comprehend you and therefore we dishonor you the great incomprehensible and awesome God forgive us father for our frivolousness our giddiness our silliness our laziness and help us all to be done with lesser things and to grow spiritually as we meditate thoughtfully upon your tri-personal, non-corporeal being. And may our studies in these days become for us a great and marvelous instrument of grace to mold us more and more into the likeness of Jesus Christ, in whose great and wonderful name we now pray. Amen.