Turn in the Old Testament to the book of Psalms, the 19th Psalm. We read this Psalm from the Word of God. Psalm 19. The heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech. Night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth. Their words to the ends of the world. In the heavens He has pitched a tent for the sun, which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion, like a champion rejoicing to run his course. It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other. Nothing is hidden from its heat. The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart. The commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes. The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever. The ordinances of the Lord are sure and altogether righteous. They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold. They are sweeter than honey, than honey from the comb. By them is your servant warned. In keeping them there is great reward. Who can discern his errors? Forgive my hidden faults. Keep your servant also from willful sins. May they not rule over me. Then will I be blameless, innocent of great transgression. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my Redeemer. Amen. From John the Gospel, chapter 14, and we read verses 1 to 14. John 14. Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God. Trust also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me, that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going. Thomas said to him, Lord, we don't know where you are going, so how can we know the way? Jesus answered, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him. Philip said, Lord, show us the father, and that will be enough for us. Jesus answered, don't you know me, Philip? Even after I have been among you, such a long time. Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, show us the Father? Don't you believe that I am in the Father and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own, rather It is the Father living in me who is doing His work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. Or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves. I tell you the truth. Anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it. Amen. May God bless to us his word. Our subject this evening is the living and true God. We've spent 11 Sabbath evenings before now considering 20th century idols the isms, relativism, existentialism, nationalism, and so on. It has been a very quick and superficial overview of these subjects, and yet I believe it has been helpful to some extent, and certainly I would hope that in future we'll be able to return to some aspects of this study in more detail, both by way of teaching and congregational discussion. But I want to end this series on a positive note by turning from empty idols to the living and true God, the real God, the God who is there, the God who is not an idol, the God who men have not made, but the God who has made man. How do we know he is there? How is this God any different from all others? Supposing someone had sat through this series and said to me at the end, I agree with all that you've said about these foolish idols, but your God is simply another of these idols. What would we say? How, on what basis, can we say that he alone is God? Well, I'm not going to attempt this evening to prove the existence of God, for that's another topic entirely. I simply want to remind you, and I'll not be saying anything that you don't know already, but I want to remind you of how God may be known. For it is only as each of us comes to know God for ourselves that we really appreciate His reality. Second-hand knowledge is not enough. Eternal life means knowing God, knowing that God exists, and knowing what He is like. and knowing that he is our God, and knowing him in all the glory of the three persons. Now there is only one way of knowing God, and that is through revelation, through God revealing himself to us. We could never discover God. We could never search out and find God. We could never know God. God has to open himself to us. He's to show himself. He has to make himself available and accessible to us. Before we can know Him, God must reveal Himself. It's like human relationships. People don't really know you, unless you choose to let them know you. They may know that your face, they may know something about you, but they don't know the real you. and they have no instrument or method of learning the real you unless you tell them about yourself or show yourself to them. We can hide ourselves from people. We do hide ourselves from many people, from most people perhaps. And it's the same with God. And praise God, he has revealed himself. God may be known. There's no need for us to build an altar like that which the Athenians built in Athens to the unknown God. There's no need for us to say we worship a God whom we believe is somewhere but we know nothing about him. There is a revelation of God. And that is a revelation which is completely adequate for all our needs. In the first place, God may be known through his creation. God may be known through his creation. In Psalm 19, we're told that the heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands in a universal, international language. Paul says the same thing in Romans chapter one verse 19. What may be known about God is plain because God has made it plain. There's revelation. For since the creation of the world, God's eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made. Look at what has been made and you can know God. From what has been made we can learn of the maker. Look at a newly built house and you can learn a great deal about the person who built that house. Look at or better eat a newly baked cake and you can learn a great deal or something about the person who made that cake. Look at the intricacy of a watch and you can learn something about the watchmaker. So the Bible tells us that we can learn about God from what he has made. Whether we think of the huge galaxies of space, the millions of planets and stars and heavenly bodies that God has formed in all their vast array and size. Whether we go and gaze at the mighty mountains stretching up into the heavens, their upper slopes covered in eternal snow. Whether we bend down and touch with our finger the velvety petal of a rose and smell the fragrance of that bloom. Whether we take a marvellous microscope and gaze at the inner structure of the atom All this tells of God, whether we simply go and look at ourselves in a mirror. These things do tell us, do show us God, God's power, God's wisdom, God's goodness, and how important it is in our hurried, urbanized, technological, artificial life to look at God's world and to find God there. Men in their blindness see nothing. But we as believers can look with fresh eyes and admire and give thanks and worship when I look up unto the heavens which thine own fingers framed, unto the moon and to the stars which were by thee ordained. You'll not see many stars tonight, but go out on some starry night. Have you ever done that? Look up at the moon and at the stars and say, oh God, you set those bodies in the heavens. You made them. How excellent. How worthy of praise you are. God may be known through his creation. But there are two problems with this way of knowing God. The first is that creation has been spoiled by sin. You could say that a woman may be known by her kitchen. You go into the kitchen and you can tell what sort of a housewife lives in that house by seeing the state in which the kitchen is left. But now it would hardly be fair to that woman if she was away from home for a week and her family were allowed to run riot in the kitchen and then for somebody to come and look at the kitchen and judge the woman by what they found because the kitchen would not be as she left it. The kitchen would have been spoiled, I would suggest, often. Nearly always. So it is with creation. Creation has been spoiled. We go and look at the deserts and at the pollution that the ravages and that the thorns and that the thistles and the marks of sin, we do not see God as we should. And again, this book of Revelation, although it tells us a great deal, doesn't tell us much. It doesn't tell us enough. It doesn't tell us anything about sin. Creation doesn't tell us anything about how to be saved. It doesn't tell us about the life to come. So secondly, God may be known through his word, the Bible. You remember how in Psalm 19, after the first six verses in which the psalmist tells us how the world shows us God, he goes on to make a contrast and says God's law is perfect. This is a much better way of getting to know someone. You can learn something about a person from what they have made. But it's much better if that person sits down and tells you about himself. If that woman tells you what sort of person she is, if she shares with you what she likes and what she dislikes, if that man tells you what he has done in the past, the experiences he's had, the home he grew up in, the history of his life, you feel you're getting to know him. Someone tells us their plans and hopes for the future, their ambitions and goals, their dreams in life. We feel we're getting to know them. Someone tells us how they feel about us, what they expect from us. One of the joys of friendship is when two people open themselves to each other. And you feel I'm really getting to know this person. They're telling me about themselves. And friends, among other things, the Bible is God telling us about himself. God telling us about himself. The Bible's about God. It's an accurate account. We don't always give accurate accounts. of ourselves. I would say we never give accurate accounts of ourselves. Our hearts are deceitful, desperately wicked. We are self-serving. Even when we are speaking about our own faults, there is an element of sin and unreality in what we're saying. We're perhaps never completely truthful about ourselves. We don't know ourselves. When I think I'm telling you the truth about myself, I may not be. But God speaks truthfully about himself. God speaks wisely about himself. Sometimes we tell people things that would be better that they didn't know. Sometimes we don't tell them the things they need to know about us. God's account of himself is useful. And this is the foremost purpose of the Bible. The Bible is not given to make us happy, although it will make us happy. The Bible is not given to solve our problems, although it will help us with our problems. The Bible is given to tell us about God. Our catechism puts it so perfectly in answer three. What do the scriptures principally teach? The scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God. That's what they principally teach. What man is to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of man. The Bible is a revelation of God. And it's so important for us to remember that. For example, in our reading and study of the Bible, as you open the Word of God, you should be asking yourself, first, first, what can I learn about God? You're not just looking for a little thought for the day, or a little verse to help you through, although those things are in the scripture, and they're there to benefit us, but first, And foremost, the Bible is to tell us about God. That should be the great function of preaching. Often our preaching isn't this, but it is meant to be a declaration of the persons of Godhead, the being of God and who God is and what God is like and what God wants and what God has done and what God will do. In any sermon that you hear, it is your responsibility to judge that sermon by this criterion. How much of God was there in it? Not just was it interesting or was it funny or did I find it helpful or was it too long or too short. How much did I learn about God? And if there's not very much of God in it, it's not a sermon. It's not a sermon. This Bible, this book, is meant to show us God. He is the center of the book. He is the goal of the book. It is the Word of God. It is about Him, and it is from Him. And we need to be much more God-centered than we are. Even the search for personal application, important as it is, may be a trap And we can be so concerned with looking for a message for ourselves that we miss what the book is teaching us. God may be known through his word. And thirdly and lastly, of course, God may be known through his son. Now, this is not a different source of information from the Bible. Some people today would separate the person of Jesus from the word of God. Our catechism again, faith in Jesus Christ is a saving grace whereby we receive and rest upon him alone for salvation as he is offered to us in the gospel. In other words, the catechism is reminding us we cannot know Christ apart from the scriptures. We cannot find Christ apart from the scriptures. We cannot trust him. It's only in this book that he may be known. He can't be known. in any other way. And yet it's true to say that certain parts of the Bible reveal God especially clearly and most first and foremost is the portrait of Jesus Christ. If you want to know God you will find God in Christ. Hebrews 1.3 The Son is the exact representation of God's being. John 1.18, no one has ever seen God, but God, the only begotten Son, has made him known. John 14.9, the passage which we read, anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. To see Jesus is to see the invisible, immortal, eternal, infinite God. We hear a great deal today about products being user-friendly. That means the product is such that a person can take it and use it and profit from it. Even an ignorant person, even an unskilled or incompetent person, even the very most bumbling user will find this product friendly to him or her, not hostile. I've spent my life looking for user-friendly products. They mostly have an implacable hostility towards me. I don't know why that is. But we're told today that things are user-friendly. Here is something. I don't mean to be trite in saying this, but this revelation of God is user-friendly. You can sit down with a small child And you can tell that child about Jesus. Jesus going about doing good, and loving, and saving, and healing, and restoring, and how he was hung on the cross, and how he prayed for his enemies, and how he took our sins, and how he was raised from the dead, and is now a great king. And my friends, the youngest child can understand that. can understand that. And a very young child can trust this Jesus and love this Christ truly and savingly for himself or herself. And this is God coming to our level. Another great word today is contextualization. Bible translators talk about it, missionaries talk about it, evangelists talk about it. How can you communicate with people in a way that they can understand and take in? This we may say is God contextualizing himself. He does not reveal himself to us as a theory. as an abstract philosophy, as a set of ideas, no. He reveals himself to us in a real, kind, beautiful, humble, gracious person. A person whom we can meet and know and love and trust. I haven't time to develop it this evening. But this is the tremendous significance of that statement in the book of Genesis. That God created man in his own image. And he did that partly because he was going to send his son. And there's salvation in that statement. Here's where the true God is most clearly distinguished from man-made idols. How ugly we have seen them to be. How unsubstantial they are. We turn to the Lord Jesus Christ, the altogether lovely one. The greatest human being who has ever lived because he was more than human. The one to whom our hearts go out, the Savior, who is so easy for us to love when God works in our hearts. And if any of us here this evening do not love Jesus Christ, we should realize what a tragic loss that is to us, and an impoverishment, and a statement about ourselves. I am the way, the truth, and the life. We can never know God completely. Throughout all eternity we will learn more and more about him. But this we know, nothing we ever discover will ever contradict what we see in Christ. Nothing we ever discover about God will ever contradict what we see in Christ. You never need to be afraid. You never need to think that there's some side of God's character that's going to cancel out what we see in Jesus. He who has seen me has seen the Father. The light, Paul says, of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. and men may pursue their isms and their philosophies and their ideas. That we, by God's grace, are men and women and boys and girls who have seen Jesus, who believe that he is God, to love him and have given ourselves to his worship. Amen. Let us bow our heads in prayer. O God, show yourself to us, we pray. As we drive home tonight in your dusk, under your clouds, past your trees and plants and flowers, As we eat before we lie down, the food which you have made, as it enters our bodies, may we say, God made this. As we lie down to rest, breathing the air which you have made, and dispose our bodies which you have made for slumber, we pray that an awareness of your being will fill the whole atmosphere of our lives. And oh God, every time we take our Bibles in our hands and open them, may we realize that there is someone who is infinitely more important than we are, with our own concerns and lives and burdens. May we more and more be men and women taken up with you enraptured with you and wanting to know you more and more, seeing your beauty, your glory. Above all, O Lord, help us to be Christians set apart from others by our utter devotion to Christ, our trust in Him, and our living for Him. Father, we know that we cannot argue many people out of their false faith, but we pray that in everything we are and do, there may be the stamp of reality which will convince them. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.