The Knowability of God | John 13:1-3
Knowing God Part 2
Pastor Charles Price
I am going to read three verses from John 17 this evening, initially. John 17, I am going to read from John 17:1 and this is the prayer that Jesus prayed with His disciples in the upper room the night that He was arrested and by the next morning had been crucified. And when you consider that in 24 hours the Lord Jesus had physically given His life, this prayer is full of meaning, which we are not going to look at other than to read the opening statements when in John 17:1 it says,
“After Jesus said this, he looked towards heaven and prayed: ‘Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.’”
Now this is a fairly short series that we are doing together on the existence of God – at least on Knowing God. Last week - last time – I talked about the existence of God and looked at the various evidences that are there for all to see, those who will open their eyes and look, for the existence of God. It’s what we call the natural revelation God has given to us in creation of Himself. And we talked about that last time.
And today I want to talk to you about what I am calling “The Knowability of God”. To what extent can God be known? Now I realize as I prepared for this and as we think about this subject, that we have taken on what is an impossible task – how do we represent God in a series of addresses like this? The best I can think of: it’s like an ocean, which we can’t fathom, the vastness of it. We can take a little glass and we can take some of the water out of the ocean; we get a little, little picture of what is there in the ocean, but little concept of the ocean itself that way. And you know, we do talk a little bit about knowing God fairly freely, but in one sense it really is an impossible task.
In the book of Job 11, one of Job’s counsellors, a man called Zophar, who didn’t always speak wisdom by the way, but I’m going to read you what Zophar said. He asked this question:
“Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can you probe the limits of the Almighty? They are higher than the heavens – what can you do? They are deeper than the depths of the grave – what can you know? Their measure is longer than the earth and wider than the sea.”
And Zophar there is asking a very good question and basically he is asking: can the finite know the infinite, can the temporal know the eternal, can a man know God? Well, when we try to understand something we cannot see, we usually think in terms of comparisons and contrasts. We say something is like something else – that’s a comparison. Or we say it is not like something else - that’s a contrast. Now when we try to think of things which we compare God or with which we may contrast God, again we run into the same difficulty. In Isaiah 40:12 [18], Isaiah asks:
“To whom, then, will you compare God? What image will you compare him to?”
What is there in all of creation you can look at and say, “That is like God” because God, the Creator, transcends everything in His creation.
That’s why, of course, we cannot prove to the sceptical mind, the existence of God. If we could prove God by putting God into some category or equating Him with something which is normal to us, He probably wouldn’t be God because He transcends everything that there is in His creation. That’s why we have some difficulties when we talk about knowing God and the knowability of God.
You know the Trinity is one case in point because Scripture reveals to us for instance that there is one God. It reveals to us that there is God the Father, there is God the Son and there is God the Holy Spirit. It is clear the Father is God, it’s clear the Son is God, it is clear the Holy Spirit is God. And yet the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, the Spirit is not the Father, and this defies logic, human logic. And yet the three are one.
There have been numerous attempts to reduce the Trinity to a simple explanation that supposedly takes into account all of these aspects but there is no analogy that really works. There are a number of popular ones. For instance, you know a tree has a trunk, it has roots, it has branches and that’s been used as a picture of the trinity. But then the branches are not the roots and yet the Father is the Spirit – the Spirit is co-equal with the Father – so that falls down. In fact, they all fall down really.
The one that I grew up with as a child – I remember the three-leaf clover often being used as an illustration. You know, it’s one clover but it’s got three leaves – it’s one God, three parts of the one God. H2O is another one that’s been frequently used. What is two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, put them together, you’ve got – if I asked you, you’d probably say water; that’s true. It’s also ice, H20 is also steam, depending on its environment, one is a solid, one is a liquid, one is a vapour and yet they are all H20. These are attempts to try to understand how we might know the Trinity.
The classic definition comes in the Creed of Athanasius, which you are probably not too familiar with. Athanasius was a Third Century bishop of Alexandria in Egypt and he lived at a time when there was a heresy – the heresy of Arianism was popular which denied the deity of Christ. And so, he came up with what has become the classic definition of the Trinity and I am going to read it to you from the Anglican Prayer Book. The more liturgical churches tend to read this Creed, especially on Trinity Sunday. And I am going to read only a little bit of it. And he says:
“There is one Person of the Father, another of the Son and another of the Holy Spirit. But the Godhead of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit is all one, the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal. Such as the Father is, such is the Son and such is the Holy Spirit. The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate, and the Holy Spirit uncreate. The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible. The Father eternal, the Son eternal, the Holy Spirit eternal. And yet they are not three eternals but one eternal. They are not three incomprehensibles nor three uncreated but one uncreated and one incomprehensible. And so likewise the Father is Almighty, the Son Almighty, and the Holy Spirit Almighty. And yet they are not three Almighties but one Almighty.”
And then he goes on similarly about Father’s God, Son’s God, Holy Spirit God, but there is one God, not three Gods. They are Lords but only one Lord etc. And then he says,
“So in all things, the Unity is in the Trinity and the Trinity in the Unity is to be worshipped.”
Well, good, I’m glad you grasped that! Because I think if these great minds of the history of the church, you know, have done their best and they end up concluding that the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the Holy Spirit incomprehensible, yet these are not three incomprehensibles but one incomprehensible, I scratch my head and want to say, “Alright, let’s not even try.”
So, there is a sense, a very real sense in which grasping a knowledge of God is not only very difficult, it’s impossible to us. Zophar’s questions are good questions. There is of course a belief that God cannot be known. We know that as agnosticism. An agnostic is someone who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence of God or nature of God. That, by definition, is an agnostic. And yet, Scripture encourages us to the reality that we can know God. In fact, here that I read to you in John 17:3, Jesus said,
“This is eternal life”.
And by the way, if I read that and said, “This is eternal life; fill in what you think will come next”, some of us would probably say: “This is eternal life: living forever in heaven.” Well, of course, that’s a wonderful dimension, but what Jesus says is:
“This is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
The Christian life, eternal life, says Jesus, is knowing God and it’s knowing Christ. In I John 5:20, John says,
“We know also that the Son has come and has given us understanding that we may know him who is true.”
The operative thing there, which we will come back to, is He has given us understanding. We didn’t work this out; we didn’t start on a search to find out about God. I saw in a bookshelf the other day a book called “The Biography of God”. That’s a very difficult task. No, He has given us understanding. And as Paul wrote in Ephesians 1:17, praying for the Ephesians,
“I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation” (here’s why) “so that you may know him better.”
But he says, I’m asking the Father to give you the Spirit of revelation. You don’t know God and we don’t know Christ simply by some human mental activity. There are certain things we may know about God objectively. We look out and say, “Those things seem to be true of God”, but we know Him by revelation; it’s the Spirit who reveals Him to us. I like what Paul also says in Ephesians when he is talking about the love of God in Ephesians 3:19, he talks about that you may “know this love that surpasses knowledge.” When you think about it, that sounds contradictory: “know this love that surpasses knowledge.” If it surpasses knowledge, how can you know it? Well, there are things which surpass knowledge humanly, but he says you can actually know this. And you find that Paul’s prayer there too is that God will reveal that.
So clearly God can be known in some way and to some extent but it is impossible to know God exhaustively and say to your neighbor, “Let me tell you everything about God.” We can’t begin to do that. When Jesus said, “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you”, He is not speaking clearly, He is not speaking about simply intellectual understanding and knowledge of God. I’ll tell you why I say that: because in the book of James, in James 2:19 says,
“You believe there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that – and they shudder.”
They take it seriously; they shudder. But knowing God simply intellectually does not make you a Christian – even the demons know something of God. What He means, “This is eternal life: that they may know you”, He is talking about experience of God. I’m going to talk about that on another occasion, that really God reveals Himself in Scripture through experience. God has given several names that He has revealed of Himself in Scripture. And you find the revelation of those names are always in the context of an experience that people have of what that name represents. And we’ll talk about that, that God reveals Himself in experience.
Now the King James uses a similar word in the Old Testament and I don’t pretend that the word in John 17 is the same word – one is Hebrew in Genesis 4, one is in Greek in John 17 – but there is a similar connection in meaning where it speaks of Adam there: “And Adam knew Eve, his wife and she conceived and bear Cain.”
Now when it says, “Adam knew Eve”, it didn’t mean that he met her on the street and said, “My name is Adam; what’s yours? How do you do?” and shook her hand. It didn’t mean that he could describe her. It meant he had intimate experience of her and she of him, and the knowledge of God comes from intimate experience of God, which we’ll see on another occasion.
But today I want to talk about the objective – I’m calling it - objective knowledge of God. You see, last time I talked about the fact that God has revealed Himself by two means – there’s natural revelation - passages like “The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies reveal his handiwork. Day after day they pour forth speech” – you read that in Psalm 19. Creation reveals the Creator behind the universe. The order of the universe reveals intelligence behind that. The moral conscience that every human being has reveals something of the moral character of the Creator – we talked about that. It’s what we call natural revelation that we can observe with a closed Bible, with the fingerprints of God all over creation.
But natural revelation doesn’t tell us enough and so we recognize there is a special revelation, we’ll call it, whereby God has chosen to reveal details about Himself. And He has chosen to reveal those details by speaking to us. This is why the Word of God is so central to us and so important to us because we recognize that the Scriptures literally is, as I described it then, the Word of God – it’s God revealing Himself.
See, if I can illustrate this: you here tonight have both a general revelation of me and a special revelation of me. Let me explain what I mean. You know something about me just by observation; you know my height, you know my appearance, my clothing, you see all these things. You might discern some things about my character just by observing me. But all of that is fairly superficial knowledge. As you look around this crowd here tonight, there are a lot of people you recognize in that way. But it’s very likely that some of you think you know more about me than you know about people you recognize week by week who sit, you know, across the aisle in some other position who you do recognize, you would greet if you met them on the street. But you probably think you know something more about me for the simple reason I talk to you a lot and my speech inevitably reveals something about me, or at least you conclude certain things about me by my speech. I give you the benefit of special revelation. In fact, somebody I was talking to about two weeks ago just made the comment to me, he said, “When I hear you preach, I feel as though I know you.” Well actually, he doesn’t know me, but he thinks he does because I talk and when you talk, you access somebody’s mind, you access their attitudes, you access what is important to them, and as we speak there is this sort of revelation of ourselves that takes place.
Now God has done that in a very specific way. He has spoken to us. God has spoken; that’s what His Word is about. And therefore, He is a revealing God and there are things that He has revealed to us that we would not know simply by observation. And I want to talk about the attributes of God. Now that’s a big word: attributes. But an attribute is a quality that is ascribed to a person. If you say somebody is a tall person, that’s an attribute. She’s a generous person – that is an attribute.
And the attributes of God we can understand in two different categories. Theologians, who have spent centuries thinking about these things, have come up with these two categories at least. First of all, there are His incommunicable attributes – that’s a big word and theologians think of big words because they have little else to do, and these are qualities that belong to God alone, that He does not share with His creation. For an example, the fact that God is all knowing, He is omniscient, God knows everything there is to know. There is nothing in His creation to whom He has communicated and given that particular attribute.
I did hear about an advertisement on one occasion, which said, “All 32 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica for Sale. Reason for sale: husband knows everything.” Well, whoever the husband was, he didn’t know everything because nobody knows everything.
So, there are God’s incommunicable attributes and we’ll talk about those a little bit tonight. And then there are His communicable attributes. That is: there are qualities that God has chosen to share with His creation, in particular with humanity. For instance, God is love. That is an attribute of God and He has chosen, in creating human beings, to give us the capacity to love. Now the communicable attributes are, by and large, moral attributes. They are to do with behaviour. And I’ll comment on that a little bit later on.
Let me talk then about His incommunicable attributes and there are five essentially. I want to just talk about briefly, and I apologize for the big words, but why not learn a bit of vocabulary as well tonight, because they are single words that best describe these incommunicable attributes of God.
First of all: the omnipotence of God - let me talk about that. By that, I mean that God is all-powerful; there are no limits to His power. I could give you many biblical statements about this, but let’s go to the beginning of the Bible and the end of the Bible. The first word of the Bible is “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Now that is a revelation of His omnipotence - that God created the universe. And at the end of the Bible, Revelation 22, it concludes with an image of the throne of God and of the Lamb and the throne represents power, sovereignty, authority. And again, it pictures God’s omnipotence.
Now in a few weeks’ time I’m going to devote a whole service to talking about the sovereignty of God. But I need to say something tonight without encroaching on that. When we talk about the omnipotence of God, we’re tempted to think that God’s omnipotence is an undisciplined attribute. What I mean by that is that we’re tempted to believe that everything that happens is the will of God because He’s omnipotent. That God in heaven can, so to speak, click His fingers and do anything He likes. Our praying is usually an appeal to His omnipotence – there’s something here that looks impossible: “God intervene!”
And consequently, when things take what seems their natural course and God doesn’t intervene, we feel justified in accusing God of inaction. And I’ve heard this question a million times: “Why didn’t God do something?” Because we think of His omnipotence, as I’ve described it, as an undisciplined thing, that God can simply zap His fingers and does. I mean we look at events of recent days – the Asian tsunami with its awful devastation in so many countries, Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans, the South Asia earthquake and the many thousands of people who have lost their lives through that, even the Avian Flu threat that we are now hearing a lot about and the estimate of how many millions may die as a consequence of this. And this is not just this year; these things happen every year. Thousands die in situations that we stand back and say, “Why in the world was that allowed to happen?”
You know there is an argument, and you’ve probably heard it, that God cannot be all-powerful and at the same time all-loving. Because if He is all-powerful, then the very existence of suffering and sadness and tragedy in the world indicates, so the argument goes, that He’s not loving. And if God is all loving and desires the best for us all the time, then He’s obviously not all-powerful because He seems unable to resist these destructive things that take place. And so, there’s this argument, you know, that God can’t be both all-powerful and all loving. And it does raise the question: what on earth is God doing? But have you ever considered the possibility that maybe God isn’t doing a lot of these things? What does it mean when Galatians 3:22 says: “The Scripture declares that the whole world is a prisoner of sin”? What did Jesus mean on three occasions when He spoke of Satan as being the “prince of this world”? What does John mean in I John 5:19 when he says, “We know that we are children of God and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one”?
Now these are verses you cannot sweep under the carpet. These are issues which I am going to address – not tonight; I’m just raising the question tonight - when we talk about the sovereignty of God. But when we speak of God’s omnipotence, it clearly is not an undisciplined omnipotence – God simply looking around the universe – zap, zap, zap, zap, zap. He doesn’t intervene that way; we might wish that He did but He doesn’t. Why? Well, we’ll address that on another occasion, but we will address it.
But nevertheless, Scripture reveals that God is all-powerful, God is omnipotent. And by the way, I don’t want to disturb you by raising the question. Our security is in the fact that He is omnipotent and that ultimately, as we will see on another occasion, ultimately history will be seen as His story. And God is working His story through history and we’ll see something of that on another occasion.
But that’s the first of God’s attributes – the omnipotence of God. Secondly, the omniscience of God, which I referred to a moment ago – the fact that God is all knowing and there are no limits to His knowledge. I John 3:20 says,
“For God knows everything.”
I remember many years ago being at a prayer meeting in Glasgow in Scotland. A lady was praying and she actually said to the Lord, “I don’t know if you know this yet, but…” and then she told Him something that had just recently happened and what she thought He might do about it. Well, I think He did know it already of course. Nothing ever catches God by surprise. Nothing ever takes Him off guard. But God’s omniscience raises a few questions with us as well. Let me mention two of them. Because God knows everything there is to know, we tend to hold Him responsible for everything but knowledge does not in itself equal responsibility.
Let me illustrate: I remember once flying into Belfast Airport in Northern Ireland and we were flying in low. It was a prop plane and we were flying over narrow country lanes down below, quite low. And I saw coming down one of these lanes – if you’ve been to Britain or Europe, you know that the roads can be very narrow and twisty – there was a combine harvester with its wide front coming down this narrow road, filling the road. And around from the corner, from my seat in the airplane, I could see a car coming the other way and I thought, “that car and that combine harvester are going to meet right on that corner”. Now the plane kept flying so I don’t know what happened. But I had foreknowledge of that event compared to the driver of the combine harvester - the farmer and the driver of the car. I had some foreknowledge; from my position I could see this was going to happen. But I was not responsible for the fact that these two would meet on the corner and the car was going faster than it probably should and probably would get into some trouble. God’s knowledge of everything does not equal His responsibility for everything. And because He knows it, it doesn’t mean if God knew that I’m going to do something silly tonight, that doesn’t hold Him responsible for it.
And the second issue this raises is: if God knows everything there is to know, then what is the point of praying to a God who knows everything? In fact, you put these first two things together: if God is all-powerful and God is all-knowing, what is the point of me spending time praying, telling God things that He already knows, or suggesting that He should do things that in His sovereignty and omnipotence He has either decided to do or not do anyway? This is the reasoning. And I remember when I was a young Christian I was very troubled by this. What’s the point of praying? Because I knew I’d never pray to God and say, “God I want to pray for Mrs. Smith who is in hospital having her appendix out” and God would say, “Mrs. Smith, I wondered where she was – so she is – she’s in the hospital having her appendix out. Thank you for telling me that.” I knew that wouldn’t happen. So why tell Him it? And if I said, “God, I’d like You to do this, this, this and this, in Jesus’ Name, Amen”, I knew He wouldn’t sit in heaven and say, “Wow, that is a brilliant idea; did you angels hear what that guy just said? Isn’t that a good idea? I think we’ll do that.” He’s already thought of everything I might suggest, so what’s the point of praying? I am not going to answer that question; I’m just raising it. You can buy the CD’s on the series I did on prayer about two years ago and that addresses that question. But I’m just saying that when we talk about the omniscience of God, it raises some practical questions for us.
There is a movement right now within parts of evangelical Christianity which speaks of the openness of God and that is a movement which says in effect, that God does not know the future as firmly as we previously thought that He might. Now I have no difficulty rejecting that thinking at all, because if God did not know all there is to know, He would not be God. Also, that subjects God to a time process and God is eternal outside time and therefore the past, the future, as well as the present is eternally present to Him. The only difference between the future and the past is the future hasn’t happened to us yet, but God is as aware of the future as of the past.
So, there’s the omniscience of God. And the third thing is the omnipresence of God. That means that God is always present; there are no limits to His presence. He is everywhere. That by the way does not mean that He is in everything; that is idea of what is called pantheism. Pantheism is the idea that God and the universe are identical and that God is in everything He has created in nature. And there are various forms of mysticism, which come close to this. Pantheism is also – forms of it at least – in Hinduism. It’s not that God is identified with everything, in everything, but God is everywhere.
Now, having said that, we also need to recognize that God also has a specific location where He resides. In I Kings 8:30 – and there are numerous verses I could give about his – but Solomon is dedicating the temple and he repeats several times in that prayer of dedication, he says to God, “Hear from heaven, your dwelling place.” God has a dwelling place. Jesus said in John 14 to His disciples, “In my Father’s house are many mansions” – “My Father has a home”. When Jesus taught His disciples how to pray, He taught them to pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven” - not “Our Father, who is omnipresent”. He has a location where He resides in heaven. Ephesians 1, amongst several verses, speaks of Jesus seated on the right hand of God in the heavenly realms. So, clearly God has a home, God has a specific place where He is located – it’s heaven. Where is heaven? I don’t know, in case you hoped I might give you some insight into that. It does say in John 17, we read before, “Jesus looked towards heaven and prayed.” Where do you think He looked? I suspect He looked up because everything is up. And we don’t know where heaven is but there is a place called heaven. Yet, although God’s home is in heaven, Psalms 139, if you read the whole section, Psalm 139:7-12, it includes this statement,
“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?”
And then David suggests a few possibilities:
“If I go to the heavens, you are there;” (because that’s His home) but “if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
“If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.
“If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me, even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is a light to you.”
David is saying in that psalm, “Where can I hide from God? Actually, there is nowhere I can hide from God because God is everywhere – even in the depths as well as in the heights – there is no hiding place.”
And the message of God’s omnipresence is that there is never a place where God is not present. Now we may withdraw experientially from His presence. That is, we may live as though we were independent and detached from God. You know, God said to the Israelites when they were going through the wilderness and you remember they were stubbornly resisting and He said in Exodus 33:3, He said,
“Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people and I might destroy you on the way.”
Now, God is not saying, “If you go up that road toward Canaan, I’m not up there because I’m down over here somewhere and so I’ll not go with you.” He’s not talking about His omnipresence but about His activity amongst them and with them. Because later He says to Moses, in the same chapter He says to Moses,
“My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest” (speaking of His active presence).
But you will know that many times – not least in the Great Commission when Jesus sent His disciples out into all the world – He says,
“And I am with you always until the end of the world.”
That is something we assume, something we may count on – that when we are in His agenda, we are confident that we have His presence, His active presence – His active presence although He is present in all places anyway.
I get concerned when I hear people pray this way – I get concerned about their understanding of God’s presence. I hear people often pray, “Lord please be with us tonight”. Now, to give them the benefit of the doubt, I am assuming they are praying, what God said to Moses, “My Presence will go with you” – “Lord, make your presence something very active and real and experiential amongst us tonight.” But actually, we don’t need to pray, “Lord please be with us tonight,” or “Please be with me as I go on this journey” or “Please be with me as I do this”. You can assume, because He’s already promised it. You can say, “Thank You, if I am in Your agenda, there is no issue about this – You are with me and You are active.”
So, God is omnipresent – everywhere – but He is experientially present when we are workers together with Him in His agenda. That’s something else that we will talk a bit about when we talk about experiencing God in a later occasion.
The fourth attribute of God is the eternal nature of God. And by His eternal nature I mean that He has always been existent, He always will be existent and there are no limits to time with God. God is without beginning and without end. He lives in the eternal ‘now’. When God revealed Himself to Moses, when Moses was supposed to go back into Egypt, “Who shall I say that has sent me?” Moses asked, and God said, “Say I AM has sent you. I AM WHO I AM. Say to the people I AM has sent me to you.” God’s name is eternally present tense.
I have a friend in Britain who said that he once thought about this and he sort of said that he said to the Lord, “Lord how am I to understand this? What is a word that would summarize this name I AM WHO I AM?” (By the way our English word ‘Jehovah’ comes from this.) And he said that the word that came to his mind was the word “Always”. “What is your name?” Moses asked. The answer: “Always”. That’s a very good paraphrase of this, I think. “My name is Always”.
Let me just compare Genesis 1:1 with John 1:1. You know there is a similarity. Genesis 1:1 says:
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”.
And John 1:1 says:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
They sound very similar statements but actually they are very different statements if you think about them. The first is a statement about the beginning - it’s time related – there was a beginning and the beginning, God created. You know, this service had a beginning; it may seem a long time ago now to some of you, but that clock keeps moving around. And Genesis 1 says whenever the beginning was, God created. But John 1:1 speaks of a past tense in the beginning because it says:
“In the beginning was” (past tense) “the Word, the Word was” (past tense) “with God”.
So, in John 1:1 he is saying, “When the beginning began” (that’s a time measured thing), “when the beginning began, there was already (past tense - somewhat in existence), “the Word. The Word was with God; the Word was God”. That is, that God pre-dates time. Time is a created thing; it’s not an everlasting thing. And God, because He is eternal, stands outside of time. And so, I AM the burning bush, I AM the cross of Christ, I AM at the return of Christ; I AM at the end of the ages. God is ceaseless.
I think it was C.S. Lewis who said, “Time is like a row of books on a bookshelf”. And God who is outside can come and pull a book out at this point in the shelf and that’s what’s where at that point, put it back, go and take one out of this side – that’s what’s there, put that back, go back over here, pull that out – and it was his way of saying God who stands outside of time – the past, the present and the future – it’s all the same to God; He can go back and forth so to speak. Now our minds can’t grasp that, other than the fact that God is eternal and He has no beginning, will have no end. Nobody created God; He is self-existent. And nobody will ever be invited to God’s funeral; He will never end and never die. And the marvellous thing of course is that we are to share in His eternal nature. This is life eternal, there is eternal life: what is it? It’s knowing God and that of course is the heart of the Christian life.
And the fifth thing about God’s attributes that are uniquely His – He does not communicate these to us – is what I am going to call the immutability of God. The word ‘immutable’ means to be unchanging. God is always the same. Malachi 3:6 says,
“I the Lord do not change.”
And then He talks about the implications of the fact that He doesn’t change. In James 1:17,
“Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”
Nothing else in the universe is immutable. Everything else in the universe is mutating. That means it is changing, in the process of changing. But God does not mutate; He is immutable. He does not decay. Everything is decaying; everything is dying. In fact, one of the evidences for there being a Creator behind the universe is: the natural flow in the universe is for everything to slow down and decay, but the universe is not doing that. It is keeping - the seasons are coming on schedule every year.
One of the oldest living things in the world you can look at, if you were to go to the Sequoia National Park in California and I’ve been there and seen the sequoia trees – the Redwoods, as they are often known. And there is one, it’s got a big fence around it; it’s a great old tree. They claim that it’s over 2,000 years old. It looks old; it is in a process of decay even though there are some green leaves coming off the top of it. And there is another stump now, which they claim is about 4,000 years old but it’s dead - that goes back to Abraham’s day. I’ve looked at that and thought, “My, that was here when Abraham was around”. The 2,000-year-old tree was here when Christ was on earth.
And I just read actually, only this week, a claim that a 250-million-year-old bacteria were found in ancient sea salt beneath Carlsbad in New Mexico. I am reading this to you:
“The microscopic organisms were revived in the laboratory after being in ‘suspended animation’, encased in a hard-shelled spore for an estimated 250 million years.”
Well, I don’t know about that, but anyway I read it. But even that is a blip in terms of time and God is exactly the same now as He was then. He is immutable; He does not change. And that’s why we can read from the book of Genesis, we can read from the whole of Scripture and we can know that God is exactly the God that is living today. What makes that God angry? It’s a good question. You can find out in the Bible. What pleases that God? You can find out in the Bible. In what conditions does God pour out His love and grace? You can read that, because God is unchanging. Everything else around us is changing. There’s a hymn we sometimes sing – or used to sing – I don’t know if it’s well known here. The first line is,
“Abide with me, fast falls the even tide.”
There’s a very which says:
“Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see.
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.”
And the prayer of that hymn is in this changing, and I don’t like the changes taking place in my life and my body as I get old – I don’t like them. I don’t like what I see in other folks as they age. And I was talking to somebody today how that sometimes old age is not the easiest of times. But God does not change; He is immutable.
Well, those are the attributes of God revealed to us in Scripture, which are ones which are uniquely His - He does not communicate to His creation. And very briefly, just three minutes, there are His communicable attributes. There are attributes that belong to God, which He has given to us - in particular human beings, because we have the unique distinction in all of creation of being created in His image. What is the nature of that image? I suggest to you it is His moral image. The attributes He shares with humanity are attributes of His character. I mentioned, at the beginning, His love as an example of that. As I John 4:8 says,
“God is love.”
But there are attributes of His goodness – that we recognize good from bad, we aspire for goodness; we love goodness. There is His grace, His kindness, His mercy, His amazing patience, to some extent, His holiness. These are qualities that are true of God that He has given to us. And I say to some extent His holiness – there will be a day when we will share fully in His holiness. That’s His intended purpose for us beyond this life. In this life, we have that old nature that fights against the Spirit but nevertheless we have the ability to aspire to holiness. That is a human thing. We have a couple of cats in our home. They do not aspire to holiness; it’s not within their capacity to do so, unfortunately. But we do.
And I am not going to speak of these anymore because I am finishing now except to say this: that these are the areas in which we actually know God. When Jesus said, “This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent”, it’s not that you can sit down and write a paper on God and check off, you know, on a multi-choice questionnaire all the things you know about God out there. But eternal life is actually knowing His love, it’s knowing His goodness, it’s knowing His grace, it’s knowing experientially His mercy, it’s experiencing His patience, it’s experiencing His holiness, because our knowledge of God will be directly related to the measure in which the character of God is being reproduced in us. The goal of the gospel is from one degree of glory to another – we’re being transformed into His image. That’s the goal: it’s His moral character.
In fact, knowing God is all about finding our way back to the Garden of Eden, where we reflect His image. Having created Adam in His own image, it was that all creation might look at Adam and know what God is like – that’s what it means to be in His image. God’s purpose for you is that people may look at you and me and see in us something of His moral character. That’s what we will talk about next time when we talk about experiencing God, because that is the heart of it - it’s experiencing God in our own lives. That is the greatest privilege on earth, don’t you think?
Let’s pray together. Lord, we are humbled by the fact that we, finite, limited, time-sensitive creatures of Your creation, don’t need to move around in a fog of confusion about where do we come from, where are we going, why are we here? We can, as the Lord Jesus did in John 17, look up to heaven and say, Father, thank You that You hear us, that eternal life is knowing You, experiencing You, taking You into our homes day by day, taking You to our places of work, taking You into our marriages, taking You into our families, taking You into the nitty-gritty of life and experiencing You, knowing You in a way that makes everything else make sense. And I pray that, as Paul prayed, that we may have that Spirit of revelation that we may know Him better, that as we love You and rest in You, and trust You, that You will go on revealing Yourself in a way that is deep and real and exciting to us. We pray it in Jesus’ Name, Amen.
“After Jesus said this, he looked towards heaven and prayed: ‘Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.’”
Now this is a fairly short series that we are doing together on the existence of God – at least on Knowing God. Last week - last time – I talked about the existence of God and looked at the various evidences that are there for all to see, those who will open their eyes and look, for the existence of God. It’s what we call the natural revelation God has given to us in creation of Himself. And we talked about that last time.
And today I want to talk to you about what I am calling “The Knowability of God”. To what extent can God be known? Now I realize as I prepared for this and as we think about this subject, that we have taken on what is an impossible task – how do we represent God in a series of addresses like this? The best I can think of: it’s like an ocean, which we can’t fathom, the vastness of it. We can take a little glass and we can take some of the water out of the ocean; we get a little, little picture of what is there in the ocean, but little concept of the ocean itself that way. And you know, we do talk a little bit about knowing God fairly freely, but in one sense it really is an impossible task.
In the book of Job 11, one of Job’s counsellors, a man called Zophar, who didn’t always speak wisdom by the way, but I’m going to read you what Zophar said. He asked this question:
“Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can you probe the limits of the Almighty? They are higher than the heavens – what can you do? They are deeper than the depths of the grave – what can you know? Their measure is longer than the earth and wider than the sea.”
And Zophar there is asking a very good question and basically he is asking: can the finite know the infinite, can the temporal know the eternal, can a man know God? Well, when we try to understand something we cannot see, we usually think in terms of comparisons and contrasts. We say something is like something else – that’s a comparison. Or we say it is not like something else - that’s a contrast. Now when we try to think of things which we compare God or with which we may contrast God, again we run into the same difficulty. In Isaiah 40:12 [18], Isaiah asks:
“To whom, then, will you compare God? What image will you compare him to?”
What is there in all of creation you can look at and say, “That is like God” because God, the Creator, transcends everything in His creation.
That’s why, of course, we cannot prove to the sceptical mind, the existence of God. If we could prove God by putting God into some category or equating Him with something which is normal to us, He probably wouldn’t be God because He transcends everything that there is in His creation. That’s why we have some difficulties when we talk about knowing God and the knowability of God.
You know the Trinity is one case in point because Scripture reveals to us for instance that there is one God. It reveals to us that there is God the Father, there is God the Son and there is God the Holy Spirit. It is clear the Father is God, it’s clear the Son is God, it is clear the Holy Spirit is God. And yet the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, the Spirit is not the Father, and this defies logic, human logic. And yet the three are one.
There have been numerous attempts to reduce the Trinity to a simple explanation that supposedly takes into account all of these aspects but there is no analogy that really works. There are a number of popular ones. For instance, you know a tree has a trunk, it has roots, it has branches and that’s been used as a picture of the trinity. But then the branches are not the roots and yet the Father is the Spirit – the Spirit is co-equal with the Father – so that falls down. In fact, they all fall down really.
The one that I grew up with as a child – I remember the three-leaf clover often being used as an illustration. You know, it’s one clover but it’s got three leaves – it’s one God, three parts of the one God. H2O is another one that’s been frequently used. What is two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, put them together, you’ve got – if I asked you, you’d probably say water; that’s true. It’s also ice, H20 is also steam, depending on its environment, one is a solid, one is a liquid, one is a vapour and yet they are all H20. These are attempts to try to understand how we might know the Trinity.
The classic definition comes in the Creed of Athanasius, which you are probably not too familiar with. Athanasius was a Third Century bishop of Alexandria in Egypt and he lived at a time when there was a heresy – the heresy of Arianism was popular which denied the deity of Christ. And so, he came up with what has become the classic definition of the Trinity and I am going to read it to you from the Anglican Prayer Book. The more liturgical churches tend to read this Creed, especially on Trinity Sunday. And I am going to read only a little bit of it. And he says:
“There is one Person of the Father, another of the Son and another of the Holy Spirit. But the Godhead of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit is all one, the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal. Such as the Father is, such is the Son and such is the Holy Spirit. The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate, and the Holy Spirit uncreate. The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible. The Father eternal, the Son eternal, the Holy Spirit eternal. And yet they are not three eternals but one eternal. They are not three incomprehensibles nor three uncreated but one uncreated and one incomprehensible. And so likewise the Father is Almighty, the Son Almighty, and the Holy Spirit Almighty. And yet they are not three Almighties but one Almighty.”
And then he goes on similarly about Father’s God, Son’s God, Holy Spirit God, but there is one God, not three Gods. They are Lords but only one Lord etc. And then he says,
“So in all things, the Unity is in the Trinity and the Trinity in the Unity is to be worshipped.”
Well, good, I’m glad you grasped that! Because I think if these great minds of the history of the church, you know, have done their best and they end up concluding that the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the Holy Spirit incomprehensible, yet these are not three incomprehensibles but one incomprehensible, I scratch my head and want to say, “Alright, let’s not even try.”
So, there is a sense, a very real sense in which grasping a knowledge of God is not only very difficult, it’s impossible to us. Zophar’s questions are good questions. There is of course a belief that God cannot be known. We know that as agnosticism. An agnostic is someone who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence of God or nature of God. That, by definition, is an agnostic. And yet, Scripture encourages us to the reality that we can know God. In fact, here that I read to you in John 17:3, Jesus said,
“This is eternal life”.
And by the way, if I read that and said, “This is eternal life; fill in what you think will come next”, some of us would probably say: “This is eternal life: living forever in heaven.” Well, of course, that’s a wonderful dimension, but what Jesus says is:
“This is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
The Christian life, eternal life, says Jesus, is knowing God and it’s knowing Christ. In I John 5:20, John says,
“We know also that the Son has come and has given us understanding that we may know him who is true.”
The operative thing there, which we will come back to, is He has given us understanding. We didn’t work this out; we didn’t start on a search to find out about God. I saw in a bookshelf the other day a book called “The Biography of God”. That’s a very difficult task. No, He has given us understanding. And as Paul wrote in Ephesians 1:17, praying for the Ephesians,
“I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation” (here’s why) “so that you may know him better.”
But he says, I’m asking the Father to give you the Spirit of revelation. You don’t know God and we don’t know Christ simply by some human mental activity. There are certain things we may know about God objectively. We look out and say, “Those things seem to be true of God”, but we know Him by revelation; it’s the Spirit who reveals Him to us. I like what Paul also says in Ephesians when he is talking about the love of God in Ephesians 3:19, he talks about that you may “know this love that surpasses knowledge.” When you think about it, that sounds contradictory: “know this love that surpasses knowledge.” If it surpasses knowledge, how can you know it? Well, there are things which surpass knowledge humanly, but he says you can actually know this. And you find that Paul’s prayer there too is that God will reveal that.
So clearly God can be known in some way and to some extent but it is impossible to know God exhaustively and say to your neighbor, “Let me tell you everything about God.” We can’t begin to do that. When Jesus said, “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you”, He is not speaking clearly, He is not speaking about simply intellectual understanding and knowledge of God. I’ll tell you why I say that: because in the book of James, in James 2:19 says,
“You believe there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that – and they shudder.”
They take it seriously; they shudder. But knowing God simply intellectually does not make you a Christian – even the demons know something of God. What He means, “This is eternal life: that they may know you”, He is talking about experience of God. I’m going to talk about that on another occasion, that really God reveals Himself in Scripture through experience. God has given several names that He has revealed of Himself in Scripture. And you find the revelation of those names are always in the context of an experience that people have of what that name represents. And we’ll talk about that, that God reveals Himself in experience.
Now the King James uses a similar word in the Old Testament and I don’t pretend that the word in John 17 is the same word – one is Hebrew in Genesis 4, one is in Greek in John 17 – but there is a similar connection in meaning where it speaks of Adam there: “And Adam knew Eve, his wife and she conceived and bear Cain.”
Now when it says, “Adam knew Eve”, it didn’t mean that he met her on the street and said, “My name is Adam; what’s yours? How do you do?” and shook her hand. It didn’t mean that he could describe her. It meant he had intimate experience of her and she of him, and the knowledge of God comes from intimate experience of God, which we’ll see on another occasion.
But today I want to talk about the objective – I’m calling it - objective knowledge of God. You see, last time I talked about the fact that God has revealed Himself by two means – there’s natural revelation - passages like “The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies reveal his handiwork. Day after day they pour forth speech” – you read that in Psalm 19. Creation reveals the Creator behind the universe. The order of the universe reveals intelligence behind that. The moral conscience that every human being has reveals something of the moral character of the Creator – we talked about that. It’s what we call natural revelation that we can observe with a closed Bible, with the fingerprints of God all over creation.
But natural revelation doesn’t tell us enough and so we recognize there is a special revelation, we’ll call it, whereby God has chosen to reveal details about Himself. And He has chosen to reveal those details by speaking to us. This is why the Word of God is so central to us and so important to us because we recognize that the Scriptures literally is, as I described it then, the Word of God – it’s God revealing Himself.
See, if I can illustrate this: you here tonight have both a general revelation of me and a special revelation of me. Let me explain what I mean. You know something about me just by observation; you know my height, you know my appearance, my clothing, you see all these things. You might discern some things about my character just by observing me. But all of that is fairly superficial knowledge. As you look around this crowd here tonight, there are a lot of people you recognize in that way. But it’s very likely that some of you think you know more about me than you know about people you recognize week by week who sit, you know, across the aisle in some other position who you do recognize, you would greet if you met them on the street. But you probably think you know something more about me for the simple reason I talk to you a lot and my speech inevitably reveals something about me, or at least you conclude certain things about me by my speech. I give you the benefit of special revelation. In fact, somebody I was talking to about two weeks ago just made the comment to me, he said, “When I hear you preach, I feel as though I know you.” Well actually, he doesn’t know me, but he thinks he does because I talk and when you talk, you access somebody’s mind, you access their attitudes, you access what is important to them, and as we speak there is this sort of revelation of ourselves that takes place.
Now God has done that in a very specific way. He has spoken to us. God has spoken; that’s what His Word is about. And therefore, He is a revealing God and there are things that He has revealed to us that we would not know simply by observation. And I want to talk about the attributes of God. Now that’s a big word: attributes. But an attribute is a quality that is ascribed to a person. If you say somebody is a tall person, that’s an attribute. She’s a generous person – that is an attribute.
And the attributes of God we can understand in two different categories. Theologians, who have spent centuries thinking about these things, have come up with these two categories at least. First of all, there are His incommunicable attributes – that’s a big word and theologians think of big words because they have little else to do, and these are qualities that belong to God alone, that He does not share with His creation. For an example, the fact that God is all knowing, He is omniscient, God knows everything there is to know. There is nothing in His creation to whom He has communicated and given that particular attribute.
I did hear about an advertisement on one occasion, which said, “All 32 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica for Sale. Reason for sale: husband knows everything.” Well, whoever the husband was, he didn’t know everything because nobody knows everything.
So, there are God’s incommunicable attributes and we’ll talk about those a little bit tonight. And then there are His communicable attributes. That is: there are qualities that God has chosen to share with His creation, in particular with humanity. For instance, God is love. That is an attribute of God and He has chosen, in creating human beings, to give us the capacity to love. Now the communicable attributes are, by and large, moral attributes. They are to do with behaviour. And I’ll comment on that a little bit later on.
Let me talk then about His incommunicable attributes and there are five essentially. I want to just talk about briefly, and I apologize for the big words, but why not learn a bit of vocabulary as well tonight, because they are single words that best describe these incommunicable attributes of God.
First of all: the omnipotence of God - let me talk about that. By that, I mean that God is all-powerful; there are no limits to His power. I could give you many biblical statements about this, but let’s go to the beginning of the Bible and the end of the Bible. The first word of the Bible is “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Now that is a revelation of His omnipotence - that God created the universe. And at the end of the Bible, Revelation 22, it concludes with an image of the throne of God and of the Lamb and the throne represents power, sovereignty, authority. And again, it pictures God’s omnipotence.
Now in a few weeks’ time I’m going to devote a whole service to talking about the sovereignty of God. But I need to say something tonight without encroaching on that. When we talk about the omnipotence of God, we’re tempted to think that God’s omnipotence is an undisciplined attribute. What I mean by that is that we’re tempted to believe that everything that happens is the will of God because He’s omnipotent. That God in heaven can, so to speak, click His fingers and do anything He likes. Our praying is usually an appeal to His omnipotence – there’s something here that looks impossible: “God intervene!”
And consequently, when things take what seems their natural course and God doesn’t intervene, we feel justified in accusing God of inaction. And I’ve heard this question a million times: “Why didn’t God do something?” Because we think of His omnipotence, as I’ve described it, as an undisciplined thing, that God can simply zap His fingers and does. I mean we look at events of recent days – the Asian tsunami with its awful devastation in so many countries, Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans, the South Asia earthquake and the many thousands of people who have lost their lives through that, even the Avian Flu threat that we are now hearing a lot about and the estimate of how many millions may die as a consequence of this. And this is not just this year; these things happen every year. Thousands die in situations that we stand back and say, “Why in the world was that allowed to happen?”
You know there is an argument, and you’ve probably heard it, that God cannot be all-powerful and at the same time all-loving. Because if He is all-powerful, then the very existence of suffering and sadness and tragedy in the world indicates, so the argument goes, that He’s not loving. And if God is all loving and desires the best for us all the time, then He’s obviously not all-powerful because He seems unable to resist these destructive things that take place. And so, there’s this argument, you know, that God can’t be both all-powerful and all loving. And it does raise the question: what on earth is God doing? But have you ever considered the possibility that maybe God isn’t doing a lot of these things? What does it mean when Galatians 3:22 says: “The Scripture declares that the whole world is a prisoner of sin”? What did Jesus mean on three occasions when He spoke of Satan as being the “prince of this world”? What does John mean in I John 5:19 when he says, “We know that we are children of God and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one”?
Now these are verses you cannot sweep under the carpet. These are issues which I am going to address – not tonight; I’m just raising the question tonight - when we talk about the sovereignty of God. But when we speak of God’s omnipotence, it clearly is not an undisciplined omnipotence – God simply looking around the universe – zap, zap, zap, zap, zap. He doesn’t intervene that way; we might wish that He did but He doesn’t. Why? Well, we’ll address that on another occasion, but we will address it.
But nevertheless, Scripture reveals that God is all-powerful, God is omnipotent. And by the way, I don’t want to disturb you by raising the question. Our security is in the fact that He is omnipotent and that ultimately, as we will see on another occasion, ultimately history will be seen as His story. And God is working His story through history and we’ll see something of that on another occasion.
But that’s the first of God’s attributes – the omnipotence of God. Secondly, the omniscience of God, which I referred to a moment ago – the fact that God is all knowing and there are no limits to His knowledge. I John 3:20 says,
“For God knows everything.”
I remember many years ago being at a prayer meeting in Glasgow in Scotland. A lady was praying and she actually said to the Lord, “I don’t know if you know this yet, but…” and then she told Him something that had just recently happened and what she thought He might do about it. Well, I think He did know it already of course. Nothing ever catches God by surprise. Nothing ever takes Him off guard. But God’s omniscience raises a few questions with us as well. Let me mention two of them. Because God knows everything there is to know, we tend to hold Him responsible for everything but knowledge does not in itself equal responsibility.
Let me illustrate: I remember once flying into Belfast Airport in Northern Ireland and we were flying in low. It was a prop plane and we were flying over narrow country lanes down below, quite low. And I saw coming down one of these lanes – if you’ve been to Britain or Europe, you know that the roads can be very narrow and twisty – there was a combine harvester with its wide front coming down this narrow road, filling the road. And around from the corner, from my seat in the airplane, I could see a car coming the other way and I thought, “that car and that combine harvester are going to meet right on that corner”. Now the plane kept flying so I don’t know what happened. But I had foreknowledge of that event compared to the driver of the combine harvester - the farmer and the driver of the car. I had some foreknowledge; from my position I could see this was going to happen. But I was not responsible for the fact that these two would meet on the corner and the car was going faster than it probably should and probably would get into some trouble. God’s knowledge of everything does not equal His responsibility for everything. And because He knows it, it doesn’t mean if God knew that I’m going to do something silly tonight, that doesn’t hold Him responsible for it.
And the second issue this raises is: if God knows everything there is to know, then what is the point of praying to a God who knows everything? In fact, you put these first two things together: if God is all-powerful and God is all-knowing, what is the point of me spending time praying, telling God things that He already knows, or suggesting that He should do things that in His sovereignty and omnipotence He has either decided to do or not do anyway? This is the reasoning. And I remember when I was a young Christian I was very troubled by this. What’s the point of praying? Because I knew I’d never pray to God and say, “God I want to pray for Mrs. Smith who is in hospital having her appendix out” and God would say, “Mrs. Smith, I wondered where she was – so she is – she’s in the hospital having her appendix out. Thank you for telling me that.” I knew that wouldn’t happen. So why tell Him it? And if I said, “God, I’d like You to do this, this, this and this, in Jesus’ Name, Amen”, I knew He wouldn’t sit in heaven and say, “Wow, that is a brilliant idea; did you angels hear what that guy just said? Isn’t that a good idea? I think we’ll do that.” He’s already thought of everything I might suggest, so what’s the point of praying? I am not going to answer that question; I’m just raising it. You can buy the CD’s on the series I did on prayer about two years ago and that addresses that question. But I’m just saying that when we talk about the omniscience of God, it raises some practical questions for us.
There is a movement right now within parts of evangelical Christianity which speaks of the openness of God and that is a movement which says in effect, that God does not know the future as firmly as we previously thought that He might. Now I have no difficulty rejecting that thinking at all, because if God did not know all there is to know, He would not be God. Also, that subjects God to a time process and God is eternal outside time and therefore the past, the future, as well as the present is eternally present to Him. The only difference between the future and the past is the future hasn’t happened to us yet, but God is as aware of the future as of the past.
So, there’s the omniscience of God. And the third thing is the omnipresence of God. That means that God is always present; there are no limits to His presence. He is everywhere. That by the way does not mean that He is in everything; that is idea of what is called pantheism. Pantheism is the idea that God and the universe are identical and that God is in everything He has created in nature. And there are various forms of mysticism, which come close to this. Pantheism is also – forms of it at least – in Hinduism. It’s not that God is identified with everything, in everything, but God is everywhere.
Now, having said that, we also need to recognize that God also has a specific location where He resides. In I Kings 8:30 – and there are numerous verses I could give about his – but Solomon is dedicating the temple and he repeats several times in that prayer of dedication, he says to God, “Hear from heaven, your dwelling place.” God has a dwelling place. Jesus said in John 14 to His disciples, “In my Father’s house are many mansions” – “My Father has a home”. When Jesus taught His disciples how to pray, He taught them to pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven” - not “Our Father, who is omnipresent”. He has a location where He resides in heaven. Ephesians 1, amongst several verses, speaks of Jesus seated on the right hand of God in the heavenly realms. So, clearly God has a home, God has a specific place where He is located – it’s heaven. Where is heaven? I don’t know, in case you hoped I might give you some insight into that. It does say in John 17, we read before, “Jesus looked towards heaven and prayed.” Where do you think He looked? I suspect He looked up because everything is up. And we don’t know where heaven is but there is a place called heaven. Yet, although God’s home is in heaven, Psalms 139, if you read the whole section, Psalm 139:7-12, it includes this statement,
“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?”
And then David suggests a few possibilities:
“If I go to the heavens, you are there;” (because that’s His home) but “if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
“If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.
“If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me, even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is a light to you.”
David is saying in that psalm, “Where can I hide from God? Actually, there is nowhere I can hide from God because God is everywhere – even in the depths as well as in the heights – there is no hiding place.”
And the message of God’s omnipresence is that there is never a place where God is not present. Now we may withdraw experientially from His presence. That is, we may live as though we were independent and detached from God. You know, God said to the Israelites when they were going through the wilderness and you remember they were stubbornly resisting and He said in Exodus 33:3, He said,
“Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people and I might destroy you on the way.”
Now, God is not saying, “If you go up that road toward Canaan, I’m not up there because I’m down over here somewhere and so I’ll not go with you.” He’s not talking about His omnipresence but about His activity amongst them and with them. Because later He says to Moses, in the same chapter He says to Moses,
“My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest” (speaking of His active presence).
But you will know that many times – not least in the Great Commission when Jesus sent His disciples out into all the world – He says,
“And I am with you always until the end of the world.”
That is something we assume, something we may count on – that when we are in His agenda, we are confident that we have His presence, His active presence – His active presence although He is present in all places anyway.
I get concerned when I hear people pray this way – I get concerned about their understanding of God’s presence. I hear people often pray, “Lord please be with us tonight”. Now, to give them the benefit of the doubt, I am assuming they are praying, what God said to Moses, “My Presence will go with you” – “Lord, make your presence something very active and real and experiential amongst us tonight.” But actually, we don’t need to pray, “Lord please be with us tonight,” or “Please be with me as I go on this journey” or “Please be with me as I do this”. You can assume, because He’s already promised it. You can say, “Thank You, if I am in Your agenda, there is no issue about this – You are with me and You are active.”
So, God is omnipresent – everywhere – but He is experientially present when we are workers together with Him in His agenda. That’s something else that we will talk a bit about when we talk about experiencing God in a later occasion.
The fourth attribute of God is the eternal nature of God. And by His eternal nature I mean that He has always been existent, He always will be existent and there are no limits to time with God. God is without beginning and without end. He lives in the eternal ‘now’. When God revealed Himself to Moses, when Moses was supposed to go back into Egypt, “Who shall I say that has sent me?” Moses asked, and God said, “Say I AM has sent you. I AM WHO I AM. Say to the people I AM has sent me to you.” God’s name is eternally present tense.
I have a friend in Britain who said that he once thought about this and he sort of said that he said to the Lord, “Lord how am I to understand this? What is a word that would summarize this name I AM WHO I AM?” (By the way our English word ‘Jehovah’ comes from this.) And he said that the word that came to his mind was the word “Always”. “What is your name?” Moses asked. The answer: “Always”. That’s a very good paraphrase of this, I think. “My name is Always”.
Let me just compare Genesis 1:1 with John 1:1. You know there is a similarity. Genesis 1:1 says:
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”.
And John 1:1 says:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
They sound very similar statements but actually they are very different statements if you think about them. The first is a statement about the beginning - it’s time related – there was a beginning and the beginning, God created. You know, this service had a beginning; it may seem a long time ago now to some of you, but that clock keeps moving around. And Genesis 1 says whenever the beginning was, God created. But John 1:1 speaks of a past tense in the beginning because it says:
“In the beginning was” (past tense) “the Word, the Word was” (past tense) “with God”.
So, in John 1:1 he is saying, “When the beginning began” (that’s a time measured thing), “when the beginning began, there was already (past tense - somewhat in existence), “the Word. The Word was with God; the Word was God”. That is, that God pre-dates time. Time is a created thing; it’s not an everlasting thing. And God, because He is eternal, stands outside of time. And so, I AM the burning bush, I AM the cross of Christ, I AM at the return of Christ; I AM at the end of the ages. God is ceaseless.
I think it was C.S. Lewis who said, “Time is like a row of books on a bookshelf”. And God who is outside can come and pull a book out at this point in the shelf and that’s what’s where at that point, put it back, go and take one out of this side – that’s what’s there, put that back, go back over here, pull that out – and it was his way of saying God who stands outside of time – the past, the present and the future – it’s all the same to God; He can go back and forth so to speak. Now our minds can’t grasp that, other than the fact that God is eternal and He has no beginning, will have no end. Nobody created God; He is self-existent. And nobody will ever be invited to God’s funeral; He will never end and never die. And the marvellous thing of course is that we are to share in His eternal nature. This is life eternal, there is eternal life: what is it? It’s knowing God and that of course is the heart of the Christian life.
And the fifth thing about God’s attributes that are uniquely His – He does not communicate these to us – is what I am going to call the immutability of God. The word ‘immutable’ means to be unchanging. God is always the same. Malachi 3:6 says,
“I the Lord do not change.”
And then He talks about the implications of the fact that He doesn’t change. In James 1:17,
“Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”
Nothing else in the universe is immutable. Everything else in the universe is mutating. That means it is changing, in the process of changing. But God does not mutate; He is immutable. He does not decay. Everything is decaying; everything is dying. In fact, one of the evidences for there being a Creator behind the universe is: the natural flow in the universe is for everything to slow down and decay, but the universe is not doing that. It is keeping - the seasons are coming on schedule every year.
One of the oldest living things in the world you can look at, if you were to go to the Sequoia National Park in California and I’ve been there and seen the sequoia trees – the Redwoods, as they are often known. And there is one, it’s got a big fence around it; it’s a great old tree. They claim that it’s over 2,000 years old. It looks old; it is in a process of decay even though there are some green leaves coming off the top of it. And there is another stump now, which they claim is about 4,000 years old but it’s dead - that goes back to Abraham’s day. I’ve looked at that and thought, “My, that was here when Abraham was around”. The 2,000-year-old tree was here when Christ was on earth.
And I just read actually, only this week, a claim that a 250-million-year-old bacteria were found in ancient sea salt beneath Carlsbad in New Mexico. I am reading this to you:
“The microscopic organisms were revived in the laboratory after being in ‘suspended animation’, encased in a hard-shelled spore for an estimated 250 million years.”
Well, I don’t know about that, but anyway I read it. But even that is a blip in terms of time and God is exactly the same now as He was then. He is immutable; He does not change. And that’s why we can read from the book of Genesis, we can read from the whole of Scripture and we can know that God is exactly the God that is living today. What makes that God angry? It’s a good question. You can find out in the Bible. What pleases that God? You can find out in the Bible. In what conditions does God pour out His love and grace? You can read that, because God is unchanging. Everything else around us is changing. There’s a hymn we sometimes sing – or used to sing – I don’t know if it’s well known here. The first line is,
“Abide with me, fast falls the even tide.”
There’s a very which says:
“Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see.
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.”
And the prayer of that hymn is in this changing, and I don’t like the changes taking place in my life and my body as I get old – I don’t like them. I don’t like what I see in other folks as they age. And I was talking to somebody today how that sometimes old age is not the easiest of times. But God does not change; He is immutable.
Well, those are the attributes of God revealed to us in Scripture, which are ones which are uniquely His - He does not communicate to His creation. And very briefly, just three minutes, there are His communicable attributes. There are attributes that belong to God, which He has given to us - in particular human beings, because we have the unique distinction in all of creation of being created in His image. What is the nature of that image? I suggest to you it is His moral image. The attributes He shares with humanity are attributes of His character. I mentioned, at the beginning, His love as an example of that. As I John 4:8 says,
“God is love.”
But there are attributes of His goodness – that we recognize good from bad, we aspire for goodness; we love goodness. There is His grace, His kindness, His mercy, His amazing patience, to some extent, His holiness. These are qualities that are true of God that He has given to us. And I say to some extent His holiness – there will be a day when we will share fully in His holiness. That’s His intended purpose for us beyond this life. In this life, we have that old nature that fights against the Spirit but nevertheless we have the ability to aspire to holiness. That is a human thing. We have a couple of cats in our home. They do not aspire to holiness; it’s not within their capacity to do so, unfortunately. But we do.
And I am not going to speak of these anymore because I am finishing now except to say this: that these are the areas in which we actually know God. When Jesus said, “This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent”, it’s not that you can sit down and write a paper on God and check off, you know, on a multi-choice questionnaire all the things you know about God out there. But eternal life is actually knowing His love, it’s knowing His goodness, it’s knowing His grace, it’s knowing experientially His mercy, it’s experiencing His patience, it’s experiencing His holiness, because our knowledge of God will be directly related to the measure in which the character of God is being reproduced in us. The goal of the gospel is from one degree of glory to another – we’re being transformed into His image. That’s the goal: it’s His moral character.
In fact, knowing God is all about finding our way back to the Garden of Eden, where we reflect His image. Having created Adam in His own image, it was that all creation might look at Adam and know what God is like – that’s what it means to be in His image. God’s purpose for you is that people may look at you and me and see in us something of His moral character. That’s what we will talk about next time when we talk about experiencing God, because that is the heart of it - it’s experiencing God in our own lives. That is the greatest privilege on earth, don’t you think?
Let’s pray together. Lord, we are humbled by the fact that we, finite, limited, time-sensitive creatures of Your creation, don’t need to move around in a fog of confusion about where do we come from, where are we going, why are we here? We can, as the Lord Jesus did in John 17, look up to heaven and say, Father, thank You that You hear us, that eternal life is knowing You, experiencing You, taking You into our homes day by day, taking You to our places of work, taking You into our marriages, taking You into our families, taking You into the nitty-gritty of life and experiencing You, knowing You in a way that makes everything else make sense. And I pray that, as Paul prayed, that we may have that Spirit of revelation that we may know Him better, that as we love You and rest in You, and trust You, that You will go on revealing Yourself in a way that is deep and real and exciting to us. We pray it in Jesus’ Name, Amen.