In my last two messages I’ve discussed two foundational truths that underlie all Christian theology – God is and God has spoken or revealed Himself to us. I explained that the covenant, Hebrew name for God, Yahweh, means He Is. It derives from God’s declaration to Moses from a burning bush: “I AM who I AM.” I also gave five classical, irrefutable arguments for the existence of God that was articulated by the renowned Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas. Taken together, a reasonable person should conclude that God is and is worth pursuing and esteeming as an act of worship.

Ancient cultures that pre-existed the Hebrew one had a belief in a supreme Creator, although their understanding was muddled over time. Many cultures, therefore, devolved into a chaotic polytheism, many gods, who competed for power, human attention and held sway capriciously over human destinies.

In my second message, titled “God Has Spoken,” I made plain that what we know about God came to us by direct revelation from God in ways comprehensible to people. What we know about God could never have been confirmed by reason alone through our natural senses. Our senses and reason clearly point to a creation that has fixed physical laws that enable life to subsist. But neither can affirm the inner character of God or His purposes for our lives other than to live and die on earth. This was the hapless state of humanity prior to the revelation of the one true God.

Only when God distinctly revealed himself to Abram son of Terah, recorded in Genesis 12, did a clear revelation of the living God begin to come to mankind. God, of His own initiative, chose to reveal Himself distinctly to one man and promise to make of His descendants a mighty nation. We know that nation today as Israel, the descendants of Abraham’s grandson Jacob, renamed Israel.

Beginning with Moses, God declared Himself thereafter as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to make clear that the Israelites were His unique chosen people. Moses is reckoned by the Jews today as their greatest prophet because through Him came the first five books of their Bible and ours that they call the Torah, or Law. These books were the foundation of what the only chosen people on earth, the Israelites, recorded about God. It took nearly another thousand years for the rest of the Hebrew canon, our Old Testament, to be completed.

The Hebrew Scripture was the only holy Scripture in Jesus’ day. As our Lord explained to his faithful disciples on the day of His resurrection: ““These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms (that is, the Hebrew Bible) must be fulfilled.” ⁴⁵ Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.”

What set apart Hebrew religion and culture from all others was a covenantal relationship with the living God and a collection of sacred writings that ensured the transmission of a trustworthy revelation of God from generation to generation. The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, called the Septuagint, and the Dead Sea Scrolls – discovered in the 20^th century – both confirm that the Hebrew Bible that we have today is the same one that faithful Jews read before the birth of Christ over 2,000 years ago.

God spoke to humanity through the Jews in a way that He spoke through no other nation or people on earth. However, God spoke finally and conclusively through the revelation of His Son, Jesus Christ. Through His life, death and resurrection and the testimony of His disciples we have conclusive evidence that Jesus was God in human flesh, God incarnate. This makes Jesus God’s final, authoritative word to humanity; and the New Testament serves to explain His life and its meaning for us in greater detail.

It has been rightly said, “The Old Testament is the New Testament concealed. The New Testament is the Old Testament revealed.” God has given the human race a perfect revelation of Himself in the Bible. Therefore, it doesn’t need to be supplemented by any new revelation of God. It can’t be, because there’s nothing more to be added to God’s ultimate revelation: the Lord Jesus Christ. How could God possibly give us anything higher or better than Himself living among us?

That is why the Book of Revelation warns at the end, “I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues which are written in this book; ¹⁹ and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city, which are written in this book.” For earlier, an angel explained to John, “The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” So if anyone diminishes the sole supremacy and centrality of Jesus Christ as the Author of Salvation and the final revelation of the living God, they will be condemned by God and lose their place in heaven.

What you don’t know about God, and especially about Jesus the Son, can hurt you – both in this life and in eternity. As God said through Hosea, “My people perish through lack of knowledge.” What we can know about God has infinitely greater rewards than any other knowledge. It leads to an intimate and everlasting relationship with the Triune God that is the best destiny that Almighty God could ever give us. I will get to that later, but let me reiterate what is at stake in Christian theology is of the utmost importance. No higher possible reward can be gained from any other source, and no worse outcome – that is hell – can result from ignoring the truth of God revealed in the Bible. If you embrace a different gospel than the one God offers you through the Bible, hell and not heaven will be your final destiny.

So today I want to focus on what God has revealed to us about Himself in sacred Scripture. Nothing revealed in Scripture is contradicted by what we can perceive about God through His creation. Scripture amplifies what the creation tells us about God, and makes it very specific. There is only one God, who chose to reveal Himself first through the Israelites and then through Jesus Christ to the world, who is worthy to be worshiped as the one true God. If you settle for a distorted conception of God that denies the Triune God, especially God in Jesus Christ, you will perish. Sadly, many moral and religious people have entered eternity that way, embracing a belief that they what was good news but undermined the true Good News of Jesus Christ.

• God is Transcendent.

The Bible unfolds in layers of interactions and prophetic declarations that God is unlike anything in the creation. God is transcendent, beyond. King Solomon rightly declared to God, “Heaven and the highest heavens cannot contain You.” Today, we know that the heavens contain perhaps a trillion galaxies of stars. The universe is unfathomably great, but God is greater still. God asks through the prophet Isaiah, “‘To whom then will you liken Me that I would be his equal?’ says the Holy One.” God knows no one is equal to Him.

The God of the Bible was always understood to be all-powerful. The Semitic name El Shaddai, meaning “God Almighty”, was known long before Abraham was born. The heavens and earth, and all within them, cry that Someone utterly greater than ourselves was behind it all.

Then God confirmed something else that was largely understood: He is holy, set apart from His creation. Theologians speak of divine attributes that are incommunicable, that cannot be imparted to anything in creation. Let me briefly describe three transcendent, or incommunicable attributes of God. God is eternal, God is infinite, and God is immutable or unchanging; and no one else can be.

For this reason, no one else can possibly be fully like God. There are some who say God has created other gods to rule this and other planets. If so, they could neither be eternal, infinite, nor unchanging like God. They would not be worthy of the title God. Lucifer thought he could be like God and was exposed as evil. He fell and became Satan.

To the contrary, Moses taught the Israelites, “Know therefore today, and take it to your heart, that the Lord, He is God in heaven above and on the earth below; there is no other.”

And through prophet Isaiah, God rebukes the polytheism of the ancient world: “You are My witnesses,” declares the Lord, “And My servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe Me and understand that I am He. Before Me there was no God formed, and there will be none after Me.”

Any modern religion that tries to apply the label “God” to humans, either now or in the future, is spreading a pernicious doctrine and a blasphemy against the one true God. The one exception, of course, is the man Christ Jesus; for as He told His critics, “Before Abraham was, I AM.” Jesus was the second Person of the Triune God from eternity past. He is, as the creed rightly declares, eternally begotten of the Father. He didn’t become divine after His death; He reassumed His eternal, divine prerogatives and powers. Yet He will forever appear as the Jewish man that He was. He is 100% God and 100% human.

Genesis plainly reveals that God created and possesses the universe. God told Jeremiah that He fills the heavens and the earth; so why would He want other gods to claim dominion and worship? God already has billions of angels possessing divine power to do God’s bidding.

• God is Eternal. Aseity.

Ancient philosophers understood that there must be an uncaused First Cause, an unmoved Mover, and a Necessary Being from which all other being or matter derived. This is God.

Bertrand Russell, a renowned philosopher of the 20th century, declared one reason for his atheism is in his famous work, Why I am not a Christian. Starting from Aquinas’ law of causality, he said if everything must have a cause, there can be no God; for how could God be the cause of His own being? But Russell misstated the law of causality, which states that every effect must have a cause. A self-existent God is no effect, but the uncaused Cause preceding all effects.

God’s self-existence is called by theologians His aseity. God alone is eternal, and therefore separate from all creation. God has always been, and has always been the same for all eternity. God is self-existent Life; therefore, all life of necessity derives from Him.

Through the prophet Isaiah, God declares, “Even from I eternity, I am He.” Likewise, Messiah is revealed by Isaiah’s contemporary Prophet Micah to be eternal. Micah 5:2 says, “But as for you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, Too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you One will go forth for Me to be ruler in Israel. His goings forth are from long ago, from the days of eternity.” Likewise, the closing book of the Bible, the Revelation, begins with, “Grace to you and peace from Him who was, who is and who is to come.” Messiah is co-eternal with the Father and the Holy Spirit. That’s why we know God must be Triune, and there is no other God like Him.

Because God is before all things, He is also the initiator of everything He does. The Bible rightly begins, “In the beginning God created…” God is never the effect, always the Cause. That is God’s unique glory, and He will allow nothing to compete with it.

For this reason, God is always the Benefactor to His creation; and we are always the beneficiary. “When God gets all the glory, we get all the benefits”; for God truly delights in being our Great Benefactor. Generosity expresses God’s limitless love for us; and He will bestow His blessings that will evoke delight in us forever. Isn’t that what good fathers love to do for their children: evoke delight in them?

Because God is eternally self-existent: He is independent of everything that exists. There is nothing that creation can supply that God doesn’t already possess. Even love. Because God is Triune, three distinct, divine Persons in one Being, God has love within Himself that is equal and perfect. Otherwise, God would depend on His creation to love Him; but we love God because He first loved us.

Jesus’ high priestly prayer in John’s Gospel closes with these remarkable words: “The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; ²³ I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may now that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me. ²⁴ Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world.

²⁵ “O righteous Father, although the world has not known You, yet I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me; ²⁶ and I have made Your name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.” So let these words sink into your heart and mind: The eternal Love between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is the very heart of God, and is the driving force of everything God does. May God’s love be at the heart of everything you are and do as well.

• God is Infinite. And God is limitless in perfection.

St. Anselm rightly said, “God is that which nothing greater can be imagined.” That is the ontological argument for God’s existence. The Bible repeatedly declares or demonstrates that God has no limits on His power, His presence, His wisdom, knowledge and understanding. Psalm 135:6 says, “Whatever the Lord pleases, He does, in heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps.” Ephesians 3:19 says God “is able to do exceeding abundantly beyond all that we can ask or think according to the power that works within us” – that is, the Holy Spirit.

God is omnipresent. He told the prophet Jeremiah, “Can a man hide himself in hiding places so I do not see him?” declares the Lord. “Do I not fill the heavens and the earth?” declares the Lord.”

God is omniscient. There is nothing known or that can be known that God does not already know. It is impossible for God to discover something new; but God delights in our discovery of His works, just as a father delights when his child learns something new. Romans 11:33 speaks with awe about God’s wisdom: “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!”

Psalm 139 also delights in God’s omniscience as it pertains to His intimate knowledge of every one of us. It begins this way: “O Lord, You have searched me and known me. 2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up; You understand my thought from afar. 3 You scrutinize my path and my lying down, and are intimately acquainted with all my ways. 4 Even before there is a word on my tongue, behold, O Lord, You know it all. 5 You have enclosed me behind and before, and laid Your hand upon me. 6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is too high, I cannot attain to it.”

God is also beyond time as we know it. Isaiah 46:10, God declares “the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things which have not been done, saying, ‘My purpose will be established, and I will accomplish all My good pleasure’.” That is where our doctrine of divine Providence derives, how God secretly guides all of human events to fulfill God’s purposes. Oh, and did you notice God does everything for His good pleasure? The reward of knowing God is the promise that we will, indeed, enjoy Him forever.

The love of Christ, Paul asserted, “surpasses knowledge.” The peace of God, says Philippians 4:7, “surpasses all comprehension.” Everything God possesses, He possesses in infinite measure. God is not merely self-existent life: He is infinite life, and therefore capable of creating and sustaining an infinite, living creation without wearying Himself or diluting His power.

That is why I believe the New Heavens which will succeed this universe will be a vastly greater universe, filled with living planets like ours. But none of those planets will know sin or death; for God delights in His eternal, self-existent life, not in death and so intends for every creature in the heavens to live forever. As Jesus rightly said, “all live to Him.” Whatever God touches comes to life, because God lives and values living beings much more than dead things!

That’s why I’ve repeatedly said – regarding heaven:

As Monroe Correctional Complex is to planet Earth, so is planet earth in comparison to the New Earth that will be our eternal home.

As the moon is to planet earth, so is this cold, dead universe in comparison to the living universe that will be our eternal inheritance – our eternal field of service, exploration, and delight.

Heaven is worth living for, because nothing can surpass what God has prepared for us. He is giving us His very best, forever!

• God is Unchanging. Theologians call it God’s immutability.

The one constant in all of existence is, and of necessity must be, God. Since God is eternal and infinite, it stands to reason that He cannot improve, nor can He diminish in power. That is what is meant by God’s immutability: there is nothing that can detract from God’s infinite perfection. God wills to be who He is: perfect, complete, and unchangeable forever. That is clearly implied in God’s declaration to Moses, “I AM who I AM.” The Hebrew verb is timeless: so the statement also means, “I WILL BE who I WILL BE” or also, “I AM who I WILL BE” and “I WILL BE who I AM.” If God were not constant, or capricious in any way, we would all be doomed.

At the close of the Hebrew Bible, God declares through the Prophet Malachi: “I, the LORD, do not change; therefore, you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed.” God’s immutability is the foundation of His unchanging faithfulness to His unbreakable covenant with Abraham’s descendants. That the Jews are still intact as a distinct ethnic community, with their religion and language intact, and in possession of the land God promised them is living proof of God’s fidelity to the covenant promises He makes. The Hebrew Bible repeatedly declares that God’s covenant with the people of Israel is everlasting and inviolable.

Then the writer of Hebrews says of Messiah: “But now He has obtained a more excellent ministry, by as much as He is the mediator of a better covenant, which is enacted upon better promises.” The New Covenant not only assures us of God’s faithfulness, but of His promise to give everlasting life and love to those who trust Jesus for their salvation.

As for Messiah, the writer of Hebrews affirms: “Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever.” So, Messiah is also immutable, and co-eternal with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

These are the transcendent, or incommunicable attributes of God: God is eternal, God is infinite and God is unchanging or immutable. Now let’s examine those attributes of God that He has imparted to us.

• God is Immanent. God lives among us. God is with us and wills for us to be with Him, now and forevermore in the most intimate love relationship that will ever exist between the Creator and His creatures.

God revealed Himself to us by giving us many of His own attributes. God made us in His image, the Bible says. Every human reflects the glory, the inner beauty, of an infinite-personal God in finite measure. The Bible, not nature, affirms that we are God’s image bearers; and that means that human dignity is immeasurable, because every soul reflects the imprint of an infinitely good Creator.

The divine imprint in human character is what theologians call “the communicable attributes of God.” God has given, or communicated, to each of us in some measure attributes that originated in Himself. God possesses in infinite perfection the attributes that we possess finitely and imperfectly.

God is holy, so we can aspire to moral purity and consecrate ourselves to God through faith. God is wisdom, so we can acquire wisdom, too. God is loving and kind, and so are we at our best. God is faithful to His promises. We call that integrity, and venerable cultures all esteem those who are true to their word. In short, God is a profoundly moral Being who has imparted a moral law or conscience within us that enables us to perceive ethically and behave morally.

That human beings fall short of God’s moral law doesn’t disprove its existence; it only confirms that we are imperfect image-bearers of God. Human sins are not attributes bestowed by a capricious God who alternates between good and evil. Sin is the deviation from what is good through the will of fallen people who are innately disposed to deviate from God’s moral will.

So let me briefly reiterate some communicable attributes that human beings possess that other higher mammals do not, or in vastly lower degree.

Humans possess within themselves a living soul – mind, will and emotions – that connect an immortal spirit to a living body. God is a self-existent, immortal Spirit. We are immortal souls solely because God wills that our spirits also be immortal, and therefore, indestructible. God has an infinite mind, will and emotions; therefore, so do we. Unlike us, however, God’s emotions never compromise His will to be holy in everything He says and does.

Within our immortal soul we have attributes that reflect God’s soul. Paul wrote succinctly about God’s character attributes, “Now the fruit of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against these there is no law.” That is, no human law can ever fault someone exhibiting these character qualities, because they all emanate from a holy Lawgiver who is the Source of all righteousness and justice. Humans possess these spiritual attributes in ways that lower mammals cannot.

Needless to say, every Christian should endeavor to exhibit these spiritual fruits, which together are the character of Christ. Praise be to God, Who also gives us the Holy Spirit in our conscience both to nurture these qualities and to nudge us when we deviate from them.

In addition to character qualities God gave the human race abilities to imitate His abilities in very finite measure.

• The Perception of God. Only humans can perceive God, both in their rational mind, but even more as living temples of God’s Spirit.
• Awareness of Spiritual Reality or transcendent things. Heaven and hell can be comprehended by humans; animals cannot comprehend, much less aspire for heaven or dread hell.
• The desire to know and be known and loved by God. Intimacy with God is the unique birthright for every human being, provided they enter into covenant with God through faith. “The one who comes to Me, I will never cast out”, Jesus promised. That is why communicating Christ’s gospel to the nations is the imperative of the Great Commission; for there is no salvation apart from Him.
• The ability and will to exercise some control, or dominion, over our environment in order to provide the means for our survival, comfort and above all offspring for future generations. God governs a perfectly ordered universe by unchanging natural laws. Humanity has the privilege of shaping planet earth as a stewardship from God.
• The ability to speak and communicate complex ideas.
• The ability to reason and calculate in the abstract apart from the immediate, physical present. Only humans make mathematical calculations or logical inferences that are the foundation of economics, engineering, agriculture, science, law, philosophy, and all social interactions.
• The ability to plan and prepare for the future.
• The ability to organize ourselves in different groups to accomplish different functions: what we know of as society.
• The ability to connect ourselves to a higher vision of humanity that extends far beyond our family clan. Human awareness of peoples outside ourselves, now stretching around the world, is something uniquely ours.
• The ability to create objects of beauty or art – both materially or verbally in writing and speech – that are not connected to our immediate surroundings. Art serves a higher human motive than survival: the pleasure of creating and sharing our creative works.
• The ability to transmit knowledge, or traditions, between generations so that humanity has acquired an ever-increasing storehouse of knowledge on every aspect of our existence. Traditions also teach us how to respond to new circumstances by giving us positive and negative examples of how others have fared in challenging circumstances. The Christian Church is built upon the Bible to be sure, but also upon 2,000 years of Christian practice and the traditions of the Jews who came before. There is no religious or social tradition or worldview comparable to this in both age and continuity.

In short, God gave the human race the ability to create something that collectively far transcends what any one human or family could produce: human civilization. And civilization, ultimately, is a representation of God’s eternal kingdom – the reason for which God made us.

Friends, the God who reveals Himself to us is truly Someone than which nothing greater can be conceived. He is infinite, He is perfect, and He is profoundly personal. God is love. God made us as an expression of His infinite love that we might share in His love and love God in return.

The most famous verse in the Bible, John 3:16, spoken our blessed Lord, says “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him may not perish, but have eternal life.” God’s word also promises, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature. The old things passed away; behold, new things have come.” Or as the King James says so beautifully, “Behold, all things are become new.”

God promises everyone a new life in His Son, through faith in the finished work of the cross. Jesus paid it all for us, so that we never have to earn the grace or love of God; for we never could. If you have never fully committed yourself to Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, I invite you to do so today. If you have committed yourself to Him, I invite you to dedicate what time you have left on earth to Him. He will take the little you have to offer and use it for His eternal glory and your eternal reward. Let us pray.