love and pleasure or delight. Now we corrected the common definition
given among Christians for the word grace, that is they call
it unmerited favor, and we showed from the scriptures that the
grace we receive is truly earned. It's just that it wasn't earned
by us. The Bible says that the Lord Jesus Christ, which says
concerning Him, that the grace of God was upon Him and that
He was full of grace and truth and that He grew in grace with
God. That grace is given to us, it
says, from His fullness, that is the fullness of the grace
that He receives. Have we all received grace upon
grace? And so the grace that you and
I receive was certainly merited or earned, it just wasn't merited
or earned by us. Therefore, most of the time in
the context of gospel preaching, we think of grace as unearned
favor, because certainly the grace of God toward us was not
earned by us. Now in this lesson concerning
the grace of God, we will learn about the God of grace. Now we
certainly cannot learn all that there is to know about God. In fact, we cannot completely
know any particular aspect about God. He is essentially unknowable. Our intellect, our mental abilities
simply do not have the capacity to know and understand God in
the way we normally use those words. We can't understand anything
that's outside the framework of time and space in which we
live. The other night, as I was kind of musing on this lesson,
thinking and meditating, you know, I was you know, trying
to think of God as clearly as I could. And once again, it's
like you come up against a wall. I just, you can't get your mind
wrapped around a being who does not exist in the same sort of
existence that we have. Now we're free to exercise our
minds, trying to comprehend God apart from his revelation of
himself. But the moment we try, we find
our minds overwhelmed as we try to grasp things that simply cannot
fit into the mental limits of our intellect. Such an exercise
provides us some benefit. It does. There's nothing wrong
with trying. And it will give us a benefit. But the benefit
it gives us is it will humble us in the knowledge that the
God of grace is incomprehensible in his essence and that the greatest
intellects of men cannot arrive at an understanding of God by
normal methods of studying things. The atheist is a fool when he
says that God is unprovable and therefore he does not exist. But we consider the atheist to
be a fool not because he lacks intellectual capacity. Some very
intelligent people with tremendous intellectual capacity have been
atheists. Rather, we consider the atheist
to be a fool because he has not considered the fact that any
being who could be understood by the human intellect is not
a god at all. The moment they say, you can't
prove him so I don't believe he exists, they simply canceled
out the possibility of a being who is beyond human capacity
to know. But while our minds cannot reach
up to him to understand him, he has reached down to us to
reveal himself to us and to do that, in terms that we can understand. Now, he cannot reveal everything
about himself, can he? Because again, even if he told
us, well, what human words could God use to describe himself to
us? All of our words are a matter
of defining things, setting limits upon them, and yet God is by
essence infinite. means non-definable. There's
some things we can say about him, but they are just, I don't
want to say superficial, but they are simply the things that
we can know about him. In fact, much of, many of the
words that we use to describe God, at least the words they
use in theological circles are words
of negation. It tells us what he's not. For
example, infinite means not finite. You can't define it. To define
it means to set limits on it. Infinite means no limits. The study of God, even a purely
academic study of him, would occupy time in eternity. So there's no way here in, you
know, one half hour class I'm going to be able to lay out to
you everything that even can be known by God in this world. Now we have said that we can
know of God only what he has seen fit to reveal of himself. The book of Hebrews opens with
a declaration of the fullness of God's self-revelation. In other words, the book of Hebrews
tells us how God has revealed himself and what the fullest
revelation of himself in this creation will be. In Hebrews
chapter 1, the first one and a half verses, we read this,
in the past, God spoke to the fathers through the prophets
at many times and in various ways. But in these last days,
he has spoken to us in son. Now, most translations of this
scripture say that God has spoken to us by his son. Well, that's
true, but the writer of Hebrews did not put it that way. Rather,
he expressed God's self-revelation in his son as though the very
language God used was the language of son. If someone comes to us
and starts speaking to us in a foreign language, we might
say, can you say that in English? And that's how we express, use
the English language. Well, God spoke to us in son. Now in verse one, it is written
that God spoke to the fathers in prophets. And that was prophet
language, or the language of prophets. The language of prophets
is very limited. That's why it says it various
times and in various portions. No prophet, none of these prophets
who spoke to the fathers could ever tell the whole truth. They only got glimpses of him.
Like, you know, if you're driving by a place that got a very tall
picket-like fence, you know, as you go by, you see little
glimpses between the pickets, and you can see there's something
back there, and you get a little bit of idea of what's back there,
but you never do get a complete picture of what's beyond the
fence. That's the way God spoke to the prophets. But now, God
has spoken in son. which is the fullness of the
revelation of God because it's the fullness of the language
of God to us. The Son is the essential language
of God as he reveals to himself in the fullest way possible for
you and I to grasp. This revelation did not come
to us in the form of a theology book. Now I'm not saying theology
books are worthless. You know, it doesn't have to
be 100% valuable or no value. But we must recognize the limitations
on it. We must recognize the limitations
on me speaking to you. There's only so much that I can
say. If you're truly going to learn
what I'm doing the best I can to say, God will have to teach
you. And he'll have to speak to you
in the language of son. But this self-revelation, the
full and complete self-revelation of God did not come to us in
a written or spoken form at all. It came to us as a person. Knowing
this person is knowing God. It is knowing God in the only
way that we can know God. And it is to know God as fully
as God can be known and as fully as God has revealed himself.
We don't ever have to understand God beyond the revelation of
himself in the Son. We come to know God in a saving
way simply Or we do not come to know God in a saving way simply
by understanding the facts surrounding the person of God or the person
of God's son. We know God by knowing his son,
it's personal knowledge, such as the knowledge we have of our
friends. The knowledge of God is not simply
an understanding of the facts that make up the body of intellectual
knowledge that we might have of him. Rather, it's a personal
connection between God and us through the mediation, through
the coming between us and God by the Lord Jesus Christ. It's like the knowledge that
a babe has of its mother. A baby does not know much about
his mother at all. He is not trained in biology. He does not know how his mother
came to be his mother, but he knows his mother. And it's kind
of easy to tell because you put a crying baby in his mother's
arms. Generally, he begins to settle down because he knows
who has him. It's like the knowledge that
a wife has of her husband, the knowledge that has grown deeper
with the passage of time, yet the knowledge is no more real
than the knowledge she had of him at the beginning. We come
to know God in a deeper way, but that's not just that we come
to know more about him. It is that we grow in a greater
understanding or appreciation, or maybe the right word is experience,
of the union that exists between us and God. So to learn of God, we must learn
of the Son. As the Son himself said, he that
has seen me has seen the Father. In chapter one of his gospel,
John the Apostle gives us a description of the Son under the character
as the one who reveals God. In fact, he's not only described
there as the one who reveals God, the son is described as
the God revealing himself. We read these words in the opening
verses of the Gospel of John. In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
Through Him, all things were made. Without Him, nothing was
made that has been made. Now these verses establish that
God has revealed Himself in one who is called the Word. To know
the Word is to know God. Well, what does John then say
about the word? Well, the first thing we find
out about the God word is that he created all things. It says all things were created
through him. Now, we're speaking here of the
son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ. He is the eternal word of God
made flesh. Now, when it says that all things
were created through him, it's not worded exactly like that
in the Greek language of the original New Testament. That's written in what in English
we would call the passive voice. If it had been written in the
active voice, it would have been, he created all things. But it's written in what the
Greek calls the middle voice, and I admit that I do not understand
the Greek middle voice very well. However, it's not talking about
things simply being created. The word means to become. So we might put it this way.
All things came into being through him. Now, you can understand
why they would translate that, all things were made by him.
Because in the end, that's kind of how it all falls out. But
the reason I like the way the Greek put it is it's getting
to the very essence. The very reality or being of
this universe came through the word. It exists or came into existence because
of Him. Now when the Bible says that
this creation, this bringing into existence, came through
Jesus Christ or the Word, John is not intending us to believe. that the word was merely the
agent of God in creation. There are some versions of Christianity
that say that our Lord Jesus is a created being, and that
the word is a created being. I know that the man Christ Jesus
is created, but the word who became flesh in the person of
Jesus Christ is uncreated. So it's not speaking there of
mere agency of creation when it says that the word is the
creator. In fact, John's text right there makes it impossible
to believe that it meant merely the agent of creation. For John
says that of all the things that have come into being, none came
into being except through the word. Now if the word is something
that was created or that at some point came into being, how can
he be the one who brought into being everything that came into
being? Did he create himself? No. He is among the list of things
which never had a beginning, which never came into being,
but is the very essence of being itself. Now, I can say those words. I
can't get my head wrapped around exactly what that means. But
that's kind of why we run into that brick wall when we try to
understand God. How do you understand something
that never had a beginning and shall never have an end except
to say that it's timeless? And once we say timeless, we
don't know what we're talking about because we can't understand
anything apart from the framework of time. Nonetheless, it's true. So God, as revealed by the word,
the God of grace, as revealed by the word, is the creator of
all things. Now, how did he create our reality? In Psalm 33, verses six through
nine, we read this. By the word of the Lord, the
heavens were made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth. He gathers the waters of the
sea into jars. He puts the deep into storehouses. Let all the earth fear the Lord. Let all the people of the world
revere him for he spoke and it came to be. He commended and
it stood firm. Now theologians call this fiat
creation. Fiat merely means to decree.
So God decreed our reality. Our natural minds perceive The
work of creation is some work of God that required him to expend
a great deal of energy. You always say, oh, how powerful
of God that he created the heavens and the earth. The pagans describe creation
as God wrestling with chaos to create order. That's what they
think creation is, as though there is some independent principle
or some principle of reality that's independent of God and
he had to wrestle with it and force it into some kind of order
and that's what creation is. But there was no disorder before
God created because before God created there was nothing but
God. He did not bring order out of
chaos. He spoke, and he came into existence. He didn't break a sweat, creating
the heavens and the earth, any more than you and I strain ourselves
to think something or say something. We just speak, and that doesn't
take a lot of effort. God spoke and everything about
this creation came into existence. He commanded and it stood firm,
not some shaky thing. So the first thing we learn about
the God of grace is that he is the creator. And the second thing
to learn about him, and now the points I'm bringing up about
him are ones that have a notable impact on understanding the grace
of God. Like I said, there's much more
that could be said, but I'm pulling out some points that are gonna
have particular application as we go on to understand the grace
of God. So the next thing, the second thing here we'll learn
about the God of grace follows upon him being the creator. And
that is that God is absolutely sovereign in all that happens
in this universe. John wrote that nothing that
exists came into existence without him. It's equally true that nothing
happens in this universe apart from him. causing it to happen,
decreeing it to happen. Now this is a distinguishing
characteristic of the God of grace, of the God of the scriptures.
This sets him apart from all the other gods that men have
invented. In Psalm 115, verses two through
eight, we read, why do the nations say, where is their God? Our
God is in the heavens. He does whatever pleases him. I'm not, for time's sake, I'm
not gonna read the rest of it, but he goes on to describe idols
as completely powerless, completely incapable of doing anything.
So just as with the office of creator, the psalmist sets the
God of scripture above all other gods by this. He is in control
of all things. He, by his word, caused all things
to be, and he, by his own will, causes all things to happen.
Now those are two essential characters our God. Take either one of those
away and you don't have a God. You have a mere invention of
the human mind. The God of Scripture is the creator
of all things and that includes us. That means he exists outside
of our creation. The psalmist expressed this God
as in the heavens. Now that was the best he could
do to describe his conception of a God who is above it all
and beyond it all. The things that are going on
down here do not change him. They do not affect him. They
do not determine what he will do. He's up there determining
what happens down here. That's the imagery that the psalmist
is evoking in our minds. Now, the manner in which God's sovereignty is expressed
here in Psalm 115 emphasizes that God's sovereignty is universal
and that it is irresistible. In the Hebrew of this text, it's
written this way, whatever he is pleased to do, he does. I
like that, putting that, the defining phrase first. All, whatever
he is pleased to do, he does. What does that mean? If there's
something that didn't happen, it's because God was not pleased
to do it. You know, doesn't that put the
lie to the common statement that God wants to save all men? Now, I do not mean this with
any kind of mean tone. I say it simply as a way to rather
forthrightly declare this aspect of the truth of God. If God wanted
to save everybody, everybody would be saved because whatever
God wants to do, he does it. And if he can't do what he wants
or if he doesn't do everything he wants, he's not God. He may
be more powerful than us, but he's not God. As surely as all things came
into being at his word, all things happen at his word. Whether God
works through natural means or intervenes in the natural course
of things, God is working his will perfectly, completely, and
without failure. Paul said he works all things
according to the counsel of his own will. To put it in human terms, whenever
God is deciding what to do, the only question He asks is, what
do I want to do? That's it. Now some object to
this, saying that God may do whatever He wants to do, but
He does not control what we want to do. But this is contrary to
the scriptures. James warned us not to say that
tomorrow we're going to do this or that, but to say, if the Lord
wills, tomorrow I'll do such and such. Our plans are always
subject to God's sovereign will, aren't they? But it goes deeper
than this. God's will controls our will. I say controls, it's decreed,
and that's the way our will works out. Men resist this truth, saying
things like, how can God find fault with us for who of us has
resisted his will? Paul actually puts forth that
objection, saying some people will say, well, why does he yet
find fault for who has resisted his will? You'll find that in
Romans 9. Paul didn't say, oh, no, no,
no, you misunderstood. He's saying, his answer was,
but who are you, old man, to reply against God? Are you going
to find fault with what God is doing? Are you going to find
fault with his judgments of you because they don't meet your
standard of judgment and justice? All of us are doing exactly what
God decreed we will do. Furthermore, God is said to control
the will and actions of men. In Proverbs 21 verse 1, the king's
heart is like a stream of water directed by the Lord. He guides
it wherever he pleases. So the hearts of the most powerful
people of this world are in the hand of the Lord, and just like
a stream of water, he turns it whatever way he wants to. And
it's also written that all of God's people perform his decreed
will. In Philippians 2, verse 13, we
read this. For it is God who works in you
to will and to do according to his good pleasure. Say, well,
now the reason I'm being saved is because I chose him. OK. Why did you choose him? That's the big question. Did
you choose him because you're smarter than your neighbor who
didn't? You're better? No, because God worked in you
to do that. And he doesn't work in everyone
that way. God is all knowing and all powerful.
These are connected to his sovereignty. He knows all things because he
decreed all things. God did not, does not go on some
big scientific type inquiry or something or watch to see what's
happening so that he knows everything that's happened. He knows all
things because there's nothing that came into existence and
nothing that happens unless he said so. And of course he's aware
of everything he said. He's all powerful. Because before
he created the heavens and the earth, there was no power other
than him, because there was no existence other than him. Consequently,
all the power in heaven and earth came from him. Therefore, there's no power in
heaven and earth that can overcome him. God is righteous. God does nothing apart from what
is just and right. No person will ever be justified
in saying, God's not dealt justly with me. He's not conducted his
affairs with me according to the pattern of righteousness.
Neither those in hell nor those in heaven have received anything
other than what justice and righteousness required. You say, wait a minute, if salvation's
not by works and we're sinners, how is it that we are justly
in heaven? Well, that's the question the
gospel answers. But know this, Jesus Christ and his work made
saving us the righteous thing for God to do. and it made condemning
us an unrighteous thing for God to do. If Christ died for a person,
paid his sin debt on the cross, it would be unrighteous of God
to punish that man for his sins, wouldn't it? Therefore, even though we know
that we are sinners and that the righteous reaction to sinners
is judgment and condemnation, nonetheless, when we are in the
presence of God, we will be there firmly planted on the principles
of righteousness and justice. We can be certain of this, whatever
happens to us, it is just and right. We do not
judge the righteousness of God by the things that we observe.
We judge the things we observe by the righteousness of God.
You know, there are people that are mad at God and accuse him
of unrighteousness because they don't like what he did, didn't
pass their test of righteousness. No, whatever happens, it's righteous. It was the right thing. All right,
God is holy. Many think this is the same as
God is righteous. Now while there is some intersection
between the concepts of holiness and righteousness, they're not
the same thing. Holiness means set apart. We see it described in Isaiah
chapter 6, in the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord high
and lifted up, and it speaks of the seraphim who cried out,
holy, holy, holy is the Lord God, the Lord Almighty, the whole
earth is full of his glory. And it says that the sound of
their voices, the doorposts and thresholds shook, and the temple
was filled with smoke. Woe to me, I cried, I am ruined. Holiness actually collects together
all the attributes of God into one overwhelming concept of what
God is. A revelation of the holiness
of God always produces a humble response on the part of men. They are laid in the dust by
the revelation of His holiness. Those who speak proudly have
not had holiness revealed to them. God's holiness overwhelms
us. In fact, our very sense of His
holiness can be described as the sense of being overwhelmed
in His presence. God's holiness impacts us with
the knowledge that we are utterly at his mercy, unable to make
any just claim against his will or offer any real resistance
to it. And then lastly, God is love.
We could speak a very long time on the love of God. But let me just make a couple
of remarks. Unlike these other things we've mentioned about
God, love is not expressed in everything God does. God is not
loving toward everyone. If he was, everyone would receive
all the blessings of his love. The scriptures say he hated Esau
and that he hates the wicked. So we know he doesn't love everybody.
What we do understand about his love is that it's sovereign.
He loves whoever he wants to love for whatever reason he wants
to love them. It is toward those he has chosen. It says, we have been blessed
in the heavenly realms with all spiritual blessings according
as he has chosen us in Christ before the foundation of the
world in love having predestined us. to the adoption of sons and
to be conformed to the image of his son. God's love is eternal. It's written, I have loved you
with an everlasting love. God's love is active. It does
all that the wisdom and power of God can do to bring about
the eternal welfare of his loved ones. And that's where his sovereignty
comes in, doesn't it? It says, we know that God works
all things together for the good of them who love him, who are
the called according to his purpose. How could he do that if he wasn't
sovereign? God's love is in Christ. The
objects of his love, says Paul, cannot be separated from the
love of God, which is in Christ Jesus. So God is the creator,
he's sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient. God is love, God is holy, God
is righteous and just. And all of those things bear
a very important impact on understanding the fundamentals of the grace
of God. All right, you're dismissed until the morning service.