Magnify The Lord

Well, good morning. It's not a continuing Bible study like we used to have in the old days, but it's kind of in the fill-in mode here, so you'll have to bear with me. I'm a little out of practice on things. This morning, if you join me in your Bibles in Psalm 34 for our lesson today, we're going to begin there and then we're going to just launch out do some traveling through the Bible and looking at some things.

I was kind of working on this for a while, and then Norm, here several weeks ago, brought a, I think it was a Wednesday night message, and he was mentioning the song of Moses. And the song of Moses in Deuteronomy chapter 32, keep your finger on Psalm 34 there, but anyway. The next thing that happens to Moses is the Lord says, get you up on the mountain and die. So this is kind of like his last thing that he told the people of Israel before he went to be with his maker. And it was just magnify the Lord. And that's what this Psalm 34 3 says, written by David at the direction of the Holy Spirit, says, oh, magnify the Lord with me and let us exalt his name together.

Boy, that's what we should be doing. And that's what we do here at Sovereign Grace Baptist Church in The Dalles, Oregon. We try to magnify the Lord and give him his due and credit for all the things, everything in the world and our salvation, everything.

And this series, this is supposed to just be a couple of weeks, but I don't know if we'll get all through it in a couple of weeks, but try to lay down certain facts and principles regarding the Lord, which he's recorded and it's really found throughout all the word of God. You know, as Jesus said, he talked to those disciples on the road to Emmaus and he expounded to them in all the scriptures, the things concerning himself. Not just, you know, in some of your Bibles it'll have little stars, oh this is a messianic prophecy. But everything in the Bible has to do with the Lord. And he said, they are they which testify of me. And so as we look at this, we want to magnify the Lord. And what does that mean? And let's exalt His name together.

And in the Old Testament, this is kind of an interesting word. And it just brings to mind some things that we looked at in a Bible study. many, many years ago that we looked at the, I think it was in Ephesians where it talks about the manifold wisdom of God and how that word meant manifold, meant variegated, meant multi, it gives you an idea of multicolored.

And we looked at the rainbow and how there's seven primary colors in the rainbow that you can only see with your naked eye, but there's an infinite spectrum of light that we can't see. And it just gives us an idea of how, what Paul said, we see through a glass dark. We can't see all of the things that God does in grace for us. But they're there, whether we can see them or not.

And he gives us a glimpse into them from time to time. And this word magnify, in the Old Testament, means to twist. And the reference is to, I swiped this piece of yarn, or I had Yvonne swipe it for me out of Nancy's. larder back there in the Bible classroom. So I took this little piece of green yarn because that's kind of the reference that we get from that word twist and it means kind of like a thread or in this case yarn is what they had back in those days and it's a gob of little individual fibers. that are twisted together. If we were to untwist it, we would see all these myriad of fibers, but as they're twisted together, they all become one.

And each one of those fibers is like an attribute of God or an expression of His character or His nature. They're all one, but they're individual little threads in here that we would that we would see. And so that's where we get this word twist to take a look at it and maybe we'll see some individual things that give us an idea about God's character. But each one of those strands is part of a whole and they're all the same.

And in the New Testament, The Greek word for this is, we have an example in Acts 19.7 where Paul and Barnabas are preaching in Ephesus and the Paul Harvey rest of the story is that all the sons of the chief priests, they were all involved in this fake exorcism scam. And Paul and Barnabas were there preaching the truth of the gospel in Acts 19, 17, after the truth of the gospel was preached. And this was known to all the Jews and Greeks also dwelling at Ephesus, and fear fell on them all, and the name of the Lord Jesus was magnified.

Well, in the Greek, that term is megas, And that's the word where we get, like, megaphone, or mega-anything. When we think of mega, we think of big, aloud. In a megaphone, it means he spoke in a loud voice. Well, that would be megaphone, is what that, in the Greek, that would be. So it gives us that idea of something that's enlarged. And when we think of magnified, In that Greek term, it means honored and made great, declared great. And to exalt is to lift high.

And so, you know, we're all familiar with a magnifying glass. We used to use them for nefarious purposes when we were kids. To find some poor unsuspecting bug. But you know what they really do is, the interesting thing about magnifying glasses, they make things appear larger, but they let us see things that we couldn't normally see with just our naked eye. They allow us to see things that are there, but they're not visible. under normal circumstances to us. And so when we think about Megas in relation to God and we examine his word and we start looking into things and we find out that there's more to him than we could imagine. He's far greater than anything that we could ever come up with.

And so the same is true for us spiritually. And so I like what Norm read there in Deuteronomy chapter 32, kind of Moses' last words. And he says, I will publish the name of the Lord. And he's talking to those people of Israel. And he says, ascribe greatness to our God. And there's very much revealed in that passage. block of scripture there in Deuteronomy chapter 32. He says, My doctrine will drop as the rain. My speech shall distill as the dew, the small rain upon the tender herb and as the showers upon the grass, because I will publish the name of the Lord, ascribe you greatness unto our God, there, verse three.

He is the Rock, capital R, Rock. His work is perfect. And as we look at this, thinking about Moses, ascribing greatness to God and magnifying his name, and he's given us a list of, just a partial list of all the wonderful attributes of God. He's a rock. He's solid, dependable. His work is perfect. All His ways are judgment, a God of truth, without iniquity. Just and right is He.

So all those things, there's the eternality of God, because He uses the term Jehovah there, which means the self-existent, everlasting God, and that's kind of gonna be one of our main focuses today, is about the eternal nature of God. He reveals that in his speech there, and he lists about seven or eight more things that are greatness about God, and then the rest of Deuteronomy goes on and gives some more detail on things.

But he goes back to verse five, and he says, but on the flip side of that, the people are corrupt in their spot. not the spot of his children. They are perverse and a crooked generation." Well, when we think about that spot, that word spot means a staying. And one of the things that we find about God and his eternal nature and caring for his people and providing the lamb slain from before the foundation of the world was he was going to remove that spot.

And that's what it tells us in Ephesians 5, verse 27, when the Lord talks about presenting the church back to God, that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having a spot, not having a stain, not having a wrinkle, or any such thing. but that it should be holy and without blemish. You know, one of the reasons I wanted to bring this particular set of lessons was because our tendency, our natural tendency and the tendency of the world is to ascribe to God our tendencies and our own thoughts and our view of fairness. Our natural state of being malleable, pliable, easily influenced, changeable, all those things are the exact opposite of what God is in truth.

But that's how we try to impose our view on Him and try to bring Him into compliance, I guess you might say, with how we think things ought to be. But you know, in Psalm 50, He's speaking through David again. He says, These things thou hast done, and I kept silence. You thought I was altogether such a one as yourself, but I'll reprove thee, and I'll set them in order before your eyes.

Boy, what a wonderful word there that God reveals Himself to us and proves all those things irrelevant and false. You know, we magnify ourselves and we have the audacity to give counsel to the Lord God Almighty, to see and do things according to our standards and view, which are corrupted by the fall. You know, the worst thing about sin and the fall is it destroyed our sense of God. We lost all sense of who He really is and what He really is and how He is. And our task here today is to bring out what's written for us in scriptures and to magnify the Lord God Almighty.

And when we, again, when we study the Word of God, we always learn that He's greater than we can comprehend, but we sure should give it a try. And you know, it's all there for us if we just put in a little elbow grease, and we have a desire. And God says, you know, if anybody wants to know, he giveth liberally. So all we have to do is say, Lord, I'd like to know as much about you as I can, and he giveth to us liberally.

So, you know, Paul had experienced so much in his life, you know, he was a Pharisee, dependent on all his birthrights and his book learning and the traditions of the elders and the keeping of the law and all those things that he, once God revealed himself to him, he said, oh, that was all done. And now he has a view of God that magnifies God and not magnifies man. And in chapter 11 of Romans he wrote, after many things had happened to him, and he said he caught up into the third heaven and saw things that's not even lawful for me to talk about. And he saw the hand of God work through the gospel and thousands of people being born again.

In Romans 11.33, he says, Oh, the depth, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God. How deep are they? You know, we had a one Bible class on from Luke chapter five, I think it was, cast your net out into the deep and get ready for a haul. not just fish, but a spiritual haul.

He says, how unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out? You know, he was just quoting Job there. He was just quoting Job 9, verse 11. Job said, he does great things past finding out, and wonders without numbers. That's what he had was the Old Testament, The Gospel in the Old Testament is what he preached and what he declared.

Psalm 115.3 says, our God is in the heavens. He hath done whatsoever he hath pleased.

And so one of the things that we find if we go back to Deuteronomy for just a second in chapter 32, he goes on down there and the big complaint about those people that he was declaring and magnifying and exalting the name of the Lord to, They were worshiping some dumb idol. They had abandoned the God that had displayed so many things from their exodus from Egypt and as they went through the wilderness and everything, they just went back. They had never got there. So in Deuteronomy 32, 31, he says, you people are going after the gods of these people.

He says, their rock is not our rock. Their little rock, little's our rock, is not our, capital R, rock. There's no comparison. And we should be about declaring that their rock is not our rock. And boy, we see a lot of that in religion today, where, oh, we all worship the same God, but boy, do we not. Their idea of God is, well, let's get together and change his mind about something.

And you've all been through there, and he's just kind of set the ball rolling, and it's up to you Everything else is up to you. But let's start then with what God reveals to us about Himself. If we have eyes to see and ears to hear and a heart to believe all that He said. And you know one of the things that we find in the Bible that whatever God requires, He provides. If you need a heart to see or hear and eyes to see and ears to hear, He's the one that gives those things. We believe according to the working of His mighty power which He wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead.

Ephesians, what's that, 119? 119, I think. So let's travel back to Genesis real quick. Genesis chapter one. In the beginning, God, before there was anything, there was the little triune, delta God, Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And we find out that in John 1 and here in Genesis that the word was with God and the word was God. The word was the same in the beginning with God. And I just love the way the Bible starts out here in Genesis. I think there's just a tremendous declaration of the gospel here in the first couple of verses.

God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep. And if you look those words up in the Hebrew, they just show it. It's just awful. It's destruction, misery, death, all these awful things. And then it says the spirit of God. moved upon the face of the waters. Isn't that what we see in our regeneration? We're in dark, we're in a dark place. We're in total darkness, dead in trespasses and sin. And God, the Spirit of God moves.

And God said, let there be light, and there was light. Well, you know, This is a different light. In verse 14, God said, let there be lights in the firmament of heaven to divide the day from the night and let them be for signs and seasons and days and years. So there we have the ones that were created for the purpose of light like we have. to see with and to tell time and to determine sequences and things. But we have this light that God said was in verse four. And God said, saw the light that it was good and God divided the light from the darkness.

Well, you know what it tells us in Hebrew, that the Word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword, and able to divide the soul and the spirit, and divide asunder. And there's the very gospel is able to separate us. And in the Bible it says, he calls us out of darkness and into his marvelous light. We're told that in the New Testament.

So we have this light that was the first day in Genesis 1, 5, and then we have the lights in the firmament of heaven on the fourth day. So two separate things that we're looking at there. And the very name Elohim that we look at here is God described to us here.

The word that expresses his plurality His Holy Spirit revealed to us in verse two, where the spirit of Elohim moves on the face of the waters. And then in Genesis 2, 4, we're introduced to the name of the third part of this triune polarity, the Lord Jehovah is introduced to us. the self-existent or eternal Elohim, who in the beginning was with God, who was God, and by Him were all things made that were made, John chapter one. And then as we go back to Genesis chapter two, verse four, these are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created in the day that the Lord God, the Jehovah, self-existent, eternal Elohim triune, Holy Spirit, Son, and Father made the earth and the heavens. So the Word declares right off the bat the eternal nature of God the Father, the Son, Jehovah, the Lord God Almighty, the Holy Spirit, magnified in eternal self-existence before the creation of the world. And boy, we have a lot of scriptures that talk about their activities before the foundation of the world, before anything was created.

So I think it's important to realize that nature of God and that everlasting, eternal quality of Him, because it helps us understand how He views us. The children that He gave Christ before the world began, tells us in Ephesians chapter one. He chose you in Christ before the world began. And so it helps us to understand a little bit about how he views his elect.

And in our Bible class Wednesday night, we were mentioning that there's four people born every second, 316,000 a day, people born. And some of those we read from Romans chapter nine were vessels of wrath fitted for destruction, hewers of wood, drawers of water, and that type of thing. And some of them were vessels of mercy whom he had afore prepared unto glory. So out of those 360,000 people that are born every day, there's some sheep out there, I guess is what we're saying.

And at some point, God is going to intersect them with his gospel of his son. And that's what Paul wrote concerning the gospel concerning his son, Jesus Christ. And that's what he wrote there. So I think, then we can draw from this. It's important to realize that salvation is not a byproduct of creation. But rather, creation is a vehicle for the redemption of a people whom God loved before time. Isn't that interesting? That's how we should be looking at it.

You know, Abraham, he met this self-existing God back in Genesis chapter 14 as he's returning from victory over a battle that he was in. And he ran into this Melchizedek. And that translation of that is the King of Right. Or King of Righteousness. And he paid him tithes. And he was blessed.

And then later on, a few chapters later in Genesis 21, we find Abraham had a little tussle with a Philistine. In chapter 20, actually, it begins where they were traveling, him and his wife were traveling, and they went into this country called Gerar. It was a Philistine country. Abraham says, man, I don't think these guys know anything about God.

We could be in bad trouble here. They could treat us evilly. And he says, I'll tell you what, you tell them you're my sister. His wife, he told Sarah, he says, you tell them you're my sister. We'll see how that goes. So Abimelech says, oh, Sarah's pretty good looking. I think I'll just, just your sister, I'm taking her. And then the Lord appears unto Abimelech in a dream, in a vision, and says, this is not going to end well for you. And so, and then Abimelech, he has words with Abraham and says, that was a dirty trick you pulled on me, and telling me she was your sister. Well, it's not exactly a lie. She kind of is my sister. But she's kind of my wife, too.

And so he says, well, you just take whatever you want, go wherever you want. You can live in any part of my country you want. He says, it's plain to see that the Lord God is with you. He says, I don't know much about Him, but I know that somebody more powerful than me is with you. And I don't want anything to do with Him.

And so they did a little sacrifice of some livestock there at this well of Beersheba, which means well of an oath. called on El Olam, the Lord, the everlasting God, whom he had met back in chapter 14. So Hebrews tells us a little bit about this interaction here in chapter seven of Hebrews, chapter seven, verse one, this Melchizedek, king of Salem or king of peace, priest of the most high God, who met Abraham returning from the slaughter of kings and blessed him, to whom Abraham also gave a tenth part of all, first being by interpretation King of Righteousness, and after that also King of Salem, which is King of Peace, Jerusalem, the name of that city of God, City of Peace there. without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like unto the Son of God, and abideth the priest continually." That was the Elulam whom Abraham called upon in at the well of Beersheba in Genesis 21.

The Lord God everlasting. You know, we think about everlasting, it's kind of like a Willy Wonka thing in America. Like, well, I'll have the everlasting gopher. That means it just lasts a long time. It starts at a point and then lasts, you can suck on that maybe all day long and you still have it.

But in everlasting terms with God, it means eternal, without beginning, without end. We have a early example of this term, olam, everlasting, connected to a word which exemplifies God's grace in Genesis, back in Genesis chapter two, we'll go back there. Genesis chapter two, verse seven and eight.

In the Lord God, Jehovah Elohim, the self-existent Elohim, God plural, formed man out of the dust of the ground. which the ground dust, which he created. Think about, I always think about the, every molecule of that dust that he formed, he made all that. He made everything. And he caused it to, all things to work according to his purpose.

And he called that dust into the being of a man, and he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul, and the Lord God, Elohim again, and Jehovah, planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed.

That word eastward there is, it kind of has to do with east, And we find a lot of things happening from the east in the Bible. You know, the wise men came from the east and they see the star in the east and those things. And the garden is in the east.

And he had an angel that blocked their path into it after the fall. But it's a kind of a compound word. And the first part of it, translated eastward, min, mine, mine. That's kind of like a three-function or three-part word there. And it gives a sense of a part of, prepositionally, from out of, or in many senses above, after, among. And then it's coupled with this, and that's based on this word min, or main, I guess you might pronounce it. And it's from an unused root, meaning to a portion apart, like a musical chord. And I haven't quite got my fingers wrapped around all of that yet, but somehow, To me it just kind of spoke to a musical chord as a lot of different things coming together to make a pleasing sound.

And I was looking in my Google and said, you know, there's 88 keys on the keyboard of that piano there. There's about 1,200 combinations that are pleasing to the Lord. 1,200 to 1,400 combinations. But there's like 39.4 septillion not so pleasing sounds. But they're combinations that you can make by hitting this key or this key or this combination. But they're kind of like those 316,000 people born every day. Some of those are vessels of mercy. Some of those are vessels of wrath. Some of those cords are pleasing. Some of them are not.

But anyway, that word is kind of coupled with this other Hebrew word, kedem or kedma. And it has to do with everlasting and eternal. the front place of absolutely the four part, relatively the east. time or antiquity. It's often used adverbially as before, anciently, eastward, aforetime. You know, when it talks about Jesus, he's going to come back and there's going to be like lightning from the east to the west and all those kind of applications that we see. So it's kind of an interesting word, eastward. You put this garden eastward and it kind of gives us a a glimpse into this vastness of God and His purposes.

Sometimes that's translated as, in Deuteronomy 33, 15, as the ancient. And in Deuteronomy 33, 27, it's translated as eternal. So the eternal God is thy refuge, it says there. So we have that reference there in Genesis chapter two that speaks to us about God and his eternal quality and the Lord God everlasting.

And it gives us a greater appreciation then when we read his word to us in verses like Jeremiah 31.3, where it says, the Lord Jehovah, the self-existent eternal one hath appeared of old unto me.

And that's the same word as translated eastward or eternally in Genesis 2.8, saying, I've loved thee with an everlasting love." That word everlasting in that verse, it means concealed, the vanishing point, eternity.

It's described as time out of mind. So that's how he describes his love. for his people. It's kind of concealed until he reveals himself to you. Like Paul, he was on that road and says, man, I was a dunce until God got me on the road to Damascus. And when it pleased God to reveal his son in me, ooh, things changed then.

I've loved thee with an everlasting. It's been concealed. You didn't know about it and you didn't want it. In fact, you despised it. The Word of God says we're like at enmity with God before He reveals His Son in us. And then we say, oh, we love Him because He first loved us. He says, I loved you with an everlasting love. Before the children were born, before they did any good or evil that the purpose of God, according to election, might stand, Romans 9. He says, therefore, because I loved you with an everlasting love, I loved you from eternity. I loved you everlastingly before you were born. Therefore, because I loved you with loving kindness, have I drawn thee.

See John 6.44. for the follow-up on that. No man can come unto me except the Father which sent me draw him. Well, let's look at a couple of verses where El Olam is presented to us. And I think you'll recognize some of these verses as presented to us later on in the New Testament. Isaiah chapter 60, verse 19. We're about out of time, so I'm going to wrap it up here.

The sun shall no more be thy light by day. Neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee. But the Lord, the Elohim, the Jehovah, self-existent God, the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light. In thy God thy glory. The sun shall no more go down, neither shall the moon withdraw itself, for the Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended.

And you can kind of find a paraphrase of that in Revelation chapter 21, verse 23. And I will close with a reading from Isaiah chapter 9, verse 6, because I know you're all familiar with this verse, because it says, for unto us a child is born. The eternal, everlasting El Olam became a man for us. A son is given and the government shall be upon his shoulder and his name shall be called Wonderful. Let's magnify the name of the Lord and exalt him and lift him up. His name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. We'll close there for today and we'll pick this up next Sunday. Before the mountains, before you form the earth power from everlasting to everlasting. Thanks for your attention and as always, be free.

Magnify The Lord

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