Faith - lesson 5
JD McCulley · Feb 15, 2015
Faith, No. 07
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/492645622436

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Alright. Well, what are we doing? That's a good question, isn't it? What's the name of this class? Faith. Is this the class you're supposed to be in? Did you in fact make it to the right class today? Alright, so you're in a class that's called Faith. What are we studying? Are we studying worldly faith?

Biblical faith. So maybe when I ask you next time what class we're in, you can say the biblical faith class. Because that's what we're studying. The biblical faith. Because there's a lot of different aspects of worldly wisdom that we'll talk about in light of several passages even today. But the world's got faith. It's just not the faith we're studying.

And we'll contrast. It's always important when you're learning about biblical, any topic, insert any topic there, when you're learning something biblical, there is almost always a counterpart to that that is worldly. And so we have to contrast and differentiate those things in order to keep them clear in our minds.

And so we set out originally in this class to say, all right, we're studying biblical faith. You're here. a good roster of folks to help us teach that. What are the basic outline components of what we're going to study? So we call this the four major aspects of faith. And we looked at those originally.

Do you remember when our first class, Mike said, what does love mean? Do you remember when we went into love? And we used that as a jumping off point. We said, well there's lots of different definitions to love. And we talked about how If we're going to understand the topic of love, we need to understand the context, because love can be used in so many different ways. And that was a jumping off point to say that faith in the Bible is used in a lot of different ways. We're going to look at the four major aspects. Are there minor? There are. Do we cover them in this class? Not necessarily. Maybe.

But we're looking at four specific aspects of faith that are major. These are the big parts all throughout scripture. From Genesis to Revelation, we see four major aspects of faith. Does anybody know what one of those is? I can read it to you. Read it. One of them. It's essence. Okay, so we've got essence. What's the second one? The faith. The faith. Okay, what's the third one? Personal. Personal faith. And the fourth one? I don't know if this is one, but what we had up on the board week after week, it says reality. Okay. Hold that thought. That's a good one. Yep. Hold that thought. I'll use that in just a moment. What's the fourth aspect that we're going to look at? As a principal. As a principal. Okay. Oops, that's Ellie. It's not a school principal, is it?

Yeah, well, these chalkboards are so good at revealing our Gen X inconsistencies with being able to spell. Often, Joe, when I write big on a board or on a whiteboard, I misspell everything. It's like I can't see. I have to scoot back to be able to see what I'm doing. So anyway, forgive me for that. What's that? I know. I know. I'm weak in that way. Okay, so this is what we're talking about.

You're in biblical faith class. We're looking at four major aspects of faith. You've got, first of all, it's essence. You've got, second of all, THE faith. You've got the Stephan article that differentiates that aspect of faith. You've got personal faith, which is our favorite.

We're not there yet. We'll talk about that. That's not where we are, though, yet. And faith is a principle. So this is where we are. We're still talking about its essence. Al, you mentioned faith is reality. That's been the conclusion that we've drawn so far of this first aspect.

Faith is That's the biblical definition of faith and in essence is that it is the reality. It's just interesting that all through the ages man has been searching for what is real, what is true. You go through all the thinkers of all the ages, Plato's dialogue in the cave, etc. etc. etc. I think, therefore I am. All these things that people want to use their brain for, to find reality and to find truth.

And yet for all that we use our senses, reality is not something we sense. It's something we appropriate by faith. It's a spiritual issue. not a rational building up of knowledge type of issue. So we're going to look at a verse today that calls out the way that certain things that God has communicated to us result in either foolishness to man, which is in that operating system of thinking that you're talking about, or it's the actual power of God. So we're going to look at that. But I wanted to bring out a couple other big picture things before we jump into question one.

When we're talking about the essence of faith, We've used Hebrews 11.1 as kind of that pinned or maybe banner verse to help anchor this in our mind.

So someone read Hebrews 11.1 again and let's remind ourselves of that verse so that we can build off of that. Yeah, I'll read it. It says, Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. So we've got those things, remember? And what are those things? Those things that we're studying. We're talking about the essence of faith. And I came up with an analogy. I don't know if it's very strong and if it works. I'm sure it'll break down at some point.

But you've got the game of baseball. and you can learn about the game of baseball. You can buy a rule book and study baseball and understand the essence of baseball. Once you complete that rule book or that definition book of what baseball is and what it isn't, you have an accurate understanding of the game of baseball. Does that mean that you're suited up and you're on the mound and you're pitching just because you read about the game of baseball?

So, in a similar way, we're talking about the game of faith, as it were, and we're not in it yet. We're not talking about our participation in this topic of faith. We're studying faith. It's a bigger topic, and it doesn't include you yet. Now, we want it to include you. It does, eventually, but we're trying to get the lay of the land. Whether or not we're playing in the game or not, we've got to get a picture of what this thing is.

So when we use Hebrews 11.1 to establish what is the game of faith like, it obviously points us to the things of God.

So we've been on a very challenging journey the last several weeks to understand the things of God. We've talked about things like about His essence. We went into God's essence Himself. So in order to understand the essence of faith, we need to understand some of the aspects of God's essence. So we looked at the fact that He's holy. We looked at the fact that He's infinite. He's self-existent. He is love. He's immutable. He's spirit and He's sovereign. And those were some of the things of God that we talked about in the last several weeks. And each time we brought up a new topic, guess what it did to our little class here? It sent us on a little bit of a spiraling rabbit trail where we just...

You've seen firecrackers when they kind of start to fizzle, one gets away from the rest of them. Roman candle type stuff. We've got a lot of Roman candles going off in this class right now. And that's okay. We knew that was going to happen. And this class is structured so that Roman candles can kind of fizzle out, but they do need to eventually fizzle out so we can get back to the major Big Bang. Not theory, but the Big Bang effect, right?

So we're going to have that big firework show at the end, but right now what we've got to do is we've got to corral ourselves together as a class, just a little bit, so that we can focus on the things that anchor this study initially, and that's the essence. And so when we look at God's essence, we talked about those different aspects, and that sent us on a lot of different exploratory conversations, which is good. We also looked at God's ways, and we're now transitioning into His thoughts, and His wisdom, and His knowledge, and His mind, and what God is doing, and what He did, and what He will do, and eventually His eternal purpose.

So these all fit, these conversations that we're going to have today, are fitting under the things of God, as it comes out of Hebrews 11.1. So I'm setting it up so we're kind of back together, focused on where we're heading. Are there any questions about where we're going with this stuff? Any thoughts? We're good. Okay. Question one. Lesson five.

How does God reveal his wisdom, his knowledge, and his mind to us? Now we touched on this a little bit last week. But we were also touching on a lot of other big topics. So let's remind ourselves what it is that, in terms of God's wisdom, His knowledge, and His mind, how do we get access to that? How does He reveal that to us?

And we used a verse, Isaiah 55.8, to kind of start a conversation around that.

Remember Isaiah 55.8?

Someone read it for me? Well, my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. This verse is a very important verse for the Christian. Why? Why is this important?

Let's reverse it. Read that as though it was the opposite of what it says. If all his thoughts were like ours? Yeah. What would you be? Unsafe. Well, let's just pretend. Let's be heretical for five seconds. We can do that. Because then we'll get back on track. What if it said that our thoughts are the same as his thoughts, etc., etc., etc.?

What does that make you? And what does that make you? And what does that make you? Now how many gods do we have? Now we're talking about something that's similar to the way that the world thinks, right? That's worldly. In fact, if you reverse what this says, you get a worldly view of the world. So I use this term, and I've used it for many years, it's the creator It's the Creator-Creature distinction.

So, in the beginning, God. Right? Or is it, in the beginning, Russ? So this verse builds on the very, very first verse of the Bible. In the beginning, God. That's who was there in the beginning. And then we read throughout the first chapter of Genesis how God created So what we have is we have a differentiation between the creator and the creature. Now, you take any attribute, we named three here, his wisdom, his knowledge, and his mind. You can look at that from a creator perspective, or you can look at that from a creature perspective.

The problem that you get into, and when it becomes non-biblical, is when they equal each other. So this is not equal. This is not the same. Right? We forget that. Because we leave class, and we go out into the world, and we hear every single day that, no, this isn't how reality is. What reality really is, is you've got maybe a creator.

I'm sorry. a creature. You've got a creature, and maybe it's a big creature. And then you've got a kind of still big, but not as big creature. And then you've got little creatures. And guess what? They all are fundamentally the same, just different degrees of strength or power or something like that.

This is a creator-creature distinction. This is a biblical view of the world. Evolution, Buddhism, Hinduism, whatever you want to ism and throw in here, this is what we call a continuity of being, where all beings are... there's a continuity between all of them. We're all joined together, and the only difference is that some are more powerful than others.

And you never really know who's going to be in power at the end of the day, because there's a struggle for that power. Think about Greek mythology. Who's in control? Well, whoever's got the capital creature, you know, tattooed across their chest or whatever, is the one that's in control until that person gets taken out by someone else.

So you think about evolution. You think about Hinduism, or like I said, Buddhism. These are all, we're all one. We're all together. in this world. We're in it together, and whoever's got the most intelligence, or maybe the most power, entire worlds of people operating according to this system rose and fell. It's a struggle for survival, isn't it?

In the biblical view of reality, you have the Creator, who is not the same as the creature, He created the creature, and He owns the creature. We don't like to be thought of as being owned, but if you don't think of yourself and understand yourself as how God identifies us as a creature, then you're going to have the temptation to start thinking, I know better than God. And guess what happened in the garden? the very first chance that Satan had to inject the idea into a human mind that you can be like God.

This doesn't matter. You can be like this. They took it. And we take it every single day because every single sin is rooted in an exchange of biblical view of reality based on faith the faith, aspects of faith, personal faith, it involves all of it. We exchange the biblical view of reality for a non-biblical view, and sin is the result of that. So, that's the setup.

Here we're talking about wisdom, knowledge, and his mind. In Isaiah 55, verse 8, it says that his ways and his thoughts are higher. Why? He's the creator. It's easy to say that. It's easy to say that, but it's very, very challenging for that to be your reality. So we just need to acknowledge that when it comes down here to personal faith later, that reality is something that we struggle with. I think it's important to point out that our thoughts and our ways are not just below God's thoughts and ways, they are in contrast with his ways. They're antagonistic to who he is, they're not just not quite up to his standard, they're in opposition to him.

Absolutely. Does that make sense? It's not like we're like, yeah, we'll take about 55% of what you say and the rest of it, you know, maybe we'll argue about over coffee. No, this is saying like, enemy of. in mind, in thought, in way, you are antagonistic, you are an enemy of God.

That's how you came into the world, being of Adam. So how does He reveal His wisdom in His ways? How does that get from the Creator to the creature? Could God have kept His ways and His thoughts and His mind separate from His creation? Yeah, there's whole views of the idea that God said it and forgot it.

I'm not going to tell you anything. Good luck. I've got other things to do. So, give me some, these are basic answers and you know what they are, but we need to establish it. How does he reveal it? One way. His word. Okay, through his word. What else? The Holy Spirit. Okay, what else? His creation. Jesus, I think we covered all four. Okay, all the four major components to how he reveals.

So, the Holy Spirit convicts man through creation, Romans 1. Now, that conviction is not a personal conviction in the sense that the Holy Spirit is not dwelt in dwelling in an unbeliever, but He does work on the unbeliever through creation. If an unbeliever responds to creation, guess what the Holy Spirit gets to him or her? The Word.

Special revelation. Not general revelation. Now they get special revelation. Now they get an opportunity to respond to the truth. The gospel. And what's the role of the Holy Spirit when that happens? To convict them of the ways and the wisdom and the mind of God. So that they stop, in a moment, trusting the creation and start trusting the Creator. And that's what Romans says. They have traded the truth for a lie.

They started worshipping things, four-footed animals, etc. And the Holy Spirit does a convincing job through the wisdom and the knowledge and the mind of God to convince that person that there is something that needs to be done about their problem. And we'll talk about that power of God through the cross in a moment. But yes, general revelation, which is the creation, specific revelation, or special revelation, which is the scripture, and the Holy Spirit is involved in communicating all that, and then the person of Christ himself. If we were to have an opportunity to witness him walking across and speaking, that would have been instantaneously an opportunity to hear straight from the mind of God, because he is God.

Are we satisfied with the answer to question number one? Alright. Number two. In 1 Corinthians 1, 18-25, the message of the cross has two effects on men. What are they? It's foolishness. Let's read it. Do you have it open? I do not. Okay, that's okay. I'll read it. Okay, 18-25. This is a long one. For the preaching of the cross is to them, who's them? Them that perish. That's right. So the preaching of the cross to them that perish foolishness. But unto us, that's the saved, which are saved, is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and I will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of the world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? Nor after that, in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.

For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified. Unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness, but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God, and the wisdom of God, because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

So we have two different things in a major, in big buckets. There's two big buckets of things happening here. When Christ went to the cross, and we're talking about the cross as a series of events, specifically the cross, but there were aspects to the cross that all produced the wisdom, or I'm sorry, that produced two different things. And what are those two things and who are they to? What did the cross produce? Two things. Big buckets. Well, it produced life for us. It did. But in this passage we don't talk about that. Oh, okay. We talk about two things. Well, foolishness and wisdom. Okay. We've got foolishness and wisdom. Is that right? Is that all right? Yeah. Okay.

Why does the cross produce foolishness, and to who does it produce foolishness to? So why and who? To those who are dying. Okay, so the unsaved, like we said. You think of the verse a couple places, the fool has said in his heart, there is no God. So those who look at things from that creature point of view that you were talking about, who use their own mind to say, Well, that's no way to get your message across, is to go and get yourself crucified. It does not seem like a wise thing to do, when you look at it from the creature point of view. Does that make sense? Did you, at a point in time, think that that wasn't such a wise idea?

No. You were never unsaved? Well, yeah, I guess I was. Well, it helps to be born into a family that already believes that. Right. You may not remember distinct times where you said in your heart, there is no God, but some of us can. If we didn't have the opportunity of coming to know the Lord at a very young age, I think about our children. They're going to struggle with these things behind the scenes, probably like you did. You have a Christian environment. taught the gospel at an early age, probably believed it at an early age for some of us, but you'll still struggle with the worldly views in the background. Because you probably never say to yourself, there is no God.

It isn't that way. It's just that you think like the world thinks. And so you think you can figure things out. I think I can figure things out because I'm the smartest man in the world. So the pride, the self-centeredness, all the things that go with the old man and his nature, all those things rebel against taking God's wisdom, God's way of doing things, as being the way.

So it may not be an overt act of saying, there's no God. It's just that I can figure things out on my own, and thank you very much God. Could I just tell you a story about my, when I was six years old, my mother, we were in the kitchen and she said, Wanda, God has a purpose for your life and he has already planned everything for your life. And, you know, I was just six. I went outside and sat down and I said, you may know what everybody else is doing, but you don't know what I'm doing. So that's sort of what God said to break a lot of those things. You know what? I share your stubbornness. I get it. I'm from Texas, and I'm a redhead, so I got those two things going for me.

I think when you grow up in a quote-unquote religious family, that all of the discussion and the rhetoric about who God is, in your mind you think, nah, he's not really what they're telling me he is. I'm really on my own and I've got to make my own way and do my thing and maybe God can help me, maybe he can't, but he's not. what they're telling me God is. See, this is something that's happening with my son right now. He's six.

I have no doubt that he's a believer, but he's still dealing with the sin nature, and that sin nature is saying, you know, we talk about this all the time, but is it really real? And he's okay to actually ask me that, which I am encouraging, because I want the opportunity to say, okay, let's think about it.

Let's put you back in control, like you're entertaining, and let's talk about the way the world works with you at the helm." And it ends usually with a, no! That's not reality. There's a biblical view, and sometimes you've got to say, okay, we're not entertaining the sin, but let's talk about where that leads us, and what that looks like, and is that where you're headed with this? And it's like, oh, well, then you think about it down the road, no, not so much.

But I think children and even ourselves, we will struggle to the last day of our life on this planet with questioning certain things about the Creator. You will struggle with that. You're just going to. But those are the opportunities and those are the needs and the circumstances that allow you to grow. Those are the kinds of Hey, I think I know better than God. Thoughts that reveal to you where the Lord is working on you. So that's important to realize.

But don't think that he's done all of a sudden because you have his thoughts. You don't. Not yet. But we do have the mind of Christ. That's a separate discussion. So we have something very, very special as believers. that allows us to deal with the worldly views that pop into our mind and are fed by this in nature. Okay, so we got number two sort of answered. It is foolishness to the unsaved. Al's point was, I think, great. Why would you go in and crucify yourself? That doesn't sound very wise. So it produces continued rejection, doesn't it? That's what happens.

But to those that are saved, what does that event of the cross produce to them? Salvation. Salvation, and that's powerful, right? That's the powerful part of it, the dunamis. Grace. Grace is there too. It's not in this verse, but it's there. And thankfulness that we didn't have to go through that. Thankfulness that God loved us so that he would do it. You know, we're still thinking about the power of God as it applies to us. Think about it as it doesn't apply to you. What's powerful about it if you're not there? What did it do? Irrespectful of you, what did it accomplish?

The cross. It dealt with the problem of sin. And then you get to be a part of that solution. But in terms of the, I mean, What's wrong with everything in the world? Sin. And what did the cross deal with? That's powerful. That's what we have from a Christian perspective, is the opportunity to not only recognize that irrespective of ourselves, but then, through faith, we'll talk about it personally, you get to benefit from that power. So, we kind of answered number three and four a little bit together here. How is the message of the cross the power of God? Now we're talking about the message. Okay? We're not talking about the event. We're talking about the message.

Well, how the Word was written. I mean, how the Bible... I mean, how people were inspired to write the Bible. that we could learn from. What is the message of the cross? What do we call that? Salvation. Gospel. Gospel, good news, right? So what is the gospel made up of? What are the historical events that make up the gospel? Death, burial, and resurrection. Doesn't it kind of take you out from under the curse that Adam and Eve put on all of us? When were you accepted?

I'm thinking at this point, God is the one who had the problem. With sin? With sin. So sin had to be reckoned from his perspective. He's the one that was offended. He's the one that his creation fell. He can't have sin in his presence, so he's got a bigger problem than I have. He's got to solve the sin issue. to his own satisfaction. Before it ever even gets to me.

Were there... Okay, let's... I'm going to reverse-engineer that a little bit. I like where you're headed with that. So, in the garden, Adam and Eve said, oh, well we've got a problem. And our problem is now we sense our sin in a new way. And so did they try to solve that problem initially? How'd they do it? Fig leaves. and hid, right? All of a sudden, they're trying to solve a problem that they're now aware of.

Now, to Mike's point, God has a bigger problem. He has to deal with their sin nature in a way that satisfies His holiness. So, you've got this aspect of justice. God, the Creator, requires a different solution to the problem than the creature does. If the creature was in control at that point, then the fig leaves would have worked. But because God is both just and loving... It's a good way to look at it. I never thought of that before. If we were in control, then my solution would have been fine. Yeah.

They needed the blood sacrifice. You think of going back to the Old Testament all through. We have gone through the book of Hebrews in the second service. Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin. So a blood sacrifice all through the types of the sacrificial system under Aaron the priest, the Aaronic priesthood was to illustrate that the life was in the blood. That's why you couldn't eat any. You were not to eat the blood because the life was in the blood. That gets back to God's perspective and my perspective. I would never come up with the idea that there has to be blood.

The philodendron worked. You know, the fig leaf was fine. That's right. Why would I have never come up with that? I want to get back to this God's problem or God's perspective. I'm going to tie in what you just said in a moment. So, here we have a God who created, sin entered, the sinful man decided he knew how to handle the solution better than God than just coming and saying, hey, what do you do about this? Because you're the one that's in control. You made us.

But here they try to solve the problem through the fig leaves. We see Cain trying to solve the problem through a different approach, and so on and so forth. There's all kinds of solutions throughout the Bible that try to satisfy God. But why can't God be satisfied? Because He's told us His ways in this regard. He said, look, I love you, so I'm not going to abandon you.

But I'm also just. And so something has to be done about the problem. So I've got these two different sides of my character. We've just talked about that character. We talked about his omnipotence, his omnipresence, etc. And his holiness, his righteousness, his justice. And so you've got this justice and this love thing. He's like, if we were to try to solve those two, they seem mutually exclusive, don't they? It's like instantaneously. You're like a match. See you later. Justice. Done. Sin. Over. Never to happen again. We'll just start over again.

Maybe that would be what God did. It wasn't His plan. It wasn't His way. His love, He could have just said, I love you so much, and as an extension of grace, without justice being a part of my character, we'll just sweep this under the rug and move on. Which is kind of the way Allah does it. You can actually get things swept under the rug.

But God has to operate according to both His justice and His love. He's got to balance the two out. So here, He's got to come up with a solution that you could never come up with, and He's going to, through that solution, show how wise He is in solving His problem and satisfying both the just nature of His character and the loving nature of His character. So what's He going to do?

First thing He says is, as a consequence, of disobeying the one, very only, single, easy to keep rule that I have in the garden. You've got plenty to eat. It's not a hard thing to do. As a result of that, you will experience what? Huh? Death. What does death mean? Separation. So as a result, you will be separated from me. What aspects of separation does that mean? I mean, there's aspects of separation.

Then they had to work by the sweat of their brow instead of being given to them as it was in the Garden. That's right. That was one of the things. Okay, so let's talk about, let's see if we can explore separation for just a few minutes. How were they separated from God? Was it physically? No, they tried to hide, but that didn't work. Okay. Was it spiritually separated from God? You're separated from all the characteristics we've been going through. All those essences of God which work for your blessing and favor in life. You're separated from all those characteristics of God. That's right. That produce the good results. Let me ask you a question. This is an interesting question, I think.

The Isaiah passage, Isaiah 55.8, was that passage, what we read there, was the truth of that passage the same for Adam and Eve before they fell? So in other words, does... So my ways are not your ways. My thoughts are higher than your thoughts. Was that true of Adam and Eve before sin? Yes. That's important to know. Isn't it? Because they're still the creature. They're still the creature. They just don't have a sin problem before. After that, it gets worse, but the statement of Isaiah is still true, even before the fall.

So afterwards, they are now separated spiritually, like you said. They're separated spiritually, and that results in a separation of their spirit from their body, so now their body is going to die, right? It also results in an eternal separation. called the second death. So you got the first death which means the first separation of your spirit from your body which happens when you go to the grave in this life or from this planet and the second death which is that eternal separation that happens as you spend the rest of eternity in the lake of hell if you don't have that sacrifice that the Lord provides. So he separates them from himself and now he says I've got to get you back in a way that's both just and loving.

We could go on and on and on about the gospel message and how complex it is in terms of God solving for all the different aspects of His character. But as we wrap it up, and if we were to continue down this path, we would come to the conclusion as believers that the message of the cross is the power of God and it represents His wisdom. because we could not solve for it because we're separated. We don't get it. His ways are not our ways, but even further than that, now we have a sin problem that separates us. Does that make sense? I think, just getting back to the basics, I have a question to what is the How is the message of the cross the power of God?

I go back to what we're looking at, 1 Corinthians 1.18, when we look at the essence verbs, for the word of the cross is two things, foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are saved, it is the power of God. So in its essence, the word of the cross is the power of God. in its essence. It's describing what it is. So the S-inferred links it. And that shows us that power. And by contrast, wisdom is thrown in there because it's foolishness to those who are perishing. But to us, it's wisdom and power. So in its essence, the Word of the Cross is those two things.

I mean, think about if you don't know the Lord, and you're sitting here hearing about Here's this event that took place that's supposed to solve for both your God's justice and His love. I mean, can you even begin to understand? I mean, without starting the process of acknowledging, hey, I'm not that guy, and I don't understand what needs to be satisfied in His world, so I'm going to have to take Him at His word? Because I could not understand this or unravel this if it weren't for this initial reality that, hey, I am not God. Did you know that every believer starts with that reality as a starting place to accepting the gospel message? I'm not God.

Okay, so what? Tell me more. But I'm deeply loved by the one who is. That's right. Why? Because he went to the cross in your place. And so He showed you that love, and it was powerful, and as a result it was wise. Now you see His wisdom in solving the problem. And God in His wisdom dealt with my sins by the shedding of the blood, but He also dealt with my sin nature. That's right. As Paul wrote in his later epistles there, I am crucified with Christ. So you have, in a sense, God working out not only a solution for my sin, but going to the root of the problem and dealing with the sin nature itself to give me a new life, a new impetus, a new way of looking.

Proverbs 2.6, I love, For the Lord gives wisdom, from his mouth come knowledge and understanding. I didn't know anything until I knew the Lord. I thought I was pretty smart, but I didn't know anything. William Newell says that it's the blood that deals with my sins, it's the cross that deals with my sin nature. Yeah, I think that's good. The old man is crucified, and your sin nature is a deposed monarch. It has no right to get you marching through his orders through the day.

Russ, I was going to say that I grew up in Boulder, which I hate to admit, but a girl that graduated two years after me, she had died in Facebook, had her obituary. And you would think, man, if anybody's going to heaven, this girl is. I mean, she's worth her tail off. doing all kinds of stuff. And it's back to the creature thing, and how Satan doesn't want anyone to know this stuff. And I looked up the church that she went to, and in the middle of all their words, it's all about Christ within, but every path to God is just as good as the next. I mean, what a heartache. Here's this girl who He was thinking this creature thing. Satan fluffs up the words on their website that use the word Christ within, and diversity, and whatever your sexual orientation is, everything else.

You're all good. And it's just such a deceiving, horrible thing. We went to a Lutheran Mass last night. for a baptism of some nephews and nieces. And that's the dance they give you. Now they told the kids that their sins now were forgiven, but that they better get busy the rest of their life.

That's the wisdom of man. And that's why grace is such a topic in this church because, and should be for every believer, Because that's God's way and wisdom applied to our life, and it has nothing to do with your works. It has everything to do with His work. He solved it, and our opportunity, as we'll get to later, is to operate by faith according to what He said He solved, and what He's going to do. Okay, so we've got a lot to cover there, but I want to finish out the class here, the last five minutes. Let's read Romans 11, 33 through 36. Someone read that out loud for me. 11, 33 through 36.

Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God, How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out. For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been His counselor? Or who hath first given to Him, and it shall be recompensed unto Him again? For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever.

Amen. Amen. That's right. So we have the word unsearchable. Okay, and you guys might have some different translations. It's just in that first part of verse 33, of the depths and the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God, how unsearchable. Okay, that was the word that in question number five here, we use the word inscrutable. So, what does that mean? It means Isaiah 55a. That's what it means.

Have you ever seen a bloodhound get on a path and all of a sudden he stops and he's like he can't go anywhere else. The path to whatever he was following, the set, falls off and he's done and he's got no idea where the rest of it goes. That's the word picture that's happening here with unsearchable. The paths cannot be traced out. We can't sit God in an experimentation room and apply the scientific method to Him. We can't search Him out.

Is that a source of comfort to you as a believer? Because He's good. it would be a source of grave concern if he were not good. Which is why you see some religious systems living in fear, and operating in fear. His unsearchable ways can be trusted because he's revealed himself far enough for us to understand and know that he's good.

He is all-powerful, but he's good. I think that the Chronicles of Narnia has some kind of realization about Aslan, the lion who represents the Lord. And I can't remember how it all goes, but they came to the conclusion that he is all-powerful, but he's good. In other words, he's not tame. It's not like that. He's capable of all powerful. He is all powerful, but he's good.

I always thought that was an interesting kind of picture to this truth. So even though we progress in the knowledge and the wisdom of God, do we progress in that? Yeah? We can never come to the end of that knowledge. We get to spend an eternity continuing along that path. Because we have an infinite God, and we're finite creatures, that's okay, two minutes. I know, but I have one minute on the clock. That clock needs to be taken down. That's no good. I don't listen to bells. Or you don't even notice it and we stay here till noon. Well now's the minute. Yeah, there was my minute.

We'll never come to the end of His knowledge is what I was going to try to say. But it doesn't mean that we can't grow in it. Alright, let's pray. Father, I thank You for the opportunity to get lost in Your Word and even forget about the bells and just have an opportunity just to be overwhelmed in a great way with who You are and what You've done and how You have in all wisdom and knowledge in Your own perfect way solved a problem for Yourself and for us that while foolishness to the world is the power of God that You save us, that You would love us that much. And so we just thank You for that. Pray for a great week ahead. It's in your name that we pray. Amen.