Which Side of the Cross - Lesson 18 Week 2

Okay, so we're on lesson 17, I think 17, 18, sorry, lesson 18, and we had worked our way down to question 5, and we were going through, the question is, define the following in regards to God. You know, some people struggle with what essence verbs are. When we're talking about God, God is, essence verb, all of these things that we're talking about. Essence verbs describe what a thing is and how it functions. So I could say God is holy and holiness is God, couldn't I? I could say God is righteous, righteousness is God, because righteousness has everything to do with God.

He's just, and the reason we're going through these attributes is that I've been convinced for a long time, and I'm sure you have too if you're paying attention, most believers have a very small God. They don't think, they put them in their own box and so when they go to them and ask them for something or they deal with them, they deal with them on their personal subjective approach to who God is.

And God is way, way more than we really perceive Him to be initially and as we go along. We pray and we doubt really because we don't think either he can't do or he doesn't want to do what we ask him. We look around at the circumstances in the world and we say, well why is God doing that or why is he letting that happen? Can't he do a better job than that?

Once we start questioning God, we become gods ourselves. So going through these aspects of who God is, I think hopefully will help us expand our understanding of the one that we have to do with. Who is this God? Who is this God that we have to do with every day and every minute of every day?

So last week we quickly reviewed, the first thing we said was that he was holy. And by holiness we mean that God is set apart from everything else. He's unto himself. It's consistent with essentially who he is. You can't limit him. He's holy. We also said he was righteous. He is absolutely right in everything. He doesn't have righteousness. He is righteous. The Lord is righteous in all his ways and kind in all his deeds. Psalm 145, 17. He's absolutely right. There's no flaw there. He's just, which means that he's fair.

He's perfectly fair in everything he does. So many people will look at this situation with Trevor and say, how is that fair? I remember when the Lord took my older brother home, he hadn't been a believer as long as me, and he was my best buddy in the world, and that's what I said to God, this is not fair. Well, it isn't a matter of fair. Isaiah 45, 21 says, Declare and set forth your case and deed. Let them consult together. Who was announced? Who has announced this from of old? Who has long since declared it? Is it not I, the Lord? And there is no other God besides me, a just God and a Savior. There is none except me. There is none except me.

So we talked about the fact that he's omnipotent and he's infinite. He's all-powerful. And a lot of times we challenge, is he really all-powerful? Well, if you read Genesis chapter 1, he just speaks and creation happens and he didn't need, he did it out of nothing.

You know the old joke about somebody challenged God, well I can create too. I can do the same thing that you do. And so the guy goes over and picks up some dirt and God says, wait a minute, you've got to get your own stuff. You've got to start with nothing. You've got to be able to just speak it into being.

So God is infinite and all-powerful. He speaks and creates, Genesis 17. When Abram was 99 years old, the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, I am God Almighty. Walk before me and be blameless. So, to understand that God is powerful means that There's nothing we as believers can counsel with him about that he can't do. You tell me something he can't do? He can't sin. But sinning is missing the mark, and he never misses the mark. He is the mark. So what can't he do? He can do anything. He's also omniscient, which means he knows everything. Can you think of anything he doesn't know?

How many times have you gone to him and said, Lord, I've got to explain something to you. And you lay out the case like he needs to have an explanation as to what's happening in this circumstance. Or people study that Romans chapter 8, about 16, 17, about the spirit helps our infirmity because we don't know how to pray as we ought.

And they always go at it from the standpoint that I pray, It goes through the Holy Spirit. He translates it so God can understand it. Who's the uninformed one in that chain? I am. The Spirit's job is to reveal God's will to me. And that's what he does.

Omniscient means he doesn't think sequentially like we do. We have this thought, and then the next thought, and the next thought, and the next thought, and we build upon our thinking. If our minds are like the Apostle Paul's and we're kind of a Greek culture, we accumulate information, draw conclusions, and make decisions. Well, God isn't like that.

He has all knowledge, all knowledge in play right now. And then a second later I can say the same thing. He's got all knowledge in play right now. Nothing sequential. It's all there now. So he doesn't have to draw conclusions. He determines. So there isn't anything that I can go to him and think that he didn't know about this ahead of time.

You think he knew about your sins ahead of time? He knew about Adam's sin ahead of time. How about yours? He knew about every one of our sins at the cross of Christ because everybody's sin in this room was future at the time of the crucifixion. And he took care of every single one of them. Every one of them.

Yet I've run into believers and so have you. who have something really tragic happen in their life and they can't believe that God will forgive them. Have you ever had that happen? Somebody says, God can't forgive me. I've been back to him so many times about this thing and this is worse than ever. How can he possibly forgive me? Well, he forgave you. He took care of that actually before he did it. He's also omnipresent. He is everywhere. Psalm 139 says, How precious also are your thoughts to me, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I should count them, they would outnumber the sand. When I awake, I am still with you." I'm still with you. Okay, and that's a review of last week. The last one that we talked about last week is the fact that he's self-existent. He doesn't need anything outside of himself to exist. So you and I do.

We need air. We need food. We need water. We need an environment where the temperature is between this degree and that degree to survive in. We need the shelter of the atmosphere to keep the radiation from killing us. We need all kinds of things to keep us moving and existing. And if you take any one of those things away, we die.

Well, God doesn't have that problem. He's self-existent. He needs nothing outside of himself. The air we breathe this morning, what if he couldn't get the next breath of air right now? We'd be dead. One of us would hold our breath and run and get that A.D. machine. And we'd be zapping, but there'd be nothing. There'd be no air, right? So we need a ton of stuff outside of us just to exist. He doesn't need any of that. He just is. He also is this thing called eternal life. What do you think eternal life is?

Let's look at John 8.58. John says, quoting Jesus, he said to them, Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I am. Before Abraham was born, I am.

John 14.6, Jesus said to him, I am way, I am truth, and I am life.

No one comes to the Father but through me. So he's not saying, essence that I am the way and I have possession of the way. He says I am the way. I am way. He's not saying that I have the truth and I've got all of the truth in my back pocket. He's saying I am this thing, truth. So we save our money, send our kids to college, we study, we read, we research all the time. And the word of God is designed for us to get to know the one who is truth. And if you know the Lord Jesus, you know truth. And he says, I'm also life.

So how would you describe eternal life? What would you say it is? Does it mean it just lasts forever? I already got that. We're all going to last forever. So what is eternal life? What is it? It's knowing Christ, but what's the life itself? I want to know about what the life is. What is eternal life?

Not subjectively to me, objectively what is it? No beginning or end. Could you say it's God's life? adding up the attributes that we've talked about God so far, could you say, well, it's this self-existent life that He is God, right? Could you say it that way? So when He says to, when He promises eternal life to us, what's He promising us? His life. his life.

Let's use Trevor as an example. Trevor was conceived in God's mind before eternity, right? He knew Trevor. And at a certain time in space, Trevor was created physically by his parents, which meant he had life unending, right? He shows up on the planet, he's born, and Trevor will exist for all eternity, won't he?

Won't he? If we say, no he won't, then I want to know where he is now. So he dies this last week. Trevor doesn't cease to exist. He just doesn't exist here anymore. So we say that he died. We say that he was born dead like every one of us were born dead. We were born separated from God. It didn't mean we didn't have human life. We did have human life. Do you see that? But we were born separated from God.

If the definition of death is separation, then the antithesis of that is union. So at some point in our existence, someone shares the gospel with us, we believe it, and we get, among other things, we get eternal life, which is the life of God. And it goes back as well as it goes forward.

So, you know, if I said now, if you're a non-believer, we put this chart up on the board before, if you're a non-believer and the life that you have, how far back in history does it go? God's history. How far? God's history. This is a non-believer that shows up on the earth and you have a timeline. How far back does his history go?

It goes back to Adam, right? Because the Word says, and Adam all die. That's his history. Before that, before Adam, we all existed in Adam. But then a person receives Christ as his Savior and gets eternal life. Now think about it. His essential identity is now in Christ. How far back does that life go? It's predestined before the foundation of the world. Okay, so we've got to the foundation of the world. Does it go back farther than that?

Yeah. If God is self-existent and everything is right now, then if we're in Christ, everything is right now for us. Our life, this eternal life we have, has no beginning, has no ending. And Malloy used to do... I always thought of eternal life as unendingness. But he said, no, no, if you take everything and you bring it all down right to here, that's eternal life. It's all now. I like that viewpoint better. Because I can't imagine unendingness. Can you? It just doesn't fit. But I can imagine everything is right now.

So God exists in eternity outside the timeline, even though Jesus came and lived in the timeline for 33 years. He exists outside time. Oh, by the way, He's the one that created time. He just spoke it and it was. So eternal life, I think, is the resurrected life of Christ that we all have. That's the eternal life. And it's special because it's the life of God. It's the resurrected life of the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ. The next one is, God is love.

I suppose my question would be, if Christ never came to the earth, would we have recognized that God was the God of love? What do you think? Are these questions too hard? We wouldn't know him as a God of love. He was God the Creator. He was God Almighty. He was the God that gave laws to people. We were offending him, but we didn't know he was love. Where do you find out that God is love? How do you find out that He is? At the cross. But where do you find it? In the Word. You find it in the Word.

In 1 John chapter 3, in the Tuesday men's, we went through this a few weeks ago, which is really the name of a hymn. It says, What manner of love that this is, that we should be called the sons of God. If you think about the kind of love that God has for you and me as believers, He just didn't say, okay, we're going to do an atonement thing, we're going to pay for your sins, and everything's going to be cool. There is a part of Christianity that tries to convince its adherents that we really are headed back to the Garden of Eden. where we're innocent and maybe we're not so innocent but we're going to live in this paradise called Eden and everything's going to be alright with God then. That is such a limit on what he's done. First to call us sons and not sons by creation but sons by God's fiat that we are legitimate organic offsprings of the God of the universe and we are his sons. that we should be called the sons of God.

His essential essence is love and so there is no boundary on the fact that He loves us. What is agape love? Describe agape love in one sentence. What is it? Which is unique to God, not unique to God, but it describes the kind of love He is. What is agape love? Sacrificial love. Sacrificial? What else? Unconditional. What's that? Unconditional. Unconditional? What else? Unconditional, sacrificial? Could you say it's inherent in the giver? It's inherent in the giver. The inherence in the giver means that because God loves, the object of his love has nothing to do with the intensity or the degree that he loves. It's all resident within him.

Now that's tough for us because we interact with other human beings and if we don't think they love us, we're not going to love them back. We're going to be a little upset about it or we're not going to be as kindly towards them as we were in the past. But God isn't like that. His love is full on because of Him towards us all the time. Yeah, it's sacrificial. If he's going to tolerate us, it's got to be. And so that's the way he operates. He operates in this agape love. And it's so hard for us, who don't operate very often in agape, to feel comfortable in that.

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where somebody really loved you and you just were uncomfortable about it? Have you ever had that happen to you? I grew up in an alcoholic family and there's no love in that environment, right? It's all a game of how we can belittle everybody around us. But if you find yourself in an environment where somebody really does love you, it's uncomfortable at first. Do you agree with that? Have you ever experienced that?

Where they really did love you and you could be an idiot and they still loved you. not only affection, but they cared about you and you knew it. It's uncomfortable at first if you're not used to it. Now if you grow up in a loving family, you are used to it.

But not everybody grows up that way. And a lot of times people who don't grow up that way, as they get to be adults, they seek out to live in that same environment. So they pick people to be their mates. who are dysfunctional that way. So we talk about dysfunctional families. It's amazing how many people marry what they came out of even though they didn't like what they had.

But that's where they feel comfortable because that's what they know. So here we come to the point where we begin to experience the love of God. It can be kind of unsettling at first. No one ever loved me like God does. that he is love himself. The next thing is that he is grace. What is grace? Give me something other than Macaulay's definition. This grace comes out of his love. It proceeds from his love. And it's his grace. How would you describe that you live, we positionally no longer live under any sort of performance system, we live under a grace system.

Again, that's another one of those things that we're very uncomfortable about at first. Where God does everything and I only have one job and that's to receive what he does. You know what I mean? I only have one job and that's to receive what he does.

That his love is so aggressive towards me that I can't add to it. I can't do anything to earn it. I can't do anything to increase it. I have done nothing to deserve it, yet there it is. And I'm in it. And I'm told the only thing I can do is to thank him for it. Thank him for it and to believe him.

Is that uncomfortable? That's really uncomfortable. We live in a society where performance is everything, right? Adam doesn't like that. No, he doesn't like that. And why doesn't he like it? That's a great point, Mike. Why doesn't Adam like grace? As a matter of fact, Louis Barry Chafer said grace is the most hated thing on the planet. Why doesn't he like it? He can't get credit for anything. Not only can he not get credit, he can't do anything.

If you think about it, your Adamic nature, what does it want to do? It wants to express itself through you. It wants to exist. And God says, you know that thing you do? Romans 7, he says, you know that thing you do where you just want to desire? Because that's what the sin nature does, it desires.

You can't do that desire thing. I can't even desire? No, you can't. Because my grace satisfies all the desires of the human heart, all of them. And so there's nothing you can sell. So the one thing that you're really good at, which is desiring, can't do that anymore.

I mean, it's a shock to the system again. But you begin to realize, you know, when God starts to tell us things about himself and about what he's doing, It can be a bit overwhelming, especially if we've got God pretty small. As you go through the attributes of God, hopefully it expands in our thinking and our minds. Wow, this God is really something.

He's way more than I ever thought He was. And then to come to this understanding that He loves me and He put me in this environment of grace. where all He wants me to do is receive from Him. That's all He wants. And He'll do everything. To find out who's making God small. Yeah, I'm making Him small. Yeah, that's right.

So, I get everything from God that I don't deserve. His mercy keeps me from having to suffer any of the consequences, the wrath and punishment, that I would deserve and yet God isn't foolish and he just doesn't sweep stuff under the rug. What he did was he took out all of the things I deserve on his son. He did it already and the wrath of God on sin perpetrated on the Lord Jesus Christ resolved every single issue between myself and God.

So what does that do? It makes him free. It frees him up in his righteousness to be gracious and to be loving with no barrier now. You read all about the Old Testament, guys, and you find that there's always a barrier, there's always an issue, there's always something, but we as believers, there isn't anything.

We are the objects of God's grace and His love all the time and His mercy. Exodus 34, section 7 talks about God's mercy. Then the Lord passed it by in front of him, him being Moses, and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in loving kindness and truth, who keeps loving kindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgressions, and sin.

Yet he will by no means leave the guilty unpunished. Visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren of the third and fourth generation. I would not want to be a Jew Because if my great-grandfather screwed up, I'm gonna pay for it That's what it says under the Jewish system the Lord says I Loving kindness for thousands who forgives iniquity transgressions and sin yet. He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished Does he leave the guilty unpunished still?

You're guilty, why aren't you punished? Because of the cross. Yeah, because he took it out on his son in your place. And if he didn't do that, you're in big trouble. Now, how about the person that leaves the planet that doesn't believe in the Lord Jesus Christ? Is he going to get punished for his transgressions, his sins, iniquity? What's the big sin? Unbelief is the big sin. That's really where the punishment is going to come in. I gave all of this to you. It's sitting right in front of you and you decided not to take it. You didn't believe me.

On Tuesday and Wednesday night we were studying the issue of faith and in Hebrews 11.6 it says, without faith it's impossible to please God. So all the spiritual push-ups you do, all the fancy dancing you do, cannot please God.

The one thing He wants is us to believe Him. And believing Him opens the door for us experientially for all of this grace and all of this love that He has towards us. We have to believe Him. And believing is a really cool thing. Because it's the one thing you can do you don't get credit for. The credit is in what He's done. The credit is in Him because He's done everything. And He says to us, Do you want this? All you have to do is believe me about it. And it's yours. All of it. Not just a little bit. All of it. He's immutable. You know what immutable means? Never changes. He never changes. He can't change. He never changes.

Now I know that there's believers that I have had conversations with that think that either their sinning or their good deeds can change God or change his mind about something. You can't change God's mind. He doesn't have a mind, it goes sequentially, he's not waiting in that sense. In the scripture it actually says that God repented and changed his mind. Yeah, and if he's sovereign and he's all-knowing, did he have an intent to go this way and just in the middle of the circumstances change and go the other way? No, he always intended to go this way. Always did.

So, the next one is truth. John 14, 6, which we've already talked about. He is the truth. Hebrews 13, 8. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. He's faithful. 1 Corinthians 10 says, No temptation has overtaken you, but such is common to man. God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted or tested beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide a way of escape also so that you will be able to endure it. I think a lot of people look at that verse and they think, God is never going to stretch the rubber band beyond my ability. Well, I must have missed that part because he's stretched the rubber band with me a lot of times beyond my ability.

Why would he do such a thing? If he's faithful... So you depend on him? That's right. Is it my job to prove to him that I'm faithful? What do you think? No. He's taken it upon himself to do what? To prove to me that he's faithful. He doesn't have to do that, but he proves to me that he's faithful, so what does he do? He puts me in a tough circumstance. I go through the circumstance, and what do I find out at the end? He's been faithful all along. I haven't been, but he certainly has. And what does that do? It bolsters my own faithfulness. If he's faithful to me, I can respond in such a way. If you read The Hungry Heart this morning, it talked exactly about that. It also shows you made some wrong choices. Made a wrong choice? Or I made a choice that was not dependent on him.

That's the other thing that trials and suffering teach us. They teach us dependence. We're taught, our whole society, our great American society, we're to be independent. kind of an oxymoron, isn't it, from a biblical standpoint? The most dependent person is the most spiritual person. The one who is the most dependent on the Lord is the one who is the most spiritual person, the one who can endure.

God is spirit. Now this is interesting. Have you ever thought about this, that God says, God is a spirit and we worship him in spirit and truth. John 4.24, the woman at the well, he says that God seeks those who will worship him in spirit and truth. And I know that we've been sold a bill of goods that music is spiritual. Oh yeah? Is it really? Tell me how it is. Tell me how music is spiritual.

How do you worship God? We think we're going to have a praise time now and we're going to worship God and we're going to turn the music up. Donna's dad said when we were in Spokane and listening to the praise band up there that God must be deaf. What is this thing about worshipping God in spirit? What is that about? Is it tied to the music? What's it tied to? Boy, these questions are hard, aren't they?

How would I worship God spiritually? Just your communion with Him. Communion with Him? And it could be through music. It could be. It definitely could be through music. If you read some of those classic hymns, those people that write those words, they're spiritual words. Most of them, to be spiritual, from the standpoint of the worship side of being spiritual, is a recognition of who God is and what he's done. And being thankful for it, isn't that? Yeah, it's responsive.

You notice that about those people that were the really great hymn writers? Everything they wrote was responsive to God's grace. They weren't originating anything. These hymns that tell God what I'm going to do are not spiritual. The hymns that talk about what he's already done is different. So what is it to worship God in spirit?

One, we're spiritually alive and we used to be spiritually dead. We were separated from God. Now we're united to him in Christ Jesus. We share the same resurrected life as Christ. We have been given his word to teach us what this life and who this person is. And so now we are spiritual beings.

Before I was a believer, I thought, well, I'm a soul that has a spirit that lives in a body and I sin and that kind of thing. But from the perspective of a believer, My essential identity now is spiritual. It's not soulish, it's spiritual. So I'm a spirit that has a soul that lives in a body. So the core and the focus of who I am is spiritual. Why is that critical? Because God is a spirit.

Do you see that? And he communicates to me spiritually. Have you ever had I think this is okay. Have you ever had just where you were reading the word of God and you were studying or talking to somebody and you just bang, you got a revelation from the Lord about something spiritual. You ever had that happen to you?

But you can't explain it to somebody. You can't say, well let me, oh I just had this revelation, let me tell you about it. And you start and you think, well I don't have the words. I don't have the words. So I think God reveals stuff to us through the word, to our spirits, but it takes a while to get it so that we can verbalize it socially, but soulishly, I mean, where we can explain what we know. I think we all know things spiritually that we can't explain yet.

Does that make sense? When the love of God is shed abroad in your heart, that's a spiritual event, the love of God is this agape, how do you explain that to somebody? How do you put that into words, yet you know it's true? How do you, when the Spirit of God persuades you that you're saved, can you persuade somebody else?

No, you can't. But you are. You're persuaded. You're absolutely persuaded. So, the worshipping of God in spirit because he is spirit really is an understanding of what you know he is. Does that make sense? And you thank him for that. So is that your spirit expressing through your soul? I think so. His worthiness? Yeah. Yeah, I think that's how that goes. In the quietness sometimes, you just understand things about God, how wonderful He is, and you don't have words for it, but you're really thankful. Why would He pay attention to me? Why would He even care? But He does. The last one is the fact that he is sovereign. Sovereignty is a really interesting thing. What is sovereignty? What does it mean that God is sovereign?

It's a word that we Americans never use. Ruler? He doesn't need any counsel, he's in charge. He doesn't need anybody to help him out. He's the cause of all causes? That's right. And because of all these other attributes, he absolutely never makes a mistake and he doesn't need to be counseled. And when he says something, it is. Whether you buy it or not, it is. And there's no getting around it. You try to dance around it, but you can't.

Romans 9.14, I don't know if you've looked at this, but I'll read you some of the verses. What shall we say then? Is there no injustice with God? Is there? May it never be.

For he says to Moses, I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy, and I'll have compassion on whom I will have compassion. So then it does not depend on man who wills or the man who runs, but God who has mercy. For the scripture said to Pharaoh, for this very purpose I raised you up, to demonstrate my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth. So then he has mercy on whom he desires and he hardens whom he desires.

You will say to me then, why does, why does he still find fault for who resists his will? On the contrary, who are you, oh man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, why did you make me like this, will it? Or does not the potter have a right over the clay to make from the same lump one vessel of honor, honorable use, and another for common use?

What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And he did so to make known the riches of his glory upon the vessels of mercy, which he prepared beforehand for glory. Even us, whom he also called, not from among Jews only, but from among Gentiles."

Does God have the right to do everything he says in those verses? Absolutely he does. And oh, by the way, he did them. He did them. It's interesting if we really had a clear understanding of how a person stands before God without Christ. We only deserve condemnation. And it isn't just because it's arbitrary. We earned it. We earned it.

Romans 6.14 says, the wages of sin is death. That means I worked for it. I worked at that sin thing and I'm going to get what I worked for. But the free gift of God, free, don't work for it, is what? Eternal life through Jesus Christ. It's free. So I work really hard to sin and I get to just receive grace in life.

Pretty good deal. A really good deal. So we still have three questions to go through. We'll pick them up next week and then we'll I sent out 19. Everybody get 19. And if not, there's a copy of it back there. So I'm going to close a minute early. Let's pray. Dear Father, how we thank you for your grace. We thank you for all of your attributes that are towards us. That we may grow, continue to grow and recognize all that we have and who you are, the one who gives all of this to us. We thank you. We pray in your son's precious name. Amen.