God Is Holy

God Is (3): 

God Is Holy

We’re in the third week of our January series “God Is,” in which we’re speaking about the attributes of God. You’ve been very patient, because so far we haven’t actually seen a true attribute of God, but rather two aspects of God’s nature that give us a framework in which to understand the attributes. We talked about the fact that God is “triune,” that is, that he is one God in three persons; and last week we saw that God is “simple,” that is, that he is not the sum of his attributes, but rather that he is embodies each of his attributes: God is not just good, he is goodness itself; he is not just loving, he is love itself.

So finally today we’re going to arrive at the first real attribute of God we’ll be seeing in this series.

Today we’re going to talk about the holiness of God—the truth that God is holy.

What is Holiness?

Before we get into today’s text, we’ve got to take a moment to define holiness (we’ll do this really quickly). Often when we think about holiness, we think of moral purity. And that’s certainly part of it; but it’s far from the whole story.

To be holy in the Bible means first and foremost to be separate. God is holy in that there is no one like him: he is not a created being; he is transcendent; he is infinitely above anything else that exists. When a created thing—a person or an object—is described as “holy” in the Bible, it firstly means that this person or object has been set apart by God for his use. God is the only truly holy being in the universe, because he is holiness; he is the only being which can make something or someone else holy.

Now, this is where you theology geeks may get mad at me. Some of you will hear someone talking about “holiness” as moral purity, and you’ll wag your heads and go, “No no no, holiness doesn’t mean morally pure, it means separate.” 

Here’s the thing, guys. God’s “separateness” from the rest of creation is transcendent—so by definition, it’s something that we as created beings never actually see (with one exception, as we’ll see in a minute). So when God displays his holiness to human beings, he’s going to show us the greatest aspect of his separateness that we can see—and that is his moral purity.

Each and every time someone is set apart for God’s service, he or she is set apart for PURE service. That person is set apart to serve God in a pure way. You simply cannot separate the idea of God’s holiness from the idea of moral purity.

Holiness necessarily includes moral purity, because God’s perfect purity is at the center of why he is separate and transcendent. Holiness is more than purity, but it’s not less. The two always go hand-in-hand, and when we as humans see God’s holiness, it is his moral perfection that we’ll have before our eyes. That is why when we talk about sin, a good working definition of that word “sin” is, anything which contradicts or violates God’s holiness.

In short, Mark Jones gives this wonderfully brief definition of God’s holiness: “Simply put, God unchangeably loves good and hates evil.”

So now that we have an idea of what we’re talking about, let’s take a look at what happens when a human being finally sees what real holiness looks like.

Isaiah’s Vision (Isaiah 6.1-8)

Isaiah was a prophet in the Old Testament, and he was a statesman: he was well-respected, and God used him to speak to several different kings of Judah. God called him to be his prophet, and Isaiah recalls the circumstances of his call in Isaiah 6. 

Isaiah is in the temple, he says—quite possibly to mourn the loss of King Uzziah, who had recently died and who ended his life poorly—and in the temple, he gets far more than comfort.

Isaiah 6.1-8:  

In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. 

Already this is remarkable, because human beings aren’t meant to see God. When Moses asked to see God’s glory, God refused, and only let him see the back of him as he passed by the mountain (Exodus 33.19-33). But this vision of God in all of his glory is what Isaiah sees. 

2 Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. 

The seraphim are angels of the Lord, and although they are far higher and holier than human beings, even they could not be considered holy as God is holy. They cover their faces and their feet with their wings, as a sign of their unworthiness. 

What is remarkable though, isn’t what they do—it’s what they say.

3 And one called to another and said: 

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; 

the whole earth is full of his glory!” 

When they say that the Lord is “holy, holy, holy,” that’s no mere poetic flourish. Repetition is a form of emphasis in biblical Hebrew. Repeating something in Hebrew added force to an idea, like saying a meal was “Really, really good.” 

Only on a couple of occasions does the Bible emphasize something to the third degree, by repeating it three times; and only one attribute of God is given this elevated status. The Bible never says that God is “love, love, love,” or “grace, grace, grace.” It says rather that he is holy, holy, holy.

By saying that God is “holy, holy, holy,” the Bible is saying that God is supremely holy, infinitely holy, perfectly holy. That holiness is the very foundation of who God is. 

And the holiness of God is so fierce and strong that the temple, and then Isaiah himself, are completely unraveled before it.

4 And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. 5 And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” 

What he says is extraordinary: “Woe is me!” That term was what is called an oracle, an announcement from God that could be either good or bad. We see examples of a good oracle in the Beatitudes Jesus gives in the Sermon on the Mount, which begin with the word blessed: Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5.3). Negative oracles were prefaced by the word woe, as when Jesus spoke to the Pharisees in Matthew 23.13:  ...woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! When he said Woe to you, he was pronouncing judgment upon the scribes and the Pharisees.

So it’s astounding that Isaiah says, “Woe is me!” Effectively, what Jesus did to the Pharisees, Isaiah is doing to himself. As R.C. Sproul said, “It was one thing for a prophet to curse another in the name of God; it was quite another for a prophet to put that curse upon himself.”

All true Christians have had the experience of being convicted of sin. That’s what happens to us when the Holy Spirit converts us: he makes us aware of our sin, and our need for a Savior. But our conviction of our sin happens progressively—God makes us aware of sin in our lives, which we work to put to death by his Spirit; then as time passes, he makes us aware of more and more areas of sin which need to be dealt with. A fundamental part of this conviction of sin is a growing vision of God’s holiness—the more we realize how holy God is, the more realize how sinful we are in comparison, and we want to grow to be more like him.

Think back to times in your life when God has done this in you. Being made aware of aspects of God’s holiness we didn’t see before, and being convicted of areas of sin in our lives we didn’t see before, is a painful experience—a supremely beneficial experience, but painful nonetheless. 

Imagine then what Isaiah must be feeling here.

Only Isaiah, in all of Scripture, had that experience all at once. In a single instant, he sees the pure, undiluted holiness of God. And as he sees God’s holiness all at once, he sees his sin all at once. 

And he is totally undone. He realizes the full weight of his rebellion against God—even if by comparison to other people, his sin may seem small. He says, “My eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” You see, he’s no longer comparing himself to other people to evaluate his sin; now, he has to compare himself to God, and the result is devastating—he is absolutely and utterly broken under the weight of his sin.

But God won’t let him remain in that awful state for long. V. 6: 

6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.” 

We don’t have time to get into the symbolism of all this, but what happens here is an act of cleansing. God doesn’t tell Isaiah, “No, keep your woe is me—you’re not so bad! You’re not perfect, but you’re a basically good person!” On the contrary: God affirms Isaiah’s sin, but rather than condemning him for it, he cleanses him of it. 

It’s a painful act—the angel touches Isaiah’s mouth with a burning coal, after all—and that’s to be expected. Repentance (recognizing and turning away from one’s sin) is always painful. But it is constructive. Isaiah is not cast out of God’s presence for his sin; he is declared a sinner, and then his sin is taken from him.

God’s Holiness

The problem with many Christians today is that, when they read this text, they mentally go straight to verses 6-7, without lingering over verses 1-5. They run straight to the forgiveness, and refuse to be broken.

We have become so accustomed to seeking our happiness and comfort at all costs that we don’t want to go through anything that will make us uncomfortable—much less that will make us suffer. 

But being confronted with the holiness of God is always painful. Always. It has to be, because when we see God as holy, we see him as he is; and reflected in what we see is how desperately wicked we are in comparison. So we run away from that experience.

And as a result, we rarely grasp what sin and wickedness actually are. People read about “the wicked” in the Bible—they read the Psalms, for example, and they see David proclaiming God’s judgment on “the wicked,” and they almost never think, Well that’s ME! “The wicked” are always other people; in comparison to other people, we think, I’m not so bad.

Earlier we talked about God’s holiness being his pure transcendence—“God unchangeably loves good and hates evil.” But what does it mean to be “good” or “evil”? 

These days, that question is a thorny one, because the popular idea is that there is no real moral goodness, no real evil; there is only what brings me happiness and doesn’t hurt anyone on the one hand, and what makes me unhappy and hurts other people on the other hand.

If this is what you think, I hate to break it to you, but you’re going to have a really hard time with the Bible. Because the Bible’s definition of what is morally right doesn’t care one bit about our opinions. Since the transcendent God of the Bible is the only perfectly holy being, holiness is WHO HE IS—so he’s the one who gets to decide what good is, and what evil is, by telling us what he is like. If he wouldn’t do it, it’s evil; if he wouldn’t desire it, it’s a sinful desire. If it’s something he hates, it’s sin. If it’s something he loves, it’s good.

But we so rarely hold ourselves up to that standard—we don’t want to, because if we look at ourselves in that mirror, we’ll see sin hiding in every act, behind every desire. Paul says in Romans 3.9-12:  

For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, 10 as it is written: 

“None is righteous, no, not one; 

11  no one understands; 

no one seeks for God. 

12  All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; 

no one does good, 

not even one.” 

We don’t want to believe that; so we’ll try to compare ourselves to other people who seem to be worse off than we are. 

We’ll look at our colleagues and friends and neighbors, and we think, Well, I don’t cut corners like that; I don’t gossip like that; I don’t tell coarse jokes like that; I don’t engage in random sexual activity. So we feel pretty good about ourselves.

The problem is that we’re using the wrong measuring stick to evaluate our “goodness.” The measure of our goodness is not other imperfect people, it’s God. 

And that reality has the power to rip us apart. Because compared to other people, we may feel good about ourselves; but compared to the holiness of God, we are in exactly the same situation as they are, with exactly the same guilt. 

In fact, compared to the holiness of God, even the good things we do aren’t good. Isaiah saw God’s holiness, and faced with that vision, he saw even his so-called “good deeds” in a new light. He says in Isaiah 64.6:  

We have all become like one who is unclean, 

and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. 

This term “polluted garment” refers to a rag used to clean up menstrual blood, or the open sores of a leper: it’s a thing we would never touch if we saw it lying around. Next to God’s holiness, even our righteous deeds are disgusting. 

Here’s the point. Compared to the worst acts, the most evil individuals in human history—the Stalins and the Maos and the Hitlers—most of us are pretty good. But we are closer in moral quality to these evil men than we are to God, because his holiness is so high above ours: even our best, most ethical, most moral acts are stained with corruption.

God’s holiness is so high above us that we can’t even imagine it, much less see it and react to it. That’s a problem for us, because unless we see God’s holiness, unless we see him as he is, and ourselves as we are, we cannot change. 

And this is why God sent us Jesus Christ.

God’s Holiness… 

i. In Jesus’s life

Paul says in Colossians 1.15 that Jesus is the image of the invisible God—if we want to see what God is like, we can now, because we have Jesus. Jesus Christ is the perfect picture of God’s holiness. Jesus was a walking picture of the Law of God, perfectly fulfilled; of every action and desire and thought being in perfect conformity with God’s character (because he is God). 

We have a hard time imagining what pursuing holiness would look like concretely. What does it look like to be holy like God? It looks like Jesus.

Every time we read the gospels, and see Jesus do something or say something that surprises us, the most surprising thing of all in that moment is the realization that this shocking thing was exactly the right thing to do. 

When Jesus angrily turned over the moneychangers’ tables in the temple…it was the right thing to do. 

When Jesus proclaimed his utter hatred for the Pharisees’ hypocrisy…it was the right thing to hate.

When Jesus told us to love our enemies, and pray for those who persecute us…it was because that’s the right way to love and pray.

In Jesus, God showed us a physical, visible, walking picture of God’s holiness—so how foolish are we to not spend as much time as we can immersing ourselves in how he lived and acted and spoke and thought?

ii. In Jesus’s death

Not only was Jesus a picture of God’s holiness in his life; we see his holiness even more beautifully on display in Jesus’s death, for in the death of Christ on the cross, in his separation from the Father, we see just how much God hates sin.

If you ever wondered just how bad your sin is, you need look no further. Any time you harbored jealousy against someone else… Any time you desired to be cool and well-esteemed by your peers more than you desired to be humble and silently serve them… Any time you loved your own comfort and pleasure more than what God calls you to love… God hated that sin so much that he poured out infinite wrath on his Son instead of you. 

Stephen Charnock wrote that the Father 

“would have the most excellent person, one next in order to himself, and equal to him in all the glorious perfections of his nature…die on a disgraceful cross, and be exposed to the flames of Divine wrath, rather than sin should live, and his holiness remain for ever disparaged by the violations of his law.”

The measure of your wickedness is not the sin of others; the measure of your wickedness is in all that Jesus suffered, so you wouldn’t have to.

But just as God wasn’t content to let Isaiah continue to be undone by his vision of holiness—but rather cleansed him of his sin—he is not content to let us simply feel bad about everything Jesus suffered for us. 

We see God’s holiness in Jesus’s life; we see God’s holiness in Jesus’s death; and we see God’s holiness in Jesus’s resurrection.

iii. In Jesus’s resurrection

Jesus’s resurrection is the proof that the holiness of God had been fulfilled in his death. Mark Jones writes, “Why did God become man? To bleed to death for sinners that he might satisfy the justice of his divine holiness.” Everything in us that runs counter to God’s character; everything in us that God abhors, he killed on the cross with Christ.

And the resurrection of Jesus is the proof that the work Jesus came to do was done. God retains no more wrath against the sin of his children; all of that wrath was poured out on Christ.

Through Jesus’s resurrection, everything he achieved on the cross can now be applied to us by his Spirit. Jesus lived a perfect life and gave it to us—God now considers that his perfect life is our perfect life. Jesus was killed for our sin—God now considers our sin dead and gone.

The holiness of God, which hates our sin, was perfectly satisfied in Christ.

iv. in Jesus’s mission

Finally, we see God’s holiness at work in the mission Jesus gives us.

Remember Isaiah’s vision in Isaiah 6—he sees God’s holiness and is completely undone; God cleanses him of his sin; and then, in v. 8, God goes one step further:

8 And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here I am! Send me.”

What happens to Isaiah is a striking image of the way God always operates. God appears to Isaiah; Isaiah is terrified in the presence of his holiness; God forgives Isaiah, and cleanses him of his sin; and then he sends him. He calls Isaiah to a mission on his behalf.

This is what always happens. When we see Jesus’s holiness on the mountain when he is transfigured, we are shaken and frightened at the glory of his holiness; when Jesus goes to the cross and suffers for our sin, those sins are taken from us; when he emerges alive and glorified from the tomb three days later, we see the proof that his perfect life has been given to us; and before returning to his Father, he sends us on a mission. 

Matthew 28.18-20:  

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. 

It’s always striking to me how much mental energy we put into verse 19—Go and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit—and how little attention we pay to verse 20—teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. 

Any teacher can tell you that the best way to know that you know how to do something, is to teach someone else to do it. Oh sure, if you don’t know how to do something, you can teach someone how to do it in theory, but the best teachers are always those who can do it, those who understand and practice what they are teaching. 

Christ gave us this mission—not just to make disciples, not just to baptize them in his name, but to teach them to obey his commands. Which means that he presumes that we’ll be obeying his commands. Jesus takes it as a given that his disciples will obey him. We’ll need help—that’s why he sends us his Spirit—but we’ll do it. 

Now, it’s going to be difficult for us, firstly because holiness is not “cool.” One of the biggest obstacles to holiness for the Christians in our church is the simple desire to be liked. The desire to be well-regarded, to get a laugh, to be the life of the party, to be intelligent, to know your theology, will supersede the desire to be like Christ if you let it.

And it will be hard because, when it comes right down to it, few Christians are seriously concerned with living as Christ lived in the first place. Especially in our Reformed circles, we spend all of our time reassuring ourselves that Christ is the Savior we needed; we spend all of our time reassuring ourselves that our salvation is sure.

And for some of us, I’m afraid we repeat that line so often because, deep down, we know that our response to what Christ did for us is woefully lacking. We completely ignore the fact that it’s to holiness that Jesus saved us; we ignore the fact that he saved us in order to make us holy like him. We keep telling ourselves that our salvation is sure in Christ because we feel guilty about how little we actually obey him, and we know it shouldn’t be this way.

Anyone who takes their faith seriously will feel this at some point or another, for legitimate reasons or no. Sometimes we’ll feel guilty because we are guilty; and sometimes we’ll feel guilty because the enemy is lying to us and filling us with doubt.

And still some of us will feel no guilt at all, even though we absolutely should. Some so-called Christians will go about their lives and never call their own holiness into question: they’ll take the good news of the gospel as a kind of blanket statement over their whole lives, and they’ll go on thinking, Well now that that’s taken care of, I can do what I want. These Christians should seriously question whether or not they have any faith at all.

Whatever the case may be—whether you’re struggling with guilt over your real (or imagined) lack of obedience, or simply realizing your faith may not be as legitimate as you thought—the solution is the same.

Every day, as many times as we can, we must remember Isaiah 6.

First, we must expose ourselves to, and remind ourselves of, the holiness of God.

This is why we speak so often about reading the Bible daily, and reading it cover-to-cover on a regular basis. This is why have times of confession every week when we come together for worship, and why I try to have times of confession every day. When we expose ourselves to God’s holiness in his Word, when we confess our sins to God, we remind ourselves of the distance that exists between us and him. 

We remember that God is not a being like ourselves, but that he is transcendent, totally separate, and that his transcendence is pure. 

We remember that there are behaviors and thoughts and desires that God loves, and that there are behaviors and thoughts and desires that God hates. 

And we remember that we are so far from his holiness that even our righteous deeds are like polluted rags compared to him.

So we repent of these things, and we stay there as long as we need to in order to feel the weight of that repentance. We place ourselves, once again, in the hands of his mercy.

Secondly, we must remember that Christ satisfied God’s holiness for us. 

Isaiah saw God’s holiness and was broken; and God came and made him whole again. Jesus’s life, death and resurrection satisfied the demands of God’s perfect holiness, and gave that holiness to us. 

We must know that, and accept that, and rest in that. There’s nothing else that we can do to add or subtract to Christ’s work on the cross for us; he totally absorbed the wrath of God for us, so when he saves us, we are totally saved. 

But the reality that Christ’s work for us is finished does not mean that his work in us is finished. Resting in Jesus’s work does not mean resting from our work.

Lastly, we must respond to Christ’s finished work by growing in holiness.

Holiness is not optional for the Christian. It is the necessary result of our salvation. If someone is truly saved, that person will be holy. 

Hebrews 12.14 says,  

Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.

If we truly understand and accept what Jesus did for us, we will grow to be like him; otherwise, our faith is a farce, and we will not see God. 

If we have seen God’s holiness revealed in the Word; and if we know that Jesus satisfied that holiness for us; then we must act like it. We must grow in holiness ourselves. And we can now—because we are made holy through Christ, God’s Spirit comes to live in us and guide us in holiness.

Without Christ, no one could look upon God and live. Now, through our Mediator and Savior, we can not only see holiness displayed in him; we can be made like him.

God Is Immutable

God Is Immutable

(Psalm 102.25-28)

Jason Procopio

I’m old enough now to have had the surreal experience of going through old photo albums with my kids and seeing pictures of my dad when he was younger than me. My dad was twenty-four years old when I was born, so I have very clear memories of what my dad was like when he was my age or younger. Looking through those old pictures, the memories of what he was like back then came screaming back to me. (Jack couldn’t believe it either; he kept saying, “Wow, he looked just like you.”)

It’s an almost melancholy experience, because although my dad is still pretty young, I have seen him change. When I was a child, he was right in the peak of his physical form. He still looks great, but his hair has gotten gray; he’s just a bit thicker than he was when he was my age. (So I guess I know what to expect.) When I was young my dad was a ball of energy; now he gets tired. When I was young he was almost hopelessly optimistic; now I see him worried. 

I know some of that is probably due to the fact that I’m older too, so he lets me see aspects of himself he didn’t let me see when I was little. 

But that’s not all there is. My dad, who in my mind was stable as a rock, has changed, and is still changing. In many ways he’s changed for the better; in some ways he’s suffered the changes that come from being an older man. But in either case, he’s not the same now as he was back then.

That reality is at the heart of some of our greatest fears about ourselves, and some of our greatest assurances from God.

We are in the second week of our annual series on the attributes of God. Last week we saw that God is independent—meaning that he exists completely in himself, and has no need of anything outside of himself to be or to act.

Today we’re going to be looking at a natural extension of that attribute: namely, that God is immutable. That is, he is unchanging. To see this, we’re going to hop around a good bit today, but we’ll start in Psalm 102. 

God Never Changes

We’ll be mostly focusing on v. 25-28, but let’s just get a little context. The beginning of this psalm is a solid lament. We don’t know exactly what’s going on, and that’s not the point—the point is how the psalmist feels about what’s going on. 

The heading for Psalm 102 reads, A Prayer of one afflicted, when he is faint and pours out his complaint before the Lord. 

This man is so desperate and weak that he forgets to eat (v. 4). He weeps in despair over God’s judgment (v. 9-10).

But after telling God how he feels about his situation, he comforts himself by reminding himself of God’s continual faithfulness. He reminds himself of God’s faithfulness to the weak and the needy (v. 18-22). 

But how can the psalmist know that God will continue to be faithful? He gives the foundation of his trust in v. 25-28.

25  Of old you laid the foundation of the earth, 

and the heavens are the work of your hands. 

26  They will perish, but you will remain; 

they will all wear out like a garment. 

You will change them like a robe, and they will pass away, 

27  but you are the same, and your years have no end. 

28  The children of your servants shall dwell secure; 

their offspring shall be established before you. 

So the psalmist is honest about his pain; but he reminds himself of God’s faithfulness. And he knows that God will continue to be faithful, because God never changes. 

The earth will perish, but you will remain. The heavens will wear out, but you are the same.

Last week we saw that God is completely independent—he alone has aseity, meaning, he alone is self-existing and self-sufficient. And by definition, if he has being in and of himself, his being doesn’t depend on anything outside of himself. 

Which means that nothing can happen that has the possibility to change him. As the song goes, As thou hast been, thou forever wilt be.

Or as we read in James 1.17:  

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. 

We hear this and we nod our heads—in the context of this limited conversation, we can get behind that idea.

But if we’re honest, we have to admit that at other times, it’s harder for us to believe that. 

Most Christians, if they read their Bibles (and unfortunately that’s a big “if”), will tend to gravitate towards the New Testament, the second part of the Bible, which talks about Jesus and the beginning of the church. It’s astonishing, the number of Christians who never read the first part, the Old Testament, which tells the story of God’s people before Christ. (Or if they do, they’ll only read the Psalms and Proverbs.)

But let’s not be too hard on them. Even if I disagree in the strongest possible way, and will encourage you night and day to read all of the Bible—Old Testament and New—at least once a year if you can… I do understand why some people have a hard time with it.

And one of the reasons is that God, as we see him in the Old Testament, can seem quite a bit different from God as he appears in the New Testament. 

People sometimes say things like, the God of the Old Testament is the God of judgment. The God of the New Testament is the God of grace.

The God of the Old Testament is the God of wrath. The God of the New Testament is the God of compassion.

The God of the Old Testament is the God of punishment. The God of the New Testament is the God of forgiveness.

On and on you could go.

I could go on a rant now about how this is patently untrue—and it is. The God of the Old Testament is not a different God from the God of the New Testament. He’s the same God. Yahweh and Jesus Christ are not at odds with one another. This is a ridiculous false dichotomy people have created.

But even so, let’s cut people who say such things some slack. 

For those of you who have read the whole Bible, have you never had the experience of reading a passage from the Old Testament, and feeling really heavy and burdened, really conscious of the wrath of God, and then wanting to hurry over to the New Testament so that you can feel reassured of God’s grace? If that’s never happened to you, then you’re probably not reading your Bible. 

That is how it feels sometimes. When we read the Bible too quickly, that is what we might come away with. 

So if that is you, don’t feel bad, and don’t be afraid. If you have a tendency to view God differently at different times in the Bible, there are two concepts that can help you make peace with what this seeming (but untrue) disparity.

Let’s look at the harder one first. It’s called the “inseparable operations of the Trinity.” (As always, you don’t need to know the term, but the idea behind it is really important.) 

That word “Trinity” simply means what the Bible means when it talks about God. The Bible says that there is one God, and that this one God has eternally existed in three distinct persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. (We don’t have time to go into how that works, so I’ll give you the simple explanation: I have no idea, and no one else does either.)

So often people will unconsciously separate the work of the three persons of the Trinity. They’ll think that the Father is at work in the Old Testament, and the Son and the Spirit are at work in the New Testament. 

This concept of inseparable operations of the Trinity simply says, "It doesn’t work like that.” Any time you see God doing anything, all three persons of the Trinity are at work. 

You can’t separate the work of the Father from the work of the Son. You can’t separate the work of the Son from the work of the Spirit. And so on. In the Old Testament, the Father, the Son and the Spirit are always working together. And in the New Testament, the Father, the Son and the Spirit are always working together.

Everything God does, he does it in all the persons of the Trinity. Everything they do, they do together, as God.

This reality should do away with these ideas we have of God being different in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. 

Guess what? As hard as it is to imagine or accept it, when the Father poured out the plagues on Egypt, guess who was there, doing it with him? The Son and the Spirit. When Jesus healed the multitudes, guess who was right there, doing it with him? The Father—the same Father who judged idolatrous nations in the Old Testament. 

When we see God doing things in the Old Testament which we wouldn’t naturally ascribe to Jesus, we should always remind ourselves that the Son was right there with the Father, working with him to do that very thing.

The second helpful concept is a little easier, and in theology it’s called “progressive revelation.” 

Progressive revelation says that although God is always the same, he doesn’t tell his people everything there is to know, all at once. He reveals himself and his plan progressively, little by little.

At creation, he shows that he is the Creator. 

To Moses he gives his name—Yahweh, the great “I AM.” 

After the exodus in Egypt, he gives his people his law—the standard of righteousness that reveals his own perfect character. 

Through the law, he shows his people that they could never be perfect on their own (because they can never obey it). 

Through the prophets, he reveals why that’s a problem, and promises to send a Savior to solve that problem.

And in Christ, he shows his people just how mind-blowing his solution is: God himself will take on the imperfection of his people, and suffer the punishment for their rebellion in their place. God himself will suffer his own wrath for the people he loves.

In other words, there are steps to God’s plan, which allow us to see many different facets of his character and plan—his perfection, his power, his justice, his wrath, his love, his grace—at different times. But God himself is the same at every step; it’s just that he didn’t reveal all these different facets of his character at the same time.

All of this reminds us that from the beginning of the Bible to the end, we learn about God progressively, but God himself does not change. The God of the Old Testament is the God of the New Testament; he did not change between the book of Malachi and the book of Matthew. He does not change. He is immutable.

How We See God

So that’s the theology of God’s immutability. And we needed to see that to understand why it matters. 

Why does it matter? What does the knowledge of God’s immutability change for us?

First of all, it changes the way we see God.

God’s immutability is the guarantee of his faithfulness. This is what we see in Psalm 102—the psalmist speaks of God’s continued faithfulness, and then rests in the fact that this faithful God never changes.

There are all kinds of promises in the Bible of things that God will do for his people. Some of those promises have already been fulfilled. For those promises, as we read the Bible from beginning to end, we can actually see how he did it. We can see that he was faithful to do what he said he would do.

Some of the promises we find in the Bible haven’t been fulfilled yet. We’re still waiting on these things. But we can have absolute assurance that he will do it.

Why? Because he never changes. As we saw last week, nothing can make God want something he doesn’t want; nothing can make him change his mind. His immutability guarantees that if he says he will do something, he will do it.

Secondly, his immutability is the guarantee of his knowability.

Because God never changes, we can know him. He has revealed himself in his Word, so we can go to the Bible and know that the way God describes himself in these pages is still true of him today. 

He hasn’t told us everything there is to know about himself—we’ll never exhaust the riches of his person—but everything he has told us about himself in the Bible is still true of him today. He has not changed in the thousands of years between the writing of Scripture and today. Because God never changes, we can know him.

Similarly, his immutability reminds us of the unchanging truth of Scripture. 

In Matthew 7.24-27, Jesus says,  

24 “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. 26 And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 27 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” 

The sand constantly shifts under a house, but a rock is steady, unmoving. Christ’s words are a sturdy foundation for our lives because they are God’s words, and God never changes. 

The God who inspired the book of Genesis is the God who lives in us today. The God who preserved his Holy Word through the millenia preserves us.

We can go to the Bible, and know that the Bible doesn’t change depending on time or place or context, because it is God’s Word, and God never changes. No matter where we are, or what we are dealing with, these promises are sure and steady; they do not depend on any external factors.

His immutability gives us comfort. 

Why would the fact that God never changes be comforting? Well, we understand why even on a basic, human level.

My parents moved a lot when I was a kid, so we don’t have a “family house”, so to speak. But no matter where they have lived, there are things in the house that are always present.

The collage of baby pictures which hangs on my parents’ wall has been there since I was a child. 

The silverware and the dishes they use today are the same ones we used when I was little. 

This slightly unsettling sculpture of Santa worshiping the baby Jesus. (We’ve had it since I was little, and I love it.)

They have many of the same blankets they’ve had since I was little. 

No matter where they live, my parents’ house has the same smell.

I'm thirty-eight years old now, and I have a family of my own. I don’t need my parents now the way I did when I was young. But even so, there’s something strangely comforting about coming home and seeing those permanent fixtures of my childhood, smelling the smells I grew up with.

God’s immutability is our ultimate source of comfort. One of the defining characteristics of God we see in Revelation 4.8, after his holiness, is that he is the Lord God Almighty, who WAS and IS and IS TO COME.

We take comfort in our God’s power, and holiness, and wisdom, and goodness, because we read about him in the Bible, and we know that the amazing God we see in these pages is the same God who lives in us, and cares for us, and serves us.

The truth of God’s immutability changes the way we see God. 

And it also changes the way we see ourselves.

How We See Ourselves

God never changes. We, on the other hand, are constantly changing.

We are never constant. We are never consistent. We say we’ll do one thing, and we do another. We change our minds. We go back on commitments. 

The fact of our perpetual change is true on every possible level. Our skin cells—all our skin cells—die and are replaced approximately every 27 days. Each of us loses 50 to 100 strands of hair every day. (Obviously, there are many other examples I could give.)

We don’t just see it physically; we see it in our behavior, even over very short periods of time. This is why we love the psalms, right? One minute David’s saying, “Oh God you are always with me, my soul is satisfied in your presence,” and literally three lines later he’s saying, “God, where ARE you?! Why have you forsaken me?!”

Is this not us? We feel confident, we feel happy, and one tiny piece of bad news—say, the news of a transport strike in Paris—can change all of that really quickly.

And if it’s true on a small scale, in regards to things like our mood, how much more true is it of larger-scale issues?

We have lots of couples in the church who got married recently. When we do pre-marital counseling with new couples, we ask them many questions about where they see themselves in several years’ time: what they plan on doing in terms of life at church and raising kids and vacation and handling finances and sex and hospitality and many other things. It’s good to talk about these things.

We’re always very careful to say that these things are subject to change. But no matter how often we say that, couples are always surprised when they actually do change. “You said you wanted two kids, and now you want six?!” “But we talked about this! We had a plan!”

Yes we did. But people change.

(And isn’t it interesting that in these situations, we ironically use the language of immutability to point out imperfections in the other—“You always do this!” “You never do what you say you will!”)

Human beings are inherently disappointing—not because we’re all as bad as we could be, but simply because when dealing with other people you rarely get what you expect to get. We are constantly changing. 

But there is good news in that as well. The good news behind the fact that we are constantly changing is the simple truth that we can change. 

One of the most frequent and destructive lies you see in relationships is the one which says, “This is just who I am. You can’t ask me to be something I’m not.” It’s destructive because it is a lie.

We can change, and we know it, because we change all the time. We can change for the worst, but we can also change for the better. Now, those changes for the better will all be accessory if the Holy Spirit doesn’t do the work of changing our hearts, but how often do we look at our lives and doubt that the Spirit can actually do that? 

We look at what the Bible calls us to be, what God calls us to do, the type of person he wants to make us into, and we are horribly daunted. We look at even something as simple as the Ten Commandments, and we think, Well, I’m in trouble. I’ll never be able to live like that.

But people change for the better all the time. People learn to create different habits, to see things differently, to eat better, to live more generously, to be less self-serving. 

So imagine how much further we can take that potential for change if we have the unchanging God of the universe in our corner, changing us as he has promised to? Imagine how much more we could change if we weren’t the ones doing the changing, but if God did the changing in us? 

That is exactly what he says he will do.

In Ezekiel 36.26-27, God says to his people:  

26 And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. 

And in Philippians 2.12-13, Paul explains how God does it:

12 Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, 13 for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. 

We work—we resist sin and we grow in spiritual discipline and we serve one another—and in our work, we become more like him. And we actually do become more like him, because it is God—the unchanging God of Abraham, the immutable God of Jacob, the ever-same God of Moses—who is working in us to conform us to the image of his Son, applying the finished work of Christ to our hearts and lives, declaring us righteous and then making us righteous. 

We can change, because God never does. The God who transformed the saints of the Old Testament and the New, the God who took a murderer and turned him into the Apostle Paul, the God who took the ultimate sin—the murder of his own Son—and through that sin brought about salvation for all his people, works in us today. 

He never changes. Which means we can change.

Conclusion

The reality of God’s immutability places two great calls on our lives.

Firstly, it calls us to obedience.

The God who doesn’t change tells us what he is like, and invites us to become like him. 

He sends his Son to live our life and suffer our death, so that we no longer have the threat of condemnation hanging over us. And once he reconciles us to himself and declares us righteous, he continually works in us by his Spirit and says, “Work with me. Let me change you.”

Brothers and sisters, what we were, what we always have been, is not what we have to be. 

For those of us who have been saved by the Holy Spirit of God, sin is no longer the default position of our hearts. He has freed us from sin. So we no longer have to say yes to sin. 

If there is one truth I pray you grasp almost more than any other, it is this: because of the finished work of Christ for us, sin is no longer inevitable. 

We can choose to speak fairly and humbly about our boss instead of complaining about him behind his back.

We can choose to look away from sin rather than giving in to it.

We can choose to be generous, to make sacrifices for the kingdom of God, rather than amassing a wealth of useless toys for ourselves.

We can choose to not sleep with our girlfriend, to not be casual about her sexuality, but to protect it for the day we can enjoy it as God intended.

YES, WE CAN.

Because the unchanging God has made good on his promise to save us from sin, we can learn to love what he loves. We can learn to desire what he says is truly desirable. We can learn to trust that he knows better than us.

The reality of our unchanging God calls us to change, through his Spirit, to be like him.

And most importantly, the truth of God’s immutability exposes our own idolatry, and invites us to place our only hope in God alone.

How often are we driven to place our trust in unstable things? in things which could never support the weight of our trust? Like the proverbial house on the sand, we build our lives and our hopes and our identities on things which are constantly changing, constantly shifting, constantly subject to change.

Consequently, our false gods always disappoint us.

If we want a good example of that, think of the way we often speak of marriage.

People often quote 1 Corinthians 13 at weddings. Most people—even most unbelievers—have heard this passage, but I’ve always hesitated to use it at weddings.

We read in this passage:

4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 

I’ve heard this text used at weddings before, and my cynical reaction is always the same: “Yeah, good luck with that!” Not a single marriage in human history has made good on the promise of this kind of love. 

Marriage (or any close friendship, for that matter) is a wonderful diagnostic tool—it lets us see, very quickly, how unloving we actually are. We are not always patient or kind. We often envy. We are often rude. How easy is it to insist on our own way, to be irritable or resentful? How impossible is it to bear all things and endure all things when “all things” include the sin of another human being, pointed at us?

But this passage makes more sense if we realize that it’s not describing the love we have, but the love of God, which he is building in us?

Jen Wilkin said of this text: “What better passage to read at a wedding than one that describes the kind of love we can never hope to receive perfectly from anyone but our heavenly Father? How much more willing might we be to replace the always and never language of our human arguments for the language of grace and forgiveness if we could just recognize that we cannot ask another human to be our God?” 

There is only one who is unchanging, and he alone is God. He alone can stand the weight of our expectations, of our hopes, our fears and our identities. And he alone has provided his Son, the only means we have to build our house on the rock.

So as we realize how inconstant we (and everyone else) are, we are invited to place our trust in the only constant in this universe: God himself, whom we can trust, because he never changes.

Giving (Resolutions)

resolutions: giving

Jason Procopio 

When we talk about spiritual disciplines, as we have been for the last several weeks, we have a tendency to think in very spiritual terms, for obvious reasons. Prayer and worship and reading the Word of God and sharing the gospel… These are all “spiritual” activities. And we like them, because since they’re spiritual, they’re fairly “safe”. They don’t cost a lot more than time and maybe, occasionally, a little embarrassment.

The same is not true of the spiritual discipline we’re seeing today, which is the spiritual discipline of generosity.

I just want to confess right from the beginning that my initial instinct to the idea of talking about this subject is not a positive one. Not because I’m not convinced that everything I’m about to say is true, but rather because of the way people often see Christians deal with this subject. 

Two images immediately spring to mind. One is from my childhood in America. My grandmother always had their television turned on in the background when I was a kid, and unless my Grandpa was watching a Western (which I preferred), Grandma had the TV tuned to the “Christian” network, which basically played church services on a loop all day long. These were not modest church services (because poor churches couldn’t afford cameras); these were church services in which, almost every time, a well-manicured man in a very expensive suit got up and told people that if they would just give 10% of their monthly earnings to his ministry, God would give them their money back times ten. Even as a child this sounded ruthless and opportunistic to me—this guy asking my grandmother (the sweetest woman on Planet Earth) to send him money so that he could buy a new pair of diamond cufflinks.

The second image that comes to mind is more recent. We were at Loanne’s parents’ house for lunch or something, and her mother came storming in after retrieving the mail. Someone had dropped an empty envelope from the local Catholic church, asking her to put money in and send it back. Neither of Loanne’s parents are Christians, and her mother had a lot of very big problems with the Catholic church. She was livid—“Why would I give them money? And why on earth are they asking random people to give to them, as if we owed them something?” So she looked up—I think to see what our reactions would be—and we both said (quite sincerely) that we agreed with her. 

Images like these have colored the way many people see the church—as an institution looking to get rich and not afraid to exploit poor people in order to do it. And in all fairness, that vision of the church has been right in the past: it was one of the main reasons for the Protestant Reformation (the Church was selling indulgences—basically you’d pay the church in order to spend less time in Purgatory after you died—and they did it in order to finance St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome). 

So I’m going into this with the weight of my mother-in-law’s negative judgment on my shoulders (a judgment I still happen to agree with). And it is, in part, that negative judgment that makes talking about this subject all the more necessary. Because neither the Catholic Church asking random people for money, nor the televangelists asking random people for money, have anything to do with what the Bible actually says on this subject. 

And the Bible says a lot about it.

We don’t have time to see all of it today, obviously, so we’re going to focus on one text in particular. I chose this text because we’re not just talking about money to talk about money; we’re talking about the spiritual disciplines, the means God gives us to grow in him. And our stewardship of the resources God has given us is a big one. So we’re going to see in this text both why we give, and how we give—how giving actually brings us closer to God.

The text is 2 Corinthians 8.1-15. 2 Corinthians is a complicated letter, because it has a complicated history. About a year after writing his first letter to this church, Paul learned from his protégé Timothy that the church was in a shambles, because opponents of Paul had arrived and were turning the church against him. Paul went to visit them, hoping to smooth things over, but the visit was very painful to him, because the church openly rebelled against him. So he left, and sent a very severe and painful letter to them (delivered by Titus, this letter is now lost), calling them to repentance and warning them of God’s judgment if they didn’t. 

To his joy, most of the Christians in this church did repent, which he learned when he met up with Titus in Macedonia. But there were still some who resisted his apostolic authority. So Paul wrote this letter to the Corinthians before coming to visit them one more time.

So this letter has three goals. Paul wants to strengthen the faithful in the church; to complete the collection for other churches as an expression of their repentance; and to offer the rebellious one more chance to repent before Paul comes.

Today’s text, in chapter 8, focuses on this second goal.

The collection in question is money they are collecting from churches all over, to support the suffering believers in Jerusalem. And in his exhortation to the Corinthians to give to the church, he’s going to show three separate things: that giving is an act of strategic joy; that giving is an act of grace; and that giving is an act of discipline. We’ll see the first two before the break and the last one after.

Generosity: an act of strategic joy (v. 1-6)

If you were here last week, what we’re going to see first will be familiar; in the first few verses, Paul tells us something similar to what John said in the beginning of his first letter. 

Keep in mind that he’s talking the collection he’s taking up for the Christians in Jerusalem, who were going through some kind of hardship: providing for their needs so that they can continue to do the work of ministry. He encourages the Corinthians to give generously by telling them about the attitude of the churches in Macedonia.  V. 1-6:  

We want you to know, brothers, about the grace of God that has been given among the churches of Macedonia, 2 for in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part. 3 For they gave according to their means, as I can testify, and beyond their means, of their own accord, 4 begging us earnestly for the favor of taking part in the relief of the saints— 5 and this, not as we expected, but they gave themselves first to the Lord and then by the will of God to us. 6 Accordingly, we urged Titus that as he had started, so he should complete among you this act of grace.

These Macedonian Christians were extremely poor, and extremely joyful in God. The one consistently positive thing about affliction is that it clarifies everything very quickly. When you lose everything, it’s easy to see what you have left. The Macedonian Christians had lost almost everything; and what they had left was God. And they found that God was enough—more than enough. The God that remained to them was so far beyond “sufficient” that they felt they had riches beyond anything they could imagine: they had abundance of joy in him.

This joy in God, paired with their extreme poverty, made them able to see what was really worth pursuing, and that was: they would give themselves to God, and to their brothers and sisters. This is what they wanted, because it was what would complete them. So they begged Paul to allow them to participate in the relief of the saints in Jerusalem, giving what little they had, beyond their means.

Giving is an act of strategic joy. Here’s what I mean by that: when we give, we have less (obviously); and when we have less, we’re able to more easily see which things truly make us complete. This is why Jesus said that it was difficult for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19.23-24). When we have a lot, it’s hard for us to believe we don’t actually need a lot. The more things we have to make us comfortable, the harder it is for us to imagine living without those things. 

We can see this very easily when we think of how the world has changed in just the last twenty years. Can you imagine going back to a life without cell phones? Without being able to carry a phone with you all the time, without having access to this wealth of information in our pockets all the time? A few of us here still remember a time before not just cell phones, but the Internet—when we wanted to know something, we had to look it up in a book. And there was a time before that when books were as precious as gold, because there were so few of them.

We can live without these things. And if we have God, we can live well without these things; we can live joyful without these things. 

Giving generously is a way to remind ourselves of this reality, to invest in not just pleasure, but joy—lasting, eternal, complete joy in our God.

Giving is an act of strategic joy.

Generosity: an act of strategic grace (v. 7-9) 

Next, we see that giving is an act of strategic grace.

7 But as you excel in everything—in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in all earnestness, and in our love for you—see that you excel in this act of grace also. 

8 I say this not as a command, but to prove by the earnestness of others that your love also is genuine. 9 For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.

To put this simply: we must remember (as Paul encouraged the Corinthians to do) that we give in order to extend grace to others. We give to God so that God’s blessing might be extended to others, through the ministry of the church. When we give, we accept to sacrifice ourselves in order to give others what they need.

And we do it because that’s what Christ did for us. God is by definition the richest being in the entire universe, because literally everything belongs to him. And yet when God saved us, he did it by taking on a human nature and living as a human being, without the comforts of heaven. Let’s put aside how difficult it must have been to take on a human form and be weak for the first time, get sick for the first time, die an incredibly painful death. That’s far from the worst of it. The Son of God went from perfect peace and comfort with the Father and Spirit to being surrounded by the sin and corruption that wrecked the world he created. The only pure and holy God surrounded himself with sin at literally every moment of his life. It must have been agony. And then to top it all off, he took those sins on himself—he became an offense to his own holiness when he took our sins with him to the cross.

Jesus Christ, though he was rich, became poor for our sake, so that by his poverty, we might become rich.

This is what so many people forget when they become Christians, when they become a part of the church. We think about our involvement in the church, what we want to invest in; and we naturally latch onto to flashier, more satisfying elements of church life—serving on the evangelism team or the worship team or the prayer team—and we’re right to do those things. 

But we often forget that we only have those things through completely ordinary means. It was Jesus, doing ordinary things with ordinary people, in perfect holiness, thirty-plus years before he ever began his ministry. It was Jesus, feeding people when they were hungry. It was Jesus, healing people when they were sick. It was Jesus, being struck by real fists and pierced by real nails and being buried in a real tomb.

He didn’t do all of that to bring us out of the material world, but to transform the way we live in the material world. One day he’ll renew the earth and get rid of sin and guess what? That world will be material too. 

All of this means that we can’t seek the spiritual without investing in the material. We can’t seek the abstract without investing in the practical. If the church is going to be what God intended her to be, we must participate in every aspect of her life…including the ordinary, practical matters of enabling the church to do what it must do. This is true no matter what church you’re a part of—if you’re visiting today, and this is not your home church, then go back home, and give generously to your church.

Giving is an act of grace, because our participation in the finances of the church gives the church the practical freedom to do what God has called us to do. We give ourselves first to God, then to each other. If we love another, we will give to the church, because we all need the church to serve us, and others will need the church to serve them.

So giving is an act of strategic joy; it is an act of strategic grace; and it is an act of strategic discipline.

Generosity: an act of strategic discipline (v. 10-15)

Calling this an act of discipline seems obvious, because we’re talking about spiritual disciplines. But a discipline is exactly what it is, because while this is at heart a spiritual matter, it works itself out in the most practical way possible. And it will require great discipline if we’re going to maintain it: discipline to see our needs and the needs of others the way God sees them.

10 And in this matter I give my judgment: this benefits you, who a year ago started not only to do this work but also to desire to do it. 11 So now finish doing it as well, so that your readiness in desiring it may be matched by your completing it out of what you have. 12 For if the readiness is there, it is acceptable according to what a person has, not according to what he does not have. 13 For I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of fairness 14 your abundance at the present time should supply their need, so that their abundance may supply your need, that there may be fairness. 15 As it is written, “Whoever gathered much had nothing left over, and whoever gathered little had no lack.” 

Paul begins in v. 10-11 by saying something really obvious: desiring to be generous is good, but it’s incomplete: the giving needs to actually happen if it’s going to make a difference. Most of us, I’m guessing, would like to do what he’s saying here; we’d like to give generously, to not just hoard resources for ourselves…but desiring it isn’t enough. 

So now, Paul says, finish doing it as well, so that your readiness in desiring it may be matched by your completing it out of what you have.

After this, he lays out some precisions which should reassure us.

First of all, he says that those who can’t afford to give a lot should not feel pressure to do so. V. 12: For if the readiness is there, it is acceptable according to what a person has, not according to what he does not have. I think it’s wonderful that the New Testament doesn’t give a number, as in Here’s what each member should be giving. The goal isn’t to burden one person in order to unburden another, but rather to give in such a way that all those who need, have what they need.

Secondly, he shows that it goes both ways: he calls the Corinthians to give to the church in Jerusalem, so that one day, when the tables are turned, the Christians in Jerusalem might provide for the Corinthians. V. 13-14: 13 For I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of fairness 14 your abundance at the present time should supply their need, so that their abundance may supply your need, that there may be fairness. 

Now of course we’re not quite in the same situation as them—we’re not giving to the church so that church members might be able to eat (though occasionally that is necessary). But the principle remains the same. If the Christians in Jerusalem have what they need, then they are freed to devote themselves to the work of the ministry. If the church has the funds to do what they need to do, they can do what they need to do.

We’re providing in a practical way in order to reap a spiritual benefit: if the church has what the church needs, then the church can do what God has called us to do. We give because the church needs our finances to continue…and because we need the church to live our lives for Christ.

And that is the crux of the matter. No matter what church you happen to be a part of, whether or not you practice this spiritual discipline well will depend in large part on how convinced you are that the church is God’s primary means of advancing his kingdom in the world today. It will depend on how convinced you are that God uses the church to do his will. It will depend on how convinced you are that you need the church in order to live faithfully for Christ.

If you don’t believe that, then yeah, you’re better off giving to something else. Other initiatives will produce more immediate effects, will do more immediate and practical good (like associations that provide for the poor). If you don’t believe that, then you may be better off not giving at all—just building your nest egg until it’s ready to explode.

If we do believe it, though—if we really believe that the church is God’s primary means of advancing his kingdom in our lives and in the world—then our first priority in generosity will be the most strategic one. At Eglise Connexion, we do believe that. And so we want to strategically invest in the primary means God has chosen to advance his kingdom: the church.

Application

Now, just a couple of quick points before we close.

First: I want to be clear that Eglise Connexion isn’t the primary means God uses to advance his kingdom; the Church is (as in, the universal church). So you may be asking, what church should I give to? 

The answer is: whatever church you go to. 

We talked about this a lot in our members’ classes: every time the New Testament talks about the relationship between the church and church members, in context it is always clear that this relationship happens between Christians and their church. We should call our elders; we should submit to our elders; and elders are responsible for our members. So whatever church you go to, whatever church you are a part of, is the one you should be investing in.

Second: this will always be painful. Giving will always be costly—and I think that’s why Paul goes further than just saying, “Find whatever change you have lying around and give that.” No, he quotes Exodus 16.18, saying (v. 15): “Whoever gathered much had nothing left over, and whoever gathered little had no lack.” He says we shouldn’t feel pressured to give beyond our means (even though he applauds it in the Macedonians), but he does say that we should give as much as our needs will allow.

And the reality is that we always think we need more than we do.

That’s why the Bible gives the principle of tithes in the Old Testament. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule—it’s not a commandment which is validated by the New Testament—but it’s still a good way to see what this might look like. The people of Israel were required to give ten percent of their earnings to God. Why this number? Firstly, because ten percent isn’t going to devastate anyone—we still have ninety percent left, which is a lot. But at the same time, ten percent is a substantial figure; we’ll feel it. We’ll be required to make choices and sacrifices to do it. 

Giving will always be painful, and that’s the point: giving helps us see that God takes care of his children, by giving us better things than we would get if we hoarded our funds and tried to provide for ourselves. 

And the main way he provides for us—the main means he has given us to see the fruit of the Spirit grow in our lives—is the church. We provide for the needs of the church so that the church can continue to do her work.

We did a whole series on the vision of our church last year. We would not be here if we did not believe this vision was worth pursuing, that it glorifies God and that it enables us to enjoy him more.

So we invest in this vision. We provide for the church that the church may provide for others (and for ourselves). It is an act of faith: our giving is strategic joy, strategic grace, and strategic discipline. And those who give know—they have seen—that what God gives them is far better than what they could give themselves.

Gen 22

impossible faith

(genesis 22)

Jason Procopio

Today’s message will be the last in our series in Genesis; we’ll surely pick up the series again at a later date, but even though Abraham is still around for a few more chapters after this, Genesis 22 is effectively the climax of his story.  

We’ve seen several times over the last nine weeks that this book was written for a specific reason, with a specific goal in mind. Jesus tells us that Moses is the author of this book, and we know that he wrote it while the Israelites were in the desert, waiting to go into the land God had promised to give them. So Moses is writing, both to give a history of the things God has done in the world up to that point, and to give a history of the people of Israel itself; but most especially, to strengthen the faith of the people of Israel, that God is faithful and sovereign over them, and to give them their mission as a people, before they go into the promised land. That’s why this book exists.

One reason we preach the way we do here is because we can’t make the Bible mean something for us that it didn’t mean for its first readers. So if we know the goal of the book for them, we also know its goal for us. We have our mission to—to go and make disciples of all nations, through the gospel of Jesus Christ—and this text strengthens our own faith in God’s sovereignty over us and for us, because we clearly see this story echoed in what God did for us in Jesus Christ.

And rarely is that goal clearer than in Genesis 22.

In chapter 12, God came to Abraham and called him to take his wife, his nephew, and his belongings, and to go to the place where God would show him. He promised Abraham that he would make him a great nation, that he would give him a son in his old age, and that through this son, and the line of descendants that would come through him, all the nations of the earth would be blessed. God made a covenant with Abraham and with his descendants after him, that he would be their God, and they would be his people. He did all this before Abraham’s son ever came.

This is the promise Abraham had clung to for years. God put Abraham through several different tests of his faith over the course of those years; some of the tests, he failed miserably; others, like the test we saw last week, he succeeded. Through these tests, we’ve seen Abraham’s faith growing over the course of this story—his trust that God would do what he said he would do, and that what God commands him to do is good. 

But today, in Genesis 22, his faith will be put to the ultimate test, because God will command him to do something which is, by all normal measures, wicked. 

Impossible Command (v. 1-2) 

It’s important to note the parallels between what we see here in chapter 22, and what we saw way back at the beginning of Abraham’s story, in chapter 12. Nearly the exact same language is used. 

In chapter 12, verse 1, God says to him,  

“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

Here, in chapter 22, v. 1-2, we read:

After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” 2 He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.”

In both cases, God calls Abraham to go and do something for which there seems to be no logical reason—a commandment without any basis—and expects him to obey. Now of course what he asks of Abraham here, in chapter 22, is much more difficult, far less romantic. But essentially, here God is completing the cycle. As someone (I can’t remember who now) put it: in chapter 12, God calls Abraham to let go of his past; now, in chapter 22, God calls him to let go of his future. He calls him to literally sacrifice the son God had promised him, and then given him.

And there are two main reasons why this second call is so terrible. The first reason is both theological and cultural. Child sacrifice is what happened in the worship of many false, pagan gods around Abraham (for example, in the worship of the false god Moloch). So God seems to be going against everything he has presented himself to be, by making it seem as if he’s actually just like every other false god.

The second reason is obvious, and purely human. Anyone who has had a child knows the fear of that child dying. For some parents that fear can be nearly paralyzing; for others, it only comes when the child gets injured or sick. But every parent—every good parent, anyway—knows that fear.

Even so, the fear Abraham must have felt here is on a different level altogether—not only would he be afraid of Isaac dying; God has commanded that he be the one to do it. There were a lot of different types of sacrifices in the Bible—you had sacrifices and offerings for worship, sacrifices to atone for sin… The two things every animal sacrifice had in common were: they were always brutal, and they were always costly. You always sacrificed the best of your livestock; the best of whatever you had, and let it go in a way that was completely final.

This is what God calls him to do to his son.

Frankly, still to this day, every time I read these two verses, it turns my stomach. There are no other verses in the Bible—for me, personally—that cause me to doubt more than these two. No verses cause me to question God’s goodness more than these two. God’s asking this of Abraham seems unbelievably cruel. What God asks of Abraham is unthinkable, impossible.

And on top of it all, it simply makes no sense. It makes no sense for God to give Abraham this promise of a son, to finally make good on that promise…and then to ask Abraham to throw it all away. It makes no sense.

We talked about this last week, if you remember. God will sometimes put his people in situations in which there seems to be no upside. Situations in which we naturally say, “No good can come of this.” 

And what we saw was that rather than simply taking that pain away, and finding another way to grow our faith, God uses our pain to strengthen our faith. This pain God uses can come from the consequences of our sin, or the sins of others, or seemingly random events; to that list, we can now add, the pain which comes from obeying God’s commandments—because if we obey, we will come across situations in which it will cost us, it will hurt us, to obey. God uses our pain to strengthen our faith.

I said that last week, and I still stand by it. But I’ll freely admit that it becomes much harder to hear that, and accept it, in a situation like this one. Because here, God isn’t just using pain; here, God is causing pain. This isn’t a result of Abraham’s sin, or anyone else’s; it’s not the kind of difficult (but relatively commonplace) pain that comes from things like cancer, or a car accident. This is an event that came about through God’s own doing—pain that would not exist if God hadn’t told Abraham to do this.

In this case, we see the reason why a little later; but for now, it is simply devastating to think about.

Impossible Faith (v. 3-10)

The author gives us no information about what was going on in Abraham’s mind that night, as he dwelt on what God had called him to do. We pick him up again the next morning. V. 3:

3 So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac. And he cut the wood for the burnt offering and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. 4 On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar. 5 Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you.” 6 And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son. And he took in his hand the fire and the knife. So they went both of them together. 7 And Isaac said to his father Abraham, “My father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” 8 Abraham said, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So they went both of them together. 

9 When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built the altar there and laid the wood in order and bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. 10 Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son.

So the first question this text forces us to ask, in v. 1-2, is, Why does God give Abraham such a frankly impossible commandment?

The second question is: Why does Abraham obey him? 

We could make a few guesses. The first would be fear. Abraham knows God’s power, and is afraid of what God might do if he doesn’t obey. This would have been one of the main motivators of those people who sacrificed their children to idols.

Another would be desire—he wants something from God, and feels like he has appease him by sacrificing Isaac. This, too, was a prime motivator of idol-worshippers who performed child sacrifices.

But these things are not what motivates Abraham. The only hint as to Abraham’s mindset we have in this text comes in v. 5. Abraham is instructing the men who have come with him as to what they should do, and he says, 

“Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you.”

Already—before he ever goes up onto the mountain—Abraham is convinced that when he comes back down, Isaac will be with him. That is not to say that Abraham knew all the details of how this story was going to play out. Hebrews 11.19 tells us that Abraham thought the sacrifice would probably take place, but that in this worst case scenario, God would raise Isaac from the dead.

How could he believe that?

Because he had faith that God would keep his promise. He had faith that God would not have promised him a son, through whom he would bless all the nations of the world, and finally give him this son, only to take him away now. He didn’t know what would happen, but that God would go back on his word…? That was unthinkable. 

So I hope you can see the shift that has taken place in Abraham. Over the course of this story, we have seen his faith tested multiple times. The first time was in chapter 12, as we saw before, when God told him to leave his home and go to a foreign land. The second time was when he settled in that land in chapter 13, when he called upon the name of the Lord (13.4), and let his nephew Lot take the best territory for himself. The next time (I think) was when he went to rescue Lot in chapter 14, trusting God to grant him victory. (And we see he was rewarded for what he did at the end of that chapter.) 

The next time was in chapter 16, when Sarah (then Sarai) despaired because of her infertility, and suggested Abraham sleep with her servant, Hagar, in order to have a child through her. This test, he failed. He accepted her offer, and had a son, Ishmael, even though it is not what God had intended, and there was strife in his household for years afterward.

The next time was in his intercession for Sodom in chapter 18, when he asked God to spare the city for the sake of a few righteous people who might be there. And even though no righteous people were found, God validated Abraham’s faith anyway, and spared his nephew Lot and his daughters. 

The next text, he failed as well—when he went to Guerar in chapter 20, Abraham feared man instead of God, and nearly lost his wife and his life for his lack of faith that God could protect him in a hostile territory.

And finally, we have the validation of his faith in chapter 21, which we saw last week, when finally God gives him and Sarah the son he had promised them, Isaac. And we see the test of faith in this same chapter, when God told him to fo what Sarah said and send away Hagar and Ishmael, no matter how painful it was, because God would take care of them, and because it is through Isaac that God’s promises would be fulfilled.

So when we arrive here, we see the simple fact that Abraham had experienced too much—both in seeing his faith validated, and in living through the consequences when his faith was lacking—to imagine that God wouldn’t make good on his promises now.

And that is what faith is. Hebrews 11.1 says,  

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. 

Have you ever read that and felt a little out of place, a little wobbly, because when you think of your own faith it’s more like, I’m PRETTY SURE these things I can’t see are true? Would you be hard pressed to call your faith a firm conviction, which says, I KNOW this things are true?

If the answer is yes, then you’re in good company. There is a reason why Hebrews 11 defines faith like this, and then goes on to describe the experience of faith of all of these men and women of God, including Abraham.

Tim Keller has said that faith is “reason plus experience.” Now obviously this isn’t a theological statement; he’s talking about our experience, about what it’s like to live out our faith day after day, over the course of our lives. At some point, you will be set in front of a choice: a choice to obey God or to disobey him. And that choice could be incredibly costly. By nature a choice is rational—it is something you think about, and something you decide. So you will have to decide to base your decision on something—to trust that when God gives us commands, his commands are good. 

At first (emotionally, at least), it will feel like a gamble—it’s not like when you make the decision to jump into a swimming pool. You know that you’ll fall down into the water, and not up, into the sky. So it’s okay to jump. But when you first make the decision to obey God, you’ll have no objective proof that what God said would happen will happen. You’ll have to base your decision on trust. 

However, over time, you’ll have years of experience behind you, and you’ll be able to witness the cumulative effect of seeing how it turned out every time you obeyed. Maybe things turned out the way you thought they would, maybe they didn’t; but you’ll know what your obedience did to you and for you. Your experience will tell you that God is trustworthy, because he has proven himself trustworthy time and time again.

This is what produces mature faith. Mature faith is not blind. Mature faith isn’t simple trust; it is proven trust. It is trust that has validated itself in your experience. And so when it comes time to make a decision again, there is little or no hesitation, because you don’t just trust, but you know, that what God commands is good.

This is the shift that has taken place in Abraham. The faith we see him display here, which would just be impossible to most of us, was possible for him because it was proven; it was tested. God had never given him any reason to think that he would not make good on his promise to him. He had seen God’s faithfulness to keep his promises in the past, and so he had the certainty that God would keep his promises in the future—even if that meant having to raise Isaac from the dead. His faith had been tested in the past, and was now strong enough to withstand the uncertainty of what was waiting for him on that mountain.

So even if he didn’t know exactly what would happen, or how it would play out, and even if he didn’t fully understand why God would call him to do such a thing, he displayed incredible faith, and obeyed.

Impossible Rescue (v. 11-19)

And of course, Abraham’s faith was validated. Remember, we had mentioned the shock of seeing God act like all the other false gods who demanded child sacrifices. Here, we see God flip the script, and in the end prove himself to be the opposite of all those other false gods, because rather than demanding a sacrifice, he provides one.

Let’s read from v. 10 again:  

10 Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son. 11 But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” 12 He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” 13 And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. 14 So Abraham called the name of that place, “The Lord will provide”; as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.” 

15 And the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven 16 and said, “By myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, 17 I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, 18 and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.” 19 So Abraham returned to his young men, and they arose and went together to Beersheba. And Abraham lived at Beersheba. 

Now at this point I think it’s fairly safe to say that if you have spent any time in church at all, you have seen the parallels between what we see here and the story of Jesus Christ; these parallels are unmistakable, and numerous. 

But of course the most obvious one is that when a sacrifice was needed, God provided the sacrifice for his people, in the person of his Son. Sacrifice was what we owed God because of our constant rebellion against him; our constant belittling of his name and his power; our constant desire to be our own gods and rule over our own lives. This is nothing less than divine treason, and we were in a terrible bind, because God’s perfect justice required payment for that treason, and it was a debt that none of us could pay.

So God became a man, joining us in our pain. He took our sin on himself, and absorbed the wrath of God against our sin—the perfect, once-for-all sacrifice for our rebellion. Only a man’s life would be an acceptable sacrifice for the sins of men; and only God himself could ever be perfect enough to be an acceptable sacrifice.

That’s what he did. That’s what God provided. 

Remember when we talked earlier about how shocking it is that God would not only allow, but actually cause this pain in Abraham’s life, the pain of commanding him to sacrifice his Son? We need to see, very clearly, that God never asks anything of us that he is not willing to do himself. In the person of Christ, God was the cause of his own pain—pain we can’t possibly imagine. He created pain for himself by becoming a man and taking our sin on himself and absorbing God’s wrath for us. He asks nothing of us that he was not willing to do himself.

And it is because of this sacrifice that we can say that we are saved by God’s grace, through faith. Christ himself is the validation of our faith. When we place our faith in God and trust that he can and will save us, how does God do it? He provides a sacrifice. He gives us Christ. 

We see all of this in the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac. Abraham didn’t know all of this at the time; but he still saw his faith validated—not only through the rescue of his son by the angel of the Lord, and the provision of the ram, but through God repeating, virtually word for word, his covenant promises to him in v. 15-18. I will multiply you… In your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed… Why? Because you had faith. Because you obeyed. 

You see, that was the missing link that Abraham didn’t have back in chapter 12. That was what has been growing in him this whole time. Look at v. 12 again: 

He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” 

Now of course God is omniscient; did he really not know that Abraham feared him (which is another way of saying that he saw God for who he was)? Of course he did. Of course he knew Abraham’s faith had matured.

But now Abraham knows it too (as do the people of Israel, reading this for the first time). Now Abraham knows that the covenant God had made with him was maintained through the faith God had been growing in him. And he knows that whatever happens in the future, he will be able to do what God commands him to do, because he sees God rightly.

Faith is Obedience is Sacrifice is Worship.

Now if you’re like me, when you read this story, you see this incredible faith of Abraham. He didn’t know what was going to happen, but he trusted God. He said, “We’ll go up to the mountain, and we’ll come back down.”

So we look at this incredible faith Abraham has, or we read Hebrews 11 and see all of these examples of men and women like Abraham and we say, “I want to be like this!” But then we look at ourselves, and think, Well THAT’S not happening! I do have faith, but doing what Abraham does here seems impossible. In fact, doing more ordinary things the Bible tells me to do seems impossible. 

So how do I get there?

The answer is actually in the text itself. If we want to share Abraham’s faith—not just the kind of faith he had, but also the maturity of his faith—we see here everything we need to do.

And the answer is: we worship.

Abraham says something strange toward the beginning of this story, before he ever goes up onto the mountain. He tells the men who have come with him (v. 5):  

“Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go over there and worship...” 

Now for a long time I thought he was simply saying this because it was the easiest way to keep everyone calm. (If he had said, “I’m going up to offer my son as a sacrifice,” he’d likely have gotten some pushback.)

But when he said he was going there with Isaac to worship, he meant it. And the impact of this event would be felt throughout the entire rest of the Bible.

Where did God send Abraham to sacrifice Isaac? To Mount Moriah (v. 2). Do you know what Mount Moriah would become, centuries later? It would become the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It was the very location in Jerusalem where one day Solomon would build the temple. This is the location where God’s people would collectively offer—what?—sacrifices.

When we think of worship, we think of what we do here—singing, raising or clapping our hands (for three of you anyway), closing our eyes, praying, etc. When we think of worship, we tend to think of things which feel good, but which actually cost us very little.

But for the people of Israel, the concept of worship is most closely associated with sacrifice. Nearly every time you see someone say they are going to worship in the Old Testament (and much of the New), it means they are going to the temple to offer sacrifices to God.

We see this in the Bible and we sort of brush past it, because we think it’s an outdated idea. Jesus was the perfect sacrifice for us (as we saw before), so we don’t have to offer sacrifices anymore. 

And thank the Lord, that’s true. We no longer have to offer animal sacrifices. But that does not mean the importance of sacrifice as worship has come to an end.

What did the apostle Paul say in Romans 12.1?

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

Can you see it? Merely coming to church and singing songs—no matter how fervently you do it—is not worship. Merely praying is not worship. These things are good—there is a lot of singing, and a lot of prayer, in Scripture—but they are not enough. They’re like the smell that you smell when you walk by a good bakery—it’s great, but how much less important, less vital, less satisfying, is it than going in, paying for the bread and actually eating it?

If any of these things which we typically call worship are divorced from sacrifice—from obedience to God, no matter the cost—they mean absolutely nothing. 

Worship—true worship—is nothing without costly obedience. And obedience is both the proof and validation of our faith. How do we know Abraham had mature faith in God? Because he obeyed. The only reason any of us would accept to lose something that is truly precious to us is because we trust that God will do what he said he would do.

So let’s go back to our question from the beginning: How do we get a faith like Abraham had? 

We obey. Every day, in the big things and in the small things. When obedience is easy, and when God commands us to do things which we find simply unthinkable. Like, for instance, to remain faithful to one woman, or one man, our entire lives, not only in our actions but in our thoughts—not only after marriage, but before.

Or to love him more than our husbands or wives, fathers or mothers, brothers or sisters, sons or daughters.

Or to consider everything we have as a gift from his hand, and think about how best to invest the resources he has given us for the profit of his kingdom in this world.

Or—perhaps most shockingly—to have no other gods before him, nothing else which lays claim to our worship and our ultimate affections.

Can you see now why faith and obedience and sacrifice and worship are really all different parts of the same thing? Why they are all components of the same machine? The only reason we would ever be willing to obey God, and sacrifice something which genuinely costs us, is because over time, we have experienced his faithfulness to us. We have grown to trust him. We have seen him at work, so we don’t just think, but we know, that he is wise, and that he is faithful, and that he is good. 

And these are the same truths cause us to lift our hands and sing to him and pray to him and proclaim, “You are good! You are glorious! You are wonderful!” 

Those words only make sense coming out of the mouths of people who have experienced enough of God to know that they’re singing the truth, because they’ve been obedient even when it was costly, and found that God was faithful.

So brothers and sisters, if you want a faith like Abraham’s, worship. Sacrifice. Obey. Even when it costs you. Because that obedience is how you will see, over time, that God is faithful. That obedience is how your faith will grow, and how your faith will be proven. My prayer for us is that all of us can one day hear God say to us what he said to Abraham: Now I know—and YOU know—that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld ANYTHING from me. And that on that day, he will welcome us home, and give us rest.

God is Eternal

God Is (4): 

God is Eternal

Jason Procopio

We’re in our final week of this mini-series on the attributes of God—it’s a series we’ll come back to in the future, as we have many more attributes left to see.

I remember the first time we told our son Jack about today’s subject; he must have been about five years old. We were reading Psalm 90 with him, and we got to verse 2: 

2  Before the mountains were brought forth, 

or ever you had formed the earth and the world, 

from everlasting to everlasting you are God. 

He asked what that meant, and we explained that everything that exists had a beginning—the world had a beginning, and everything in it. But then we said, “But God never had a beginning, and he’ll never have an end.” 

And he just stared at us, like a deer in headlights, for a long time, and then he shook his head and said very matter-of-factly, “No.”

I’m sure you’ve guessed it: for this final week, we’re talking about the reality that “God Is Eternal.”

Now I want to say this clearly before we begin. A lot of people get into discussions on subjects like this, and they get really excited, because they’re fascinating. But as I said a couple weeks ago, the goal of this series is not to give a series of metaphysical lessons on the nature or essence of God; the goal of this series is to ask ourselves, “What difference does it make? Why should these truths drive us to worship God, and love God, and serve God?”

And at least in regards the eternity of God, you don’t need to understand how it works in order to answer that question. 

So let’s talk about God’s eternity for a moment, and then we’ll get into why it matters.

The Eternality of God 

In order to talk about God’s eternity (or eternality, if you prefer an adjective—and no, I did not make up that word), we need to remember how the Bible uses language, and why. 

This isn’t a perfect illustration, but you’ll see what I’m getting at. Have you ever tried explaining the Internet to a very small child? If you’ve got small kids, give it a try: you’ll see the problem. They don’t yet have the basic knowledge they need to understand the greater knowledge. So if your kid asks, “How’d that picture of Spider-Man get inside your computer?” (as my son has asked me), you have to simplify it: you have to say things that are true, but that aren’t the whole story—things like, “Well, there’s all this information—pictures and words and music and movies—kind of floating around, and the computer knows how to reach out and grab those things and show them to us.” That’s not false, but it’s far from the whole story.

God had the unique challenge of making human beings understand, in a limited way, what they are too small to understand. So in order to do that, he often speaks to us in the Bible in what theologians sometimes call “condescending language.” That means that he uses language we can understand, to help us grasp, in a limited way, things we can’t understand.

And this whole question of God’s eternality comes down to that question: how the Bible uses language. When it speaks of God’s relationship to time, is it using condescending language, or is it using accurate language?

Here’s what the Bible says. The Bible says that God is eternal—that God has always and will always exist. We saw that already: FROM everlasting (since an eternity before) TO everlasting (until an eternity after) YOU ARE GOD.

Most theologians throughout history have taken this to mean that God is, as they say, “outside of time.” Mark Jones explains it by saying, “God has no succession of moments… He does not increase in knowledge or wisdom. He sees all things that have ever been or shall ever be at once, which we may call an ‘eternal present.’”

The idea is that because God created time, he is necessarily outside of it, and so always sees past, present and future. The most convincing argument for this—at least it’s the argument that’s come the closest to convincing me—comes from the 11th-century theologian Anselm (and this is really good):

“Through your eternity you were, you are, and you will be. And since being past is different from being future, and being present is different from being past and from being future, how does your eternity exist always as a whole? Does none of your eternity pass by so that it no longer is, and is none of it going to become what, so to speak, it not yet is? Then, in no case were you yesterday or will you be tomorrow; instead, yesterday, today, and tomorrow, you are. Or better, you simply are—existing beyond all time. You do not exist yesterday or today or tomorrow; for yesterday, today, and tomorrow are nothing other than temporal distinctions. Now, although without you nothing can exist, you are not in space and time but all things are in you. For you are not contained by anything but rather you contain all things.”

That comes awfully close to what Paul said in Colossians 1.16:  

And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together [including time, according to Anselm]. 

So let me be clear: you can say this, and believe it, and affirm it, and be perfectly in the realm of orthodox Christianity—this is where most theologians and Christians go, and if I had to guess, I would guess that it’s probably true.

Here’s why it makes me a little uncomfortable, at least as a pastor: the Bible never says precisely that: it never explicitly says that God is outside of time, or even use language that would suggest it. To explain God’s relationship to time, the Bible uses words like “before, after, always,” etc. Jesus presents himself in Revelation 1.4 as he who is [present], who was [past], and who will be [future]. 

The apostle Peter says in 2 Peter 3.8 that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

Are we to take that as “condescending language,” as God saying something we can understand, to help us grasp the incomprehensible? Or are we to take it to mean what it seems like—that God has experienced so much that a thousand years are nothing to him? Because he doesn’t say that “with the Lord a thousand years are all happening right now”—it says they are “as a day”: that is, so brief it’s like it passes in the blink of an eye. (We say the same thing about our children: It’s gone by so fast, it feels like he was born yesterday.)

Oscar Cullman wrote that the New Testament “does not make a philosophical, qualitative distinction between time and eternity. It knows linear time only…” He says, “Primitive Christianity knows nothing of a timeless God. The ‘eternal’ God is he who was in the beginning, is now, and will be in all the future”...

He’s right—that’s the way the Bible talks. And even those who maintain that God exists outside of time will admit as much. James Barr, who affirms that God is outside of time, still says that “if such a thing as a Christian doctrine of time has to be developed, the work of discussing it and developing it must belong not to biblical but to philosophical theology.”

That’s why all this talk makes me nervous—I’m not a philosopher; I’m a pastor. My job is to take what the Bible says, and preach what the Bible says, so that we might live according to what the Bible says. To paraphrase Calvin, in our discussions of theology we want to go as far as the Bible, and no further: anything beyond belongs to the realm of speculation, and is no longer biblical theology.

So what do we do with this, then? Do we simply put the idea of God’s eternity on a shelf and not talk about it, because we can’t understand with certainty what it all means?

The answer is a resounding no. Whether or not God is “outside of time” is irrelevant. Although the Bible isn’t concerned with explaining the metaphysics of God’s eternity, it absolutely affirms it, and it affirms it in such a way as to make it clear that knowing that God is eternal should make a massive difference in our lives.

So all that being said, let’s go back to today’s text, Psalm 90. 

Psalm 90 was written by Moses, and God’s eternality is at the center of this whole psalm. He establishes God’s eternality in verses 1 and 2, and then teases out a series of truths related to it—three primary truths that we need to see.

Eternal Refuge (v. 1-6)

Firstly, he shows us that because God is eternal, he is a fitting and proper refuge for his people.

Ps 90.1-2:  

1 Lord, you have been our dwelling place 

in all generations. 

2  Before the mountains were brought forth, 

or ever you had formed the earth and the world, 

from everlasting to everlasting you are God.  

3  You return man to dust 

and say, “Return, O children of man!” 

4  For a thousand years in your sight 

are but as yesterday when it is past, 

or as a watch in the night.  

5  You sweep them away as with a flood; they are like a dream, 

like grass that is renewed in the morning: 

6  in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; 

in the evening it fades and withers. 

Moses goes back and forth between God’s eternity and our place in his hands. In v. 1-2 he says that God is the dwelling place—or refuge, as it is often translated—for his people: why? Because before God ever created the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

Then in v. 3, he speaks of the sobering reality that God is the one in control of man’s life and death: he’s the one who after forming man from the dust, returns man to the dust. How can he have the right, and the perspective, and the wisdom, to do that? Because he is the eternal God—a thousand years in his sight are like yesterday when it is past.

The first affirmation is a positive one (God is a refuge because he is eternal), and the second, some may see as negative (God has eternal power over all of humanity, power to give life and power to take life). But both the positive and negative affirmations are reasons for comfort.

Why? Here’s the best way I can think of to explain it.

My father was a youth pastor when I was young, and I remember one event from my early childhood very clearly. One summer night at a church party at someone’s house, the teenagers in his youth group picked him up and threw him in the swimming pool that was there. 

I was four, maybe five years old, and absolutely terrified. I had no idea what was going on; I just heard them yelling, heard my dad yelling, heard the splash, and I started wailing. 

To reassure me, my mom brought me over to the pool; my dad swam over to the side. He stood up in the pool, and picked me up, and wrapped me up in a tight bear hug. He was soaking wet, so I was too. But I remember that when he picked me up and held me, I knew that everything was okay, because my dad was big, and the water only came to his waist, and he was holding me.

There are aspects of life and death and the passage of time that we can’t grasp. Thinking about things that were here thousands of years ago, of which we now only see the barest remnants, is frightening because we know it’ll be the same for us in a few thousand years.

The older we get, the more we think about aging, sickness, death…because at one time they were far away, but we know they are creeping up on us more and more every day. And it happens crazy fast.

Here’s what Moses is saying: God is bigger than all that. He was here before he created the world, and he’ll be here after he’s renewed it. He brings us into the world, and when he knows it’s time he takes us out of it. 

God is a proper and sure refuge for us because he is above and before every natural thing that frightens us, and he holds them—and us—in his hand. 

If there ever was a sure refuge from fear, it is in the arms of the One who was here before the things that frighten us.

That’s the first truth—because God is eternal he is a refuge for his people.

The second thing Moses brings to light in relation to God’s eternity is harder to swallow: his eternal wrath.

Eternal Wrath (v. 7-11)

7  For we are brought to an end by your anger; 

by your wrath we are dismayed. 

8  You have set our iniquities before you, 

our secret sins in the light of your presence. 

9  For all our days pass away under your wrath; 

we bring our years to an end like a sigh. 

10  The years of our life are seventy, 

or even by reason of strength eighty; 

yet their span is but toil and trouble; 

they are soon gone, and we fly away. 

11  Who considers the power of your anger, 

and your wrath according to the fear of you? 

Think back: last week we talked about God’s holiness—that God unchangeably loves good and hates evil. And the week before that, we talked about God’s simplicity: that all of God’s attributes are who he is, and they are all involved in everything God does or says or thinks.

So God’s love of good and hatred of evil did not begin with the creation of the world. It didn’t begin with Adam’s sin. It didn’t begin when God cast Adam and Eve from the garden in punishment for their sin. 

God’s holiness—his love for good and his hatred of evil—is as eternal as he is, because that’s who he is. And the same goes for God’s wrath: his wrath against sin is also eternal, and it has always been there, and it will always be there. 

God’s eternality should make us soberingly aware of God’s eternal wrath against sin. Hell is not a reality we have the luxury of shaking off. The Bible speaks of hell in strikingly specific terms, and they’re terrifying. It describes hell as being a lake of fire (Rev. 19.20), unquenchable fire (Luke 3.17), a fiery furnace and a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt. 13.42), blackness of darkness forever (Jude 13), etc. (And just so we’re clear: Jesus doesn’t present these images as allegorical.) Hell is a terrifying reality.

But the most frightening aspect of hell is without a doubt that hell is eternal.

I’ve had a recurring nightmare, pretty much ever since I became an adult. Here’s what happens: I’m standing in line at the post office…and that’s it. I stand, and I wait. All night long. I wake up stressed, and annoyed, and grumpy—and weirdly, my feet hurt—every time. 

Why? Because in reality, as everyone knows, time slows to a crawl when we’re bored. This is why I bring a book with me everywhere I go.

The very real torment sinners will feel, which Jesus describes so vividly, will last forever. As Mark Jones wrote, “In hell it will feel as though there is only time—slow time… For those consigned to hell, their despair will…increase, not decrease. They will never again experience the relief we get in this life of knowing that a difficulty will soon pass (e.g., the nurse who anticipates the end of a stressful twelve-hour shift). As the creature in hell realizes more and more that he or she will suffer forever the despair of eternal judgment will increase.”

(And parenthetically, for those who think of eternal punishment as unfair, remember that those who reject God do so because they don’t love him, and they never will, as we see in Revelation 16.11. They will hate God and curse him there for all eternity, and since their hatred of God will never end, their punishment will also never end.)

The reality of God’s eternity should shake us to our core, because God has always existed, and he has always existed as he is—loving good and hating sin. Nothing will ever make him feel otherwise. So understanding that God is eternal should drive us to repent of our sin, and turn to the only refuge we have from his wrath. 

And comfortingly, this refuge is also related to his eternity. If God’s wrath against sin is eternal, so is his love.

Eternal Love (v. 12-15)

12  So teach us to number our days 

that we may get a heart of wisdom. 

13  Return, O Lord! How long? 

Have pity on your servants! 

14  Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, 

that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. 

15  Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, 

and for as many years as we have seen evil. 

It’s important to see that the context Moses describes here is the context of every human being who has ever lived. These people are tired. They have lived, and they have suffered, and they are exhausted. 

The idea of God’s eternity can seem like a cruel joke sometimes, because he has been living way longer than us, and yet he never gets tired; never gets stressed; never needs a breather. 

But his eternity is also the only source of comfort we have, because he is simple: God is eternal, and God is love, and consequently, his love is as eternal as he is. It has always been, and it will always be.

So rather than merely complaining, or seeing God’s eternity as a frightening reality, Moses leans into it—he describes a people appealing to God’s love, which they know has always existed, and which, they believe, will always exist for them.

Because God is eternal, his love is a breath of fresh air for suffocating people. 

Firstly because we know that even if God exists outside of time, he legitimately understands what it is to suffer in a time-constrained world, because he became a man like us. 

Thinking about this while preparing this sermon has been particularly comforting for me this week, because I’ve been feeling this a lot lately.

A lot of you probably know that this has been a punishing few weeks for my family. Someone in the house has been sick pretty much non-stop for six weeks now, we had bedbugs in our apartment… It’s been a mess. 

On top of that, just the realities of what it’s like to be planting a church has been weighing on me. Little things that aren’t that important, like the dozens of small inconveniences that come from the fact that we don’t have a building, so there’s a lot of work that goes into getting this place ready for Sunday morning… Like the fact that I don’t have an office to work in, but have been working in a library or a café every day for the last four and a half years…

Early one Sunday morning a couple weeks ago, I actually wrote down in my journal that the idea of lugging the things we needed for church all the way here in that suitcase with the broken wheels, and setting up the church, and tearing it down, seemed painfully exhausting… I was tired before I even got started. 

And that was the day the guy came up here and hit me in the face.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m really not complaining. I have the best job in the world. But we all know what this is like: you come to moments in your life when little inconveniences—or actual, legitimate painful situations—pile on each other, one after the other, and suddenly they all seem huge, and you just wonder, “Will this ever end?”

Here’s my point. Jesus knows what it’s like. 

Regardless of what his experience of time was like before, when Jesus became a man, he had a definite past, a present, and a future. He had long days. He got tired, emotionally and physically. He didn’t just see, but experienced a day beginning, and a day ending. 

He knows what it is to wait for something good—like meeting his disciples for the first time. And he knows what it is to wait for something bad—like waiting for the temple guards to come put him in chains, and put him on the road which, in a few very long hours, would lead him to the cross. 

If God was simply eternal, we could complain that he can’t possibly understand how hard it is.

But God became a man. Jesus lived as we lived, in order to be a compassionate high priest for us. 

And he died our death, because he knew what was waiting for him. He suffered the cross for the joy that was set before him (Hebrews 12.2). He suffered the eternal wrath of God in order to share eternity with us. 

We’re not eternal like God; each of us had a beginning.

But Jesus lived, suffered and died, to suffer the punishment for our sins and to give us his perfect life. He did all this so that God might declare us righteous as he is righteous…so that our lives with him might never have an end. 

So if we have faith in Christ, we know, as he did, what’s waiting for us. And that’s the second reason why his eternal love is a comfort for us.

If despair in hell is compounded by the fact that it will never end, the same is true of joy in heaven. 

Time slows down when you’re suffering, and you feel like it will never end. The opposite is true when you’re enjoying yourself. A vacation always feels painfully short, and our joy is dulled a bit because we know it’s going to end soon.

That’s not how it’s going to be in heaven.

In heaven, our joy will increase without end, because we’ll know that there is no end. 

In heaven, there will be no end to what we can discover, what we can explore, what we can learn about God, and about his creation. 

In heaven, there will be no end to the simple satisfaction of finally being able to see what we were created to see, as we were created to see it. 

In heaven, there will be no end to the rest we find in our Father. 

In heaven, there will be no end to the infinite pleasures we find in his presence.

It will be so wonderful that, like the best vacation, millennia will fly by in an instant. Time will pass in a blink…and there will always be more of it.

Moses knows all of this—he understands the eternal wrath of God, and the eternal love of God. He also understands the limited time he has in his own life—and so he pleads with God to help him grasp the limited time he has, to use it rightly. V. 12: So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.

Often people look to the end of a message to find out what God expects them to do. “Give me an action plan! Preferably in two to four points.”

But sometimes God’s Word doesn’t drive us to do anything—sometimes God’s Word simply drives us to contemplate something, to consider it and reflect on it and realize it. That’s the case here.

God’s eternity should make us remember how short this life is—that compared to the rest of eternity, the number of years we have in this life is painfully small. It will go by in a blink. So what kind of people do we want to be, during the time we have here?

God’s eternity should drive us to remember the eternity he has given to us—either an eternity of torment in hell, or an eternity of joy and rest in heaven. 

God’s eternity should make us consider our own eternity, and rush to our Savior endlessly to find our righteousness through faith in him. It should drive us to share the gospel with others, so that they might find themselves on the right side of eternity through faith in Christ. 

And while we wait for our lives to begin in heaven, the knowledge of God’s eternity should cause us to be thankful for our Savior, who experienced time as we do, who knows what it is like to wait, and who is therefore a good and compassionate high priest for us (Hebrews 4.15). 

God’s eternity should drive us to seek our refuge in him, because the only sure refuge is in the One who is, and who was, before the things that frighten us today.

Our God is eternal. We must consider his eternity, remember it, rejoice in it, and share it.