WHAT IS GOD LIKE?

Unchanging Faith ❧ Part 7

Selected Passages ❧ Pastor, Dr. John Denney

Children by nature are tirelessly and persistently curious.  From the moment they’re able to express their thoughts into words they’re like a fire hydrant that has been turned on full blast; the rushing flow of their questions surges faster than mom and dad can keep up! If you’ve raised children, you know exactly what I’m talking about!  It seems from morning till evening parents are barraged with, “How come?” and “Why?” questions.  Some questions leave you feeling as though you’re being thoroughly cross-examined by an interrogation specialist. They have their ways of making you talk!  Some questions are as simple as black and white, while others leave mom and dad completely stumped.  No sooner do they have one question answered than they quickly move on to another.  And what’s more, this tireless and persistent curiosity doesn’t just go away as you age!  If anything, our questions become more refined, more pressing, more urgent.  The great theoretical physicist Albert Einstein once commented: I’m neither especially clever nor especially gifted. I am only very, very curious.  Elsewhere he noted: The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.  I think the English writer Samuel Johnson said it best: Curiosity is the thirst of the soul.  Never discourage your child’s curiosity.  Instead help him or her to ask the important questions and direct them to the answers that will quench the thirst of their souls. 

There is no greater curiosity, no greater question that stirs the thirst of our souls than this one question: What is God like? A.W. Tozer said: What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.  Why is that? Let me give you some reasons why.  What we think of God greatly shapes and determines our ability to enjoy life and find meaning and purpose greater than ourselves. What we think of God greatly shapes our moral character as well as our eternal destiny. What we think of God has a tremendous influence on how we conduct our relationships. What we think of God plays a determining role in our response to life’s disappointments, injustices, pain and griefs.  What we think of God gives us hope to press on when we feel like giving up.  When you stop to think about it, Tozer could not have said it better!  What we think of God is the most important thing about us!   

This morning we’re going to continue to explore the Bible’s answer the greatest question we could ask: What is God Like? Last week we briefly saw there is no One Person of greater authority to tell us what God is like than His Son the Lord Jesus Christ.  Jesus told His disciples they’re to see God as their Father (Matthew 6:9).  The Apostle Paul wrote that when a person trust’s Christ as his or her Savior, that person receives God’s Spirit.  He or she becomes a child of God. Now we call him, “Abba, Father(Romans 8:15, NLT).  Some believe God is the Father of all.  But that’s not true.  What’s true is God is the Creator of all, but only those who have a surrendered and obedient trust in His Son Jesus can be rightly called God’s children. If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him(Romans 8:9). All who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God(Romans 8:14). 

So, if God is our Father, what kind of a Father is He? What is He like in His character? Theologians often describe the different qualities of God’s character as His attributes. God’s attributes are those inherent qualities that uniquely make God, God. That said, I prefer what the late theologian Charles Ryrie called the perfections of God because all of God’s qualities are perfect (Ryrie, Basic Theology, p.36). We’re going to look at just a handful of some of God’s perfections this morning. The “Perfections” of God.  

1. God is Eternal.  Unlike anyone or anything, God has neither beginning or end.Before the mountains were born or You gave birth to the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God (Psalm 90:2). You get the sense as though the psalmist (Moses in this case) climbed up the mountain of time to its highest peak and then he looked as far into the past as the vision of his finite mind allowed and sees that God was before the mountains were born – before time began. Then he turns his gaze the other way and peers as far into the future as his mind allows and he observes that from everlasting to everlasting, You are God. God has always and will always be God.  He has neither beginning nor end.  Elsewhere, in Genesis, Abraham calls God, the everlasting God(Genesis 21:33). God is eternal.  

What does this mean? Why is does it matter that God is eternal? It means we can be secure knowing that God is our Forever Father. The eternal God is our refuge(Deuteronomy 33:27, NLT). The word for refuge means home or abode.  God is our eternal Home our hearts long for.  The Good News Bible translates this: God has always been your defense; his eternal arms are your support (Deut. 33:27, GNT).  There will never be a time when God’s strength or ability will fail to sustain you.  There will never be a time when He will fail to provide for our needs.  There will never be a time when He will cease to be our Father. There will never be a time when He will grow old and die.  He will never grow weak, nor will He ever be weak in His purposes towards us.  Have you never heard? Have you never understood? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of all the earth. He never grows weak or weary (Isaiah 40:28). 

1. God is Independent. This simply means God does not need us.  God did not create us and our world because He was lonely.  He did not need us for our advice in how He should run the world. Can a person do anything to help God? Can even a wise person be helpful to him? (Job 22:2,NLT). God asks in Isaiah: Who has directed the Spirit of the Lord, or as His counselor has informed Him? (Isaiah 40:13).  He has always been supremely happy and content in Himself.  While speaking to a group of people surrounded by the gods they’d made and the temples they’d made for them, Paul shared God, is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things (Acts 17:24-25). 

If God is independent and He does not need us, then why did He create us? God says in Isaiah, Bring all who claim me as their God, for I have made them for my glory (Isaiah 43:7, NLT).  We are important to God because He made us for His glory!  And that glory is uniquely seen the fact that we are made in God’s image (Gen. 1:26).  As God’s image-bearers, we have immense value and significance.  Paul tells us in Ephesians, Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure (Ephesians 1:4-5). God did not choose us out of obligation.  He chose us because it brings Him great joy! 

1. God is Immutable. The world around us is in a constant state of change and uncertainty.  All we have to do is look in a mirror and we have undeniable proof!  We don’t look the same as we did ten or twenty years ago. The world is not the same place it was ten or twenty years ago either.  But none of this is true for God. For I, the Lord, do not change; therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed (Malachi 3:6).  James says there is no variation or shifting shadow in God (James 1:17). When the Bible says God does not change, it means He does not change in what theologian Wayne Grudem alliterates as God’s promises, His purposes, and His perfections (Grudem, p.83).  We don’t have to wonder from one day to the next if God still loves us or likes us.  We don’t need to live in fear if He will keep His promises to us of complete forgiveness in Christ, or His promise of eternal life. If God could change, then how could we ever trust Him?    

Someone might ask: “What about when God changes His mind like He did in the book of Jonah?” God said He was going to destroy the city of Nineveh due to their wicked ways, then He changed His mind (Jonah 3:10).  What really changed was not God, but the people of Nineveh.  When they heard, God was going to judge their city, they repented.  It was as though they’d been walking into the wind, going against God, then they turned and began walking with the wind. On the surface, it looks like God changed, but He really didn’t.  The people of Ninevah stopped walking into the wind of God’s wrath and started walking away from it toward God’s forgiveness.  To them it felt like God, changed, but it was them who changed.  God’s unchangeableness means we can have complete assurance that God’s promises, purposes, and perfections will never fail.  

1. God is Infinite. God is without limit, without measure.  But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain You, how much less this house which I have built! (1 Kings 8:27). God is infinitely greater than all His creation (space, time, energy).  You can never come to the end of God’s being. All that God is, He is without limits.  A.W. Tozer sort of help us grasp this truth.  I say, sort of because you don’t understand what I’m talking about and nor do I! But Tozer helps a little. He says, If there were any borders to God, if there were any place where God is not, then that place would mark the confines or limits of God. And if God had limits, He could not be the infinite God (Tozer, “The Attributes of God,” p. 119).  This perfection of God is different from His eternality.  God’s eternality has to do with His endless existence.  Whereas God’s infinity has to do with His endless being. 

Trying to get a mental grip on this truth is like an ant trying to explain the ocean! He can’t understand it any more than we can understand the truth that God is infinite.  We know that God is infinite – without limits.  Were He any less, He would be less than God.  

C. S. Lewis described the infinity of God as a piece of white paper that spread endlessly in all directions. Then, he said, if you took a pencil and made a one-inch-long line on it, that would be time.  When you started to push the pencil, it was the beginning of time and when you lifted the pencil it was the end of time. And all around in every direction and without end is God.  

What does this truth about God mean? It means there is no end to God’s love, God’s power, God’s knowledge, God’s goodness.  If God had any limits, any boundaries, He would be less than God. 

Tozer adds, You may have a charley horse in your head for two weeks after trying to follow this, but it is a mighty good cure for this little cheap god we have today. This little cheap god we’ve made up is one you can pal around with – “the Man upstairs,” the fellow who helps you win baseball games.  That god isn’t the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  He isn’t the God who laid the foundations of the earth; he’s some other god (Tozer, p. 7). 

Let me close with this. One of my favorite stories is about a man named Thomas Aquinas, a 13^th century theologian. He attempted to create what he believed would be one of the greatest intellectual achievements of Western civilization known as the Summa Theologica.  It’s a massive work: thirty-eight treatises, three thousand articles, ten thousand objections. For nine long intense years Thomas tried to gather into one coherent whole all of truth: a complete systematic compilation of theology. He attempted to describe all that could be known about God is a book.   It was an enormous undertaking including subjects such as: anthropology, science, ethics, psychology, political theory and theology, all under God. 

On December 6, 1273, Thomas abruptly stopped his work. During a time of worship in the chapel of St. Thomas, he caught a glimpse of eternity, and suddenly he knew that all his efforts to describe God fell so far short that he decided never to write again.

When his secretary, Reginald, tried to encourage him to do more writing, he said, “Reginald, I can do no more. Such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as so much straw.” Firm in his resolve, he didn’t write another word.  One year after he gave up writing he died. 

I think Aquinas’ response is a fitting one for all of us.  The moment we attempt to satisfy the thirst of our souls in discovering all of Whom God is, even in the four brief perfections of God we looked at today, we find that the best we can say “seems as so much straw.”  

Our greatest delight is not to know all of Whom God is. We’ll never come to the end of knowing all of Who He is. Instead, our greatest delight should be to find the curiosity of our thirsty souls quenched in the overwhelming wonder of Who God is as our resurrected Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.   I’m convinced that when we do, we’ll agree with Tozer’s words: What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.