SA Ep78 - The Articles of Faith #2 The One True God

SA Ep78 - The Articles of Faith #2 The One True God

In Episode 2, we focus on the doctrine of the one true God. The Bible teaches that there is only one living and true God, not many gods, not rival deities, and not a god shaped by human imagination. He is eternal, holy, sovereign, wise, merciful, and worthy of all worship. This episode shows that everything in life begins with God, and that to misunderstand Him is to misunderstand everything else.

We also look at the danger of false gods and modern idolatry, reminding the listener that idols are not limited to carved images, but include anything that takes God’s place in the heart. The episode makes the difference clear between merely knowing about God and truly knowing Him through Jesus Christ. In the end, this is not just a lesson about God’s existence, but a call to bow before the God who is there, trust Him, and know Him as He has revealed Himself in His Word.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Seeking Approval Podcast. I'm Dr. Chris Smelser from Iliad Baptist Church. You know life moves fast, and faith is not meant to be rushed. I want to take some time and slow down with you and have some honest conversations from the Word of God about daily living. So join me here today on Seeking Approval. In a world full of false gods, confused religion, empty spirituality, and man-made ideas about divine things, there's one question that always rises above all the noise. Who is God really? Not just who do we imagine him to be, not who does culture prefer him to be, not uh what have we defined him to be, but who has he revealed himself to be in his own words. And if we get this wrong, we could get everything wrong. But if we know the true God, everything else begins to fall in place. This is where we want to move to in our next article in the 18 Articles of Faith is the one true God. There is only one God. Now he's three parts in one, but there's only one God. And we want to deal uh exclusively with who God is. And God gives a great testimony of himself that we will look at in Exodus uh, hopefully, if we have time today, that he speaks directly of himself. There's many people throughout scripture that God gives testimony of. And one day I would love to be able to uh to do the series of uh when God uh testifies. There are some that he testified so greatly about. Uh he said that uh uh David was a man after God's own heart. He said there was never a man uh greater than Solomon. Uh that uh there there's so many testimonies that God gives all throughout scripture, but he gives one of himself. And we'll look at that in a little while, but I want to turn our attention to this uh article or the doctrine of the one true God. The Bible does not present God as one option among many. It does say in Psalm that uh in the book of Psalm that he is uh sitting in the hall of the gods, the little g gods, there are other gods out there. And in this world that we live in, people have many gods in their life. And there may be some listening right now say, Well, I don't. Is there anything else that comes between you and God? Is there anything that stands in between you and witnessing to someone and spreading the gospel message? Is it shyness, backwardness, time, hurriedness to get to the next thing, to do the next job, to be at the next game or practice or whatever it might be? There are a bunch of little jeek gods out there, and many good Christians who you know sit on the church pews every Sunday and and are trying to live and do right will still have those little jeek gods that will sneak up in their life. But God is eternal, he's holy, he's sovereign, he's wise, he's worthy of all. He's not one option of many, he is the only option. Because he is the only one that can affect positively our eternal future. The other gods can affect our future, but not positively affect. And we'll look at what Scripture says about the uniqueness of God and his nature and his attributes and his rightful place in our lives. We looked at it during our prayer series about the introduction, our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. There is so much to be said about God and his holiness and who he is. But there's a difference in knowing about God and knowing God. So many people today are trying to know God in knowledge. That's gnosis in your Greek, in your New Testament. Paul wrote about knowledge of God, the gnosis of God, understanding who God is. And we can know who he is, we can know about him, we can read about him, we can even believe in him. But if we don't know God, epinosis, if we don't have an experiential knowledge, if we don't ever understand who God is fully, then there's we even missed it by a mile. It's one of those things that if you miss it by an inch, you missed it by a mile. That there's really no in-between, there's no middle ground with this. And uh this second article is really, I mean, the word of God and the one true God, article one and two, really lay the foundation of everything else that will happen in our life. You know, the the in Judaism, the Jews uh in antiquity, they had the Talmud. They had a list of 613 laws that told them what to do, how to do, when to do it. I mean, that God gave them Ten Commandments, and they went and took those ten commandments and inflated those uh ten into six hundred and thirteen laws, in which they had to live by, and everything was given a name and a place and a time and all that. And that so they had the Talmud that could tell them uh everything, and it was a multi-volume book uh that was uh that men like Paul would study, uh I mean, relentlessly study uh in order to understand every portion of it. Paul uh studied at the what we would say at the feet of Gamelia, one of the greatest uh uh uh teachers in Jewish history. There was the the school of Gamelia and the school of Hillel, and they they kind of were opposing. They had some different views on things, marriage and divorce being one of those things. So they had the Talmud that they would study and they would know every everything about it. Well, we don't have that, but what we do have is a canon of scripture, 66 books, uh, 31,102 verses, written by 40 plus authors over a span of 4,000 years or so, that tells us everything that we need to know about God and about right living. And so when we come to this greatest piece of literature ever pinned down by a human hand, we find at the very beginning in Genesis 1.1, this is where we should start with God. It says, In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. Well, that already begs a question. Well, then where did God come from? Where did I mean how did God get to where he is? God is God is self-existent. I know that that's hard for us to understand, and a lot of times because we can't understand that in our mind, and we want some some kind of proof or scientific reasoning behind this, um, because we we think that everything that is there needs a creator. And that's true for everything except God. God has no creator. He says, I'm the I am. Who shall I say sent me? Tell him I am and sent me. What does I am mean? I am means I'm I was I was there before it existed. I was there in the past, I'm here in the present, I'll be here in the future, I'll be here after the future is over, I'll still be here. God is outside of time, space, and matter. If God were in time, space, or matter, he would not be God. You see, the man who created the computer is not inside the computer pushing buttons and and plugging and unplugging wires while we're typing on it. There's no one sitting in an office somewhere whenever you get on your phone and you ask ChatGPT, uh, hey, uh, can you do this for me? There's no man on the other side typing as fast as he can and sending it back to you. They're outside of all that was created, which therefore still makes humans smarter than machines. I know that some people may not agree with that, but it is true. Humans have what we call reasoning. Now, AI is getting pretty good at reasoning, but AI can't reason like a human. AI can't think like a human, AI can't can't even compute like a human can compute. It's it's it's difficult, it's hard to understand. But that's just the fact of it. But God is on the outside of time, space, and matter. If he was inside time, we would say, When did he begin? When is he gonna end? But he's outside of that. If he's inside of matter, we will say, Well, then you know, why can't we have why can't we see God right now? Because he's outside of matter. Jesus showed us that whenever after his resurrection, he just walked through the door. He didn't need to open it. Just walked right through. He didn't have to use the door if he didn't want to. He could have just walked through the wall or just showed up from out of nowhere. I mean, you know, beam me up Scotty type of stuff. He's outside of matter. It doesn't that doesn't belong to him. So God being outside of these things, time, space, and matter doesn't mean anything to him. We want to know when did he begin? Well, God was there in the beginning because he created everything. He stepped out where there was nothing to step on, created something where there was nothing to create with, named it when there was nothing to name it from before. The Bible is unmistakably clear that there is only one God. Deuteronomy 6.4 says, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. Isaiah 45.5 says, I am the Lord and there is none else. There is no God beside me. He asked the the the He asked Israel at one time when they were carrying their idols around of stone and metal and stone and wood, and he asked them, you know, almost facetiously, is it kind of the way I read it? He said, You're not tired of carrying those things? And then what are you gonna do when you get old and you can't carry those things no more, when your bones are brittle and your joints ache, and you can't carry those big heavy idols around anymore? What are you gonna do then? You're not tired of that yet? Once you worship the true and living God, who will carry you when you need to be carried. This is the Bible. This is what the Bible says about God. But God also has a testimony of Himself. Well, let me give you this verse. Psalm 90 and 2 says, before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst to form the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. That's what David. David said that God was God before anything was made. Before anything was made that was made, God was there. And without God, there was nothing made that was made, according to John chapter number one. So God is there. And he is real, and he's holy. I think it was in Isaiah 6 3, whatever the angels cry, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. Jeremiah wrote, But the Lord is the true God, he is the living God and the everlasting King. God actually testifies of Himself. Turn with me, if you would, to the book of Exodus. Exodus 34 and uh verse number six. We find Moses is going back to Mount Sinai to get the tablets replaced after he broke the tablets when he came down and saw the golden calf and all that. But in in chapter number six, uh the Lord descended in a cloud and stood there with Moses and proclaimed the name of the Lord. So the Lord came down and proclaimed his own name. And it says, And the Lord passed by before him and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long suffering and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children unto the third and fourth generation. That was speaking directly to Israel who worshiped the golden calf. And Moses made haste and bowed his head toward the earth and worshiped, and he said, If now I have found grace in thy sight, O Lord, let my uh let my Lord, I pray thee, go among us, for it is a stiff-necked people, and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for thine inheritance. God said that he is merciful, is gracious, long suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, and he keeps mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and sin and transgression. He goes on down later in that uh in that chapter, in verse number uh uh fourteen, talking about their their idols that they were having, and talking about the Canaanites and the Hittites and the Amorites and the Perizites and the Hivites and the Jebusites and all the sights that they were there in uh in the in the promised land, and it says, For thou shalt worship no other God. For the Lord, listen to this, for the Lord whose name is Capital J, jealous, is a jealous God. Wow. Have you ever read that before? Have you ever read the fact that God calls himself jealous? He said, My name is jealous. He's a jealous God. But he's merciful, he's true, he's long-suffering, he's he's magnificent, he's holy. We have tried to redefine God in our generation, and we want God to fit in our little box and what we want him to be. Churches today have been pressured into preaching a God of all love. God is all love all the time. Heard something interesting the other day, one of our preachers at the church, and I want to thank Brother Rick for just a good conversation we had about it. He said, You look at John 3.16, he says, For God so loved the world that he gave. It's past tense. He loved and he gave. That means he loved the world so much that he gave his son for our sins. But that does not mean that he just forces his love upon everybody. God is all love. And we want to make it seem as if God loves us. And no matter what we do, where we're at, God still loves us. And as a as a person who believes in eternal security, I believe that when I'm saved, I'm saved until the day I die, and there's nothing uh that I can do to you know to get rid of it, to wash it off or anything like that. People will say, Oh, you're one of those uh once saved, always saved type of people. Well, if that's the way you want to label them, that's fine. I believe in eternal security. I believe that God, uh, when he saved me, I'm I'm saved to the uttermost. But uh they'll say, oh, so you believe like uh you can you can live how you want to, you can live like hell and still go to heaven, can't you? Well, I didn't say that. I did say I believe in eternal security. But I didn't say that that just gives me the right to do whatever and live however I want to. People will tell you, don't preach on eternal security in your church. Even if you believe it, don't preach it because then you're giving everybody in your church the free pass to do and live as they want because they're gonna be saved no matter what. If you're living like that, that's gonna be between you and God, and he's gonna deal with you. I mean, just look at what we were reading in Exodus. God will deal with you. He's not gonna excuse your sin just because you're saved, but he's also not gonna take his covenant away from you just because you sinned, because the covenant is not based on us, it's it's based on God. Matter of fact, if you go back over to that book of Exodus, he said, I'm I'm your God. I'm the one. And he told him, he told him in that book, he said, You're going whoring after all these other gods out there. You better turn back to me. I'm jealous. My name is jealous. So, no, I don't believe that we can just live and do as we want and just, you know, use God as our safety blanket. I do believe in eternal security. I do believe that there is one true God. And I believe that God who saved me is the same God who'll keep me. So God is not a God who learns or revises or improves. He never sits back and rubs his forehead and says, Man, I didn't see that coming. He's never on the edge of his seat going, Oh man, what's gonna happen next? Never asks advice. He gets it a lot of times. Sometimes unwarranted. We're quick to offer God all kinds of advice. He never struggles to know what's what's best for a situation. Romans 11 speaks of the depth of the riches of both God's wisdom and his knowledge. His wisdom governs creation, his wisdom governs providence, his wisdom governs redemption, his wisdom governs judgment. This is who God is. And so, what's our job in this? Well John 17 3 lays it out fairly clearly. And this is eternal life, that they might know thee, T-H-E, that they might know thee, the only true, listen to those, listen to those descriptors, only true God and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent. That's the only true God. And Jesus Christ. Well, preacher, where's the Holy Spirit? I thought, I thought we were Trinitarian. I thought we believed in all three. We do, we do, we do. But see, the Holy Spirit does this little thing. He's he kind of, we'll talk about him later. He kind of does this little kind of hide and go seek thing. He's like peekaboo. He's hide, he's always hiding in the background. See, the spirit, the Holy Spirit of God never wants or seeks recognition. It urges, it compels, it, it, uh, it uh will uh uh conflict the heart. It will uh bring conviction on people, it will cause you to to question and to stir and to ask, you know, what is this I'm feeling? What is the, you know, what what's what's tugging on? That's what he does, and he kind of does it from the background. He never wants praise, he never wants accolades, he don't even want to be mentioned. And so, as the Holy Spirit, according to Peter, was compelling these men to write what the words of God by the Holy Spirit, these holy men were compelled to write as the Spirit moved them. And because the Spirit was the one moving them, he would just say, Don't write about me. I don't need talk about the one only true God. Talk about his son Jesus Christ. Give them all the praise and honor and glory. That's why we don't see him mentioned a lot of times like this, but he's there, don't you worry. So the only true and living God is one that we need to know. I've got so much more that I can say about this, but I'm already at 20 minutes, and I try to keep these under 20 minutes for those who are driving to work. I don't want you to miss things or have to get to work and sit in your car because I know you'd rather listen to me than go to work, and then you'll be late to work, and then you get reprimanded, could lose your job, and then you're gonna be calling me fussing at me, and I don't want that to happen. So I guess I'll end it out like this today. With so much more that we could say. I mean, we could preach the nature of God for days and days and days. There is no neutrality when it comes to God, there's no conscientious objectors. You know, I believe in God, but you know, I'll do my own thing. No, no, no. That ain't how it works. Nobody is neutral in this. We must be like Rebecca, whenever the servant of Isaac asked her if she was on that camel riding up, had never seen Isaac, didn't know anything about his land, who he was, what he had, or anything else. All she knew she was leaving her country. And as Rebecca wrote up there, the servant of Isaac said, Are you gonna go with the man? And the Bible says she lit she lit off her camel. Now that word lit, you could it has a couple different meanings. It could be got down, step down, but it also means to fall flat, to get on your face, to f as in worship. So in some form or fashion, she got off the camel, whether it was to bow down and worship, but she could see Isaac off in a distance. And he said, Will you go with this man? And her answer was very simple. No neutrality in it. She didn't say, Well, let me talk to him first. Let me think let me see what I think. Let me figure it out in my mind. No, she got off that camel, fell on her face, and said, I will go. So my question to you today, do you believe in God? Do you believe in the one true living God? Have you finally lit off your camel? Have you finally gotten down off your high place? Bowed your face to the ground before the true and living God and said, I believe. Have you submitted yourself to him and to his son? We'll talk about him next time. Because the only wise response is to worship him, trust him, obey him, and heaven help to know him. Thank you for joining us today on Seeking Approval. You know our faith oftentimes grows in quiet places. I hope today's conversation gave you something worth carrying throughout the rest of this day. And join me, Dr. Chris Smelser, again next time as we continue thinking, learning, and walking together. Until then, grace and peace to you from Seeking Approval at Gilead Baptist Church.