SPEAKER_00: First Corinthians eight.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna read verses one through seven.
SPEAKER_00: Now concerning food offered idols, we know that all of us possess knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: This knowledge puffs up.
SPEAKER_00: But love builds up.
SPEAKER_00: If anyone imagines that he knows something, he doesn't yet know as he ought to know.
SPEAKER_00: But if anyone loves God, he is known by God.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that an idol has no real existence, and that there is no God but one.
SPEAKER_00: For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords, yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and through whom we exist.
SPEAKER_00: However, not everyone possesses this knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: Some, through former association with idols, eat food as if it was really offered to an idol, and their conscience being weak is defiled.
SPEAKER_00: This is the word of God, and I pray that he would seal it in your hearts.
SPEAKER_00: In the Western world, the so-called Western world, the idea of polytheism is somewhat quaint.
SPEAKER_00: When we think of polytheism in our world, we might think of people that live for lots of idols.
SPEAKER_00: Somebody who lives for work, and somebody who lives for sports, and somebody who lives for family, and somebody who lives for the commanders.
SPEAKER_00: I'm putting them in a different category than sports, if you noticed.
SPEAKER_00: You know, that that's that's our form of polytheism, but that just globally is not polytheism.
SPEAKER_00: I remember going to my first and only Buddhist wedding that I've ever been to in Malaysia, and it was a wonderful wedding.
SPEAKER_00: It was a lovely time, and I learned lots about uh weddings in the Eastern worlds that I did not know.
SPEAKER_00: Namely, first of all, they take all day long.
SPEAKER_00: It started at 8 in the morning, and when I left at midnight, it was still going strong.
SPEAKER_00: We spent the morning, though, basically driving around town offering food to idols.
SPEAKER_00: I wasn't doing the actual offering of the food, but I was with part of the caravan of the wedding party.
SPEAKER_00: It was going kind of temple to temple, idol to idol, laying plates of food in front of the idols, and they would they would roll dice, and the dice would reveal if the idol was done eating the food or not.
SPEAKER_00: And then you would take the food and go to another idol, drive across town.
SPEAKER_00: It was all the you know, the idols of all the ancestors.
SPEAKER_00: And I was a uh snot-nosed, arrogant seminary student at the time.
SPEAKER_00: You can imagine how well I fit in in this scene.
SPEAKER_00: I asked lots of questions.
SPEAKER_00: I I was under strict uh commands to not be belligerent, strict commands to not um be rude, which of course I needed those commands to not be rude.
SPEAKER_00: Um but I so I figured I'm just gonna ask questions.
SPEAKER_00: Like, how did the dice know if the idol is done eating?
SPEAKER_00: How is the idol communicating with the dice?
SPEAKER_00: Is the idol communicating with other things that aren't the dice?
SPEAKER_00: Why doesn't the idol just speak?
SPEAKER_00: Like those kind of totally non-confrontational helpful questions.
SPEAKER_00: It's the Socratic method, just asking questions.
SPEAKER_00: And as I mentioned, I learned a lot.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, for example, I learned in in Buddhism the idols aren't directly controlling the dice.
SPEAKER_00: The, you know, the idols are done eating and the dice are reflecting that.
SPEAKER_00: It's not the idols are telling the dice, it's the dice are reflecting a world in which the idols are done eating, blah, blah, blah.
SPEAKER_00: There's nuances and differences.
SPEAKER_00: But I spent the morning, I would say, basically making fun of the idols.
SPEAKER_00: Um then at lunch, to my surprise, we show up at a restaurant, and the food that we were all expected to eat is the food that all morning long had been offered to the idols.
SPEAKER_00: Which led to all kinds of other questions for me.
SPEAKER_00: Like, if the idols ate the food already, how is there any food left over for me?
SPEAKER_00: Like, I thought the idols ate the food, and yet here it is.
SPEAKER_00: And then I was in like the horns of a moral quandary here.
SPEAKER_00: Like, do I eat the food offered to idols?
SPEAKER_00: And you can see, this is the first time in my life where 1 Corinthians 8 like came into laser-sharp focus.
SPEAKER_00: You could see how having spent the morning making fun of the idols, there might be a nicer way of saying it, but that's what I was doing, making fun of the existence of the idols.
SPEAKER_00: If I were to then suddenly say, I can't eat this food, because the idols that I had spent all morning making fun of and questioning their existence and showing how they can't really eat the food, I mean it's wrapped in saran wrap, or you're kidding, the idol can eat through the saran wrap.
SPEAKER_00: Come on.
SPEAKER_00: If after all of that, I would have said, Oh, but now I can't eat it because it's been defiled by the idols I spent the morning making fun of.
SPEAKER_00: You could see how that would logically undercut my whole argument.
SPEAKER_00: At the same time, if there were other Christians there that had been saved from that background, maybe they would be very offended by a Christian eating food offered to idols.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm this is my own confession.
SPEAKER_00: Time, like at the moment, I thought I'm a seminary student.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe how I act will be the pattern for some weaker believer here.
SPEAKER_00: They might pattern their life after me.
SPEAKER_00: In retrospect, I realized if there was anybody saved out of that world, they probably were a way more mature believer than I was at that time, for sure.
SPEAKER_00: But I didn't, I didn't have, as Paul says in chapter one, that knowledge yet.
SPEAKER_00: So this is the moment where monotheism and the world collide.
SPEAKER_00: This is why Paul roots the question of should you eat food off for diodols, which for us can be so far off.
SPEAKER_00: Like it's in a different world for many of us.
SPEAKER_00: I consider myself fairly well traveled, and I've had to make the decision that a whole chapter of the Bible addresses one time in my whole life.
SPEAKER_00: But for the Corinthians, this is called Tuesday for them.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is every day they're wrestling with this.
SPEAKER_00: Every day they're confronted with do I eat the food offered to idols?
SPEAKER_00: Every day.
SPEAKER_00: They're living in a world where they're surrounded by the word.
SPEAKER_00: It's the Roman pantheon.
SPEAKER_00: There's temples to all of the gods.
SPEAKER_00: And of course, this is the best place to buy the food, is at the markets, because there's so much of it.
SPEAKER_00: The food is offered to idols, the idols are done eating it, and so then it's sold to you.
SPEAKER_00: It was the best food available.
SPEAKER_00: And so the Corinthians are constantly finding themselves in a similar dilemma.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul helps them in verse 4 by saying, just this basic observation: if you eat food that was offered to idols, know that an idol does not exist, verse 4.
SPEAKER_00: It has no real existence.
SPEAKER_00: That word for real is a letheon, it's the word for truth.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't, like it doesn't honestly exist.
SPEAKER_00: And he's using a little bit of a Platonic world view here, where there's the form of something that's, you know, ethereal and not concrete, and there's the concrete presentation of something.
SPEAKER_00: And his argument here is that yes, there's a concrete presentation of idols.
SPEAKER_00: There are these different idols everywhere, but there's no actual form behind them.
SPEAKER_00: There's nothing behind them.
SPEAKER_00: These idols are not representing anything with a real and true existence at all.
SPEAKER_00: To use a different example, every philosophy book uses dogs and trees, and I mentioned this a couple weeks ago, but they all use dogs and trees.
SPEAKER_00: Picture a dog, and you have the idea of a form of a dog in your mind, and you know, your dog might be like that dog, and even if your dog is a chihuahua, it still matches the form of the dog in some way.
SPEAKER_00: There's a form of a tree, and you know the bush is not a tree, but it has a tree-ness to it kind of thing.
SPEAKER_00: There's a form out there that's that's the ideal tree or the ideal dog or whatever, and it's all fun and games, and you're talking about dogs and trees.
SPEAKER_00: I mentioned that a couple weeks ago.
SPEAKER_00: But eventually you get to something that's important, like God.
SPEAKER_00: And so Paul's point here is that there are all these idols, but they have zero connection to God in a real form.
SPEAKER_00: There's no form of God behind those idols.
SPEAKER_00: They're nothing.
SPEAKER_00: They're less than nothing.
SPEAKER_00: They're certainly not corrupting your food.
SPEAKER_00: And so this is what he says in verse 4.
SPEAKER_00: The idols have no real existence.
SPEAKER_00: Of course, the idols are really there, obviously, but there's no truth or substance or form behind them.
SPEAKER_00: And that's because there is no God but one.
SPEAKER_00: And here Paul is jumping in verse 4 back to Deuteronomy 6, the passage we looked at last week.
SPEAKER_00: So that's the connection in my mind here that Paul in 1 Corinthians 8 is latching his everyday confrontation about idols.
SPEAKER_00: This happens every day in the Roman world.
SPEAKER_00: He's latching that on to the passage we looked at last week.
SPEAKER_00: That here, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one.
SPEAKER_00: That's where he goes.
SPEAKER_00: There's only one God.
SPEAKER_00: There are so-called gods, verse 5.
SPEAKER_00: So-called gods.
SPEAKER_00: Some translations render it differently, some translations puts gods in quotes, and the Isvidas at the end of verse 5.
SPEAKER_00: There are many gods and many lords, and here the word God and Lord is, they're both coming from the Shema.
SPEAKER_00: Shmah Israel, remember?
SPEAKER_00: Yahweh, El Chene, or Yahweh, Adonai, Yahweh Ehad, Yahweh, Adonai, Yahweh being the Lord, in all caps in the English Bible, Adonai being Lord, with the lowercase, O-R-D, the two words for God, along with Elohim being the three words for God.
SPEAKER_00: So that's what Paul's using.
SPEAKER_00: There are, of course, many gods, Yahweh's, in quotes, and many lords, Adonai's, in quotes, because they're not real.
SPEAKER_00: They have no substance behind them.
SPEAKER_00: They're just shadows.
SPEAKER_00: Yet for us, there is one God.
SPEAKER_00: There is a true God that exists.
SPEAKER_00: And here's where monotheism runs headlong into the polytheistic world.
SPEAKER_00: There is such a thing as a true God.
SPEAKER_00: He is not represented by idols.
SPEAKER_00: This is the first two commandments.
SPEAKER_00: There is only one God.
SPEAKER_00: Do not make any idols.
SPEAKER_00: The true God is not represented by idols.
SPEAKER_00: And then Paul goes on to say there's one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.
SPEAKER_00: And this is an awkward sentence, even more awkward in the Greek, but it comes across pretty awkward in English.
SPEAKER_00: If you look at the M-dashes, the long hyphens it's using in verse 5.
SPEAKER_00: There's two of them.
SPEAKER_00: There's the sarcastic quote marks, and then there's this weird, yet for us there is one God.
SPEAKER_00: This is a very abrupt and convoluted sentence.
SPEAKER_00: I learned a grammatical term as I was preparing for this tonight.
SPEAKER_00: It's an anacoluthaon.
SPEAKER_00: I don't even know I'm saying that right.
SPEAKER_00: An anacoluthon?
SPEAKER_00: I looked it up in an English textbook, which defines it as a sentence that breaks away from the expected grammatical structure.
SPEAKER_00: An anacoluthon, a sentence that doesn't grammatically make sense.
SPEAKER_00: It's surprising in the English book I looked up, uh, gave this example of an anacoluthon in English.
SPEAKER_00: While in the garden, the wind slammed the gate.
SPEAKER_00: It's an odd sentence.
SPEAKER_00: While in the garden, the wind slammed the gate.
SPEAKER_00: It's a sentence that conveys meaning, but notice the subject is in the wrong place of the sentence.
SPEAKER_00: The opening phrase doesn't have the right subject.
SPEAKER_00: Well, who is in the garden?
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't say the wind is the one doing the action.
SPEAKER_00: It's an odd sentence.
SPEAKER_00: It's an anacluthon.
SPEAKER_00: There's a name for that.
SPEAKER_00: You will be quizzed later.
SPEAKER_00: This is an anacluthon in Greek.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't follow the right grammatical structure.
SPEAKER_00: The subject is all out of whack.
SPEAKER_00: For us, there is one God.
SPEAKER_00: And then it lists two things.
SPEAKER_00: For us, there is one God, and then one Lord, Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: One commentator calls this verse a Christological modification of the Shema, which is Deuteronomy 6.4.
SPEAKER_00: This is Paul taking the most well-known verse in the Old Testament and giving it a Christological twist.
SPEAKER_00: A Christian version of Deuteronomy 6, verse 4.
SPEAKER_00: And there's already echoes of the Trinity in Deuteronomy 6.
SPEAKER_00: We did talk about that last week.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord is one.
SPEAKER_00: And yet there's two names going on there.
SPEAKER_00: Why would you have to declare him to be one?
SPEAKER_00: Even the word for one has the kind of a plural ending on it in the Hebrew.
SPEAKER_00: So it is an odd thing in the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_00: There's echoes of the Trinity there.
SPEAKER_00: But it comes into more focus in the New Testament, obviously.
SPEAKER_00: There are many so-called gods in heaven and earth, verse 5, that says, but verse 6, yet for us there is one God.
SPEAKER_00: In this passage, Paul's reaffirming Jewish monotheism.
SPEAKER_00: He's not saying that Christians reject monotheism or that they reject the Shema.
SPEAKER_00: He's reaffirming it.
SPEAKER_00: He is rooting Christianity's opposition to idols in the singularity of the true God.
SPEAKER_00: As I mentioned, the grammar of this is awkward, which leads many commentators to think that this was the start of an early creed.
SPEAKER_00: This was something the Christians, it was a phrase that Paul was quoting that Christians themselves had quoted.
SPEAKER_00: Almost every commentary I looked at for this passage referred to this as one of the first creeds or one of the first hymns, but more common than hymn was a creed.
SPEAKER_00: That seems to be the consensus that Paul is giving you echoes here of some kind of maybe new believer's confession.
SPEAKER_00: That there is no God but the Father, from whom are all things and through and for whom we exist, in one Lord, Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: This is his confession.
SPEAKER_00: He's using it in the context of idols, because if people can rally around the singularity of the true God, that'll provide unity in the church.
SPEAKER_00: And if people can do so while exalting Jesus Christ, that distinguishes the true church from all the idols of the world.
SPEAKER_00: So Paul is not saying we also believe in many gods, that would just get rid of idols and replace with Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: He's saying we don't have anything in common.
SPEAKER_00: It's so, we're so different than the idol worshippers that line the streets that the food they're offering to their so-called gods, it doesn't even affect the food at all.
SPEAKER_00: There's no true meaning there at all.
SPEAKER_00: In contrast, we believe in the crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: But he goes even more in detail here.
SPEAKER_00: Remember, I said in the Shema there's two words for God, Yahweh and Adonai.
SPEAKER_00: Paul here swaps out the word Yahweh and replaces it with Father, and swaps out the word Adonai and replaces it with the Lord Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: So Paul's taking Deuteronomy 6.4 and inserting two very common terms in Christian worship.
SPEAKER_00: There is one Yahweh, God the Father, and there is one Lord, Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: We'll look at the Jesus Christ part from other passages later on as we study through the Nicene Creed, but the Nicene Creed begins with this attitude.
SPEAKER_00: We believe in one God, and we looked at, we believe in our first week of the study.
SPEAKER_00: In one God, we looked at that last week.
SPEAKER_00: And so now the Father Almighty.
SPEAKER_00: We believe in one God.
SPEAKER_00: The Father Almighty will be our focus tonight.
SPEAKER_00: Paul refers to the one God we believe in as the Father.
SPEAKER_00: There's lots of reasons why God is called Father.
SPEAKER_00: I'll give you three of them tonight.
SPEAKER_00: First, it reveals God's perfections.
SPEAKER_00: Calling God the Father reveals his perfections or his oneness.
SPEAKER_00: As I mentioned, this is the ontological monotheism.
SPEAKER_00: Paul is saying that God truly exists in his nature, in his essence, in his being, as one.
SPEAKER_00: This is a reference from Deuteronomy 6.4, which again we looked at last week.
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to repreach last week's message, but recall from last week the main crux of that text is that there is only one God.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what Paul is reiterating.
SPEAKER_00: People can have only one father.
SPEAKER_00: There's only one God.
SPEAKER_00: There's a oneness to God.
SPEAKER_00: And when I say God's perfections, that's not, don't hear me arguing that because human fathers are good and perfect, God must be good and perfect.
SPEAKER_00: No, of course not.
SPEAKER_00: If anything, it's the opposite way.
SPEAKER_00: Human fathers strive to be good because God is good.
SPEAKER_00: But God's certainly not patterned off of any of our existence.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying that human fathers are perfect or even good at all.
SPEAKER_00: But I'm saying that God's perfections exist in one being.
SPEAKER_00: All of the attributes of God are his perfections.
SPEAKER_00: He's a perfect being.
SPEAKER_00: That's what I mean by God's perfections.
SPEAKER_00: They're rooted in one person.
SPEAKER_00: They're not multiplied.
SPEAKER_00: God's perfections are not multiplied, but they're singular.
SPEAKER_00: There's the oneness of God.
SPEAKER_00: Last week we talked about how that's the doctrine of divine simplicity, that all the attributes of God exist in their complete totality in a unified way.
SPEAKER_00: They don't collapse on each other.
SPEAKER_00: They're all one.
SPEAKER_00: God is not divided, He's not made up of parts.
SPEAKER_00: You don't take goodness and righteousness and mix them together, and out comes God.
SPEAKER_00: No, God is a singular being.
SPEAKER_00: That's what monotheism is.
SPEAKER_00: God is a singular being.
SPEAKER_00: All of his attributes reside in one person, and the attributes in that person cannot be really divided.
SPEAKER_00: And if you remember, you can think through kind of the three major attributes people think about when they talk about God is his omnipotence, his omniscience, and his omnipresence.
SPEAKER_00: And you see how they collapse into each other.
SPEAKER_00: He's omnipotent.
SPEAKER_00: He can do all things, he creates all things.
SPEAKER_00: He can't truly be fought because everything comes from him.
SPEAKER_00: People resist him, of course, but even in resisting him, they do his will.
SPEAKER_00: And even sinners rebel against God, they're using the air he gave and the lungs that he gave them with the life that he lends them to rebel against him.
SPEAKER_00: Doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
SPEAKER_00: But God is truly omnipotent.
SPEAKER_00: He created all things.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul says that here in verse 6, from whom are all things.
SPEAKER_00: That's his omnipotence.
SPEAKER_00: He is the creator, he makes all things.
SPEAKER_00: His omniscience.
SPEAKER_00: He knows all things.
SPEAKER_00: And you see how that's a form of his omnipotence.
SPEAKER_00: He has the power to know all things, and so he does know all things.
SPEAKER_00: He has the power to create all things, and so he knows everything because everything comes from him.
SPEAKER_00: So of course he knows it.
SPEAKER_00: He knows the details of all of creation because he made all of creation.
SPEAKER_00: So his omniscience and his omnipotence, you can see how they're really reflecting the same attributes.
SPEAKER_00: God is so far beyond us, we don't really have a word for all of his attributes together.
SPEAKER_00: We just, you know, we have to use our own words like his power and his knowledge and his holiness and his love and his goodness.
SPEAKER_00: We have to start throwing adjectives and nouns at him to try to get things that stick.
SPEAKER_00: But you recognize in God's perfections, he's so far beyond us that our own little quaint divisions don't do him justice.
SPEAKER_00: His omniscience just means that he knows everything that he made.
SPEAKER_00: It's another way of saying he's omnipotent.
SPEAKER_00: But think of a practical effect of God's omniscience, of all of God's knowledge and power residing in one person.
SPEAKER_00: That means he's knowable if he reveals himself.
SPEAKER_00: If God was divided, if there was more than one omniscient and omnipotent being, God could not be truly knowable.
SPEAKER_00: You would need knowledge from different sources and you have to cobble it together.
SPEAKER_00: But because all the attributes of God are singular, they reside in one place, in one essence.
SPEAKER_00: God is knowable if he reveals himself.
SPEAKER_00: You can't know him completely.
SPEAKER_00: Of course you can't know him completely.
SPEAKER_00: But you can know him as he reveals himself.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul says this in verse 1.
SPEAKER_00: Go back up.
SPEAKER_00: This is why I started reading in verse 1.
SPEAKER_00: All of us possess knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: We all know the idols aren't real.
SPEAKER_00: But we have knowledge that can puff up.
SPEAKER_00: Making fun of idols only goes so far.
SPEAKER_00: But look at verse 2.
SPEAKER_00: If anyone imagines he knows something, he doesn't yet know as he ought to know.
SPEAKER_00: You think you know a lot about God because you read a book?
SPEAKER_00: Ha! I mean, how far above us is God?
SPEAKER_00: God is omniscient.
SPEAKER_00: But by comparison, we know so little.
SPEAKER_00: You know, the analogy of you know us having a competition to try to jump to Africa from Virginia Beach, it's silly, you know.
SPEAKER_00: The the first and the second place, it doesn't matter who takes first and second.
SPEAKER_00: You all didn't, you didn't clear the coastline.
SPEAKER_00: That's often used as an analogy about our own righteousness trying to earn salvation by works, but it's also true about omniscience.
SPEAKER_00: The person who thinks he knows something, knows what Paul says here, verse 2, you think he knows something, you don't even begin to know anything.
SPEAKER_00: God is so far above us.
SPEAKER_00: But that doesn't mean he's unknowable, because look at verse 3.
SPEAKER_00: If anyone loves God, he's known by God.
SPEAKER_00: If anyone has a true love for God, where did you get that from?
SPEAKER_00: Remember Matthew 16?
SPEAKER_00: If you confess Jesus is the Christ, that's the work of the Father in you.
SPEAKER_00: So if you have a true love for God, That means God knows you.
SPEAKER_00: God is unsearchable.
SPEAKER_00: That's Psalm 145, verse 3.
SPEAKER_00: His knowledge is too high for us.
SPEAKER_00: That's Psalm 139, verse 6.
SPEAKER_00: God is unsearchable, but he is knowable.
SPEAKER_00: He is incomprehensible, but he is knowable.
SPEAKER_00: You can never understand him.
SPEAKER_00: Through all eternity, you will never know him fully.
SPEAKER_00: But he is knowable.
SPEAKER_00: And he's omnipresent.
SPEAKER_00: He's everywhere.
SPEAKER_00: And that's another way of saying he's omniscient.
SPEAKER_00: He knows all things everywhere.
SPEAKER_00: He's not physically everywhere because he doesn't have a body.
SPEAKER_00: But his omnipresence is another way of saying his omniscience, which is another way of saying his omnipotence.
SPEAKER_00: Even before creation, he was present.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 90, verse 2, he's the eternal God.
SPEAKER_00: Isaiah 44, verse 6, that he is the first and the last.
SPEAKER_00: Those are the attributes of God.
SPEAKER_00: Those are his perfections in one perfect essence.
SPEAKER_00: He's holy because he's separate from us.
SPEAKER_00: There's no moral defilement in him.
SPEAKER_00: God is perfectly powerful, perfectly perfect knowledge, perfectly present, and perfectly holy.
SPEAKER_00: This is the doctrine of a seity, that he has life in and of himself different from us.
SPEAKER_00: We have to borrow our life from him because we're made.
SPEAKER_00: He's not made, he doesn't borrow life from anyone.
SPEAKER_00: He exists in and of himself.
SPEAKER_00: That's all the perfections of God in one essence.
SPEAKER_00: God's essence is identical with his perfections.
SPEAKER_00: Who he is is perfect.
SPEAKER_00: And there's a way that can sound confusing when you say his essence is identical with his perfections.
SPEAKER_00: That can sound confusing, but think of a human being.
SPEAKER_00: Think of your husband or your wife or your kids or even your dog.
SPEAKER_00: You know, you can have a good dog.
SPEAKER_00: The goodness is something your dog is doing.
SPEAKER_00: Your dog, you have your actual dog, and he's trying to be good.
SPEAKER_00: Good dog.
SPEAKER_00: You have a husband who is growing in his ability to love you and know you and care for you.
SPEAKER_00: So there's the standard that he's growing into.
SPEAKER_00: You have kids that are growing in knowledge and discipline and all those things.
SPEAKER_00: They have an individual existence that's different than those attributes, and they grow in those attributes.
SPEAKER_00: God is completely unlike that.
SPEAKER_00: Those attributes of goodness and knowledge and love, they don't have any significance independent of God.
SPEAKER_00: God's existence is his perfections.
SPEAKER_00: He is perfect knowledge, perfect love, perfect righteousness, perfect goodness, all of those things in one, and he doesn't grow into them, he is them.
SPEAKER_00: His existence is his perfections.
SPEAKER_00: Our existence is just constantly trying to grow in knowledge and grow in love in verse one.
SPEAKER_00: We're just trying.
SPEAKER_00: The more we try to grow in knowledge, we end up being puffing ourselves up.
SPEAKER_00: How different from God.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 3 if anyone loves God, he is truly known by God.
SPEAKER_00: That's because God's perfections dwell inside of him, his knowledge is inside of him, that's all singular.
SPEAKER_00: His knowledge is his perfections, his righteousness is his perfections, and vice versa.
SPEAKER_00: All of it is in one person, secondly.
SPEAKER_00: We see God's perfections in his oneness.
SPEAKER_00: Secondly, we see God's personhood or his subsistence.
SPEAKER_00: God's personhood.
SPEAKER_00: God is referred to as Father because God exists as a person.
SPEAKER_00: God is not a nebulous force.
SPEAKER_00: God as Father is a person.
SPEAKER_00: God's attributes are not ethereal.
SPEAKER_00: God's attributes don't exist in a nebulous way.
SPEAKER_00: They're not just theory.
SPEAKER_00: They're not just out there in the ether.
SPEAKER_00: God's attributes, which means God's perfections, exist in a person.
SPEAKER_00: That's the language of fatherhood, and that's why fatherhood is such critical language in the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: When the Bible refers to God as Father, it's personalizing God.
SPEAKER_00: It's saying he's a true person.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, he has a nature and a being and an essence, but that essence doesn't exist independent of a person.
SPEAKER_00: The essence and nature and very existence of God is in a person, God the Father.
SPEAKER_00: God's attributes do not exist independent of Him.
SPEAKER_00: I have on my wall the best diagram possible of the Trinity, and yet it has one big problem in it.
SPEAKER_00: And it's just because diagrams can't be fixed.
SPEAKER_00: You can't diagram God, is the moral of the story.
SPEAKER_00: The best diagram still has a big problem with it.
SPEAKER_00: But my diagram has God is Father.
SPEAKER_00: It's the triangle diagram, and you see how the Father fills the Son, and the Father and Son fill the Spirit, and yet the Son is not the Father, and the Spirit is not the Father, and it's it's a it's a wonderful painting.
SPEAKER_00: Um, or drawing, clip art kind of thing made.
SPEAKER_00: But in the middle of it, it's got the little symbol for God, and it has like God and the arrow going out from God to the Father, and God to the Son, and God to the Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: And I understand what it means by that, but there's a big problem with that.
SPEAKER_00: It presents almost four things: the Father, Son, Spirit, and God.
SPEAKER_00: But that's a bad way of looking at it.
SPEAKER_00: There's not, that would be four things.
SPEAKER_00: That would be a quatrinity or whatever the right word would be.
SPEAKER_00: God does not exist as Father, Son, Spirit, and God.
SPEAKER_00: There's not a nature or an essence or a being of God that exists independently of the Father.
SPEAKER_00: It's not like there's this nature of God that is the Father sometimes and is the Son sometimes and is the Spirit sometimes, and exists independent of those three people.
SPEAKER_00: No, that's that's modalism.
SPEAKER_00: There's probably 50 heresies come from that.
SPEAKER_00: All of the being and essence and nature and attributes of God subsist in the Father, as the Father.
SPEAKER_00: They don't exist outside of a person.
SPEAKER_00: They exist or subsist as Father.
SPEAKER_00: God is not a force.
SPEAKER_00: God is a person.
SPEAKER_00: God is not a collection of attributes, but everything he does is for attribution.
SPEAKER_00: He's a person who acts.
SPEAKER_00: It's not like the father has the knowledge of God.
SPEAKER_00: No, the knowledge of God resides in the Father in its perfection.
SPEAKER_00: There's not four things in God.
SPEAKER_00: God exists as a person.
SPEAKER_00: This is why when the Bible introduces you to God, he introduces you to God as a father, repeatedly throughout the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_00: God is a loving Father.
SPEAKER_00: He's a person, He has a name.
SPEAKER_00: Moses' very first question is who do I say sent me?
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't get a generic answer.
SPEAKER_00: He gets I am, I exist.
SPEAKER_00: It's a person speaking to him.
SPEAKER_00: Yahweh is a person, and that person is the Father.
SPEAKER_00: Number three.
SPEAKER_00: God's paternity.
SPEAKER_00: So God's perfections, God's personhood, and God's paternity.
SPEAKER_00: Paternity is just a fancy word for God, is the source.
SPEAKER_00: He's the fountain.
SPEAKER_00: Everything comes from Him.
SPEAKER_00: It's a way of highlighting that He's the creator.
SPEAKER_00: Paternity is a way that means somebody is responsible.
SPEAKER_00: In the human world, paternity means that you're responsible for that person having life.
SPEAKER_00: In the theological world, it means that everything that exists comes from the Father.
SPEAKER_00: He is Father over all.
SPEAKER_00: Everything is from Him.
SPEAKER_00: He is even within the Trinity.
SPEAKER_00: This is God is Father independent of creation.
SPEAKER_00: If God had never created, he still would be Father, because He is Father within the Trinity.
SPEAKER_00: What it means to be a Father is to have a Son, and of course, the Father has the eternal Son.
SPEAKER_00: We'll talk about the Son next week, but it's impossible to talk about the Father without bringing the Son a little bit because what it means to be a Father is to have an offspring, is to have a Son.
SPEAKER_00: And of course, the Son is eternal because the Father is eternal.
SPEAKER_00: There's never a time when the Father didn't have a Son because then he wouldn't eternally be the Father, but God is eternally the Father.
SPEAKER_00: We'll talk about how sonship works in the concept of eternity next week, but for now, notice that God is the source of even the Godhead itself.
SPEAKER_00: The Son and Spirit come from the Father.
SPEAKER_00: He's the source of wisdom.
SPEAKER_00: This is Proverbs 8.
SPEAKER_00: Think about Proverbs 8, verse 22, describes wisdom in relationship to the Father.
SPEAKER_00: Wisdom speaking says, Yahweh possessed me at the beginning of his work.
SPEAKER_00: I was the first of his acts of old.
SPEAKER_00: And you're already starting to see the concept of sonship in eternity there.
SPEAKER_00: I was the first of his eternal acts.
SPEAKER_00: How can you order things in eternity?
SPEAKER_00: You can't.
SPEAKER_00: Ages ago, wisdom says I was set up at the first, before the beginning.
SPEAKER_00: So how do you have a first before the beginning?
SPEAKER_00: You can't.
SPEAKER_00: It's a way of saying that wisdom or the son is eternal.
SPEAKER_00: Father is the source of the Trinity, and source is a great, a great word.
SPEAKER_00: A source is a great word because it doesn't have chronology to it.
SPEAKER_00: It has priority, but not chronology.
SPEAKER_00: There's never a source of the river without the river.
SPEAKER_00: There's never a source of the spring without the spring.
SPEAKER_00: They're co-terminal.
SPEAKER_00: They have the same beginning.
SPEAKER_00: One exists with the other.
SPEAKER_00: You can see the logical priority, the source comes before the water.
SPEAKER_00: But not a chronological.
SPEAKER_00: As long as the source is there, the water is there.
SPEAKER_00: As long as the father is there, the son is there.
SPEAKER_00: The son and spirit come from the father, but the father is first.
SPEAKER_00: Again, not in chronology, but in priority.
SPEAKER_00: Holiness, love, knowledge, wisdom, all that comes from him because it is him.
SPEAKER_00: There's no concept of love outside of the Father.
SPEAKER_00: There's no concept of knowledge or holiness outside of the Father.
SPEAKER_00: And that again is all over 1 Corinthians 8.
SPEAKER_00: In the very practical world of knowledge, Paul says, verse 6, from whom are all things.
SPEAKER_00: There is one God the Father, from whom are all things.
SPEAKER_00: Well, love is a thing.
SPEAKER_00: The things he's talked about in closest proximity are love and knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: They come from God.
SPEAKER_00: They do not exist apart from God.
SPEAKER_00: He is the source of love.
SPEAKER_00: He's the source of knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: He's the source of creation.
SPEAKER_00: All things come from him.
SPEAKER_00: From whom are all things.
SPEAKER_00: Including us.
SPEAKER_00: That's what he says in the middle of verse 6, for whom we exist.
SPEAKER_00: All things come from him.
SPEAKER_00: As I mentioned, this is the biblical doctrine of his seity.
SPEAKER_00: It's Romans 11, 36, for from him and through him are all things.
SPEAKER_00: Or Acts 17, where Paul says to the watching Roman philosophers, in him, in God, we live and move and have our being.
SPEAKER_00: He does not live in a temple made by human hands as though he needed anything.
SPEAKER_00: He gives us all things.
SPEAKER_00: He has life and existence independent of us.
SPEAKER_00: God existed before the universe.
SPEAKER_00: And the universe relies on him, not the other way around.
SPEAKER_00: Everything created is dependent upon God.
SPEAKER_00: Colossians 1:17, in him, or he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 100, verse 3.
SPEAKER_00: Know that Yahweh, He is God.
SPEAKER_00: It is He who made us and not us ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: We didn't make ourselves, God made us.
SPEAKER_00: That's the paternity of God.
SPEAKER_00: All things come from Him.
SPEAKER_00: The Son comes from Him.
SPEAKER_00: The Spirit comes from the Father and the Son.
SPEAKER_00: Perfections come from Him because they exist in Him.
SPEAKER_00: Everything comes from Him.
SPEAKER_00: And this is where you see the arguments for God's existence.
SPEAKER_00: And so zoom out.
SPEAKER_00: You got these three on the screen here: God's oneness, God's subsistence, and God is a fountain.
SPEAKER_00: God's perfections, God's personhood, and God's paternity.
SPEAKER_00: There's three kinds of arguments for the existence of God using classic theism or classic apologetics.
SPEAKER_00: The moral argument for God, that if there's a concept of goodness in the world, there has to be a supremely good being.
SPEAKER_00: And you see that in the oneness of God.
SPEAKER_00: We recognize in the world that there is degrees of goodness.
SPEAKER_00: Some people are better than others, some dogs are better than others.
SPEAKER_00: Some laws are better than others.
SPEAKER_00: Some things are better than others.
SPEAKER_00: Just the existence of degrees of goodness implies that there has to be a supremely good being, to be the standard of everything else.
SPEAKER_00: That's called the moral argument for God.
SPEAKER_00: It appears in different ways, like, you know, some laws are unrighteous, we know that.
SPEAKER_00: What does it mean to call a law unrighteous, though?
SPEAKER_00: Isn't if something's a law, does it mean that it is righteous by definition?
SPEAKER_00: No.
SPEAKER_00: All of our human laws are measured against the divine and supreme law.
SPEAKER_00: That's the moral argument for God.
SPEAKER_00: Even non-Christians have a standard they're held to, and so even in non-Christian societies, even in the Roman pagan idol worshiping, meat-eating societies, they had this standard.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you can't have anybody's wife.
SPEAKER_00: You can't, they committed sexual immorality, but they knew that it was wrong.
SPEAKER_00: There's a standard above them.
SPEAKER_00: That's the moral argument for God, and it's rooted in God's perfections, God's oneness.
SPEAKER_00: There's the teleological argument for God.
SPEAKER_00: That God is a designer.
SPEAKER_00: Not just that there's God isn't intelligent, but the intelligence resides in a person.
SPEAKER_00: Not just that there's knowledge out there in the ether, but that knowledge resides in God the Father.
SPEAKER_00: That's the teleological argument for God, that He makes a universe with design to it.
SPEAKER_00: This is the argument that if you found a wristwatch on the beach, you would recognize that there must have been somebody who made the wristwatch.
SPEAKER_00: Sand and crabs did not make the wristwatch.
SPEAKER_00: It had to have had a designer.
SPEAKER_00: One of my favorite clips in evangelism from Ray Comfort is he would often go on UCLA's campus and argue with atheists, and he would take out a banana and show it's the perfect fruit because it's color-coded, you know when it's riped, and you know when it's ripened, it's curved to fit in the human hand, it's sweet that comes in bushels that are just the right kind of size that humans want to buy, and you can eat them before they all grow rotten.
SPEAKER_00: I keep telling myself that.
SPEAKER_00: He's got this whole speech about how the design of a banana is perfect, and that shows you that God must have designed it because he makes it so good and lovely.
SPEAKER_00: And of course, he'll run across uh these ECLA students that will counter him and be like, no, no, no, you this shows how dumb you are as a Christian, because we know that human farmers genetically modified those bananas you get in the store to give them their curves and to, you know, uh make the riper ones more yellow and to get the right number of bananas in a bushel, that's all done by human beings designed it that way, which is walking into his trap.
SPEAKER_00: Because if you think the curve of a banana means that a human being had to design it, how much more complicated are you than the banana?
SPEAKER_00: Infinitely more.
SPEAKER_00: Somebody designed you.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what Paul says in verse six here, again, in the context of idols.
SPEAKER_00: You're a complicated person.
SPEAKER_00: But you were made in verse six by God and you live through him.
SPEAKER_00: You were made through him, we exist, it says in verse 6.
SPEAKER_00: That's the teleological argument.
SPEAKER_00: You were made with a purpose.
SPEAKER_00: And then the third, God is the fountain.
SPEAKER_00: That's the cosmological argument.
SPEAKER_00: So in physics, you recognize that a closed system can have no new energy introduced.
SPEAKER_00: Two objects at rest will stay at rest unless they're acted on by an outside force and makes one move and hit the other.
SPEAKER_00: The fact that there's movement in our worlds is showing us that there must be an outside force that acted on us.
SPEAKER_00: That's the cosmological argument.
SPEAKER_00: Just the fact that there is motion in any way at any time shows that there has to be an energy that exists outside of our universe to make anything at all move.
SPEAKER_00: The unmoved mover.
SPEAKER_00: And again, punk college kids that don't get the argument will say, but what about that?
SPEAKER_00: Somebody had to move on that.
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's turtles all the way down.
SPEAKER_00: There's somebody who moved the unmoved mover.
SPEAKER_00: It's like, you're not listening.
SPEAKER_00: There has to, if that was true, that would just repeat the problem over and over again.
SPEAKER_00: But motion exists.
SPEAKER_00: That means there has to be something outside of the world giving it energy, giving it direction, giving it motion.
SPEAKER_00: That's the cosmological argument.
SPEAKER_00: Notice that Paul combines all three of these.
SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about idols.
SPEAKER_00: There is knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: There is love that is greater than knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: That implies standards that's rooted in God.
SPEAKER_00: That God exists as a person, verse three.
SPEAKER_00: If anyone loves God, he is known by God.
SPEAKER_00: Not just that there's knowledge of you out there, but that knowledge is resident in the Father.
SPEAKER_00: And the cosmological argument, verse six, that he made the universe and you live for him.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 7 is sad though.
SPEAKER_00: Not everyone knows this knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: Not everyone knows this.
SPEAKER_00: The fool says in his heart, Psalm 14 says there is no God.
SPEAKER_00: That might be Psalm 54.
SPEAKER_00: The fool says in his heart, there is no God.
SPEAKER_00: The fool stands on the earth that God made and denies that he exists.
SPEAKER_00: The fool breathes the air that God gives and questions whether or not God is good in giving it.
SPEAKER_00: And this is why the knowledge and paternity and personhood of God goes beyond even that.
SPEAKER_00: It goes to adoption, that God chooses to save people.
SPEAKER_00: It goes to revelation that the Father chooses to reveal himself.
SPEAKER_00: It goes to redemption, the Father sends his sons to redeem us from our sins.
SPEAKER_00: It goes to teleos, that God designs a purpose for our life, namely to live in and through Christ.
SPEAKER_00: It goes to rewards, that God is the source of rewards and to punishment, that God's a source of punishment.
SPEAKER_00: It goes to language, that God gives us speech because God speaks the universe into existence.
SPEAKER_00: It goes to sin because sin confuses speech and crashes everything in the world.
SPEAKER_00: And then it goes to the redemption of Jesus Christ, that God sends Jesus into a sin-struck world to redeem people from their sin, adopt them into his family, and call them sons.
SPEAKER_00: Redemption is also rooted in the Father.
SPEAKER_00: Don't picture the Son is on a rebel mission to save people against the Father's will.
SPEAKER_00: No, the Son comes to save us.
SPEAKER_00: Because the Father sends, it's the Father's plan.
SPEAKER_00: He's a loving Father and sets his love on us.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, we're thankful for the words that you give us, the holiness you call us to.
SPEAKER_00: We know the knowledge puffs up and love produces humility.
SPEAKER_00: We know that perfect love resides in you and you've shed it in our hearts.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, we're so thankful that you are our Savior.
SPEAKER_00: And God, we're thankful that you're a Father who knows us and loves us.
SPEAKER_00: Who knows us perfectly, who gives us life.
SPEAKER_00: Much more, of course, could be said about your fatherhood, your the care for which you take in us, the way you provide for us.
SPEAKER_00: There's so much more that could be said.
SPEAKER_00: And above it all is your perfections.
SPEAKER_00: You're the perfect God.
SPEAKER_00: All perfections reside in you.
SPEAKER_00: You give us shadows of them.
SPEAKER_00: You've revealed yourself to us.
SPEAKER_00: We received the knowledge hungrily.
SPEAKER_00: We're so thankful.
SPEAKER_00: I give you thanks for your word in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: And now, for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.
SPEAKER_00: If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, ibc.church.
SPEAKER_00: If you want more information about the Master Seminary or our location here in Washington, D.C., please go to TMS.edu.
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.
SPEAKER_00: area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.
SPEAKER_00: I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.
SPEAKER_00: But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.
SPEAKER_00: Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.