Absolute Lesson #2: God the Father

Lesson 2

God the Father

Absolute Curriculum

Year 1, Lesson 2

Introduction (Trinity):

Last time we considered the importance of Scripture in knowing God. This time we are going to dive into the question of “Who is God?”, which we said last week was the most fundamentally important question we could ask as human beings. Before we get ahead of ourselves though, we need to become familiar with a word you won't find anywhere in your Bible; and that is the word “Trinity.” The doctrine of the Trinity can be summed up most simply with the following three statements:

1. God is three persons.
2. Each person is fully God.
3. There is one God.¹

This of course is not an exhaustive teaching on the Trinity, but it does give us the basic elements of the doctrine. Many hours, books, and broken Sunday School lessons have been devoted to attempting to explain the doctrine of the Trinity. While I will never suggest that we shouldn't try to understand a biblical doctrine, I think it is important to realize that the men who developed this doctrine in the early days of the church didn't come at it as a mystery to be solved, but rather developed it as a way of explaining the mystery of how God in Scripture is presented as three Persons in one Being.² To say it in a slightly different way, the doctrine of the Trinity isn't a mystery that we try to figure out, the doctrine of the Trinity is a framework that helps us understand what the Bible tells us about God. It keeps us in balance by not letting us forget the three-fold truth that God is three persons, each person is fully God, and there is one God.

God the Father: Creator

Who are the three persons of the Trinity? We gain perhaps the clearest statement of this in Matthew 28:19, “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.”³ So, God is three persons, and the names of these persons are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Each fully and equally God, yet living together throughout all eternity in perfect unity as one being. What I want to do today is look at God the Father. What is He like? Over the next couple of sessions we will then look at the person of the Son and the person of the Spirit, and we will conclude our study on God by discussing some of the attributes of God.

Who is God the Father? The Nicene Creed⁴ opens with this statement, “I believe in one God and Father Almighty; Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.”⁵

Doesn't say a whole lot, does it? Essentially they define the Father as the Maker, or Creator, of all that there is. They say virtually nothing else about Him. Part of this is because of when the creeds of the church were written. Very few people in the church back then had any questions about who God the Father was, the questions that were swirling around at that time centered around Jesus. We will discuss some of those next time. But establishing that God is the Maker of all is a good place to jump from today.

Is this the clear teaching of the Bible? Yes, the church has believed and confessed this for over 1600 years, but is this what the Bible actually says? In a word; yes. The Bible is unequivocal on this point. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”⁶ The first verse of the Bible says that God did what? He created the heavens and the earth, which is a more poetic way of saying that He made everything. How did He make everything? By His Word. Verses 3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24, and 26 of Genesis one all open with the phrase, “And God said.” When we think of God's word our thoughts generally go (rightly) straight to the Bible. But we need to realize that the term has more attached to it in the Bible than just the Bible itself. As J.I. Packer puts it, “God's word in the Old Testament is his creative utterance, his power in action fulfilling his purpose.”⁷ This is absolutely true, in fact we see that at the beginning of John's gospel he refers to Jesus as “the Word.”

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was in the beginning with God. ³ All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.”⁸

So God creates by speaking; but His speech is not like our speech. His speech is not the reverberating of atoms (for when God first spoke there were no atoms!). His speech is His creative action and revelation of Himself, especially through His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ.

Sender of the Son

Which leads us to the next thing we need to know about God. God the Father sent His Son into the world. Jesus said, “the very works that I am doing, bear witness about me that the Father has sent me. ³⁷ And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me.”⁹

God the Father sent the Son into the world, to fulfill two primary purposes.

The Revelation of the Father

^“No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”¹⁰

God sent the Son into the world to make the Father known. The Father has never been seen, and so the only way for us to truly come to know Him was for His Son to come and reveal Him. But even with such revelation, we cannot come to know God, because we have sinned. We sit under His just wrath. We need more than information, we need to be saved from our sin if we are to know God. Which leads us to the other main reason the Father sends Jesus.

To Save the World

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. ¹⁷ For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”¹¹

God did not only send His Son, but gave Him, that whoever places their faith in Christ might have eternal life. God's goal in this was to save the world through Christ. To save you, and to save me from our sinfulness and to remove the condemnation that we deserved. Which leads us to the last thing I want to cover in relation to God the Father.

Planner of Salvation

^“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, ⁴ even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love ⁵ he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, ⁶ to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.”¹²

Paul here ascribes praise to God the Father for all He has given us in Jesus Christ. While we will probably look a little more closely at these verses in the future, what I want s to notice today is this: God the Father chose us, Paul speaking here of those who are saved, before the foundation of the world. That is, before the sun came up in the sky, before there was a sky for a sun to come up in , before there was an earth for the sun to shine upon, God the Father was planning the salvation of, and predestining for adoption, all those who would believe. God the Father has planned salvation from eternity past. This is a wonderful truth. God the Father has revealed Himself in His Son, purchased Salvation in His Son, and this is according to the plan He has set out long before the foundations of this world were laid. Perhaps the most fitting way to end today's lesson is wth Paul's prayer at the end of Romans chapter 11:

“Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

³⁴  “For who has known the mind of the Lord,

or who has been his counselor?”

³⁵  “Or who has given a gift to him

that he might be repaid?”

³⁶ For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.”¹³

1Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994) pg 231

2This insight is from an interview with Fred Sanders on the Mere Fidelity podcast https://soundcloud.com/mere-fidelity/the-trinity-and-the-bible-with-fred-sanders Accessed 08/20/2014

3 The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2001). (Matthew 28:19). Wheaton: Standard Bible Society. All Scripture quoted, unless otherwise noted, will be from the ESV.

4The creed formulated at the council of Nicea in A.D. 325 and revised at Constantinople in A.D. 381. This creed is confessed to by Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant believers alike.

5Nicene Creed, as reproduced in Grudem, Systematic Theology, pg 1169

6 Genesis 1:1

7J.I. Packer, Knowing God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1973) pg 56

8 John 1:1-3

9 John 5:36b-37a. Emphasis added. Cf. John 4:34, 6:38

10 John 1:18

11 John 3:16-17

12 Ephesians 1:3-6

13 Romans 11:33-36

Absolute Curriculum #1: Intro and Why We Need the Bible

Intro Video For Leaders

Intro Video For Students

Lesson 1

Introduction to Absolute

Absolute Curriculum

Year 1, Lesson 1

Welcome to the Absolute curriculum. The goal of this curriculum is to introduce you to the Absolutes of the Christian faith, the things you need to know. Things that I wish I had known at your age, or wish I had understood better. What you can typically expect to see is a 10-20 minutes video of me walking you through a particular text of Scripture or a topic that arises as we study the Bible. This, along with the discussion time with your leaders afterward, will hopefully serve to give you at least a basic understanding of each of the things that we will be discussing. If you want to know more about anything, ask your leaders! They would be more than willing to help you out in deepening your knowledge of God and His word. 

I hope this is a help to you all. Let's jump in.

Introduction to God

So how are we going to approach this study? Well, we are going to break it into several “chunks” where we will build on the same concept for 4-5 lessons. This is in part due to our format (there is no way to really say what needs to be said about God in 15 minutes) and in part to the fact that going through these things a little slower and bit by bit should, at least theoretically, help us grasp what we're learning a bit better. So the first “chunk” of knowledge we are going to approach is the knowledge of God. Knowing who God is, and responding appropriately, is the most important thing in our lives. Proverbs 1:7 says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.”[1] You might even question if there is a God. I'll be honest with you, we aren't even going to grapple with that question, and here's why:

“18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.” [2]

The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”[3]

The question is not, “is there a God?” He has made that clear[4]. The question is, “who is He?”

Why we need the Bible

This leads us into our study today. How do we answer this question of who God is? You may have noticed that three times already I have referenced the Bible. That should give you a clue as to where we're going. The reason we must approach the Bible to know God is that it [the Bible] is God's revelation of Himself. Other religions and systems attempt to seek knowledge of God via other means. Means which, invariably, fall woefully short of true knowledge of God. Why is this? It is because, “God makes himself known on his own terms, when, where, and how he chooses. God can be an object of our knowledge only if he has revealed himself to us. Consequently, theology can exist as a legitimate enterprise only when it begins with God's self-revelation.”[5]

What makes us think the bible is God's self-revelation? Well, there are many places we could turn, but let's look simply at one of them.

“20 knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. 21 For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”[6]

The men who wrote the bible did so as the were carried along by God, and thus they spoke the very words which He wanted them to speak. This wasn't some sort of mechanical dictation, as you can see from the many styles and personalities of the writers which come through, but this is no mere human book. This book is the word of God Himself. In looking at the bible we will cover four main points, which you can remember with the acronym “SCAN.”

S- the bible is Sufficient

C- the bible is Clear

A- the bible is Authoritative

N- the bible is Necessary[7]

Now, while SCAN is a handy way to remember these four points, I believe we will be better served if we walk through them in reverse order.

The Necessity of the Bible:

We've already hit on this first point some. We need the bible to understand God, because the bible is God's self-revelation to us.

You may be familiar with the C.S. Lewis quote, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”[8] I believe the reason so many folks quote this statement is that it resonates with us at a very deep level. We have longings for something deeper than this world has. The basic reason for this, Genesis chapter one tells us, is that we are made in the image of God. We were designed to mirror and reflect Him, and to enjoy an intimate fellowship with our Creator. However, Genesis three introduces to us how sin entered the world through Adam's disobedience, thus severing that closeness with God. We are now born apart from God, under the condemnation of our sin.[9] What is our fundamental need? God is our fundamental need. We need forgiven of our sin against Him, and we need to be reconciled into a right relationship with Him. Which means, again, that we desperately need His word, because it is the only way we can come to know Him!

The Authority of the Bible:

We need the bible. But then we come to another question of pressing importance: can I trust what the bible has to say? The answer, in short, is yes. “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.”[10] If all Scripture is breathed out by God, or as the passage we read from 2 Peter put it, given by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, then Scripture is as true as God is true. How true is God? Well, the Apostle Paul says, “Let God be true though every one were a liar.”[11] And Jesus himself applies these words not only to the person of God, but to God's word when he says, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.”[12]

God is truth. His word, being inspired and breathed-out by Him, is our final standard of earthly truth, and thus the highest of earthly authorities.[13] Wayne Grudem summarizes this point helpfully,

“All the words in the Bible are God's words. Therefore, to disbelieve or disobey them is to disbelieve or disobey God Himself.”[14]

The Clarity of the Bible:

We need the Bible to know God, and His word speaks authoritatively (not only on who He is, but on all other matters to which is speaks). However, what good will this do us if we cannot understand what the Bible says? It is here that we desperately need to know that Scripture is clear. While approaching the Word of God can in one sense be very intimidating (who can understand God?), it is important for us to remember why He has given us the Scriptures: to reveal Himself to us. 2 Timothy 3:15 says that the Scriptures “are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.”[15] They can only do this if they are clear and able to be understood. Which they are. Indeed, the Psalmist praises the Lord for the ability of His word to make even a simple man wise. “The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.”[16] God's word is clear, clear enough for you and I to understand.

The Sufficiency of the Bible:

Finally, we come to our concluding point. But the fact that it is last by no means makes it least. I want to conclude today with that fact that the Bible is sufficient. That is to say, it is enough. We already quoted 2 Timothy 3:15 & 16, so let's look what follows them,

“You have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”[17]

Scriptures is able to make us wise for salvation, it is breathed out by God, and...it is profitable. Profitable for what? For teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. How profitable is it in these things? Just a little? No. It is so profitable that through them, the man of God may be complete and equipped for every good work. The Bible is all we need for salvation, and it is all we need to live the live God has called us to in obedience to Him. This has a couple of applications.

First, it guards us against any church or tradition that teaches us we need anything beyond the Bible. For example, Mormons have the Book of Mormon, Islam has the Koran, Roman Catholics have the pope and church tradition. All of these religions would claim the Bible, or at least parts of it, as part of their sacred literature, but they hold these other teachings beside or above Scripture in terms of authority. They say the Bible on it's own is not enough to tell us what God would have.[18] The results are always disastrous, and lead, at best, to a distortion of the Bible's message, and usually to a flat out contradiction or denial of biblical truth. 

That error may be easy to see. But the fact is we all have a (perhaps subtle) desire for God to use extra Biblical revelation to speak to us. We want a personal word from the Lord. The author of Hebrews says, “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son.”[19] We would like to think that God will speak to us at many times and many ways. Through visions, dreams, or in a “still small voice.” But what the writer says here is that God has spoken to us in these last days through His Son, Jesus Christ. And how do we know Jesus? Through the Bible. May be this sounds depressing, or impersonal. But in truth, it is exactly the opposite. I don't need to go seek some quite place to here from God. God speaks to me in His word. Any time I pick up the Bible and read it, I am reading God's personal revelation of Himself to me in His Son, Jesus. How amazing is that! God has spoken finally, authoritatively, and sufficiently in Jesus. We need nothing more. The Bible is enough.

---

[1]     The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2001). (Proverbs 1:7a). Wheaton: Standard Bible Society. All Scripture quoted, unless otherwise noted, will be from the ESV.

[2]      Romans 1:18–23

[3]      Psalm 14:1a

[4]    See: Wayne Grudem, Christian Beliefs (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), chapter two “What is God like?” Also, Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), chapter nine “The Existence of God.”

[5]       Michael Horton, Pilgrim Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011) pg 36-37. Emphasis in original.

[6]      2 Peter 1:20–21. See also, 2 Timothy 3:16, Hebrews 1:1-2,

[7]     Taken from “Fullness and Finality: The Sufficiency of God's Word” a lecture given by Kevin DeYoung. http://www.wts.edu/stayinformed/view.html?id=1796 accessed August 17, 2014

[8]     C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillian, 1952) pg 120

[9]   “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” Psalm 51:5. “For the wages of sin is death.” Romans 6:23

[10]  2 Timothy 3:16

[11]  Romans 3:4

[12]   John 17:17. See also, Titus 1:2, 2 Samuel 7:28, and Proverbs 30:5.

[13]  Some may contest that it is circular reasoning to appeal to the Bible to prove the Bible's authority. Grudem makes a helpful point in regards to this: “It should be admitted that this is a kind of circular argument. However, that does not make its use invalid, for all arguments for an absolute authority must ultimately appeal to that authority for proof: otherwise the authority would not be an absolute or highest authority. This problem is not unique to the Christian who is arguing for the authority of the Bible. Everyone either implicitly or explicitly uses some kind of circular argument when defending his or her ultimate authority for belief.” Systematic Theology, pg 78-79.

[14]  Grudem, Christian Beliefs, pg 13.

[15]   2 Timothy 3:15

[16]   Psalm 19:7

[17]  2 Timothy 2:15b-17

[18]  Some might ask, what then of creeds, confessions, and other statements of Biblical truth? Should we read Christian books, or listen to sermons? What about a curriculum like this that is attempting to explain the Bible? If the Bible is really enough, are any of these things legitimate?

           The answer is a definite “yes.” Christians have, throughout church history, affirmed that all of these things, creeds, confessions, sermons, books, are to be appreciated, embraced, and used in accordance with their alignment with and accordance to Scripture. Their usefulness lies not in any intrinsic value of their own, but as summaries and explanations of the Biblical text itself.

[  Heb 1:1-2a